Digital Repatriation at the Getty Restores Powerful Nahua Voices
Dancers accompany a drummer playing the huehuetl (upright drum) in Book 9 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
On August 13, 1521, Cuauhtémoc—the last ruler of the Aztec Empire—surrendered Tenochtitlán to invading forces led by Spaniard Hernán Cortés. Exactly 500 years later, on August 13, 2021, dozens of people logged in to Zoom for a public reading hosted by the Getty Research Institute. Over the next five hours, attendees read in Nahuatl, Spanish and English. Some cried. Eventually, they recited all of Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century work that recounts the collapse of the Aztec Empire from Native viewpoints.
“It made me realize how much this story needs to be read aloud, like other great works of literature,” says Kim Richter, a scholar of Pre-Columbian art and principal lead of the Getty Research Institute’s Digital Florentine Codex initiative.
Lunar eclipse in Book 7 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
The reading was a benchmark in the institute’s ongoing project to open access to the Florentine Codex, a monstrous work whose size alone would seem to discourage public consumption. A team of Nahua authors and artists alongside Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún assembled the codex, which clocks in at 2,500 pages of text and 2,000 hand-painted images organized into 12 books. Its original title—The Universal History of the Things of New Spain—gives some sense of its immodest ambitions. Inspired by the Western encyclopedic format, the text catalogs several topics—like religion, philosophy, and science—across pre-Columbian Nahua life. Its final book narrates the fall of Tenochtitlán.
The authors completed the manuscript in 1577 in Tlatelolco, a city-state that began as an offshoot of Tenochtitlán, became its rival, and later became a part of Mexico City. Then it made its way to Europe and eventually to the Medici’s family library in Florence, where it acquired its second name: the Florentine Codex. For centuries, it was available only to a narrow group of scholars. But over the last eight years, the Getty Research Institute has worked to provide unprecedented access to the codex for people all around the world, especially those fluent in Nahuatl, the Indigenous language of the Valley of Mexico associated with the Aztec Empire.
In reviewing the document’s history, Richter notes that making its pages digital—like the World Digital Library did in 2012—is an important step to opening access to the text, but only a preliminary one. “To interact with this work, you still have to have incredibly specialized knowledge,” she says. “You have to read colonial Spanish and Classical Nahuatl, and you have to understand references from 16th-century central Mexico.”
Even though, since 1829, publishers have produced several iterations of the Florentine Codex, Richter’s team is pushing further. In addition to making high-quality scans of each of its 2,400 pages, they created searchable transcriptions and translations; a searchable bank of the book’s art tagged in Spanish, English, Classical Nahuatl and Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl; and a glossary of terms to organize the codex’s people, places, and things. All these elements are available online. “There are so many different entry points into this text,” Richter says. “We wanted to make it as simple as possible for people to read it. We can’t begin to envision all the ways in which it could be used.”
Man is awakened with the sound of a shell trumpet and water poured over his face in Book 2 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
Weaver working with a backstrap loom in Book 10 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
Disguised Mexica merchants in Tzinacantlan acquiring quetzal feathers in Book 9 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
The document, Richter emphasizes, is the cultural property of today’s Nahuatl-speaking community. Over 1.5 million people speak variants of Nahuatl in Mexico and the United States, including in the Getty’s own backyard of Los Angeles. Richter hopes that by rethinking the codex with Nahuatl-speaking people at the forefront, her team can contribute to the literary inheritance of Nahua groups and the revitalization of Nahuatl, an endangered language.
Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz, another key member of the Digital Florentine Codex project, thinks about the codex’s modern significance a lot. A native Nahuatl speaker, he’s a research specialist at the Getty, a Nahuatl instructor at UCLA and director of the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, which promotes the revitalization of Nahuatl. His work focuses on digital repatriation—returning Native cultural property to Native communities.
“Indigenous people should have access to these spaces,” he said in Nahuatl at a 2019 research symposium that marked the quincentenary of Cortés’ arrival in Mesoamerica. He pointed out that Classic Nahuatl makes up over half of the Florentine Codex, and it’s one of the most cited documents in the world about the Aztec Empire and the Nahuas. But while translations of the text, or parts of it, exist in English, Spanish, and Russian, no one has ever published a version in a contemporary Nahuatl variant. “How is this possible? Imagine if translations of Beowulf, one of the most important works in Old English literature, only existed in German and French and not modern English.”
That’s why he created summaries of the codex’s Book 12 in Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, a widely spoken contemporary dialect, and recorded himself reading the entire book in its original Classical Nahuatl. This is the first time that someone has translated sections of the Florentine Codex into modern Nahuatl—and perhaps not strangely, rethinking the text’s present also invites us to rethink its past. The Getty Research Institute’s project challenges a long-held scholarly bias that the Florentine Codex is a Spanish book that Bernardino de Sahagún created; instead, the institute presents it as a Tlatelolca book that mostly Nahua authors wrote.
Heroic Tlatelolcan warrior, Tzilcatzin, throwing stones at the invading Spaniards in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
When the Spaniards first marched into Tenochtitlán, the center of the Aztec Empire that floated atop Lake Texcoco, its white buildings, cleanliness, and size stunned them. Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz de Castillo remembered that “some of our soldiers asked if what they saw. . . was between dreams. . . things never heard, nor seen, nor even dreamed of.”¹ In his letters to Carlos V, Cortés fumbled to convey the spectacle of what he saw (“The city is so big and remarkable that, although there is much I could say of it which I will omit, the little I will say is, I think, almost unbelievable”²) and wrote that through evangelization, they could transform Native communities of the Valley of Mexico into model Spanish subjects. Over the next decade, Bernardino de Sahagún was one of the friars who arrived to do just that.
