Revisioning the Conquest of Mexico

Abstract

When the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) compiled the famous encyclopaedic history of Nahua culture generally known as the Florentine Codex (1578/79–80), he relied heavily on Nahua aides. Educated in the western humanist tradition and knowledgeable about their own world, these native collaborators were crucial to Sahagún's project. This article focuses in particular on the drawings of the Florentine Codex, analysing the close relationship between text and image in Book Twelve, which tells the story of the conquest of Mexico (1519–21). The drawings have received little scholarly attention as they lack the artistic features of what was regarded as ‘classic’ indigenous pictographic writing. This article argues that the tlacuiloque, the writers/painters of Book Twelve, did not merely sprinkle some elements of indigenous pictographic writing in more European style pictures, but created a new idiom to transmit their own way of visualising intertwined histories of conquest.