Florentine Codex

Page 51 of Book IX from the Florentine Codex. The text is in Nahuatl; World Digital Library.

The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research project in Mesoamerica by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it: La Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España (in English: the Universal History of the Things of New Spain). After a translation mistake, it was given the name "Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España". The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as "The Florentine Codex", as it is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.

In partnership with Nahua men who were formerly his students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, Sahagún conducted research, organized evidence, wrote and edited his findings starting in 1545 up until his death in 1590. The work consists of 2,400 pages organized into twelve books; more than 2,000 illustrations drawn by native artists provide vivid images of this era. It documents the culture, religious cosmology (worldview) and ritual practices, society, economics, and natural history of the Aztec people. It has been described as “one of the most remarkable accounts of a non-Western culture ever composed”.

Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson were the first to translate the Codex from Nahuatl to English, in a project that took 30 years to complete. In 2012 high-resolution scans of all volumes of The Florentine Codex, in Nahuatl and Spanish, with illustrations, were added to the World Digital Library.

History of the manuscript

Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (original from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana).

The three bound volumes of the Florentine Codex are found in the Biblioteca Medicea-Lorenziana Palat. 218-220 in Florence, Italy, with the title Florentine Codex chosen by its English translators, Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, following in the tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican scholars Francisco del Paso y Troncoso and Joaquín García Icazbalceta.

The manuscript became part of the collection of the library in Florence at some point after its creation in the late sixteenth century. It was not until the late eighteenth century did scholars become aware of its existence, when the bibliographer Angelo Maria Bandini published a description of it in Latin in 1793. Its existence became more generally known in the nineteenth century, with a description published by P. Fr. Marcelino de Civezza in 1879.

It became known to the Spanish Royal Academy of History and at the 5th meeting of the International Congress of Americanists the find was announced to the larger scholarly community. German scholar Eduard Seler gave a description of the illustrations at the 7th meeting of the International Congress of Americanists in 1888. Mexican scholar Francisco del Paso y Troncoso received permission in 1893 from the Italian government to copy the alphabetic text and the illustrations.

The three-volume manuscript of the Florentine Codex has been intensely analyzed and compared to earlier drafts found in Madrid. The Tolosa Manuscript (Códice Castellano de Madrid) was known in the 1860s and studied by José Fernando Ramírez The Tolosa Manuscript has been source for all published editions in Spanish of the Historia General.

The English translation of the complete Nahuatl text of all twelve volumes of the Florentine Codex was a decades-long work of Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, a monumental contribution to the scholarship on Mesoamerican ethnohistory. In 1979 the Mexican government published a full-color, three-volume facsimile of the Florentine Codex in a limited edition of 2,000, allowing scholars to have easier access to the manuscript. The Archivo General de la Nación (Dra. Alejandra Moreno Toscano, director) supervised the project that was published by the Secretaria de Gobernación (Prof. Enrique Olivares Santana, Secretary). The 2012 World Digital Library high resolution digital version of the manuscript makes it fully accessible to all those interested in this important source for Mexican history.

Sahagún's motivations for research

Sahagún's primary motivation was to evangelize indigenous Mesoamerican peoples, and his writings were devoted to this end. He described this work as an explanation of the “divine, or rather idolatrous, human, and natural things of New Spain.” He compared its body of knowledge to that needed by a physician to cure the “patient” suffering from idolatry. He had three overarching goals for his research:

1. To describe and explain ancient Indigenous religion, beliefs, practices, deities. This was to help friars and others understand this “idolatrous” religion and to evangelize the Aztecs.
2. To create a vocabulary of the Aztec language, Nahuatl. This provides more than definitions from a dictionary, but rather an explanation of their cultural origins, with pictures. This was to help friars and others learn Nahuatl, but also to understand the cultural context of the language.
3. To record and document the great cultural inheritance of the Indigenous peoples of New Spain.

Sahagún conducted research for several decades, edited and revised it over several decades, created several versions of a 2,400-page manuscript, and addressed a cluster of religious, cultural and nature themes. Copies of it were sent back to the royal court of Spain and to the Vatican in the late 16th century to explain Aztec culture. The document was essentially lost for about two centuries, until a scholar rediscovered it in the Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) an archive library in Florence, Italy. A scholarly community of historians, anthropologists, art historians, and linguists has been actively investigating Bernardino’s work, its subtleties and mysteries, for more than 200 years.

Evolution, format, and structure

An illustration of the "One Flower" ceremony, from the 16th century Florentine Codex. The two drums are the teponaztli (foreground) and the huehuetl (background).

The Florentine Codex is a complex document, assembled, edited, and appended over decades. Essentially it is three integral texts: (1) in Nahuatl; (2) a Spanish text; (3) pictorials. The final version of the Florentine Codex was completed in 1569. The Nahuatl Sahagún’s goals of orientating fellow missionaries to Aztec culture, providing a rich Nahuatl vocabulary, and recording the indigenous cultural heritage at times compete with each other within it. The manuscript pages are generally of two columns, with Nahuatl, written first, on the right and a Spanish gloss or translation on the left. There are diverse voices, views, and opinions in these 2,400 pages, and the result is a document which at times can appear contradictory.

