The Florentine Codex - University of Texas Press

THE

FLORENTINE CODEX

THE

FLORENTINE CODEX An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico EDITED BY

JEANETTE FAVROT PETERSON AND KEVIN TERRACIANO

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS333AUSTIN

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2019 Publication of this book has been supported by funds from the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and UCLA Latin American Institute Publications

Images from the Florentine Codex courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; any other unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Peterson, Jeanette Favrot, editor. | Terraciano, Kevin, 1962– editor.

Title: The Florentine Codex : an encyclopedia of the Nahua world in sixteenth-century Mexico / edited by Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018043826 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1840-9 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1841-6 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1842-3 (nonlibrary e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Codice florentino. | Manuscripts, Nahuatl. | Manuscripts, Mexican. | Aztecs—History—16th century. | Mexico—History—16th century.

Classification: LCC F1219.56.C7552 F55 2019 | DDC 972/.02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043826 doi:10.7560/318409

Contents

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1 2

Introduction. An Encyclopedia of Nahua Culture: Context and Content KEVIN TERRACIANO

1

PART I. THE ART OF TRANSLATION Images in Translation: A Codex “Muy Historiado” JEANETTE FAVROT PETERSON

21

On the Reception of the Florentine Codex: The First Italian Translation IDA GIOVANNA RAO

37

3

Reading between the Lines of Book 12 KEVIN TERRACIANO

4

The Art of War, the Working Class, and Snowfall: Reflections on the Assimilation of Western Aesthetics PABLO ESCALANTE GONZALBO

5

6

7

vii

PART II. LORDS: ROYAL AND SACRED Surviving Conquest: Depicting Aztec Deities in Sahagún’s Historia ELOISE QUIÑONES KEBER Fashioning Conceptual Categories in the Florentine Codex: Old-World and Indigenous Foundations for the Rulers and the Gods ELIZABETH HILL BOONE Teotl and Diablo: Indigenous and Christian Conceptions of Gods and Devils in the Florentine Codex GUILHEM OLIVIER

45

63

77

95

110

8

9

10

11 12

13

vi • CONTENTS

PART III. ORDERING THE COSMOS Ecology and Leadership: Pantitlan and Other Erratic Phenomena BARBARA E. MUNDY Bundling Natural History: Tlaquimilolli, Folk Biology, and Book 11 MOLLY H. BASSETT Powerful Words and Eloquent Images DIANA MAGALONI KERPEL

125

139 152

PART IV. SOCIAL DISCOURSE AND DEVIANCE Rhetoric as Acculturation: The Anomalous Book 6 JEANETTE FAVROT PETERSON

167

Flowers and Speech in Discourses on Deviance in Book 10 LISA SOUSA

184

Parts of the Body: Order and Disorder ELLEN T. BAIRD

200

BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTRIBUTORS INDEX

217 231 233

THE

FLORENTINE CODEX

FIGURE I.1. Victims of the first smallpox outbreak in 1520. Florentine Codex, Bk. 12, fol. 53v. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Med. Palat. 218–220. Courtesy of MIBACT.

Introduction An Encyclopedia of Nahua Culture: Context and Content KEVIN TERRACIANO

I

t is difficult to imagine the sense of urgency that fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his team of indigenous writers and artists felt as they struggled to complete the final draft of their encyclopedia of Nahua culture and language known today as the Florentine Codex.

They worked inside the cloistered walls of the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Santiago Tlatelolco while family, friends, and some of their own group succumbed to disease. Writing during the virulent epidemic of 1576, Sahagún recalled an earlier plague of 1545, when he claimed to have buried more than ten thousand corpses before he himself fell ill and nearly died. “There is hardly anyone still in the college,” he lamented. “Dead and sick, almost all are gone.”1 Sahagún blamed the two epidemics for the decline of the colegio.

The Franciscan colegio in Tlatelolco, a Mexica community just north of neighboring Tenochtitlan and on the same island in the lake of the Basin of Mexico, was the first European college in the Americas. The Holy Cross College was founded on January 6, 1536, to educate Nahua youth, primarily but not exclusively the sons of Nahua elites. The Franciscans offered a basic humanities curriculum, teaching the neophytes how to read and write in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin; the trivium and the quadrivium; and elements of the Christian doctrine. The college possessed an extensive library to support these endeavors.

By the second half of the sixteenth century, Tlatelolco had become a center of Franciscan learning and humanist education in New Spain.

But by the 1570s, Sahagún had seen the “whole land . . . depleted of people” with his very own eyes.2 He feared that the Indians were destined for extinction, to be replaced forever by Spaniards and their descendants.3 A striking image in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex depicts victims of the first outbreak of smallpox, after the Spaniards were expelled from Tenochtitlan in 1520 (fig. I.1). A woman attends to the sick, who lie suffering on petates, or reed mats.

The Nahuatl text says that the epidemic lasted a full sixty days before it moved toward the south, and “the Mexica warriors were greatly weakened by it.”4 The epidemic of 1576 struck in August; Sahagún penned the prologues and interpolations in November of that year. To describe the devastation wrought by war and disease on the indigenous peoples of New Spain, he recalled the words of an Old Testament prophecy. In the prologue to Book 1 he compares the war of 1520–1521 to the curse which Jeremiah, in the name of God, thundered upon Judea and Jerusalem in the fifth chapter, saying: “I will cause to come upon you, I will bring against you a people from afar, a very vigorous and brave people, a very ancient people skilled in battle, a people whose language you will not understand, . . . all powerful and courageous people, lusting to kill. This people will destroy you and your women and children and everything you possess, and will destroy all your villages and buildings.” This has literally happened to these Indians by way of the Spaniards.5

1

The Florentine Codex took shape amid the chaos of conquest, disease, and consolidation of imperial power in Mexico, the culmination of decades of meticulous gathering and recording of knowledge about Nahua culture.

As soon as the bilingual manuscript was completed, the final version in a series of works collectively referred to as the Historia general (or universal), it was whisked away to Spain. In March 1578, Sahagún wrote a letter to the Spanish king, humbly inquiring whether his majesty had seen the books that had taken three decades to complete.6 By this time, fray Bernardino was approaching eighty years of age and wrote with a trembling hand. He would never know of the work’s final destination or fate. Table I.1 provides a timeline for the manuscript’s production.

THE MANUSCRIPT This volume presents studies generated by our 2015 conference on the Florentine Codex that address issues raised by the internal dynamics of the manuscript, its “three texts,” and their external implications. The questions we initially explored, and herein pursue in writing, we hope will promote greater understanding of the relationship of the bilingual texts to the relevant imagery, with an emphasis on the methods, potential models, and intent of its multiple authors. This introductory chapter locates the production of the Florentine Codex in its historical, literary, and artistic framework and summarizes the thirteen substantive contributions to this volume.

At the outset I should clarify the several titles conferred on the Florentine Codex and their inconsistent usage. The “Florentine Codex” is the title that the pioneering historians Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble, and other prominent scholars have given the manuscript that now exists in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy (Med. Palat. 218, 219, and 220). The twelve books of the manuscript were originally bound in four volumes;7 today the manuscript consists of 1,223 folios (2,446 pages) and is rebound in three volumes.

Ironically, historians do not know the original title of the work; it is unclear what title Sahagún chose. The manuscript preserves only a small fragment of the title page, which was probably removed when it was bound a second time. It is also called the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España and the Historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España, based on the titles of a working draft and 2 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

a copy of the Spanish text, the Palacio Real and Tolosa manuscripts, respectively, both in Madrid.8 Many scholars have also adopted the Historia general title, including Carlos María de Bustamante, Paso y Troncoso, and Anderson and Dibble, both for Sahagún’s larger project (1558–1577) and explicitly for the final edition. In 1829– 1830, Bustamante published the Spanish translation of the codex as the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España.

It is based on the Tolosa manuscript, which in general is a faithful copy of the Florentine’s Spanish text.9 In the prologues to each of the twelve books, Sahagún seems to avoid a title, referring to the work numerous times as the libros (books) or the doze libros (twelve books) or the obra (work). He also uses the title historia more than once, in the prologues to Books 9 and 10 and in his letter to the king in 1578, mentioned before. The broader meaning of the word historia in the early modern period did not refer exclusively to an account of past events; the term was often modified with other descriptive terms, such as natural (i.e., flora and fauna) or moral (mores) to indicate broader studies of nature or customs.10 The qualifying term general implies the treatment of a wide range of subjects, and universal suggests an attempt to insert the Nahuas into a universal Christian history. Jesús Bustamante García observes that the archbishop of Mexico, Pedro Moya de Contreras, referred to the work as Sahagún’s “Historia universal de las Yndias” in his letter to the king, dated December 16, 1578.11 Victoria Ríos Castaño provides evidence that universal was the term recognized by King Philip II and the Council of the Indies. She also points out that the choice of twelve books conforms to the symbolic import of the number twelve to the friars and to Christian ideology in general.12 Sahagún also refers to having written “twelve books of the divine, or rather idolatrous, human, and natural things of this New Spain.”13 Thus he refers to his entire encyclopedic project with many of the key words that were later applied to it: “Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España.”

