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Acana war
The Acana war (in some sources the "Landing of the Boats") was a seminal conflict of medieval Zacapican, marking the beginning of the Angatahuacan hegemony. The war was preceded by decades of intense competition between Angatahuaca and their network of merchant outposts against a coalition of mainland city-states united against the expansion of Angatahuacan influence on the mainland. By the 8th century, Angatahuaca gained near-total military control of Aztaco island and could mobilize a powerful armada of large ships by pressing the trading vessels of its merchant households into military service. The dominance of the Angatahuacan navy allowed the city to intercept any attempted invasion of Aztaco island, protecting Angatahuaca itself from any direct attack. The navy also allowed any one Angatahuacan vassal or ally on the mainland to be resupplied by sea, frustrating attempts to besiege their coastal strongholds and giving the trading city a major military advantage in any conflict against individual mainland states. For decades, Angatahuaca had leveraged this advantage to greatly expand its influence by establishing new outposts and vassalizing weak states, upsetting the balance of power between the traditionally dominant states of the Fog Coast. In 732, the coalition of states aligned against Angatahuaca began a coordinated assault against the mainland outposts and Angatahuacan allies, hoping to overpower Angatahuaca's ability to isolate threats and reinforce their strongholds indefinitely using the resources of their wider sphere of influence.
As the war progressed, the Angatahuacans developed a strategy of defeat in detail to overcome the numerically superior forces of the coalition. Angatahuacan commanders demonstrated an understanding of amphibious attacks and combined operations of ships and troops on land that was atypical of the time, using fleets of ships to quickly redeploy their forces, isolate smaller contingents of enemy forces to defeat the opposition in a piecemeal fashion. Being few in number, Angatahuacan troops struggled to reinforce their formations in the field, slowing their progress. The Acana war dragged on into a protracted conflict made up of a series of long sieges and countless skirmishes, with the balance of attrition swinging in favor of the Angatahuacans who successfully prevented the coalition from uniting their forces and eventually overpowered the most important coalition strongholds. The Angatahuacan victory in the Acana war was a major upset in the power balance of the region, destroying the balance of power that had existed among the Fog Coast city states for centuries. After a handful of minor wars against outlying holdouts, Angatahuaca established itself as the uncontested hegemon of the Fog Coast, uniting the Nahua states under one banner for the first time in history.