Many objects from the Americas that moved across distances and cultures in the early modern period left only tenuous traces in the documentary record, making it difficult for scholars to reconstruct what was thought of them in the past. An exception is the pictorial manuscript known as the Codex Mendoza, which produced a stunning wealth of documented responses. From the mid 16th to the mid 19th century (and beyond), the codex provoked descriptions, comments, questions and numerous reproductions that in their selective rendition of material created different versions of the document itself. Thus, the Codex Mendoza moved not only across space and time but also across languages, cultural categories, media, knowledge economies and interpretive horizons. Mobility made the Codex Mendoza flexible, unstable and prone to mutability – as was the case with other objects that moved across space and time. In various places and moments, readers turned the pages and pored over the images and the words, creating their own versions of the Codex Mendoza.

The Codex Mendoza is one of the earliest known post-conquest manuscripts created in New Spain. Produced in Mexico City, likely in the 1540s, it consists of a collection of paintings crafted by Aztec or Nahua painter-scribes (Nahuatl tlacuilo, pl. tlacuiloque) that were then glossed in detail and supplemented by a lengthy text written in Spanish by a legal scribe. The manuscript crossed the Atlantic soon after, perhaps as early as the 1550s. Ever since, it has been admired, cherished, coveted and pored over by scholars, collectors and enthusiasts. It was perhaps the best known and most studied Mexican manuscript in early modern Europe and, until the 1830s, the only Mexican document widely available for study through printed versions. It has functioned since the 17th century as a sort of Rosetta Stone for Mexican pictorial writing. Recent exhibitions have described it as one of the most important ‘treasures’ among the magnificent collections of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where it has been held since 1659.

The manuscript is composed of 71 folios (leaves) of paper and measures roughly 30 x 21 cm (12 x 8 ¼ in). It consists of 72 pages of images annotated with Spanish glosses and 63 pages of textual commentary in Spanish. It is organised into three distinct sections. The first, in 16 folios, presents a political and military history of the Aztecs from the founding of the capital city of Tenochtitlan in 1325 to its fall in 1521. It is ordered chronologically according to the reign of each emperor or tlatoani, providing the dates of his rule through turquoise-coloured year glyphs and the names of the towns he brought into the imperial fold. The second and longest section, in 39 folios, relates Aztec imperial geography to economics. It details the tax obligations of towns subject to Aztec rule, catalogued by region and specifying the items they contributed, among them fine feathers, animal skins, precious stones, gold, mantles, liquidambar and cacao beans. The third section, which occupies 16 folios, describes life in the Aztec world: the upbringing of boys and girls from birth until age 15; various occupations and trades, including detailed depictions of military orders and their uniforms; and information about governance and customs. The manuscript provides a trove of details about precontact Aztec life.

The Codex Mendoza was produced through a complex process that involved multiple makers and a sequence of steps. First, Nahua painter-scribes created the pictorial content. They used for the most part pre-Hispanic pictorial conventions, though some of the images employ European elements. Then, following local custom, these figures provided the basis for a spoken account in Nahuatl that explained their meaning and augmented their content by supplying details that went beyond the pictures. In a third step, Spaniards entered the process: a Spanish interpreter fluent in Nahuatl (a nahuatlato) provided a Spanish-language oral interpretation. Then, a Spanish scribe took down the recitation to compose the lengthy textual passages. At some point, the scribe annotated every individual figure with a brief Spanish gloss that translated image into text and, often, Nahua concepts into Hispanic ones. Finally, the scribe composed a closing statement that revealed details about this process and highlighted the complexities of translation. Thus, while the work is customarily described as an illustrated manuscript, it can more accurately be considered an extensively annotated collection of drawings.