THE IMPERIAL ARCHIVE Despite many dramatic postconquest changes, the Nahuatl-speaking peoples who lived around Lake Texcoco in the Basin of Mexico continued to live and work in hundreds of separate, semiautonomous altepetl (communities) that survived in altered but recognizable forms.14 Even the two altepetl at the center of the Mexica capital,

TABLE I.1. Chronology of the Historia General [Universal] de las Cosas de Nueva España

DATE

PRODUCTION STAGES

1547

Sahagún first records huehuetlatolli in Nahuatl (later, Bk. 6) in the Colegio de Santa Cruz, Santiago Tlatelolco.

1555

First Nahuatl composition of the conquest narrative (later, Bk. 12), Tlatelolco.

1558

Francisco de Toral, Franciscan provincial, requests Sahagún compile and expand his work on the Nahuatl language and cultural data. Sahagún prepares an outline, or minuta, of planned texts.

1558–1565

Códices Matritenses or Madrid Codices (Tepepulco and Tlatelolco) A collection of Sahagún’s Nahuatl writings, bound in two volumes, that reside in two libraries in Madrid, the Real Academia de la Historia and the Palacio Real. These include: 1. Primeros memoriales (1559–1561, Tepepulco) Four sections on gods, heaven and underworld, lordship, human things. Recorded in Nahuatl with images.

2. “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” (1561–1565, Tlatelolco) 3a. Segundos memoriales (1561–1562) 3b. Memoriales en tres columnas (1563–1565) 3c. Memoriales con escolios (ca. 1565)

1565–1570

San Francisco, Mexico: Sahagún reorders, amends, and annotates texts.

1569

“Manuscrito de ”: “clean copy” of twelve books in Nahuatl of Historia general, now lost.

1570–1575

Sahagún’s writings impounded and scattered (Tlatelolco).

August 4, 1575

Arrival of Rodrigo de Sequera with orders from Juan de Ovando (d. Aug. 8, 1575), president of Council of the Indies, Seville, to commission Sahagún to produce a bilingual, illustrated copy of his encyclopedic Nahuatl manuscript.

fall 1575–spring 1577

Florentine Codex (Tlatelolco) Production of the final edition of the Historia general commonly known as the Florentine Codex (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence).

April 22, 1577

Royal order (real cédula) to Viceroy Martín Enríquez to seize Sahagún’s works.

October 28, 1577

Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras writes to Philip II to confirm that Sahagún’s works have been sequestered and will be sent to the king. On December 16, 1578, the archbishop confirms the shipment, as does Sahagún in an earlier letter of March 26, 1578.

1580

Florentine Codex has reached Spain by this time, brought by fray Rodrigo de Sequera. It is taken shortly thereafter to Rome, perhaps as a diplomatic gift for Cardinal Ferdinando I de’ Medici (1563–1588).

1578–1588

Tolosa manuscript (ms. 9-4812, Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid) First copy of Spanish text in the Florentine Codex, made in Mexico or Spain.

1587 or 1588

Florentine Codex in Medici collection moved to Florence when Ferdinando I de’ Medici made grand duke of Tuscany.

1783

First recorded entry of the Florentine Codex in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Med. Palat.

218–220).

Note: All documents were initiated and overseen by Sahagún but were multiauthored, with indigenous Nahua scholars and painters transcribing the information from oral Nahuatl to alphabetic script, creating the accompanying images, and often revising texts.

Sources: Anderson 1982; Dibble 1982a; Sahagún 1979, Bk. 6, fol. 215v; Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 1, 46–47, 51; D’Olwer and Cline 1973, 188–203; Baudot 1995, 496–502; Marchetti 1983, 22; Bustamante García 1990, 307–308, 327–346, 451; LeónPortilla 2002a, 115–224; Rao 2011, 38–39; Ríos Castaño 2014, 99–109.

Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, which bore the brunt of the Spanish-led invasion in 1520–1521, managed to regroup and reassert their identities within the new colonial order.

Nonetheless, their leaders and inhabitants were forced to come to terms with new political and religious authorities who spoke a foreign language, introduced another legal system, and promoted a rapidly changing economy in which the competition for natural and human resources, especially at the center of this “New Spain,” intensified with each generation.

At the same time, the Crown sought to impose its sovereignty on the distant land. Carlos V brought the chaotic early period of Cortés, and his successor, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, president of the first audiencia, or high court, to a close by appointing a second audiencia of judges loyal to the Crown and a new viceroy, don Antonio de Mendoza, who governed from 1535 to 1550. Viceroy Mendoza consolidated the Crown’s authority and supported the efforts of the mendicant orders to establish the Church.15 In this early period of violent entradas (expeditions) and Indian slaving, fray Bartolomé de las Casas and other critics of empire exposed the hypocrisy of the concept of “just war” and lamented the rapidly declining native population. The New Laws of 1542 represented the Crown’s attempt to assert its authority throughout Spanish America by reigning in conquistadores, outlawing indigenous slavery in socalled pacified areas, and abolishing the encomienda (royal grant of indigenous labor and tribute to a Spaniard). Although the New Laws were not carried out fully anywhere, rebellious movements and the discovery of rich silver deposits in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru stiffened the Crown’s resolve to assert control over the Indies, as the Holy Roman Empire continued to expand.

The Florentine Codex is unique in its scope and reliance on Nahua collaborators, but it nevertheless falls within the parameters of the early modern European quest for collecting information on newly conquered territories and their people. Spain’s overseas ventures generated a staggering amount of information, contributing to the creation of an imperial archive. Leaders of expeditions were among the first to report, using the genre of the relación, or account. Hernando Cortés wrote the first cartas de relación from Mexico, sending his letters directly to the king beginning in 1519. Early relaciones and crónicas (chronicles), written by both secular and ecclesiastical officials, brimmed with cultural detail about the people of the new lands, the indios. The first royal chronicler of the 4 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, stationed on the island of Española, in Santo Domingo, interviewed Spaniards returning to Spain for the first part of his lengthy history, Historia general y natural de las Indias, published in Seville in 1535.

Fray Toribio de Benavente, one of the original twelve Franciscans to arrive in New Spain in 1524, who adopted the name Motolinía (Nahuatl for “he is poor, afflicted”), completed his Historia de los indios de la Nueva España in 1541, within two decades of his arrival, but it was not published until the nineteenth century.16 Motolinía consulted many Nahuas and was one of the first Spaniards to realize how Nahuas kept written records of their histories, using a pictorial system that he compared to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Francisco López de Gómara, author of the first history of the conquest of Mexico (after Cortés’s letters), published in 1552, copied entire sections of Motolinía’s manuscript on indigenous customs into his own work.17 Native artists in the early postconquest period contributed directly to many manuscripts by providing information and producing images. Nahua tlacuiloque (plural of tlacuilo, writer/painter) learned how to write their languages with the Roman alphabet; many culture groups in Mesoamerica had developed traditions of writing on stone, fig-bark paper (amatl), deerskin, and cloth with natural pigments long before the Spaniards arrived. The eleventh book of the Florentine Codex features twelve pages on colors or pigments used for writing/painting.

Figure I.2 is a folio from chapter 11, which shows two tlacuiloque working while assistants prepare pigments of different colors. Ironically, the images in this second part of Book 11 contain no colors; the artists seem to have run out of pigments by this latter part of the project, after painting hundreds of images throughout most of the manuscript.

One of the first compilations to feature indigenous images and Spanish text was the Codex Mendoza. Produced during Viceroy Mendoza’s term of office (1535– 1550), little is known about the origins of this manuscript, for it contains no title page or prologue. One potential scenario is that an indigenous group in Mexico City, perhaps in collaboration with friars, created a pictorial manuscript that portrays Tenochtitlan and Mexica society in a positive light and then approached Spanish authorities to have it translated and sent to the king. The Codex Mendoza consists of three parts: (1) a history of Mexica dynastic leaders and their conquests; (2) a long list of tribute that altepetl subject to the Mexica empire sent to Tenochtitlan;

FIGURE I.2. Assistants prepare pigments for tlacuiloque (writers/artists). Florentine Codex, Bk. 11, fol. 221v.

Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Med. Palat. 218–220. Courtesy of MIBACT.

and (3) a series of scenes describing the birth, life, and death of Nahua people. The tlacuiloque designed and executed seventy-two pages of finely painted images. The artists then explained the meaning of the images to a translator, who wrote explanatory Spanish glosses alongside the paintings. The resulting narrative juxtaposes images, language, and a wealth of information on Mexica culture.18 But it is unclear whether Viceroy Mendoza commissioned or even saw the manuscript.

