Capital of Tula in Toltec empire

Successor to the power of Teotihuacan, was the Toltec ‘empire’ with its capital at Tula, about fifty miles from present-day Mexico City.

Tula may have once been an outpost of Teotihuacan, guarding it frontiers against the hunting tribes of the northern deserts. United under the leader Mixcoatl, the warlike Toltec overwhelm the peoples of central Mexico.

There, Mixcoatl’s son Toplizin founds a large empire of states centered around the Toltec capital of Tula. Tula spreads over a area of more than five square miles and has a population in the tens of thousands.

Tula had a population of about 40,000 by 1100. The Toltec architects designed with established methods, such as placing buildings around large plazas, using many-tiered platforms as bases, building newer structures as bases, building newer structures atop older ones and painting colorful motifs on surfaces of buildings.

The region includes a swampland that provides the Toltec with basketry materials and gives Tula its original name –Tollan, meaning ‘place of the reeds.’

The last king of Tula and the Toltecs, Ce Coatl Huemac, ruled for sixty years. The first decades of his reign brought prosperity to the Toltecs but in 1168, Huemac was forced to leave Tula following a number of years of continuous social crisis, made more acute by hunger and invasions resulting from a long period of drought in all central Mexico.

In 1224, Tula was finally sacked and burned by invaders from the north. The destruction of Tula, had occurred even before the arrival of the Aztecs to Central Mexico, but they knew of and visited its ruins.
Capital of Tula in Toltec empire

Ancient city of Cholula

Cholula, at one time, had been one of the most important pre-Colombian cities on the continent.

It was rising from being a village to being a city of some importance. Cholula was founded by the Toltecs sometime round 1500 BC.  For Toltecs the city was a place for commerce, worship and burial.

It has been continuously occupied and has been a major religious center. The Great Pyramid, Tlachihualtepetl, is the largest pre-Hispanic structure in The World in the terms of volume of construction material.  As the city became a place of power, many of the powerful cultures of Mexico had their turn to rule it - the Olmecs, Toltecs, and later the Aztecs, with whom the city had some alliance.

For centuries, Cholula was considered to be the Tollan or Place of the Tules, from which the various groups of origin had been expelled and to where they return (Cholollan-Tollan).

By the time Cortes passed through Mexico and through Cholula in 1519, the town was already old and fairly large.
Ancient city of Cholula