As a result of the complex, multistep process of manufacture, which engaged Nahua and Spanish participants, concepts and elements, the Codex Mendoza is an inherently transcultural object. It combines elements from at least two distinct traditions of the writing and representation of history. Nahua aspects include the pictographic writing and oral account, the artists and narrator, the pigments used in the figures and the information contained in the document. Old World aspects include the imported Spanish paper and ink, the book format and adherence to the page as the dominant structural unit (as opposed to the use of a pre-Hispanic format, such as the screenfold, scroll or painted cloth), the alphabetic writing, the scribes and the intended audience, as the document is believed to have been created for readers beyond the shores of New Spain. The Codex Mendoza can be understood as the product of a series of translations: rendering images into words, Nahuatl into Spanish, oral interpretation into alphabetic writing and preconquest indigenous history into a version framed within the context of post-conquest viceregal society and produced expressly for European viewers and readers.

When the initial translations in medium, language and cultural framing ceased and the codex was complete, its physical transport began. Apparently finished in haste, the codex travelled by land from Mexico City to the gulf port of Veracruz and there boarded a ship that carried it across the Atlantic. Once set in motion, it continued to circulate for the next hundred years to destinations its makers never imagined. During that period, it changed hands multiple times and was a prized possession of some of the most noted European collectors and travel writers. It is unclear whether the codex ever reached Spain, and also unclear how it ended up in the hands of its first recorded owner: André Thevet (c.1516–90), a French traveller and author of books on the Americas, royal cosmographer to the Valois court. By 1587, it appears, the codex had passed to Richard Hakluyt (c.1552–1616), an active promoter of English settlement in North America and the author of two important compilations that approached geography and travel from the perspective of English political aspirations towards the New World. After Hakluyt’s death in 1616, the manuscript went to Samuel Purchas (c.1577–1626), an English cleric and the author of an immensely popular travel compilation that would be of great importance to the codex’s early modern reception. After Purchas’s death ten years later, the English jurist, politician, scholar and collector John Selden (1584–1654) acquired the manuscript. Finally, after Selden’s death in 1654, his extensive collection of over eight thousand books and manuscripts went to the Bodleian Library at Oxford – it took five years to complete the transaction, but by 1659 at the latest the Mendoza had reached the institution that has held on to it ever since, marking the end of its physical travels. Remarkably, the Mendoza has the very first shelf mark and catalogue entry among the Bodleian’s collection of more than 350 notable manuscripts from Selden: Manuscript Selden A.1.

Although the Codex Mendoza has never left the Bodleian Library since its arrival, it continued to move – not physically but through publication. Its paper travels began with Samuel Purchas’s widely read Hakluytus Posthumus: Or, Purchas His Pilgrimes,¹ which includes a 52-page chapter on the Mendoza, reproducing the original and adding commentary. Purchas explained that although his book introduced the letters of other modern and ancient nations, including Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic and Persian, as well as Egyptian and Ethiopian hieroglyphs, this precious Mexican manuscript was the only known full-fledged history of and by a foreign nation, addressing their rulers, economics, religion and customs. For Purchas, the Codex Mendoza represented much more than a collectible example of exotic writing: it constituted a unique indigenous source about the Aztec world.

Table 1.  Publications Presenting Material from the Codex Mendoza, 1625–1831

Indeed, the Mendoza was extraordinary at that moment. A small number of pre- and postconquest Mexican manuscripts were then held in various collections across Europe, but nobody knew how to make sense of the former and almost nobody saw the latter. The Spanish-language text made the Mendoza one of the very few Mexican manuscripts that Europeans found legible. The fact that it was a history – a highly regarded genre at the time – mattered greatly to Purchas’s assessment of the codex, helping to prove Aztec governance and civility and to establish the Aztecs as a sophisticated civilisation. Purchas’s high esteem for the manuscript is evidenced by the decision to reproduce it almost in its entirety, which involved having the Spanish text translated into English and also commissioning a large number of woodcut reproductions of the figures, a laborious and costly choice. Indeed, no other American manuscript was publicly reproduced in print in its entirety before the 19th century.

Purchas’s version of the Codex Mendoza had enormous impact. Between 1625 and the publication of Lord Kingsborough’s nine-volume Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48),² Purchas’s print translation provided the source material for no fewer than six other titles in nine different editions, many of them influential and widely read works (Table 1). For two centuries, the numerous authors who wrote about the Mendoza based their information and images on Purchas’s edition, and to a lesser degree on later publications based on it. This meant that they knew the pictographs as black-and-white woodcuts rather than as vividly coloured drawings, and that they did not fully realise the Spanish textual presence. Still, thanks to Purchas, the Mendoza may well be the single most reproduced and studied New World manuscript.

