Almost 500 years after it was written, the Florentine Codex continues to reveal hidden secrets and spread knowledge about the indigenous peoples who lived through the fall of Tenochtitlan in the 16th century. To date, it is considered the most reliable document on Mexica culture, the Aztec empire, and the arrival of the Spanish to what is now Mexico. However, new findings could contribute to changing the way the Conquest is told, thanks to several texts in Nahuatl that had not transcended due to their lack of translation into Spanish. Now that they have been revealed, they provide interesting nuances in the narration of the events that marked the country's history and that invite us to review some passages.
The team, made up of 68 researchers, scientists and linguists, has taken seven years – with a pandemic in between – to scan and digitize the almost 2,500 pages of the manuscript and translate them into Spanish, English and Nahuatl. The project, which is now available online, allows you to admire page by page the original writing in Spanish and Nahuatl and the more than 2,000 hand-painted drawings. It also gives the possibility of searching for texts, images and keywords, which makes it more accessible. The work has been funded by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (United States), in collaboration with the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenciana in Florence (Italy). “The codex is the most important manuscript of the 16th century and represents the largest indigenous encyclopedia of that time,” says Kim Richter, project leader and specialist in Mesoamerican Studies.
The Florentine Codex was created in 1577 by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish Franciscan friar who dedicated most of his life to documenting the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Elders, Nahua philologists, scribes and artists known as tlacuilos, who wrote and illustrated the three volumes and 12 books into which the work is divided. Among them, we know the name of Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Marco Jacobita, Agustín de la Fuente and Pedro de Sanbuenaventura, trilingual grammarians who could write in Nahuatl, Spanish and Latin and who were trained at the Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, where Mexico City is currently located. Once completed, the manuscript was sent to Europe and ended up in the Medici family library in Florence – hence its name.
Although the Florentine Codex had been available since 2012 through the World Digital Library, it remained incomprehensible to the general public, since knowledge of 16th-century Nahuatl and Spanish was required. For centuries, society lived with its back to the mystery. The doctor points out that despite being a bilingual primary document of a unique nature, all this time more attention was paid to the translation into Spanish. “Books 1 to 11 still need to be translated from Nahuatl, a project that began at UNAM and has not yet concluded. Berenice Alcántara and Federico Navarrete were in charge of the translation of book 12, although my dream would have been to be able to integrate the complete narrative into Nahuatl,” she says.
According to his point of view, Sahagún's narrative is based on the Letters of Report that Cortés wrote to Charles V to report how his troops were advancing. Richter, however, considers that it was necessary to make a joint narration of the three narratives: in Spanish, Nahuatl and the illustrations, to fully understand what the old codex hides. As on so many other occasions, the narrative of the victors is far from that of the defeated. “The Nahuatl and Spanish texts do not say totally different things, but the way of representing that memory is very different,” he points out.
He explains that in book 12, dedicated to the Conquest, the Spanish text is much more factual and cold and that, for example, it includes Montezuma's surrender in a docile way. “The Nahuatl text says that the capture of Moctezuma, Itzcuauhtzin and the other leaders was violent and suggests that they were imprisoned and died under the hands of the Spanish,” says the specialist in Mesoamerican studies. “The Nahuatl text tells in a more poetic way the disaster that was that invasion and that war and does not talk about the allies of the Spanish, but about the betrayal of the Tlaxcalans,” she says.
In one of the illustrations you can see how the Spanish throw Moctezuma's body into the water, something that does not go unnoticed by researchers. “All the images in book 12 are in black and white, however, these artists reserved the little color they had to paint some images with which they wanted to draw the reader's attention. In this way, they focused on some passages such as the death of Moctezuma without saying it openly because they were under Spanish rule, but which reveals an intention to tell that passage of history,” explains Richter.
Another objective of this new research has been to know the people who made the codex beyond Sahagún. The texts were born from the talks that the monk had with the wise men and that were collected by his indigenous disciples, as Diana Magaloni, director of the Art of the Ancient Americas Program at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, points out in the magazine Mexican Archeology. “We have identified the hands of the artists and scribes,” says Kim Richter. “Sahagún does not give us the names of all the artists, he only mentions three of the scribes, but now we know that there were nine and that some of those who wrote were also able to make the drawings,” he adds and points out that they have identified 22 probable artists. who were in charge of the illustrations.
All of them entered the Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco school as young monks. “Many were children of the Nahuatl elite and received a humanistic education, based on the new currents of Europe,” says the expert. Trained at the University of Salamanca, Brother Bernardino de Sahagún had the task of training future Franciscans who would master Nahuatl and evangelize in that language. “At the end of the 16th century, that philosophy changed and books in Nahuatl stopped being produced because the institutions realized that they could not control the narrative that was used,” explains Richter. Just as it happened with the Florentine Codex.
After these years, specialists consider it likely that the same authors of the Florentine Codex participated in the creation of other documents such as The Annals of Tlatelolco or the Aubin Codex, from the same time. “In the Aubin they mention and draw Antonio Valeriano, one of the masters who worked with Sahagún. He was one of the best enlightened researchers of that time,” considers Richter. Like modern encyclopedias, the codex covers a wide variety of topics and documents, beyond Mexica society, the perspective of the town of Tlatelolco, from where it was written.
Access to the Florentine Codex continues to have an impact in today's Mexico, as stated by academic Eduardo Cruz Cruz, who was part of the project, during a conference. “Having access and reading it first-hand is really important for our self-esteem, it helps us understand that classical Nahuatl was no less important than Spanish in the 16th century.” A different vision of the story that has been told until now and that, as Richter explains, “is an outstanding debt that was owed to the Nahuas and their language.”
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