Florentine Codex: Book 12: Book 12: The Conquest of Mexico (Volume 12) by Bernardino de Sahagún
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The more I read about the Pre-Colombian cultures of Mexico, the more I am confronted with the basic questions of historiography. Though there are many excellent sources of information—ruins, artwork, living ancestors, Spanish eyewitness accounts, pre-contact documents, indigenous stories, and later historical accounts—all of these carry with them strong limitations and biases, giving our knowledge a kind of multicolored, mosaic quality.
This book is an excellent example of this. Written by a Spanish friar using native informants, this is a kind of hybrid insider/outsider document. The knowledge collected by Sahagún was authentic and valuable, and yet it was collected as a part of a missionary effort—not just to conserve, but also to convert. Further, Sahagún wrote his enormous treatise on Aztec culture many decades after initial contact, at a time when the Mexica empire was shattered, its people subjugated, and its culture already heavily influenced by the Spaniards. While enormously valuable, then, this document cannot be read as a clear window into the past.
The strongest example of this is the beginning of the document. Here, it mentions the several ominous omens—a flame in the sky, a boiling lake—that supposedly appeared before the arrival of the Spanish, giving the conquest an almost Biblical aspect. The codex also claims that the Aztec emperor initially mistook the Spaniards for gods, thus leading to several strategic errors.
But this information is dubious for several reasons. For one, anything so highly flattering to the Christian missionaries (as if God is intervening on their behalf) should be suspect in itself. What’s more, these stories were collected from people living a generation or more after the conquest, not direct witnesses; and one can see how these stories serve a kind of defensive purpose. After all, if the heavens intervened to topple their culture, it somewhat absolves the fallible humans who were defeated. It is no wonder that modern historians have largely discarded these stories as myths.
Does that make this document valueless? Absolutely not. Apart from the specific information contained therein—much of it indeed reliable—it also preserves a sense of huge cultural disruption that the Spanish caused when they arrived. So much of the book consists of confused and desperate battles, which escalate in scope and intensity until the book has a nearly apocalyptic tone. Even now, one can feel the sense of cultural dislocation and loss in these pages. Particularly evocative, I found, was the section on the introduction of smallpox:
But before the Spaniards had risen against us, first there came to be prevalent a great sickness, a plague. It was in Tepeilhuitl that it originated, that there spread over the people a great destruction of men. Some it indeed covered [with pustles]; they were spread everywhere, on one’s face, on one’s head, on one’s breast, etc. There was indeed perishing; many died of it.
This book is also worth reading precisely because of the issue that I highlighted above. As lay readers, we are rarely confronted with the realities of actually doing history—the difficult work of piecing together coherent narratives from a variety of fragmentary and sometimes contradictory sources. Yet when a historian does this work in the background, and presents us with a neat story, we are given a false perception of how easy it is to draw conclusions about the past. In the case of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, it just so happens that our sources are particularly fraught. This period in time, then, shows in exaggerated form the problems that exist in any historical work, and is thus an education in itself.
Lotz in Translation 