Itzcalpan

Itzcalpan stood in the southern part of the Cempoala region of Veracruz, in a landscape of small political communities near the routes between the coast and the Mexican interior. Before the Spanish conquest it remained outside the territories conquered by Tenochtitlan and its allies, although relations with those powers could be tense. Local political geography therefore included independent communities alongside tributary provinces.

The colonial Relación de Veracruz remembered Itzcalpan as an important settlement with a large pre-conquest population. After conquest it was also known as La Rinconada, and the Spanish Crown granted it to Hernán Cortés as part of the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca. That transfer placed a formerly autonomous community within a colonial lordship. Its history around the conquest thus joined a change in political authority with the reassignment of settlements and their obligations under the new regime.