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This hand-colored copperplate engraving titled Alt Mexico, attributed to Jacques Nicolas Bellin and published around 1764 in Abbé Prévost’s monumental Histoire générale des voyages, presents a European reimagining of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, before the Spanish conquest. The view draws heavily on earlier post-conquest descriptions, particularly those by Hernán Cortés and the chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo
Shown in an idealized bird’s-eye perspective, the engraving shows the island city of Tenochtitlan situated in the middle of Lake Texcoco, connected to the surrounding mainland by a series of causeways. Within the city, a series of canals and roads divides its densely built quarters, depicting a sophisticated urban layout often praised by Spanish chroniclers. At the ceremonial center is the Templo Mayor, the sacred precinct devoted to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc. Red-tiled roofs and European-style architecture, anachronistically depicted here, underscore the engraver’s Eurocentric reinterpretation of Indigenous grandeur.
Tenochtitlan was founded by the Mexica (Aztecs) in 1325 on a series of islets in Lake Texcoco. As the heart of a vast tributary empire, it grew into one of the largest and most complex cities of the pre-Columbian Americas, boasting an estimated population exceeding 200,000 by the time of the Spanish arrival. The city’s engineering—featuring aqueducts, chinampas (artificial agricultural islands), and a complex drainage system—impressed the Spanish, whose conquest in 1521 led to its near-total destruction. Over its ruins, the Spanish built Mexico City, which became the administrative center of New Spain.
The print reflects Enlightenment Europe’s fascination with the “New World”. Abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages was one of the most commercially successful efforts to compile and interpret global geographical and cultural knowledge for a literate European audience in the middle of the 18th Century.
Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703-1772) was among the most important mapmakers of the eighteenth century. In 1721, at only the age of 18, he was appointed Hydrographer to the French Navy. In August 1741, he became the first Ingénieur de la Marine of the Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine (the French Hydrographic Office) and was named Official Hydrographer of the French King.
During his term as Official Hydrographer, the Dépôt was the one of the most active centers for the production of sea charts and maps in Europe. Their output included a folio-format sea atlas of France, the Neptune Francois. He also produced a number of sea atlases of the world, including the Atlas Maritime and the Hydrographie Francaise. These gained fame and distinction all over Europe and were republished throughout the eighteenth and even in the nineteenth century.
Bellin also produced smaller format maps such as the 1764 Petit Atlas Maritime, containing 580 finely-detailed charts. He also contributed a number of maps for the 15-volume Histoire Generale des Voyages of Antoine François Prévost.
Bellin set a very high standard of workmanship and accuracy, cementing France's leading role in European cartography and geography during this period. Many of his maps were copied by other mapmakers across the continent.
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