4 ideas
The Nahua elders report sores covering faces, chests and bellies so densely that victims could not move or turn over. Many died because no one was well enough to cook, and survivors were left pitted and some blinded. The epidemic killed the ruler Cuitlahuac and weakened the city before the final Spanish siege of 1521.
When an epidemic strikes a whole population at once, the dying comes from two sources: the pathogen and the loss of the people who would normally feed and nurse the sick. The elders say plainly that many starved because nobody could rise to cook. The deaths therefore come from a breakdown of the social system as well as from infection.
Book XII records the conquest in Nahuatl, told by Indigenous elders rather than by Spanish chroniclers. This shifts attention from the victors' strategy and heroism to omens, dread, bodily suffering, grief, and the destruction of daily life. Who narrates an event determines which facts are treated as the event itself.
The Nahua account exists only because a Franciscan friar organized its collection, and he had missionary aims. Trilingual Nahua scholars from the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco interviewed elders and recorded their answers in Nahuatl alongside Spanish text and pictures. The resulting source is both genuinely Indigenous testimony and a document shaped by the questions and purposes of the colonizing church. Reading it well means keeping both facts in view.