The Codex Mendoza: An Aztec World for a Spanish Emperor

Around 1541, twenty years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, commissioned a book for the emperor Charles V. Indigenous tlacuiloque, painter-scribes trained in the old way, painted its pages in the pictorial script of central Mexico. A Spanish interpreter added notes and a commentary. It was meant to explain to the king the empire he now ruled: how it began, what it collected, and how its people lived. The ship carrying it across the Atlantic was taken by French privateers. The book survived, travelled through the hands of scholars in France and England, and has been in Oxford since 1659.

The book

• 71 leaves of European paper, painted and annotated in Spanish.
• Made c. 1541, and in any case before 1553, when it belonged to the French royal cosmographer André Thevet, whose name is written on its pages.
• In England it passed from Richard Hakluyt to Samuel Purchas, who published woodcuts of it in 1625, and then to the jurist John Selden. It reached the Bodleian Library in 1659.

Three parts

1. History. The founding of Tenochtitlan in 1325 (the year 2 House), and the conquests of each Mexica ruler, each town shown with a burning temple, the sign of conquest.
2. Tribute. Town by town, what the provinces sent to Motecuhzoma: cloaks, warriors' suits, feathers, jade, cacao, maize. It was probably copied from an older, pre-conquest tribute record.
3. A life. From birth and naming through education, punishments, training for war or for the priesthood, marriage and old age.

The founding image

The first page shows the story that stands at the heart of Mexica religion and identity. Guided by their god Huitzilopochtli, the wandering Mexica were to settle where they saw an eagle on a cactus growing from a rock. On the frontispiece the eagle perches on the nopal in the middle of a lake divided by canals into four parts, surrounded by the ten founding leaders, with Tenoch seated among them. The same emblem is on the flag of Mexico today.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Pictorial writing. Aztec writing combined pictures, place-name glyphs built from recognisable images (a hill, a stone, a cactus) and number signs: dots for ones, flags for twenties, feathers for four hundreds. The tribute pages use them throughout.

The four quarters. The lake divided into four by blue canals represents the four quarters of Tenochtitlan and the four directions of the cosmos, with the eagle and cactus at the centre.

The priests' school. Part III shows the calmecac, the school where young nobles trained for the priesthood with night vigils, penance and study of the sacred books, and the telpochcalli for warriors.

Connections

The Aztec (ch43). Compare the Codex Borgia (V41), a pre-conquest divinatory book, and the Tilma of Guadalupe (V13), made in the same decades of colonial Mexico.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/codex-mendoza.html