More certain is Mendoza’s sponsorship of the 1541 Relación de Michoacán, a book that was written by a Franciscan based on interviews with indigenous informants and illustrated by indigenous artists. Its tripartite structure resembles the Codex Mendoza, but its purpose was to help resolve territorial disputes in and around Tzintzuntzan.19 By the 1540s, indigenous writers throughout highland Mesoamerica were producing many different types of pictorial manuscripts to support claims within the Spanish justice system, attempting to show proof of possession and hereditary authority for judges in the form of maps and lists of rulers. In fact, Viceroy Mendoza had ruled in favor of allowing pictorial claims as evidence in lawsuits.20 Indigenous artists used images to document everything from land claims to abuses of authority. The Codex Tepetlaoztoc (or Kingsborough) and the Codex Osuna, for example, were produced for legal disputes in the 1550s and 1560s.

In this early postconquest period, Franciscans played a leading role among the mendicant orders in working closely with indigenous men to record their languages for evangelical purposes, creating vocabularios (translation dictionaries), artes (grammar texts), doctrinas (doctrinal texts explaining Christian concepts), and confesionarios (confessional manuals)—all in native languages, with or without Spanish translations. Many of these works were among the first books published in the Americas. Fray Alonso de Molina, who worked and taught alongside Sahagún in the Colegio de Santa Cruz, published the first Spanish-toNahuatl vocabulario in 1555, and then added a Nahuatlto-Spanish complement in 1571, creating the first twoway dictionary of an indigenous language of the Americas.

Obviously, Molina could not have done this without the assistance of many Nahuas who were fluent in Spanish. In spite of the indispensable contribution of bilingual indigenous scholars, the title pages of these works consistently refer to the friars as the sole authors, even when indigenous contributions are acknowledged in the prologues to 6 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

the works. In the making of the Florentine Codex, Bernardino de Sahagún shared these collaborative working practices, but to his credit he included the names of some of his Nahua coauthors in his prologues and interpolations.

A UNIQUE COLLABORATIVE PROJECT Fray Bernardino de Sahagún was born around 1499 or 1500 in the ancient town of Sahagún, in the kingdom of León. He took his vows and assumed the habit of the Franciscan order in Salamanca, where he likely also attended the University of Salamanca.21 He arrived in New Spain in 1529 and established a reputation for learning Nahuatl.22 By the 1540s, he embarked on a series of projects that stand out for their originality and sheer ambition, summarized in table I.1. For example, he collected dozens of Nahuatl speeches in 1547 and recorded a Nahuatl version of the conquest of Mexico in 1555. In 1558, the Franciscan provincial, fray Francisco de Toral, commissioned Sahagún to compile a study of indigenous culture that would be useful to the religious who sought to indoctrinate neophytes in the Christian faith. To this end, Sahagún took four Nahua scholars whom he had taught at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco to the Franciscan convent in Tepepulco, an altepetl located about eighty kilometers northeast of Mexico City and the probable source of the Nahuatl speeches that he had collected earlier. The four scholars were Antonio Valeriano of Azcapotzalco, Martín Jacobita of Tlatelolco, and Pedro de San Buenaventura and Alonso Vegerano of Cuauhtitlan.

In Tepepulco Sahagún and his team consulted with elders and leaders, who used images as mnemonic devices to elicit oral recitations and responses, in the manner that preconquest-style codices were used to guide a narrative.

The Nahuatl scholars wrote down the responses prompted by the images. Sahagún also compiled word lists for various topics that were explained later, focusing on the lexicon associated with each topic.23 By 1561, Sahagún and his team produced a manuscript known today as the Primeros memoriales, considered a precursor to the Florentine Codex in its thematic structure and its reliance on a strong pictorial component. Its four chapters consist of eighty-eight folios, or 176 pages; more than half of the pages contain illustrations. The Primeros memoriales follows a pattern detected in other encyclopedic manuscripts that organize their material from the celestial to the more earthbound realms, discussed more

fully later. The first chapter, titled “Teteo,” addresses the deities and their associated rituals; the second, “Ilhuicayotl iuan Mictlancayotl,” treats matters related to the heavens and the place of the dead; the third, “Tlatocayotl,” deals with rulers; and the fourth chapter, “Tlacayotl,” considers a variety of human affairs.24 Images serve a primary function in the Primeros memoriales, as in the Codex Mendoza, guiding the content of the alphabetic text. Unlike the Mendoza glosses, which are in Spanish, in the Primeros memoriales Nahuas wrote explanations or transmitted information in Nahuatl.

In 1561 Sahagún returned to the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Santiago Tlatelolco, where he applied the methods he had developed in Tepepulco, meeting with leaders there to request support for his grander project. In the prologue to Book 2 of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún recounts how in Tlatelolco “[t]he governor with his councilmen assigned me as many as eight or ten leaders, selected from among all, very capable in their language, and in their ancient customs.”25 These men, and four or five of his most able trilingual students from the Colegio de Santa Cruz, “amended, explained, and expanded” what was collected in Tepepulco. The resulting drafts from this period are known as the “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco.” In 1565 Sahagún returned to the convent of San Francisco in Mexico City to work alone for three years, where he “examined and reexamined” all his writings. He writes in the prologue to Book 2 that he “divided them into books, into twelve books, and some books by chapters and paragraphs.” He included material already gathered on rhetoric (1547) and the conquest (1555), which became Books 6 and 12 of the Florentine Codex, respectively. The Franciscan completed this Nahuatl “Manuscrito de 1569” in Mexico City. Nahua students “added and amended many things to the twelve books when they made a clear copy.”

However, at this time only the Nahuatl text of the bilingual project was complete.26 In 1570, the merits of Sahagún’s project were discussed at the provincial order chapter meeting in Mexico City.

Some members voiced concern with the project, Sahagún recalls, that “it was contrary to the vows of poverty to spend monies in recording those writings.”27 It is likely that the matter involved more than economic considerations. At issue was a heated debate over the role of knowledge about indigenous cultures within the missionary program. Franciscans were divided. Did recognizing and recording indigenous culture, including sacred beliefs

and practices, advance or undermine their goals of converting the native inhabitants to Christianity? In any case, Sahagún was instructed to dismiss his scribes and complete the work alone, despite the “trembling” of his hand in old age. Even worse, the provincial, fray Alonso de Escalona, confiscated and scattered the books by sending them to friars throughout the province for their perusal.

The tide turned five years later, however, and Sahagún eventually retrieved the books with the assistance of the commissary fray Miguel Navarro. In 1575, the commissary general fray Rodrigo de Sequera ordered the Nahuatl manuscript to be translated into Spanish, authorizing the project’s continuation. Sequera intended to send it to the president of the Council of the Indies, don Juan de Ovando.28 Ovando had become president in 1571, advising the king on policy regarding the Indies and building a corpus of data for the imperial archive.29 His interests ranged from geography and natural resources to the customs and history of indigenous peoples. Ovando began to develop questionnaires to be circulated throughout the Spanish empire, ultimately the basis of the Relaciones geográficas that were sent to New Spain in 1576. In 1573 King Philip II issued a decree to compile a historia, a book of descripciones, a type of encyclopedia on the history of the Indies and its people, the type of manuscript on which Sahagún and his team had been working.30 Ovando created the position of cosmógrafo-cronista to write the official history and geography of the Indies, and he sent out scientific expeditions, including that of Francisco Hernández, the protomédico who collected a vast array of botanical and medicinal information in Mexico. When Ovando heard of Sahagún’s work he asked to see the books, and Sequera intended to send them to him, but Ovando died in 1575.

In 1576, the archbishop of Mexico, Pedro Moya de Contreras, entered the conversation, urging Sequera to have the books translated into Spanish and to send them to the king.31 Meanwhile, Sahagún prepared Spanish summaries of the Nahuatl text in what would become the final edition of the Historia general, or the Florentine Codex. He focused on translating the manuscript and writing the prologues in 1576 and 1577. The prologues refer to current events of that period, including the epidemic of 1576, discussed before. Artists also added the hundreds of images in these two years, most painted in polychrome tones. Only the images in the second half of Book 11 and in Books 6 and 12 lack color (with a few exceptions), suggesting that these INTRODUCTION • 7

were the final books being illustrated when the color pigments ran out; or that their preparation could not keep up with the scribes’ hurried pace to complete the manuscript; or that the epidemic of 1576–1577 affected the availability of pigments and manpower to complete its production, or some combination of these factors.32 Everyone was forced to work faster to meet a new deadline when the Crown altered its position on manuscripts involving indigenous history and religion and issued royal cedulas ordering the confiscation of all manuscripts on the topic. In April of 1577, King Philip II issued a decree that concludes: We order that, as soon as you receive this, our decree, with great care and diligence you take measures to get these books without there remaining the originals or copies of them, and to send them well guarded at once to our Council of the Indies, that they may there be examined. And you will be advised not to permit anyone, for any reason, in any language, to write concerning the superstitions and way of life these Indians had.33

