Bernardino de Sahagún

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.

The purpose was never neutral and Sahagún never pretended otherwise. In the prologue to the first book he compares the friar to a physician who cannot prescribe without first knowing the disease, and the disease is the religion he is describing. The Franciscans had found that converts baptised in the 1520s were still keeping the old calendar, still making offerings, and still using a vocabulary whose meaning the clergy could not hear. A full description of Nahua ritual was a working tool for detecting it.

The Spanish Crown understood that too and did not like it. In 1577 Philip II ordered every copy and draft gathered up and sent to Spain, on the reasoning that setting down the old religion in the old language might keep it alive; the manuscript that reached Florence, and gave the Codex its name, survived by accident of that dispersal.

None of this makes the work untrue, but it shapes what is in it. The questions asked were the ones a friar wanted answered, the elders answering knew what the answers were for, and subjects a Christian reader would find scandalous are handled at a careful distance. Mesoamerican studies rest more heavily on this book than on any other single source, which is why the conditions of its making are now taught alongside its contents.