Codex Mendoza: Facsimile Edition Premium Color Ink and White Paper

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The Codex Mendoza is a remarkable product of a concerted effort on the part of the Spanish occupiers of Mexico to record the preconquest culture of the Aztecs. Work on the manuscript probably started in 1541 in the city of Mexico, the former Tenochtitlán, capital of the Aztec Triple Alliance. It records the history of Tenochtitlán, the tributes either collected or expected from the towns of the Valley of Mexico in the early years of the sixteenth century, and the lifecycles of the preconquest residents of the area. All of this is reported principally in pictographs in the pre-Columbian tradition arrayed over seventy-three of its 144 pages, with Spanish-language explanations.The manuscript's pictographs are attributed to an indigenous painter-scribe, described as "the master of painters" and named Francisco Gualpuyogualcal in a contemporary document. He may have been one of the painter-scribes of the Matrícula de Tributos, created twenty or more years earlier.The central portion of the codex shows the tribute either expected or received from the thirty-eight provinces of the Aztec Empire to either the central government or the last Aztec emperor, Montezuma II (d. 1520) himself. This content is closely related to that of the Matrícula de Tributos. The goods paid in tribute, all represented by painted vignettes, include ceremonial textiles, battle attire, foodstuffs, and luxury goods.Although completed in haste to be sent to Spain, the manuscript was captured at sea and ended up in France, where royal cosmographer André Thevet (d. 1592) inscribed his name into the book. Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616), who served as chaplain to the English ambassador in France in the 1580s, purchased the codex and took it to England. It passed through the hands of Samuel Purchas (d. 1626); his son, also Samuel (d. ca. 1658); and John Selden (1584-1654). By the time the Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript in the 1650s it was bound with tables of currency values (fols. 73-84 of MS Arch. Selden A. 1).