The decree suggests a shift in policy from encouraging the collection of information on indigenous culture and history to prohibiting writing on those topics. Moreover, the decree authorized the confiscation of all manuscripts and related materials on these controversial topics. The Council of Trent’s decrees (1545–1563) to condemn false doctrines and idolatries and the presence of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, established in New Spain in 1571, might have influenced the Crown’s decision. This cedula and its enforcement expedited Sahagún’s plan to send the books to Spain. Sahagún wrote a letter to Philip II in March 1578, averring that he had sent a copy of the Historia general to the king but had heard nothing of its reception, and that he would copy the manuscript and send it again if it had not reached him (unwittingly suggesting that he had defied the order by keeping a copy of the manuscript). Another reference to this manuscript appears in Sahagún’s 1585 version of Book 12, where he claims he gave a first copy to the outgoing viceroy, don Martín Enríquez, and then later gave a second copy to fray Rodrigo de Sequera.34 Since a first so-called Enríquez copy is no longer extant, and it is difficult to believe that Sahagún and his team could produce two major manuscripts within a couple of years, the only certainty is that Sahagún entrusted a complete version with images to Sequera, who departed 8 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

Mexico for Spain in 1580.35 This “Sequera manuscript,” dedicated to the supportive commissary general, is the Florentine Codex. Sahagún called the books of this copy “muy historiados” (profusely illustrated).36 Although the fate of the Sequera manuscript once it reached Spain is equally unclear, it likely arrived in Rome, where Ferdinando I de’ Medici acquired the manuscript, by gift or purchase, from Sequera.37 Giovanna Rao provides new evidence indicating that Ferdinando possessed the manuscript before he became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1588. She concludes that Sequera probably thought that the codex was more likely to survive if it were entrusted to the grand duke, who sought to augment the collection of international manuscripts begun by Cosimo the Elder. One fascinating piece of evidence that the codex had reached Florence by 1588–1589 comes from the depiction of Mexica warriors on the ceiling of the former Armeria (room 21) of the Uffizi Gallery, originally a Medici palace. The greatest affinity between the Florentine Codex and the Uffizi murals is found in the portrayal of a heroic Mexica warrior, Tzilacatzin, who is featured in Book 12 (fol. 60v).38 The artist must have seen the codex before he painted his stylized narrative of the conquest of the Americas. After 1587–1589, the preservation and location of the codex was unknown to all those outside a few people within the Medici circle until 1793, when the bibliographer Angelo Maria Bandini published a catalogue in Latin of manuscripts in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, designed by Michelangelo. Still, the work was not studied until it was cited again by fray Marcelino de Civezza in 1879, a full three centuries after its journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Tuscany.39 This discussion of the evolution and survival of the Florentine Codex sheds light on the unique qualities of the manuscript. Sahagún deliberates on why and how the work was produced, referring to the obstacles that beset the project and suggesting that he knew the books would continue to attract scrutiny: “[T]his work has been examined and verified by many over many years. It has suffered many travails and misfortunes until it has been put into the form it is now in.”40 Sahagún’s prologues abound with such defensive remarks about the nature of the work, beginning with his opening statement in the first prologue, in which he compares a doctor’s remedy to the extirpation of idolatry. Just as a doctor needs to know the symptoms of a sickness in order to apply a cure to the patient, he reasoned, the religious of New Spain needed to be able

to identify idolatry in its many forms in order to destroy it completely. Saving people, whether from disease of the body or the soul, required knowledge.

Considering that Sahagún wrote these prologues last, in 1576 and 1577, in the midst of an epidemic, it is no coincidence that he chose to compare the work of priests with doctors. Many friars, in fact, believed that God was punishing the Indians with disease because of their idolatries. And yet this religious justification was only one aspect of the work. If fray Francisco de Toral commissioned Sahagún to compile a study of indigenous culture that would be useful to the mendicants who sought to indoctrinate them in the Christian faith, Sahagún and his team of Nahua writers and artists went far beyond this objective, creating a massive compilation of language and culture that resembles a humanist encyclopedia more than a handbook for extirpation. Indeed, no other manuscript in the Americas can match the Florentine Codex for its wide-ranging coverage of numerous topics (some controversial at the time), its hundreds of carefully painted illustrations, and its record of the indigenous language.

“A TREASURY FOR THE KNOWLEDGE OF MANY THINGS ” : MODELS FOR THE MANUSCRIPT In referring to the type of work that he and his colleagues had sought to produce, Sahagún remarks that many who knew of his project would ask about the calepino, in reference to the demonstrative vocabulary of Latin that Ambrosio Calepino (1440–1510/1511) had created.41 Although Sahagún concluded that it would be impossible to create a calepino, considering that there were very few Nahuatl (alphabetic) writings at this time, he thought his project might lay the groundwork for such a work. He interrogated his Nahua colleagues for “all manners of speech and all the words that this language uses, as well verified and certain as that which Virgil, Cicero, and other authors wrote in the Latin language.” Sahagún was certain that the compendium would be “a treasury for the knowledge of many things worthy of being known,” and a “thing of much value in New and Old Spain.”42 If recording “all manners of speech and all the words” of the language was one of Sahagún’s main concerns, organizing and preserving knowledge on a wide variety of topics regarding Nahua culture was another. Aside from the calepino, several other works seem to have influenced the objective and method

of the Florentine Codex, including classical and medieval encyclopedias, historias (general, universal, natural, moral), Christian treatises, and the many books on sermons and confessions that filled the shelves of the Colegio de Santa Cruz library.

The Florentine Codex is clearly “encyclopedic” in that it attempts to encapsulate the sum of what was then known about the Nahua world in a concrete, pictorialized book form. Sahagún’s monumental endeavor fulfills the very definition of the encyclopedia, from the Greek for “general knowledge” (enkyklios paideia).43 It is also a work that “encapsulates a total or universal body of knowledge organizing it in order to preserve it and make it accessible.”44 The manuscript’s format and its sequence of twelve books conform to the hierarchical organization of classical and medieval compendia, progressing from the realms of the divine (“Gods” and “Ceremonies”) to the human (“The People”) and the natural realms (“Earthly Things”). Only Book 6, “Rhetoric,” and Book 12, “The Conquest,” break with this sequence (for a summary of the organization of the twelve books, see table I.2).

For its overarching structural organization, as well as in some cases specific data, three well-known encyclopedias have been suggested as models (see table I.3): Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, found in the Tlatelolco library; the seventh-century Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (580–636); and the thirteenth-century De proprietatibus rerum (On the nature of things, 1220–1240) by Bartholomeus Anglicus.45 Isidore was the first Christian writer to compile a summa of universal knowledge in the Etymologiae, also known as Origines. The twenty-volume compilation assembled parts of many books from antiquity. Two of these well-known encyclopedists, Pliny and Isidore, also devote considerable attention to language and rhetoric.46 Sahagún seems to imitate Pliny in describing his Historia general project as a thesaurus, a treasury (tesoro), and a coffer (recamara) or storehouse.47 Anglicus’s influence on Book 6 and especially Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, in its description of the vices and virtues of various Nahua types, is well documented.48 Several Christian texts influenced Sahagún’s model and the content of the Florentine Codex. Saint Augustine, for one, wrote on the conversion of non-Christian populations and the taxonomy of “pagan” gods. Augustine wrote De civitate dei (City of God) to defend Christianity after the sack of Rome by a Gothic army in 410. By the sixteenth century, the work was firmly established in INTRODUCTION • 9

TABLE I.2. Organization of the Florentine Codex

BOOK

SHORT TITLE

Divine 1

Gods

“De los dioses . . .”

2

Ceremonies; Calendar

“Del calendario, fiestas y ceremonias . . .”

3

Origin of Gods

“Del principio que tuvieron los dioses . . .”

4

Astrology; Divination

“De la astrología . . . o arte adivinatoria Indiana”

5

Omens

“De los agueros y prenósticos . . .”

6

Rhetoric, Moral Philosophy

“De la rethorica y philosophia moral”

7

Sun, Moon, Stars

“De la astrología y philosophia natural” Human

8

Kings, Lords, Governance

“De los reyes y señores . . . el govierno . . .”

9

Merchants; Artisans

“De los mercaderes, oficiales de oro y piedras . . .”

10

The People; Anatomy

“De los vicios y virtudes desta gente Indiana” Nature

11

Earthly Things

“De las cosas naturales; animales . . .”

