The whole army was now ordered to withdraw from the great temple of Tlaltelolco, and to return to their original head-quarters.  Cortes proceeded to Cojohuacan, where he took the command in person, sending Sandoval to resume his station at Tepejacac, and our division, under Alvarado, retired to Tacuba.  Thus was the important seige of Mexico brought to a successful conclusion, by the capture of Guatimotzin and his family at the hour of vespers, on the day of St Hypolitus, 13th of August 1521.  Glorified be our Lord Jesus Christ, and his Holy Virgin Mother, Amen!

In the night after the capture of Guatimotzin, about midnight, there was the greatest tempest of thunder, lightning, and rain I ever witnessed.  But all the soldiers were as deaf as if they had been an hour in a belfrey, and all the bells ringing about their ears.  This proceeded from the continual noise they had been accustomed to from the enemy during the ninety-three days[12] of this memorable siege:  Some bringing on their troops to attack us on the causeways, with loud shouts, and shrill whistling; others in canoes assailing our flanks; some at work on the pallisades, water courses, and stone parapets, or preparing their magazines of arms, and the shrieks and yells of the women, who supplied the warriors with stones, darts, and arrows; the infernal noise of their timbals, horns, and trumpets, and the dismal drum, and other shocking noises, perpetually sounding in our ears:  All of which immediately ceased on the capture of Guatimotzin.  In consequence of the dispute between Sandoval and Holguin threatening unpleasant consequences, Cortes related to them from the Roman history the dispute between Marius and Sylla, about the capture of Iugurtha, which was ultimately productive of very fatal civil wars.  He assured them that the whole affair should be represented to the emperor Don Carlos, by whose arbitration it should be decided.  But in two years after, the emperor authorised Cortes to bear in his arms the seven kings whom he had subdued, Montezuma, Guatimotzin, and the princes of Tezcuco, Cojohuacan, Iztapalapa, Tacuba, and Matlatzinco.

It is absolutely truth, to which I swear amen! that all the lake, the houses, and the courts were filled with dead bodies, so that I know not how to describe the miserable spectacle.  All the streets, squares, courts, and houses of Tlaltelolco, were so covered by them, that we could not take a single step without treading on or between the bodies of dead Indians.  The lake and the canals were full of them, and the stench was intolerable.  It was for this reason that our troops retired from the city immediately after the capture of Guatimotzin:  Cortes was himself ill for some time, owing to the dreadful effluvia arising from the putrifying bodies.  I have read the history of the destruction of Jerusalem, but I cannot conceive that the mortality even there exceeded what I was witness to in Mexico; as all the warriors from the most distant provinces of that populous empire were concentrated there, and almost the whole garrison was cut off in their almost perpetual encounters with us, or perished of famine.