Scholars have proposed several classical and medieval worldbook authors that inspired Sahagún, such as Aristotle, Pliny, Isidore of Seville, and Bartholomew the Englishman. These shaped the late medieval approach to the organization of knowledge. The twelve books of the Florentine Codex are organized in the following way:

1. Gods, religious beliefs and rituals, cosmology, and moral philosophy,
2. Humanity (society, politics, economics, including anatomy and disease),
3. Natural history.

Book 12, the account of the conquest of Mexico from the point of view of the conquered of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco is the only strictly historical book of the Historia General.

This follows the organizational flow of logic found in medieval encyclopedias, in particular the 19-volume De proprietatibus rerum of his fellow Franciscan Friar Bartholomew the Englishman. One scholar has argued that Bartholomew’s work served as a conceptual model for Sahagún, although evidence is circumstantial. With more confidence one can assert that both of these present the cosmos, society and nature of the late medieval paradigm.

Images within the Florentine Codex

The pictorials of the Florentine Codex could be analyzed in detail once the facsimile edition became available generally in 1979. Previously, the images were known mainly through the black-and-white drawings found in various earlier publications, separated from the alphabetic text. The images in the Florentine Codex were created as an integral element of the larger opus. Although many of the images show evidence of European influence, a careful analysis by one scholar posits that they were created by "members of the hereditary profession of tlacuilo or native scribe-painter."

The images were inserted in places in the text left open for them, and in some cases the blank space has not been filled, strongly suggesting that when the manuscripts were sent to Spain they were as yet unfinished. The images are of two types, what can be called "primary figures" that amplify the meaning of the alphabetic texts and "ornamentals" that were merely decorative. The majority of the nearly 2500 images are "primary figures" (approximately 2000) with the remainder ornamental. The figures were drawn in black outline first, with color added later. There were several artists, of varying skill, involved in creating the images, not a single person.

It is not clear what artistic sources the scribes utilized, but the library of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco had European books with illustrations and books of engravings. There are European elements in the imagery as well as pre-conquest images done in the "native style". A number of the images have Christian elements, what one scholar has called "Christian editorializing."

Books

The codex is composed of the following twelve books:

1. The Gods. Deals with gods worshiped by the natives of this land, which is New Spain.
2. The Ceremonies. Deals with holidays and sacrifices with which these natives honored their gods in times of infidelity.
3. The Origin of the Gods. About the creation of the gods.
4. The Soothsayers. About Indian judiciary astrology or omens and fortune-telling arts.
5. The Omens. Deals with foretelling these natives made from birds, animals, and insects in order to foretell the future.
6. Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy. About prayers to their gods, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and theology in the same context.
7. The Sun, Moon and Stars, and the Binding of the Years. Deals with the sun, the moon, the stars, and the jubilee year.
8. Kings and Lords. About kings and lords, and the way they held their elections and governed their reigns.
9. The Merchants. About long-distance elite merchants, pochteca, who expanded trade, reconnoitered new areas to conquer, and agents-provocateurs.
10. The People. About general history: it explains vices and virtues, spiritual as well as bodily, of all manner of persons.
11. Earthly Things. About properties of animals, birds, fish, trees, herbs, flowers, metals, and stones, and about colors.
12. The Conquest. About the conquest of New Spain from the Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco point of view.

Ethnographic methodologies

Aztec warriors as shown in the Florentine Codex.

Sahagún was among the first to develop an array of strategies for gathering and validating knowledge of indigenous New World cultures. Much later, the discipline of anthropology would later formalize these as ethnography - the scientific research strategy to document the beliefs, behavior, social roles and relationships, and worldview of another culture, but to explain these within the logic of that culture. Ethnography requires the practice of empathy with those very different from oneself, and the suspension of one’s own cultural beliefs in order to understand and explain the worldview of those living in another culture.

Sahagún systematically gathered knowledge from a range of diverse informants who were recognized as having expert knowledge of Aztec culture. He did so in the native language of Nahuatl, but then compared the answers from different sources of information. He sought out different kinds of informants, including women (which was unusual).

Some passages appear to be the transcription of spontaneous narration of religious beliefs, society or nature. Other parts clearly reflect a consistent set of questions presented to different people designed to elicit specific information. Some sections of text report Sahagún’s own narration of events or commentary.

He developed a methodology with the following elements:

1. He used the native language of Nahuatl.
2. He elicited information of elders, cultural authorities publicly recognized as most knowledgeable.
3. He adapted the project to the ways that Aztec culture recorded and transmitted knowledge.
4. He used the expertise of his former students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, whom he credited by name.
5. He attempted to capture the totality or complete reality of Aztec culture on its own terms.
6. He structured his inquiry, using questionnaires, but was prepared to set this aside when more valuable information was shared through other means.
7. He attended to the diverse ways that diverse meanings are transmitted through Nahuatl linguistics.
8. He undertook a comparative evaluation of information, drawing from multiple sources, in order to determine the degree of confidence with which he could hold that information.
9. He collected information on the conquest of Mexico from the Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco point of view of the defeated.