History

12

The Conquest

“De la conquista de la Nueva España”

Sources: Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 1, 46; Bk. 9, 71; D’Olwer and Cline 1973, 192, table 2; Bustamante García 1990, 308–327, 452–453.

the canon of Christian texts. Augustine’s intent to compile knowledge on pagan religions in order to expose their false and sinful nature resonates with Sahagún’s objective for compiling the first five books of the Florentine Codex.49 Elizabeth Boone and Guilhem Olivier refer to the influence of Augustine in this volume. Ríos Castaño demonstrates the importance of Augustine and shows that several collections of sermons, manuals of confessional practices, and texts on biblical exegesis had a decisive influence on Sahagún’s model and inquisitorial method of collecting information.50 Book 11 of the Florentine Codex on the flora and fauna, minerology, and topography of New Spain anticipates other sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century studies of natural history. These include the works of Andrea Cesalpino (De plantis libri XVI, published in 1583), Ulisse Androvandi (De reliquis animalibus [. . .], 1605), and Francisco Hernández (Cuatro libros de la naturaleza [. . .] de la Nueva España, 1615), which feature legends and proverbs,

10 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

superstitions, and symbols associated with specific animals and plants.51 In fact, Hernández consulted Sahagún’s manuscript in Tlatelolco.

The range of potential models for the Florentine Codex continues to expand as intriguing new sources are identified, some described in this volume. For example, Boone refers to the work of Albricus, a philosopher who wrote a thirteenth-century treatise (Liber ymaginum deorum), as well as new manuals published in the sixteenth century on the description and mythology of the classical gods, which helped frame questionnaires regarding Nahua deities and also impacted the rendering of the gods’ iconography in the Florentine Codex. The Franciscan Johann Boemus published in 1520 a work on peoples and their customs (Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus). Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo observes that Olaus Magnus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1565) and Johann von Cube’s Hortus sanitatis (1536) served as models for several illustrations in the Florentine Codex. Likewise, in her recent study on

TABLE I.3. Five Potential Classical and Medieval Encyclopedic Models for the Florentine Codex

PLINY, NATURALIS HISTORIA

ISIDORE OF SEVILLE, ETYMOLOGIAE

BARTHOLOMEUS ANGLICUS, DE PROPRIETATIBUS RERUM

AUGUSTINE, DE CIVITATE DEI

ALFONSO X, GENERAL ESTORIA

*

*

*

*

*

Book 2: Ceremonies, Calendar

*

*

*

*

Book 3: Origin of Gods

*

*

*

Book 4: Astrology

*

Book 5: Omens

*

Book 6: Rhetoric, Moral Philosophy

*

*

*

*

SAHAGÚN, FLORENTINE CODEX

Book 1: Gods

Book 7: Celestial Bodies

*

Book 8: Kings, Lords

*

Book 9: Merchants, Artisans

*

*

*

*

*

Book 11: Earthly Things

*

*

*

*

* *

Book 10: The People Book 12: Conquest

*

* *

*

*

*

*

Note: * indicates overlap with subject matter of Florentine Codex books.

Sources: Pliny the Elder 2004; Isidore 2006; Hernández de León-Portilla 2002; Ríos Castaño 2014, 111–149, 260–274, app. 2; Robertson 1966, 627; Garibay K. 1953–1954, 2:68–88; Alfonso el Sabio 1930, 1958.

the conquest of Mexico, Diana Magaloni Kerpel reveals a panorama of Christian images that informed the artists of Book 12.52 One medieval Iberian work that is never cited but might also have influenced Sahagún’s ambitious project, including its title, is the General estoria of the Spanish court of the learned monarch Alfonso X. It was the first great “historia general” produced in Castile. Written not in Latin but in Castilian, the General estoria was intended as a world history from the time of creation to the reign of Alfonso el Sabio, king of Castile and León (1252–1284). The unfinished work intertwines the Old Testament, Greek and Roman mythology, and extrabiblical information on the people and empires of the extended Mediterranean world and ends with the birth of Christ.53 The General estoria relied on a wide array of sources in Latin (especially Pliny), Arabic, Castilian, French, and English; like Sahagún’s Historia, it treats the histories of deities, kings, and earthly things. The manuscripts’ euhemeristic interpretation of legends, in which gods and goddesses are treated as old kings, queens, and heroes who were worshipped as deities

after their deaths, resembles the Florentine Codex’s treatment of Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, for example, who lived in Toltec times and were later worshipped as gods.

In the prologue to Book 8 Sahagún compares the legend of Quetzalcoatl to that of King Arthur, whose exploits are discussed at length in the General estoria, based on a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth.54 Sahagún likens the people and altepetl of central Mexico to those of the Mediterranean world, comparing Cholula to Rome, Tlaxcala to Carthage, Tula to Troy, and Mexico to Venice.55 Like the ancient Romans, the people left impressive antiquities and structures strewn across the land, in places like Tula and Xochicalco. Sahagún’s attempt to make sense of Mesoamerica by comparison with the Mediterranean pagan world is part of his Historia general project.

There is no doubt that Sahagún planned a work that is based to some degree on the hierarchy and categorization visible in classical, medieval, and Renaissance models.

But ultimately the Florentine Codex is singular in that the end product relied on the constant participation of Nahua scholars who took the various prototypes presented by

INTRODUCTION • 11

Sahagún and adapted them to their own ways of gathering and presenting knowledge, filtered through their own choices of what to document and preserve. At the same time, the scholars were exposed to Hispanic values and were well versed in Christian beliefs. The dynamic process of exchange and interaction between Sahagún and his team of Nahuas created new forms of expression and knowledge. The manuscript’s artwork makes apparent this adaptation. In many respects, the art style of the images is neither European nor Mesoamerican but an entirely new colonial creation. Thus the final product is truly unique, even compared with manuscripts produced in New Spain in the same century.56

THE PRESENT VOLUME Much has been written on the Florentine Codex; we are indebted to those who recognized the great value of the manuscript and spent much of their careers plumbing its rich commentary. We pay homage to such luminosos as Arthur Anderson, Charles Dibble, Ángel María Garibay Kintana, Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, Miguel León-Portilla, James Lockhart, Alfredo López Austin, H. B. Nicholson, Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, Donald Robertson—to name only a few. Many of their groundbreaking works on the Florentine Codex appear in the bibliography and throughout the many notes of this volume. This chapter draws from many previous introductory studies, especially the essays by Anderson and Dibble in the introductory volume to their English translation of the Nahuatl, which set a high standard for their clear and concise prose.57 The introduction by Ángel María Garibay Kintana in the 1953–1954 edition of the Historia general is another invaluable source. Excellent studies of the Florentine Codex and related manuscripts include those compiled by Munro Edmonson (1974); J. Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson, and Eloise Quiñones Keber (1988); Quiñones Keber (2002); John Frederick Schwaller (2003); and Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors (2011). The list of contributors to these volumes reads like a who’s who of Florentine Codex scholars. The Handbook of Middle American Indians, edited by Robert Wauchope, especially volume 13, part 2 (1973), contains several seminal essays on the Florentine Codex and manuscripts associated with Sahagún. The flagship research journal published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, founded in 1959, deserves recognition 12 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

for publishing hundreds of articles on the Florentine. The journal’s longtime editor and contributing author, Miguel León-Portilla, has published many pieces related to the Florentine Codex in Estudios and is spearheading a multiauthored project to translate sections of Nahuatl text in the Florentine Codex into Spanish. A facsimile edition of the Florentine Codex, produced in 1979 by Giunti Barbera in Florence and the Secretaría de Gobernación in Mexico, spurred on studies of the codex. A facsimile edition and translation of the Primeros memoriales, translated

by Thelma Sullivan and edited by Nicholson et al. (1993, 1997), represents another breakthrough. Jesús Bustamante García (1990) provides a useful, detailed examination of the composition of Sahagún’s manuscripts.

Most recently, Victoria Ríos Castaño (2014) has examined the methods and models of the Historia universal and Sahagún’s mission of translation and conversion.

Yet the Florentine Codex remains an understudied work, considering its depth and breadth of content.

Sahagún’s primary interest was collecting and preserving the Nahuatl texts. His Spanish translation seems like a secondary consideration, an obligation frequently requested by his superiors and completed, for the most part, only in the final years of the project. The Spanish ranges from translating the Nahuatl text verbatim, to summarizing or ignoring it. And yet the Spanish data has been used more often by scholars. The very first publication of the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, in 1829–1830, by Carlos María de Bustamante, was based on the Tolosa manuscript version of the Spanish translation. Many subsequent editions were based on this same version. The monumental translation project of Anderson and Dibble (Sahagún, 1950–1982), and James Lockhart’s translation of both the Nahuatl and the Spanish of Book 12 (1993), have enabled more recent studies of the Nahuatl, understood through English translation. Likewise, Ángel María Garibay Kintana and Miguel León-Portilla offer sections of the Nahuatl text of Book 12 in Spanish, in Visión de los vencidos (1959). Despite these excellent works, systematic analyses of the Florentine based on the original Nahuatl text are few.

The images of the Florentine were created last but clearly play a prominent role in the manuscript, judging by their number, quality, and color. Our 2015 conference was, to our knowledge, the first dedicated specifically to the interrelation of the three “texts”—the Nahuatl, the Spanish translation, and the images58—and was certainly

the first to focus on how the images and their meanings differ from textual exegesis. The painstaking labor and commitment required to create so many detailed, colored paintings suggest that Nahuas insisted on including them, as discussed by Jeanette Peterson in chapter 1.

