The Essential Codex Mendoza

"The Codex Mendoza is a pictorial document. It was painted by Aztec scribes a couple of decades after the Spanish conquest, and it’s one of our best sources of information about a number of aspects of Aztec society. It has a section on the expansion of the Aztec Empire, which kings conquered which towns. It has a section on the taxes paid by the Aztec provinces, who gave how much of what kind of goods. And then it has a section on daily life, from birth to death, and what life was like for the Aztecs. Mendoza was the Spanish administrator, and he wanted to show the king of Spain something about the Aztecs. So, he found a couple of the old scribes who had kept these pictorial records before the conquest, and had them create in three parts the Codex Mendoza . He then sent it off to the king of Spain. But the ship got intercepted by French pirates and the Codex ended up in Paris, where the Royal cosmographer of the French king wrote his name on the first page. It’s now in the British Museum. It’s a colourful document, and it’s a great source of information. There have been lots of editions over the years. The definitive edition was put together by Patricia Anawalt and Frances Berdan and published in a very expensive four-volume series with plenty of analysis. But they also published this paperback version, which focuses on the actual Codex and has less analysis and is more accessible. This is something we know about the Aztecs in a form of writing that the Aztecs actually used. It depends on your definition. If your definition includes documents painted shortly after the Spanish conquest, there is a lot of documentation. Scribes continued the tradition after the Spanish conquest, and so a lot of the early pictorial and written documents are really pretty good representations of what went on before the Spanish arrived. But there are only a handful of painted manuscripts from before 1519."