How the Florentine Codex Was Made

Sahagún did not so much write the Florentine Codex as organise it. Working first at Tepepulco around 1558 and then at Tlatelolco, he put a written questionnaire to assemblies of elders chosen by the local rulers, and had their answers taken down in Nahuatl by former students of the Colegio de Santa Cruz who could write their own language in the Latin alphabet. Those students, among them Antonio Valeriano of Azcapotzalco, Alonso Vegerano of Cuauhtitlán and Martín Jacobita of Tlatelolco, are named in his prologues, which is close to unheard of in a sixteenth century Spanish work.

Nahua painters supplied the images. The result runs to twelve books covering the gods, the ceremonies, omens and divination, rhetoric and moral philosophy, natural history, and finally the conquest as the defeated side told it. The Spanish column that runs beside the Nahuatl is not a translation. It is a shorter paraphrase, sometimes softened and sometimes expanded with commentary of his own, so the two columns of one page can be read against each other. That gap is where a great deal of the modern scholarly argument happens. The Nahuatl alone carries a very different weight from the Spanish, and any claim about what the Codex says should specify which column it came from.