One important observation to emerge from the conference, and more fully underscored in the chapters of this volume, is that one cannot call the manuscript “Sahagún’s Florentine Codex.” In reality, Sahagún was more coordinator, compiler, editor, and translator than author. Garibay and León-Portilla advanced this idea as early as the 1950s.59 But scholars are still coming to terms with how Nahua authors and artists contributed the essential content of the work. Sahagún assumed responsibility for the Spanish translation, and there is no doubt that he wrote the prologues and Spanish interpolations, but those parts constitute less than half of the total work and are not the primary contributions. Although Sahagún contributed to this notion by calling himself the “author” in the text, he also refers to himself as a compiler, and he credits many (but not all) of the Nahuas who played a pivotal role in the project.60 In addition to those trilingual four already mentioned and on whom Sahagún relied the most—Antonio Valeriano, Martín Jacobita, Pedro de San Buenaventura, and Alonso Vegerano—other scribes included Diego de Grado and Bonifacio Maximiliano of Tlatelolco, and Mateo Severino of Xochimilco.61 Still others who came from different communities around the great lake of Texcoco contributed to the manuscript. For example, in Book 11 we find a list of Nahua tiçitl, or physicians, from barrios and parishes of Tlatelolco, who contributed their knowledge to the section on medical cures and herbs in folios 139v to 181. The experienced elders include Gaspar Matías and Pedro de Raquena of Concepción; Pedro Santiago and Miguel Motolinía of Santa Inés; Francisco Simón, Miguel Damián, and Miguel García of Santo Toribio; and Felipe Hernández of Santa Ana. In Book 10, another eight médicos mexicanos are listed as providing information for the preceding section (fols. 97–113v) on illnesses of the body: Juan Pérez, Pedro Pérez, Pedro Hernández, José Hernández, Miguel García, Francisco de la Cruz, Baltasar Juárez, and Antonio Martínez.62 Even those talented Nahuas who remain unnamed were not simply his “informants” or his “aides.” They were Sahagún’s sources of information: the multilingual writers of the Nahuatl text, the part of the work that was produced first; and the artists who “illuminated” the manuscript, the part that was done last.

Finally, it is important to consider what the manuscript means for Mexico and for the Americas in general. There is no doubt that the Florentine Codex is the most remarkable and most important intellectual product of the exchange between indigenous and European cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. Such a work could have been produced only in Mesoamerica, where the introduction of the Roman alphabet and European art style made sense to people who had been writing and painting with ink and natural colors for centuries. It is among the rare first manuscripts to represent indigenous cultures that involved indigenous people. It is the richest resource for the study of “classical” Nahuatl.

As a collaborative, multivoiced enterprise, the Florentine Codex embodies various modes of interpretation and transformation, processes that may be characterized as distorting or betraying the original while simultaneously, in the “creative destruction” that defines all translation, also being perceived as processes of “invention and renewal.”63 The Nahua scribes and artists actively constructed versions of their cultural identity through their choice of vocabulary, as well as by means of syntactical and pictorial choices. Sahagún, on the other hand, seems to reconcile his inherited intellectual traditions and orthodox religiosity with his desire to bear witness to the differences, as well as the similarities, that marked the Americas. These dual objectives were not without tension, as manifest in Sahagún’s outlook as well as our modern assessment of his achievements. Scholars have tended to characterize the friar in rather polarized terms, as a learned scholar who sought to record indigenous language and knowledge, or as a physician of souls who employed inquisitorial methods of collecting information for pragmatic missionary purposes. Rather than regarding Sahagún primarily as a pioneer ethnographer (and something of an anachronism), or conversely as firmly rooted in a sixteenth-century EuroChristian framework, the Franciscan seems to be caught between a medieval and modern mindset: the former defined knowledge as revealed by the grace of God, whereas the ideas of modernity credited the human intellect with the capability of producing knowledge, as Walden Browne argues.64 In his task as cultural translator, collating and permanently inscribing the language and culture of the Nahuatlspeaking peoples, Sahagún adopted a Western book form and hierarchical organization of topics. Anthony Grafton critically notes that the vast quantity of incoming informaINTRODUCTION • 13

tion was shoehorned into existing schemata; in his words, Sahagún bent “the New World to the old systems.”65 Nonetheless, while recognizing the European influences on the content and organization of the work, many of the authors in this volume discern indigenous or Nahua modes of categorizing knowledge, underscoring the discretionary power of the tlacuiloque over their sources and interpretative strategies. In other words, Sahagún had confidence in those who had trained with him, even if his trust in the Nahua population eventually dissipated into a darker suspicion, as censorship, age, disease, and the growing decline of the regular orders grew ever more debilitating in the later years. In the end, nothing went exactly according to plan in New Spain. Spanish intentions were seldom fully achieved and were always tempered and compromised by local actors and negotiations. This was true of Sahagún’s Historia general, as well. Sahagún clearly had his models, but the final manuscript reflects the profound input and subjectivity of the Nahua artists and writers on whom he depended to complete the project, as the chapters of this volume hope to show.

While keeping in mind the intellectual coherence of this volume and the complementary overlap between essays, we have subdivided the chapters loosely into four thematic sections: “The Art of Translation,” “Lords: Royal and Sacred,” “Ordering the Cosmos,” and “Social Discourse and Deviance.” We recognize that in doing so we, too, are guilty of imposing our academic need to classify knowledge.

THE ART OF TRANSLATION The philological objective of Sahagún, that is, his aim to produce a sweeping and inclusive dictionary of the Nahuatl language, is laudable in a time period when the indigenous languages of the Americas were increasingly under siege. For Spanish officials, particularly ecclesiastical authorities, words in native tongues were inherently suspect and images potentially idolatrous; translation itself might camouflage heretical ideas and harbor dangerous political meanings. The first section, “The Art of Translation,” encompasses four chapters that directly and indirectly confront the textual and pictorial facets of the translational process within the contested social, political, and counterreformational milieu of late sixteenth-century Spain and New Spain. The slippage inherent in these acts of translation is understood as a process that generates new meanings.66 14 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

Jeanette Favrot Peterson addresses not only the nature and motives behind the plethora of images in the Florentine Codex but also the historiographic factors that promoted textual exegesis of the manuscript while hindering serious scholarship of its paintings. While acknowledging the pervasive stylistic and iconographic Europeanizations visible in the imagery, Peterson also locates meaningful signs reflective of an indigenous worldview and long-standing pictographic tradition. As indices of intercultural dynamics, the images reinforce the appeal of the Florentine Codex to dual audiences and betray the Nahua painters’ roles as vital participants in the creation of the manuscript.

Ida Giovanna Rao’s remarkable discovery of the earliest translation into Italian of the first five books of the Florentine Codex (with Lia Markey) underscores the almost immediate recognition of the illuminated manuscript’s significance. Notwithstanding Ferdinando I de’ Medici’s own Catholic fervor and his belief in a universal Christendom, his humanist education made him open to the value of the newly discovered Americas. Through a selection of excerpts published for the first time, herein also in English, Rao demonstrates the care with which the professional (if anonymous) translator worked literally, rather than liberally, making changes primarily in the abbreviation of some passages.

Nowhere are the partisan motivations of translators more apparent than in the competing Nahua-Spanish dialogues on the conquest in Book 12. Kevin Terraciano deconstructs the Mexica (Nahua) narrative, one of the earliest accounts (1555) from an indigenous perspective.

He identifies significant differences between the Nahuatl text and the Spanish translation, which is much shorter than the original, and considers reasons for the discrepancies. The paintings of Book 12 operate somewhat independently, both adhering to the narrative and veering off to depict other memories not articulated in the alphabetic texts. Terraciano connects the conspicuous, exaggerated display of feathers in the headgear of both indigenous and European protagonists with Nahua concepts of tonalli and teotl, extreme force and power. A close analysis of all three “texts” enriches our understanding of this invaluable indigenous account of the encounter and war.

The appropriation and translation of a wide array of pictorial prototypes by the Florentine’s painters is the theme of Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo’s chapter. Given the wealth of humanist publications in monastic libraries from

which the tlacuiloque drew inspiration, Escalante Gonzalbo points to the influence of emblem books and published pharmacopeia of nature,67 as well as of the 1565 edition of Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, by the bishop Olaus Magnus. The author explores the formal analogies with these sources, and analyzes their content and meaning to reveal linked messaging that is not neutral but imbued with political and moralizing commentary.

