The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it (in English: The General History of the Things of New Spain).Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (Translation of and Introduction to Historia General de Las Cosas de La Nueva España; 12 Volumes in 13 Books ), trans. Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O Anderson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982). Images are taken from Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex. Complete digital facsimile edition on 16 DVDs. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press, 2009. Reproduced with permission from Arizona State University Hispanic Research Center. The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.
In partnership with Nahua elders and authors who were formerly his students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, Sahagún conducted research, organized evidence, wrote and edited his findings. He worked on this project from 1545 up until his death in 1590. The work consists of 2,500 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."H. B. Nicholson, "Fray Bernardino De Sahagún: A Spanish Missionary in New Spain, 1529-1590", in Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagún, ed. Eloise Quiñones Keber (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2002).
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.Ann Bardsley and Ursula Hanly, U Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Professor Charles Dibble Dies , 5 Dec. 2002, University of Utah. Accessed 7 July 2012. 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. In 2015, Sahagún's work was inscribed into the Memory of the World register by UNESCO. In 2023, the Getty Research Institute released the Digital Florentine Codex which gives access to the complete manuscript.
History of the manuscript
In 1575 the Council of the Indies suggested to the Spanish Crown to educate the Indigenous peoples in Spanish instead of using the Indigenous languages. For this reason, the Spanish authorities required Fray Sahagún to hand over all of his documents about the Aztec culture and the results of his research in order to get further details about this matter.Felipe II frente a las culturas y a los discursos prehispánicos de América, De la transculturación a la erradicación, Georges Baudot, IPEALT Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, Editor Caravelle. Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien, Année 2002, vol 78, pp. 37-56 In the meantime, the Bishop of Sigüenza, Diego de Espinosa, who was also the Inquisitor General and President of the Royal Council of Castile, instructed the cleric Luis Sánchez to report about the situation of the native Americans. The concerning findings of this report triggered a visit by Juan de Ovando to the Council of the Indies because it demonstrated a total ignorance of the Spanish authorities about the native cultures and, in Ovando's opinion, was not possible to make correct decisions without reliable information. As a consequence, the Council of the Indies ordered the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1568 to include ethnographic and geographic information regarding any new discovery within their limits. A similar disposition was given to the Vice-Royalty of New Spain in 1569, specifying that 37 chapters were to be reported; in 1570, the extent of the report was modified to required information for 200 chapters. That same year, Phillip II of Spain created a new position as "Cosmógrafo y Cronista Mayor de Indias" to collect and organize this information. He appointed Don Juan López de Velasco, so that he could write "La Historia General de las Indias". His primary focus was a compilation about the history of the Indies.
King Phillip II of Spain concluded that was not beneficial for the Spanish colonies in America and, hence, it never took place. That is the reason why the missionaries, including Fray Bernardino de Sahagún continued their missionary work and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun was able to make two more copies of his Historia general. The three bound volumes of the Florentine Codex are found in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Palat. 218-220 in Florence, Italy, with the title Florentine Codex chosen by its English translators, Americans 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.Charles Dibble, "Sahagún's Historia", in Florentine Codex: Introductions and Indices, Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, No. 14, Part I 1982, p. 15
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 that scholars became aware of it, when the bibliographer Angelo Maria Bandini published a description of it in Latin in 1793.Dibble, "Sahagún's Historia", p. 16. The work became more generally known in the nineteenth century, with a description published by P. Fr. Marcellino da Civezza in 1879.
The Spanish Royal Academy of History learned of this work and, at the fifth meeting of the International Congress of Americanists, the find was announced to the larger scholarly community. In 1888, German scholar Eduard Seler presented a description of the illustrations at the 7th meeting of the International Congress of Americanists. Mexican scholar Francisco del Paso y Troncoso received permission in 1893 from the Italian government to copy the alphabetic text and the illustrations.Dibble, "Sahagún's Historia", p. 17.
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.José Fernando Ramírez, "Códices majicanos de fr. Bernardino de Sahagún." Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, Vol. VI (Madrid 1885), pp. 85-124. The Tolosa Manuscript has been the source for all published editions in Spanish of the Historia General.Dibble, "Sahagún's Historia" p. 21.
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,Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1950-1982. an important contribution to the scholarship on Mesoamerican ethno-history. 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 Secretariat of the Interior (Enrique Olivares Santana, Secretary). The 2012 World Digital Library high-resolution digital version of the manuscript makes it fully accessible online to all those interested in this source for Mexican and Aztec history. In 2023, the Getty Research Institute released the Digital Florentine Codex which gives access to the complete manuscript and multiple translations.
Sahagún's motivations for research
The missionary Sahagún had the goal of evangelizing the 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".H. B. Nicholson, "Fray Bernardino De Sahagún: A Spanish Missionary in New Spain, 1529-1590", in Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagún, ed. Eloise Quiñones Keber (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2002). Prologue to Book XI, Introductory Volume, page 46. 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: To describe and explain ancient Indigenous religion, beliefs, practices, deities. This was to help friars and others understand this "idolatrous" religion in order to evangelize the Aztecs. To create a vocabulary of the Aztec language, Nahuatl. This provides more than definitions from a dictionary, as it gives an explanation of their cultural origins, with pictures. This was to help friars and others learn Nahuatl and to understand the cultural context of the language. To record and document the great cultural inheritance of the Indigenous peoples of New Spain.Alfredo López Austin, "The Research Method of Fray Bernardino De Sahagún: The Questionnaires", in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: The Work of Sahagún, ed. Munro S. Edmonson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974). Page 121.
Sahagún conducted research for several decades, edited and revised his work over several decades, created several versions of a 2,400-page manuscript, and addressed a cluster of religious, cultural and nature themes.Edmonson, M. S. (Ed.) (1974) Sixteenth-century Mexico: The Work of Sahagún, Albuquerque, New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press. Copies of the work were sent by ship to the royal court of Spain and to the Vatican in the late-sixteenth century to explain Aztec culture. The copies of the work were essentially lost for about two centuries, until a scholar rediscovered it in the Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) an archive library in Florence, Italy. The Spanish also had earlier drafts in their archives. A scholarly community of historians, anthropologists, art historians, and linguists has since been investigating Sahagún's work, its subtleties and mysteries, for more than 200 years.For a history of this scholarly work, see Miguel León-Portilla, Bernardino De Sahagún: The First Anthropologist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).
Evolution, format, and structure
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.Howard F. Cline, "Evolution of the Historia General" in Handbook of Middle American Indians, Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, Part 2, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973, pp. 189-207. Sahagún's goals of orienting fellow missionaries to Aztec culture, providing a rich Nahuatl vocabulary, and recording the indigenous cultural heritage are at times in competition within the work. The manuscript pages are generally arranged in two columns, with Nahuatl, written first, on the right and a Spanish gloss or translation on the left. Diverse voices, views, and opinions are expressed in these 2,400 pages, and the result is a document that is sometimes contradictory.
Scholars have proposed several classical and medieval worldbook authors who inspired Sahagún, such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, and Bartholomeus Anglicus. These shaped the late medieval approach to the organization of knowledge.López Austin, "The Research Method of Fray Bernardino De Sahagún: The Questionnaires."
The twelve books of the Florentine Codex are organized in the following way:
Gods, religious beliefs and rituals, cosmology, and moral philosophy