Florentine Codex

The method behind the manuscript is unusually explicit for the sixteenth century. Sahagun drew up questions, put them to groups of elders in more than one town, had the answers given in Nahuatl and recorded in Nahuatl by former students of the college at Tlatelolco who wrote Latin, Spanish and their own language, and then revised the material over decades in successive versions. The named collaborators are recorded, which is why the work can be discussed as a collaboration rather than as one friar's book. The final object sets Nahuatl and Spanish in parallel columns with more than a thousand illustrations by Nahua artists.

The Spanish is not a translation. It is frequently shorter, sometimes omits what the Nahuatl says, and occasionally says something different, so a reader working from the Spanish alone is reading an abridgement made for a European audience. That gap is where much modern work happens. Reading the Nahuatl column on its own terms recovers material the Spanish column suppresses, compresses or misunderstands, including formal oratory, the elaborate speech used at births and funerals and installations, and religious concepts for which the friars had no vocabulary they were willing to use. Scholars now generally treat the two columns as two different documents bound together rather than as one text in two languages.

The project's stated purpose was practical. To recognise idolatry, and to detect it surviving under Christian forms, missionaries needed to know what it looked like, and Sahagun argued that a physician must know the disease. The work therefore exists because the church wanted an inventory of what it was suppressing, and its completeness is a function of that aim.

The plan was not welcomed indefinitely. Authorities became uneasy about a detailed account of a suppressed religion circulating at all, the materials were ordered collected, and the manuscript ended up in Europe rather than in use in Mexico. The result is that the fullest record of Mexica religion survived by being removed from the place it described. Both facts have to be held together, and neither cancels the other. The codex is the single richest source for Mexica deities, festivals, calendar, medicine and formal speech, and it is a colonial instrument whose questions shaped the answers it received, whose organising categories were European, and whose informants were speaking under conquest to men who held power over them. Its twelfth book, an account of the conquest given from the defeated side and revised over the years that followed, is the clearest single place to watch both of those things operating at once.