LORDS: ROYAL AND SACRED Given the attention to elite history, governance, and cosmology in the extant precontact records of Mesoamerica and coeval colonial accounts, it is not surprising that several books in the Florentine Codex are devoted to the lordly class in Aztec society, as well as to the priesthood, divine beings, and the rituals held to honor them. Paradoxically, while Sahagún’s mission was obsessed with eradicating idolatry, in the encyclopedic project he preserves those same “idols,” methodically, but not always objectively, documenting the indigenous Mesoamerican pantheon in order to create a kind of missionaries’ guidebook to the Aztec supernatural world. Sahagún intended the Florentine Codex to serve as one of several “weapons” to fight the devil, under whose dominion idolatry was practiced.68 The three chapters in the section “Lords: Royal and Sacred” interrogate the transformations that occurred between the indigenous and the European prototypes of gods and kings and their depictions in Sahagún’s manuscripts. These authors suggest varied motives for the Aztec deities assuming more humanlike representations, while addressing the core issue of the gods’ ontology, or how divinity (the complex Nahuatl term teotl) was understood, even when filtered through a Christian perspective.

Eloise Quiñones Keber undertakes a comparative study of the representation of Aztec deities and their calendrical festivals as they evolved from the Primeros memoriales to the Florentine Codex twenty years later. In the weaving together of memory, oral testimony, and the mnemonic prompts provided by the “ancient paintings,” Sahagún’s team gathered information about the attire worn by each of the deities, their perceived powers, and their ritual roles.

Quiñones Keber reconstructs how and why the descriptions of the gods expanded to their more fulsome treatment in the Florentine Codex, focusing on the evolution of the earth and corn goddess Chicomecoatl (Seven Serpent). The author also analyzes the increased extravagance

and complexity of the veintena, or twenty-day festival, as practiced in the martial ceremonies of the Mexica capital.

In exploring the disparity between the Aztec kings and the supernaturals in the illustrated manuscripts attributed to Sahagún, Elizabeth Hill Boone traces the continuities and ruptures with the antecedents available to the Franciscan and his team. Royal lords easily migrated almost verbatim from the flat, ideoplastic images of precontact annals histories to the folios produced by Sahagún’s team of Nahua artists. In contrast, the representations of Aztec gods required scribes and artists to innovate from bicultural models. Sixteenth-century publications on the pagan gods offered appropriate templates for the textual information on their taxonomy, appearance, and physical attributes, referring to both pictorial models from indigenous codices and manuals of classical deities. In the transfer to the European mimetic canon, Boone concludes that Aztec deities were severed from their divinatory preconquest meaning, yielding “simple visual representations of anthropomorphic beings.”

The anthropomorphism of the godly images is further explored by Guilhem Olivier, who probes the delicate semantic and conceptual overlap between the humanity of the gods and the divinization of mortals as manifest in the Florentine Codex. In the search for an antecedent, Olivier points to the theory of euhemerism, from the Greek Euhemerus of the fourth century BCE. As Quiñones Keber and Boone also recognize, the equivalency of Aztec deities to their classical counterparts was intended not only to enhance the reader’s familiarity with a known European entity but also to diminish the divinity of the indigenous gods. Although perhaps a successful reductive strategy, this process was never one of complete erasure, as Olivier demonstrates with his painstaking analysis of the multivalent term teotl (plural teteo), often translated as “god.”

Teotl had a wide semantic range, referring to something marvelous or one imbued with solar energy (tonalli), a significance that allowed for the assimilation of the European newcomers at contact to be perceived as teteo, connecting with observations made by Terraciano in chapter 3.69

ORDERING THE COSMOS The chapters in this next section rest on a fundamental tenet of the Nahua worldview, that of cosmic order. One of the awesome responsibilities of the Nahua governing class was to maintain an equilibrium between the human INTRODUCTION • 15

and the supernatural realms, a balance that ensured a predictable rotation of the universe and dependable provisions for life. An order-disorder dialectic framed Nahua cognitive structures, social interactions, ritual behavior, morality, and even the animacy with which painted images were endowed.

Order in the Nahua world was menaced routinely by the ecological challenges of the lacustrine environs of Mexico City–Tenochtitlan. Water, both an essential lifegiving entity yet a deadly force, had to be properly managed. Barbara E. Mundy links the relationship of such natural threats as floods to the authority of Mexica leaders, who were perceived as appropriate custodians of water management. The author highlights the propitiatory offerings and sacrifices to petition and control water-related threats that occurred at the ceremonial site of Pantitlan, an anomalous whirlpool-spring in Lake Texcoco. Mundy also investigates a second aberrant phenomenon, the furry aquatic creature known as acuitlachtli (water bear), a type of nutria that was equally transgressive in its hybridity, habitat, and the danger it posed to the city’s water supply.

Both the ritual site and the animal occupied liminal zones, representing the kind of eruption that indigenous leaders were charged to eliminate or minimize in their efforts to sustain a precarious cosmos.

Molly H. Bassett similarly erases the Western boundary between the natural and the supernatural in the Nahua lifeworld. In a bold proposal, she argues that “nature” provided a template for a Nahua way of clustering knowledge: literally and figuratively conceived of as a quimilli, or bundle (a unit of twenty). Bassett explores one of the sacred bundles, the tlaquimilolli, conceptualized as a temple-mountain, not only as biologically and socially essential, but also as an embodiment of divine forces. Another example, the ocelotl bundle, is more hypothetical, but the author provides evidence for the potency of the spotted jaguar pelage as an organizing principle and a sign of sacred and political power. Bassett’s project resonates with Olivier’s contention that although the structural clustering of the Aztec deities in the Florentine Codex conforms to an overarching Roman pantheon, we need to investigate alternative autochthonous taxonomies.70 The permeable membrane between the interlocking human and sacred spheres is also a foundational idea in Diana Magaloni Kerpel’s essay on the expressive carriers of Nahua knowledge from the “other side,” crossing time,

16 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

space, and degrees of animacy. The author explores spoken word and painted image in the Florentine Codex as creative acts, divinely generated and in some cases displaying a “living presence.”71 Images could be embodiments of the sacred, thus becoming more than just a representation.72 To reveal the layered meanings of ritual discourse, as well as in the Florentine’s imagistic sign system, she uses the Tzeltal Maya metaphor of a flower’s “unfolding” with all of its sensory implications, as recorded by Pedro Pitarch. Magaloni Kerpel also applies her understanding of the pigments used in the Florentine Codex to support the tenacity with which the tlacuiloque continued to perceive images as signifying vehicles with their own palette and material makeup.

SOCIAL DISCOURSE AND DEVIANCE The spoken word, and its power to communicate knowledge in a culture that valued orality above all, was also crucial to maintaining stability in an inherently disorderly world. In this final section, “Social Discourse and Deviance,” words are shown to exert so much weight that they bear authority over the Nahua body politic. These chapters also underscore the composite, often contested, nature of pictorial representation when caught between two discrete cultural and religious systems. Whereas pictures in other encyclopedic manuscripts, such as the Codex Mendoza, discussed before, juxtapose indigenous pictorial models with Spanish alphabetic script,73 the images in the Florentine more commonly conflate diverse systems of representation to create new syntheses within competing prescriptive norms in a multiethnic society.

If the elite played a central role in maintaining cosmic order, as Mundy makes clear in the previous section, they manifested this fundamental responsibility in their cultivated mastery over rhetoric and the esoteric knowledge it encapsulated. Jeanette Favrot Peterson explores the most formal of the discourses, known as the huehuetlatolli (speech of the elders), that transmitted Nahua values and beliefs to the next generation. Sahagún recognized the metaphorical elegance of these orations as well as their didactic utility early in his career. Although the Nahuatl texts constitute some of the most authentic material in the Florentine Codex, paradoxically, the huehuetlatolli and prayers were regularly appropriated for the mendicants’ sermons. Christian scenes were similarly integrated into

the mixed syntax of the black-and-white images in Book 6, ironically sacralizing Nahua rhetoric.

Similarly, Lisa Sousa reveals the variety of strategies in Book 10 deployed by the indigenous authors and artists to retain Nahua values while adhering in part to new Christian prescriptions of good and evil in the sections on social deviants. The Nahuatl text articulates traditional ideals of what constituted morality, employing verbal metaphors of speech and flowers. The more hybrid images adopt certain European style traits and figural forms that either condemn or condone certain behaviors, while signaling speech and flower metaphors or adding new information featuring Nahua glyphic elements. The figures of the socalled prostitute (ahuiani) and adulteress (tetzauhcioatl), for example, are shown standing precariously on, or holding, water (the atl glyph). The water glyphs operate phonetically as well as symbolically, reinforcing the censorious Nahua attitude toward women whose deviant behavior was considered fluid, irresponsible, and ultimately a threat to the social, economic, and political order.

There is no more dramatic disjunction between the Spanish and Nahuatl texts in the Florentine Codex than those found in chapter 27 of Book 10. Ellen T. Baird compares Sahagún’s Spanish lament at the status of mendicant affairs regarding their indigenous charges with the parallel Nahuatl texts that steadily enumerate anatomical parts. Although the two textual narratives reveal a kind of split agenda, the images manage to bridge or comment on both texts. The visualization of severed body parts mirrors Sahagún’s cognizance of the increasing dissolution of the Nahua body politic in the face of colonial threats and natural disasters. Baird parses, in both the written and pictorial elements of the Florentine, the order-disorder dialectic as it played out within a New Spain reeling from the impact of recurrent, deadly plagues.

