Cempoala

The Cempoala were the ruling house of the Totonac city of Cempoala on the Gulf coast of Veracruz, whose Nahuatl name means place of twenty waters. Totonac settlers had occupied the plain since the Toltec empire's height between 1000 and 1150; the walled city, with its temples and palaces, may have held 25,000 to 30,000 people at its peak.

In the fifteenth century Moctezuma I conquered the coast, and Cempoala's rulers became Aztec tributaries, sending goods and people for sacrifice and enslavement. In 1519 its tlatoani Xicomecoatl, nicknamed the Fat Chief by the Spaniards, welcomed Hernán Cortés and made the first Spanish-indigenous alliance against the Aztecs at Quiahuiztlan.

Thousands of Cempoalan warriors joined the march inland ending with the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. In May 1520 Cempoala was the scene of Cortés's victory over Pánfilo de Narváez.