Florentine Codex: Sahagún's Nahua Encyclopedia of Mexico

The Florentine Codex is the most famous of the manuscripts produced by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators in 16th-century Mexico. Completed in 1575–1577, it is a twelve-book encyclopedia of the religion, customs, language and natural world of the Nahua (Aztec) peoples, written in Nahuatl and Spanish and illustrated with nearly 2,500 images. Its final book gives a Mexica account of the Spanish conquest, making it one of the most important sources for the history of pre-Hispanic and early colonial Mexico.

Background

Sahagún was born around 1499 in the town of Sahagún in León, Spain, and studied at the University of Salamanca before joining the Franciscan order. He arrived in New Spain in 1529, eight years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and spent the remaining six decades of his life there.

He taught at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, founded in 1536 to educate sons of the Nahua nobility in Latin, Spanish and theology. Its students became fluent in three languages, and some of them later became his closest collaborators.

Sahagún’s motive was religious. He believed missionaries could not root out the old religion without understanding it, much as a doctor must understand a disease. That meant recording Nahua beliefs, rituals and vocabulary in great detail and in the Nahuatl language itself.

How the work was made

In 1558 the Franciscan provincial, Francisco de Toral, formally asked Sahagún to write in Nahuatl about whatever would be useful for the mission. Sahagún devised a questionnaire and began interviewing elders who remembered life before the conquest.

The research took place in three stages. At Tepepulco, north-east of Mexico City, around 1558–1561, he worked with about a dozen elders, who answered with painted pictures that students then explained in writing; the results survive as the Primeros Memoriales. At Tlatelolco, roughly 1561–1565, a second group of informants reviewed and enlarged the material. In Mexico City, in the later 1560s, Sahagún reorganised everything into twelve books.

The Nahuatl text was written and edited by trilingual former students, of whom Sahagún named Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita and Pedro de San Buenaventura. Earlier drafts, now held in Madrid and known as the Códices Matritenses, show the project’s development.

The project was often short of support. In the 1570s some of Sahagún’s fellow Franciscans questioned the cost and value of the work, and his papers were for a time scattered among convents. In 1575 the new commissary general, Rodrigo de Sequera, gave him the backing to produce a fair copy, and between about 1575 and 1577 the bilingual, illustrated manuscript now in Florence was completed.

Contents of the twelve books

The books move from the divine to the human and the natural world, ending with the conquest:

• Books 1–3: the gods, religious ceremonies and the origin myths of the gods.
• Books 4–7: divination and the ritual calendar, omens, rhetoric and moral speeches (huehuetlatolli), and the sun, moon and stars.
• Books 8–10: kings and lords, merchants and craftsmen, and the people, including their virtues, vices, occupations and the human body.
• Book 11: “earthly things”, a natural history of animals, plants, minerals and landscapes.
• Book 12: the conquest of Mexico.

Each page has two columns, with the Nahuatl text on the right and a Spanish version on the left. The Spanish is often a summary rather than a full translation, and in many places the space was filled instead by paintings.

The illustrations were made by Nahua artists who combined Indigenous conventions with European techniques such as shading and landscape perspective. They show feasts, rituals, crafts, plants, animals, warfare and daily life, and are valued by art historians in their own right.

Book 12: the conquest from the Mexica side

Book 12 narrates the events of 1519–1521 from the viewpoint of Mexica informants from Tlatelolco, the twin city of Tenochtitlan. It begins with omens said to have foretold disaster and follows the arrival of Hernán Cortés, the role of interpreters, the massacre in the main temple precinct, the smallpox epidemic and the final siege.

Its portrayal is not neutral. The informants were recalling events decades later, and Tlatelolco had its own rivalry with Tenochtitlan. Historians also debate how far the omens reflect memory after the event. Even so, Book 12 preserves details and a perspective found in no Spanish chronicle.

In 1585 Sahagún wrote a revised Spanish version of the conquest narrative that was more favourable to the Spaniards, which shows how sensitive the subject had become. The episode forms part of the wider story of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.

From Mexico to Florence

In 1577 Philip II ordered that Sahagún’s writings be collected and sent to Spain, and forbade further writing on Indigenous “superstitions” and ways of life. Royal officials feared such works could keep old beliefs alive. Sahagún complied, and the fair copy appears to have gone to Spain with Sequera around 1580.

How the manuscript reached Italy is not documented. By the late 1580s it was in the collections of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany, possibly as a diplomatic gift. Today it is kept in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, catalogued as Mediceo Palatino 218–220. It runs to roughly 2,400 pages.

Sahagún himself never saw the final work published. He died in Mexico City in 1590, aged about 90.

Legacy

For centuries the manuscript attracted little attention. Scholars took serious interest from the late 19th century, and in 1979 the Mexican government published a full colour facsimile. The English translation of the Nahuatl text by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, issued between 1950 and 1982, made it widely available to researchers.

Sahagún is often described as a pioneer of ethnography because of his systematic interviews, cross-checking with several groups of informants and use of the native language. Modern scholars also stress that the work was shaped by its missionary purpose and by the Nahua authors and artists, who decided much of what was recorded and how.

Digital access has widened its audience further. Scans were placed online by the World Digital Library in 2012, and in 2023 the Getty Research Institute launched a digital edition that links each passage of the Nahuatl and Spanish text to its images, with modern translations. Students and Nahuatl speakers today can therefore read the work without travelling to Florence.

The codex remains essential for the study of Nahuatl, Aztec religion, medicine, botany and art. It also records the aftermath of later disasters: Sahagún described the cocoliztli epidemic of 1545, which he witnessed at Tlatelolco.

Timeline

• 1529: Sahagún arrives in New Spain as a Franciscan missionary.
• 1536: The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco is founded.
• 1558: Provincial Francisco de Toral commissions Sahagún’s Nahuatl study.
• c. 1558–1561: Interviews with elders at Tepepulco produce the Primeros Memoriales.
• c. 1561–1565: Work continues with informants at Tlatelolco.
• c. 1575–1577: The bilingual, illustrated manuscript now in Florence is produced.
• 1577: Philip II orders Sahagún’s writings collected and sent to Spain.
• 1590: Sahagún dies in Mexico City.
• 1950–1982: Anderson and Dibble publish the English translation.
• 1979: A complete facsimile is published in Mexico.

Why it matters

The Florentine Codex is the largest surviving description of an Indigenous American society written in its own language within living memory of the conquest. Created for missionary ends but voiced largely by Nahua elders, scholars and artists, it remains a unique window onto the Aztec world and its destruction.