The contributors to this volume share a genuine and deep respect for the authors and artists of the Florentine Codex, who compiled such a monumental encyclopedia of Nahua culture in a time of crisis. Not only are all thirteen chapter the product of collegial exchanges within our community of scholars; in addition, they acknowledge the work and insights that preceded our own. We hope that our present volume will encourage others to appreciate the “treasure” that we now call the Florentine Codex.

NOTES I thank Jeanette Peterson for her many contributions to this introduction and for the extensive comments, suggestions, edits, and additions she has made to multiple drafts. She also deserves credit for creating first drafts of the tables. I am fortunate to have worked closely with Jeanette on this project, since we began to plan our conference at UCLA and the Getty in 2014. Her consummate professional manner, enthusiasm, friendship, and good humor are most appreciated. I also thank Eloise Quiñones Keber, Barbara Mundy, and Lisa Sousa for their valuable comments on a draft of the introduction.

1. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 10, 84.

There were three major epidemics in New Spain in the sixteenth century, but the first occurred in 1520, before Sahagún’s arrival.

2. Sahagún 1950–1982, prologue to Bk. 11, 99.

3. Sahagún 1950–1982, prologue to Bk. 11, 94, 99. See also Baird, chapter 13 of this volume.

4. Sahagún 1979, Bk. 12, fol. 53v.

5. Sahagún 1979, prologue to Bk. 1, 47.

6. A. Anderson 1982, 37.

7. According to Sahagún’s description in the prologue to Book 9. See also Dibble 1982a, 19.

8. On the manuscripts’ titles, also see Bustamante García 1992, 248– 249, 328–334.

9. Dibble 1982a, 22.

10. In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in 1611, Sebastián de Covarrubias defines historia as “cualquiera narración que se cuente . . . se llama historia, como historia de los animales . . . de las plantas, etc.” (Covarrubias Orozco 1995, 639). On the overarching definition of historia, see also León-Portilla 2002a, 260–261.

11. Bustamante García 1990, 339.

12. Ríos Castaño 2014, 113–116.

13. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 1, 46.

14. On Tenochtitlan in the early colonial period, see Caso 1956; Kellogg 1995; Connell 2011; Mundy 2015. On the Nahua altepetl after the conquest, see Lockhart 1992.

15. Ruiz Medrano 2010, 15.

16. Motolinía 1969.

17. Chapters 200–248 of López de Gómara’s Historia are from Motolinía’s manuscript Historia de los indios de la Nueva España.

18. Bleichmar 2015.

19. Afanador-Pujol 2015, 3n11.

20. Ruiz Medrano 2010, 33–35.

21. On Sahagún’s early education in Spain, see Bustamante García 1992, 257; León-Portilla 2002a, 26–70; Ríos Castaño 2014, 37–62; Peterson, chapter 1 of this volume.

22. A. Anderson 1982, 30–31.

23. Dibble 1982a, 10–11.

24. Dibble 1982a, 12–13; Sahagún 1979. See also the facsimile edition, Sahagún 1993b.

25. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 2, 53–58.

26. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 2, 55.

27. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 2, 55.

28. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 2, 55–56.

29. See Poole 2004 on Ovando’s career.

30. A. Anderson 1982, 35.

31. A. Anderson 1982, 36.

32. Magaloni Kerpel 2014.

INTRODUCTION • 17

33. A. Anderson 1982, 37n47; quoted from Códice Franciscano.

34. Sahagún 1989b, 141.

35. On the murky issue of whether one or two manuscripts were produced as “final” bilingual copies, see León-Portilla 2002a, 214–222; Ríos Castaño 2014, 109. Some scholars have suggested that the “first” Enríquez manuscript was in fact the “Manuscrito de 1569”; however, it was only in Nahuatl and is now lost. Others conflate the two, as does Bustamante García (1990, 341–344), who also suggests that Enríquez might have possessed the two drafts, the Códices Matritenses, that are now in the libraries of the Palacio Real and the Real Academia. On the date of Sequera’s 1580 departure to Spain, see Dibble 1982a, 19.

36. A. Anderson 1982, 37n50.

37. Markey 2011, 198–213.

38. On Ludovico Buti’s frescoes and the influence of the Florentine Codex, see Heikamp 1982, 132–136; and Markey 2011, 199–201, 216–217.

39. Rao 2011, 39–43; chapter 2 of this volume. The Florentine Codex was transferred to the Laurentian Library in Florence in 1783, along with 248 other manuscripts from the Medici collection, but it was not described fully until an inventory of 1793.

40. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 2, 56.

41. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 1, 50.

Calepino’s popular Latin-Greek dictionary was first published in 1502 and inspired other polyglot vocabularies.

42. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 1, 51.

43. Carey 2003, 17.

44. Quoted from Anna Sigrídur Arnar (“Encyclopedism,” 1990) in Murphy 2004, 11.

45. Garibay K. 1953–1954, 2:70–71; Robertson 1966, 617–628; Mignolo 1995, 194–201; Hernández de León-Portilla 2002, 41–59; Ríos Castaño 2014, 118–129. Thomas of Cantimpré, a thirteenth-century Dominican who wrote De natura rerum (1224–1228), has also been suggested as influential.

46. Isidore of Seville relied heavily on Pliny’s work and others; his compendium of ancient and Arabic learning was printed in ten editions between 1470 and 1520 (Isidore 2006). Other works attributed to Isidore include On the Nature of Things, a book of astronomy and natural history, and Chronica majora, a “universal history.”

47. In his prologues to the books of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún speaks of his work as a treasury or coffer (tesoro; recamara) and “a treasury for the knowledge of many things worthy of being known.” Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 1, 51, and Bk. 11, 87–88.

Similarly, Pliny, in his preface 17 of Natural History, speaks of his work as a “treasury” and a “storehouse.” See Carey 2003, 75, 138.

48. Robertson 1966, 623–626; Ríos Castaño 2014, 120–129.

49. On Augustine as a model for the Florentine, see Bustamante García 1992, 355–364.

50. Ríos Castaño 2014, 111–149.

18 • KEVIN TERRACIANO

51. Escalante Gonzalbo 1999.

52. Magaloni Kerpel 2016.

53. Most of the extant (lengthy but incomplete) manuscripts are in the Biblioteca de El Escorial or the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

54. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 8, 69.

55. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 1, 48.

56. For comparative purposes, Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas y tierra firme, completed in 1579, deserves mention.

The Dominican conducted interviews with elders and consulted pictorial texts, especially in Tetzcoco. Nahua artists added dozens of illustrations to the manuscript, which was not published until the late nineteenth century (1867–1880).

57. See Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol.

58. See Terraciano 2010 on the idea of the three texts.

59. Sahagún 1956, vol. 1, 10–12; León-Portilla 1958, 18. Cited in Bustamante García 1990, 237–238.

60. Lockhart 1993, 28. Sahagún claims to be the author in the prologue to Book 2, and then his interpolation in the Spanish column of chapter 39, Book 12, bears the heading “author.” In this same prologue he refers to the vital role that Nahuas played, and again in chapter 27 of Book 10 he attests to the abilities and potential of native scholars. He refers to “compiling” the manuscript in the prologue to Book 10.

61. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 2, 55.

62. Sahagún 1979, Bk. 11, fols. 180v–181, and Bk. 10, fol. 113v; López Austin 1988, 1:42; Dufendach 2017, 220. It is possible that the same Miguel García is listed in both groups, although it is a common name and could represent two different men.

63. Cronin 2003, 38.

64. On the tension between the medieval and modern mindset, see Browne 2000, esp. 9, 72; for a counterargument, León-Portilla (2002a, 9–11, 258–267) maintains Sahagún’s title as a “pioneer of anthropology.”

65. Grafton 1992, 116–117. Grafton is severe in his condemnation, claiming that Sahagún “freeze-dried the multiple, protean ingredients of their [the Nahuas’] cultural tradition” (1992, 146).

66. Wouk 2017, 1–3, 8–9.

67. Escalante Gonzalbo 1999.

68. Sahagún 1950–1982, introductory vol., prologue to Bk. 3, 59.

69. Bassett 2015.

70. Olivier 2016.

71. Other Mesoamerican traditions that endowed animacy or a living essence to their glyphic signs include the Maya, the Mixtec, and the Cotzumalhuapan cultures. On this see Chinchilla Mazariegos 2011, 59–66.

72. Alonso de Molina (1977, pt. 2, fol. 95v) defines teixiptla as “image of someone, substitute, or delegate” (“imagen de alguno, sustituto, o delegado”).

73. Bleichmar 2015, 686–689.