But the Spaniards knew little about the place they wanted to colonize. Although its lingua franca was Nahuatl, a language spoken in many dialects by a broad Mesoamerican group called the Nahuas, its competing city-states—including the dominant Mexica, who didn’t use the term Aztec to refer to themselves—charted different political objectives. Meanwhile, smallpox epidemics decimated Native populations. Sahagún worried that, if they remained ignorant of Nahuatl and Nahua culture, missionaries would fail to convert anyone. He decided to collect as much information about the Nahua as he could. “The doctor cannot correctly apply medicines to the patient [without] first knowing from what mood, or from what cause, the disease proceeds,”³ he wrote.
Chapter on feather work (amantecayotl) in Book 9 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
Insects in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
Sahagún worked at a school called the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, which priests built in the early 1530s to Hispanicize the sons of important Nahua noblemen into Western ways of thinking. There, he taught the boys subjects like Spanish, Latin, Christian philosophy and arithmetic. When they graduated, he tasked some of them with gathering data from their communities about the Valley of Mexico before Cortés’ arrival. They synthesized their findings by writing and rewriting the Florentine Codex, which contains three texts: a Nahuatl text, written on the document’s right; a Spanish text, written on its left, and dispersed throughout, a pictographic text that Nahua artists hand-painted.
Spaniards tossing dead bodies of Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin and Itzquauhtzin, last independent rulers of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, respectively, into the water; Moteuczoma’s body is unceremoniously retrieved and cremated in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
The Nahuatl text came first, and it varies significantly from the Spanish one. It’s abundant in detail, providing names, geographic references and snippets of historical dialogue. Richter highlights Book 12’s description of the death of Moctezuma, the tlatoani—or leader—of Tenochtitlán upon Cortés’ arrival, and Itzquauhtzin, the tlatoani of Tlatelolco, as representative of these differences. Moctezuma’s death was a flaming point of tension, with each side blaming the other for his murder. The version in Nahuatl shifts responsibility—instead of the Mexica finding the bodies outside of a temple, as in the Spanish version, the Spaniards remove the bodies from the temple, insinuating their culpability. And in the Nahua text, the grief of Itzquauhtzin’s people—the people of Tlatelolco, where the authors of the codex lived mere decades later—upon finding him dead is consumingly visceral: “They grieved greatly, their hearts were desolate . . . It was with great splendor that his body was burned.” The Spanish version doesn’t even give his name.
Scholars have long called the codex Sahagún’s work. Yet the Nahua contributors from Tlatelolco were its first authors, and their goals sometimes obscured Sahagún’s own. Sahagún himself credited several Nahua contributors in the text by name. In fact, the potential for Native agency within Nahuatl-language documents was so radical that, in 1555, the Crown required that an ecclesiastical language expert approve certain works written in Nahuatl. Upon the completion of the codex in 1577, King Felipe II of Spain considered it dangerous enough that he ordered the confiscation of all its copies. Cardinal Ferdinando I de’ Medici still got one to the Medici family library, where it remained safe during the Spanish Inquisition.
Mexica jaguar and eagle warriors in Book 2 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
The Getty Research Institute’s digitization project aims to recover the disruptive history of the Florentine Codex by centering the people who wrote it 500 years ago alongside their cultural heirs today. “As historians,” Richter says, “we know that history doesn’t just exist—it’s created.” She means that even though schools, institutions and scholars have presented certain versions as objective truth for centuries, Western histories are just one story of many.
This is something that Cruz Cruz wants people to understand, especially kids in Mexico who speak Nahuatl. When he was young, his teachers presented the Spaniards as conquerors of a subjugated Native population. He points out that curricula teach Natives as either quickly defeated or traitorous allies of Cortés. In interviewing Nahuatl-speaking adolescents in Mexico, Cruz Cruz discovered internalized racism and rejection of Nahuatl rooted in these misconceptions. The children then read summaries of Book 12 written in Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, their own language. The stories—their stories—of Mexica warriors who fought to defend their empire against disease and crumbling alliances and of Nahua scholars who elegantly recorded these events in Nahuatl enthralled them.
Such cultural shifts are why Richter, Cruz Cruz and their colleagues have gone beyond putting the Florentine Codex on the internet. They’ve given readers, and specifically Nahua readers, the tools they need to understand all three of its texts. In collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles, they’ve also hosted workshops for teachers to help them incorporate the Florentine Codex into their lesson plans as a primary source across subjects—history, yes, but also math, art and music. Now that the codex and its supplemental tools are available for free online, Richter says that her team will focus on empowering more educators to bring the codex into the classroom for students in the United States, Mexico and beyond.
Healer (ticitl) tending to people suffering from smallpox in 1520 in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, 1577. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT.
According to Cruz Cruz: “As academics who work with old documents, it’s easy to distance ourselves from the contemporary communities to which this legacy belongs. History is not something of the past; it affects us in every aspect of the present. How it is remembered and taught is impactful.”
Richter says that the power of the August 2021 reading circle came not from reading an old book but from connecting with Nahua men and women who lived through one of the most chaotic moments of modern history. “We were sitting in a place devastated by a pandemic,” Richter adds, “reading the words of other people who also saw their communities unmade by pandemic after pandemic.” These people both lived through great upheaval and made great works of art. Digital repatriation can restore a broad view of their resilience and creativity—recovering the magnificence of the Florentine Codex and its place within Nahua, Mexican and global histories is one way to amend the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves.
You can access the Florentine Codex for free on Getty’s website.
¹ Historia verdadera, 57
² Carta segunda, 67-68
³ Códice Florentino, fol. vr
Kayla Aletha Welch is a writer. She has a PhD in Latin American literature from the University of Pittsburgh, where she served as a Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Her work explores culture, art, and most importantly, people.