Cuauhteopan

Cuauhteopan lay in the highland valleys of Puebla, where Nahua farmers worked terraced fields of maize, beans and chilli beside the streams that flow down from the mountains. The villages were grouped under local lords and paid tribute in cloth, cacao and food to the Mexica empire, whose officials toured the valleys to collect it. When Spanish forces arrived in the 1520s, many of these villages allied with Tlaxcalan and Spanish troops against their former overlords, and the Spanish encomienda later assigned the local labour to new owners.