travel through hostile land. The officer in charge of Vera Cruz decided to send four officers to meet with Qualpopoca. When they arrived, they were captured and two were killed, the other two escaping through the woods. Upon their return to Vera Cruz, the officer in charge was infuriated, and led troops to storm Almería. Here they learned that Moctezuma was supposedly the one who ordered the officers executed. Back in , Cortés detained Moctezuma and questioned him. Though no serious conclusions were reached, this negatively affected the relationship between Moctezuma and the Spaniards. Cortés subsequently besieged for over 90 days, causing a famine. Having gained control, he then directed the systematic destruction and leveling of the city; and began its rebuilding, despite opposition. The reconstruction involved the creation of a central area designated for Spanish use (the traza). The outer Indian section, now dubbed San Juan Tenochtitlan, continued to be governed by the previous indigenous elite and was divided into the same subdivisions as before. The people of were soon exposed to diseases to which they had no immunity. Symptoms were often delayed for up to ten days, when the infection would spread throughout the body, causing sores, pain, and high fever. People were weak to the point that they could not move, nor obtain food and water. Burial of the dead become difficult to impossible, due to the pervasiveness of the people's illness. The people of Tenochtitlan began to starve and weaken. The death toll rose steadily over the course of the next 60 days. Colonial era Cortés founded the Spanish capital of Mexico City on the ruins of Tenochtitlan. Despite the extensive damage to the built environment, the site retained symbolic power and legitimacy as the capital of the Aztec empire, which Cortés sought to appropriate. For a time this , the highest rank in the Spanish hierarchy of settlement designation, was called Mexico–Tenochtitlan. Charles Gibson devotes the final chapter of his classic work, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, to what he called "The City," with later historians building on his work. The Spaniards established a or town council, which had jurisdiction over the Spanish residents. The Spanish established a Europeans-only zone in the center of the city, an area of 13 blocks in each direction of the central plaza, which was the . Although many native residents died during the siege of Tenochtitlan, the indigenous still