Print not only gave the Codex Mendoza legs but it also made it malleable. Authors provided various interpretations of the material and its significance, creating in effect multiple versions of the codex as they used it to pursue discussions about history, religion, pictographic writing, the civility of New World populations, the history of languages and other topics. The first to draw on Purchas’s Mendoza for his own publication was Johannes de Laet (1581–1649), the Dutch geographer, author and founding member of the Dutch West India Company, who included it in various editions of his popular New World, or Description of the West Indies.³ De Laet reproduced a very limited number of the many images in Purchas’s publication, focusing instead on the information the document provided about Aztec history in order to compare this indigenous source to the writings of Spanish authors, pointing out inconsistencies. For his part, the French orientalist Melchisédech Thévenot (c.1620–92) included in his own publication 47 pages of printed images copied from Purchas’s woodcuts, followed by a French translation of Purchas’s English translation of the original Spanish, itself a translation from the Nahuatl. Thus, while Purchas had laboriously reproduced the pairing of image and text in his printed book, Thévenot dissociated the two elements and privileged the images as examples of non-European writing. Notably, Thévenot’s version opened not with the depiction of the foundation of the imperial Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan – as the codex itself does and Purchas also did – but rather with a view of Moctezuma’s palace, which in the manuscript appears only towards the end. By focusing on the depiction of royal authority as a representation of Aztec imperial history rather than on the calendrical or numerical figures that so interested other interpreters as instances of hieroglyphic writing, Thévenot’s frontispiece suggested greater similitude between European and Aztec traditions. Another author to examine and reproduce Purchas’s version of the Mendoza, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), used it in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus as evidence to support his belief that the Mexican pictographs were in fact hieroglyphs demonstrating the spread of Egyptian culture throughout the world in ancient times.⁴

Detained in the library, the Mendoza continued to move in print. It was included in travel collections as a source on Amerindian civilisation. It provided material for the comparative study of cultures, religions, languages and writing systems. It was recruited into discussions surrounding European colonial and commercial expansion and competition. It served antiquarians and collectors. It allowed for evolutionary arguments about the relative civility or primitivism of various cultures. And on and on, multiplying with astonishing interpretive malleability. Between 1625 and 1830, the codex’s printed translations produced numerous distinct versions, multiplying the object through interpretation while the manuscript itself remained for the most part out of sight, hidden away in the library. These translations, reproductions and re-evaluations continued over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, as the Mendoza (along with other early colonial and preconquest objects) entered discussions concerning the role of the Aztec past in the making of modern Mexico. In recent years, the Codex Mendoza has been described as a treasure. A jet-setting star of international exhibitions, it has been admired by audiences in London, New York, Los Angeles and beyond. And reproductions continue to offer powerful interpretations about the meaning and importance of the original manuscript: the digital edition published in 2015 as a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) was described as a ‘virtual repatriation’.

FURTHER READING

Berdan, F., and P.R. Anawalt (eds.) (1992) The Codex Mendoza, 4 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

Bleichmar, D. (2015) ‘History in pictures: translating the Codex Mendoza’, Art History, 38 (4): 682–701.

Bleichmar, D., and M. Martins (eds.) (2016) Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons).

Brotherston, G. (1995) Painted Books from Mexico: Codices in UK Collections and the World They Represent (London: British Museum Press).

Gruzinski, S. (1992) Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance (Paris: UNESCO/Flammarion).

Hamann, B.E. (2008) ‘How Maya hieroglyphs got their name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western grammatology since the fifteenth century’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 152 (1): 1–68.

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (2015) ‘Introduction’, Codex Mendoza, https://codicemendoza.inah.gob.mx/html/acerca.php?lang=english.

¹ S. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus: Or, Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1625).

² E. King, Antiquities of Mexico, Comprising Fac-similes of Ancient Mexican Paintings and Hieroglyphics (London, 1831), vol. 1.

³ J. de Laet, Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1630).

⁴ A. Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, 1652–4).