The first people to inhabit this land may have arrived as many as 20,000 years before Columbus. Their descendants built a succession of brilliant, highly developed civilizations which flourished from 1200 BC to 1521 AD. Of these, the Mayan and Aztec cultures are the best known.
Hern�n Cort�s landed on the coast near modern-day Veracruz on 21 April 1519 with 11 ships, 550 men and 16 horses. The local Indians were friendly and soon, in the Aztec capital Tenochtitl�n, tales of 'towers floating on water' bearing fair-skinned beings were carried to Moctezuma II, the Aztec king. According to the Aztec calendar, 1519 would see the god Quetzalc�atl's return from the east. The Spaniards were well received in towns which resented Aztec domination and thus gained their first Indian allies. With 6000 Indians, they approached the Aztecs' island capital - a city bigger than any in Spain. Moctezuma invited them into his palace and the Spaniards promptly took him hostage. By 13 August 1521, Aztec resistance had ended. The position of the conquered peoples deteriorated disastrously, not only because of harsh treatment at the hands of the colonists but also because of a series of epidemics, caused by diseases brought by the Spaniards. The Indian population fell from an estimated 25 million at the time of conquest to one million by 1605.
From the 16th to 19th centuries, a sort of apartheid system existed in Mexico, which fueled the power struggles driving events in Mexico during these years. Spanish-born colonists - known as peninsulares or, derisively, gachupines - were a minuscule part of the population but were considered nobility in New Spain (as Mexico was then called), however humble their prior status in Spain. By the 18th century, criollos, people born of Spanish parents in New Spain, had managed to acquire fortunes in mining, commerce, ranching and agriculture and, not surprisingly, they sought political power commensurate with their wealth. Below the criollos were the mestizos, people of mixed Spanish and Indian or African slave ancestry, and at the bottom of the pile were the remaining Indians and Africans. The catalyst for rebellion came in 1808 when Napoleon Bonaparte occupied most of Spain - direct Spanish control over New Spain suddenly ceased and rivalry between peninsulares and criollos in the colony intensified. On 16 September 1810 Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a criollo parish priest, summoned his parishioners to church and issued his now-famous call to rebellion, the Grito de Dolores. Sporadic fighting continued until 1821 when Spain agreed to Mexican independence.
Twenty-two years of chronic instability followed independence: the presidency changed hands 36 times and large chunks of Mexican territory were lost to the USA. In 1845, the US congress voted to annex Texas. This led to the Mexican-American War, in which US troops captured Mexico City. At the end of the war, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexico ceded modern Texas, California, Utah, Colorado and most of New Mexico and Arizona to the USA. By 1862, Mexico was heavily in debt to Britain, France and Spain, who sent a joint force to Mexico to collect their debts. France, under the hawkish Napoleon III, decided to go even further and colonize Mexico, leading to yet another war. In 1864, Napoleon invited the Austrian archduke, Maximilian of Hapsburg, to become emperor of Mexico but his reign was brief.
Things were relatively stable under the dictatorship of Porfirio D�az, who ruled for 33 years until 1911. With the slogan 'order and progress', he brought Mexico into the industrial age and kept it free of the wars which had plagued it for over 60 years - but peace came at a cost. Political opposition, free elections and a free press were banned, and control was maintained by a ruthless army. Widespread dissatisfaction with D�az's rule led to strikes which precipitated the Mexican Revolution.