These methodological innovations substantiate the claim Sahagún was the first anthropologist.

Most of the Florentine Codex is alphabetic text in Nahuatl and Spanish, but its 2,000 pictures provide vivid images of sixteenth-century New Spain. Some of these images directly support the alphabetic text; others are thematically related; others are for seemingly decorative purposes. Some are colorful large, and consume most of a page; others are black and white sketches. The pictorial images offer remarkable detail about life in New Spain, but they do not bear titles, and the relationship of some to the adjoining text is not always self-evident. They can be considered a “third column of language” in the manuscript. Several different artists’ hands have been identified, and many questions about their accuracy have been raised. The drawings convey a blend of Indigenous and European artistic elements and cultural influences.

Many passages of the texts in the Florentine Codex present descriptions of like items (e.g., gods, classes of people, animals) according to consistent patterns, and it appears that Sahagún deployed a series of questionnaires to structure his interviews. The following questions appear to have been used to gather information about the gods for Book One:

1. What are the titles, the attributes, or the characteristics of the god?
2. What were his powers?
3. What ceremonies were performed in his honor?
4. What was his attire?

For Book Ten, "The People," a questionnaire may have been used to gather information about the social organization of labor and workers, with questions such as:

1. What is the (trader, artisan) called and why?
2. What particular gods did they venerate?
3. How were their gods attired?
4. How were they worshiped?
5. What do they produce?
6. How did each occupation work?

This book also described some other indigenous groups in Mesoamerica.

Sahagún was particularly interested in Nahua medicine, and as such the information he collected is a major contribution to the history of medicine generally. His interest in recording medical information was not trivial, since many thousands of people died from plagues and diseases, including friars and students at the school. Sections of Books Ten and Eleven describe human anatomy, disease, and medicinal plant remedies. Sahagún named more than a dozen Aztec “doctors” who dictated and edited these sections. The passage on human anatomy appears primarily intended to record vocabulary. A questionnaire such as the following may have been used:

1. What is the name of the plant (plant part)?
2. What does it look like?
3. What does it cure?
4. How is the medicine prepared?
5. How is it administered?
6. Where is it found?

The text in this section provides very detailed information about location, cultivation, and medical uses of plants and plant parts as well as information about the uses of animal products as medicine. The drawings in this section provide important visual information to amplify the alphabetic text. The information is useful for a wider understanding of the history of botany and the history of zoology. There has been some scholarly speculation that Sahagún had some involvement in the creation of the Badianus Manuscript, an herbal created in 1552 that has pictorials of medicinal plants and their uses. Originally written in Nahuatl, only the translation to Latin has survived.

Book Eleven, “Earthly Things,” has the most text and approximately half of the drawings in the codex. The text describes it as a “forest, garden, orchard of the Mexican language.” It describes the Aztec cultural understanding of the animals, birds, insects, fish and trees in Mesoamerica. Apparently Sahagún designed a questionnaire about animals such as the following:

1. What is the name of the animal?
2. What animals does it resemble?
3. Where does it live?
4. Why does it receive this name?
5. What does it look like?
6. What habits does it have?
7. What does it feed on?
8. How does it hunt?
9. What sounds does it make?

Plants and animals are described in association with their behavior and natural conditions or habitat. But then the responses of the Nahuas presented their information in a fashion that was consistent with their worldview. This led in some cases to contradictory and to modern readers somewhat confusing presentations of information. There are also sections on minerals, mining, bridges, roads, types of terrain, and food crops.

The Florentine Codex is one of the most remarkable social science research projects ever conducted. It is not unique as a chronicle of encountering the New World and its peoples, for there were others in this era. Sahagún's methods for gathering information from the perspective from within a foreign culture were highly unusual for this time. He reported the worldview of people of Central Mexico as they understood it, and not exclusively from the European perspective. “The scope of the Historia's coverage of contact-period Central Mexico indigenous culture is remarkable, unmatched by any other sixteenth-century works that attempted to describe the native way of life.” Foremost in his own mind, Sahagún was a Franciscan missionary, but he may also rightfully be given the title as Father of American Ethnography.

Gallery of images from the Florentine Codex

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Editions

• General History of the Things of New Spain by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: The Florentine Codex, at the World Digital Library
• Bernardino de Sahagún, translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble; The Florentine Codex : General History of the Things of New Spain, 12 volumes; University of Utah Press (January 7, 2002), hardcover, ISBN 087480082X ISBN 978-0874800821
• Bernardino de, Sahagun; Kupriienko, Sergii (2013) [2013]. General history of the affairs of New Spain. Books X-XI: Aztec's Knowledge in medicine and botany. Kyiv: Видавець Купрієнко С.А. ISBN 978-617-7085-07-1. Retrieved 4 September 2013.

See also

• Aztec codices
• Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco
• Bernardino de Sahagún