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TheCodex Mendozais one of the earliest known post-conquest manuscripts created in New Spain. Produced in Mexico City, likely in the 1540s, it consists of a collection of paintings crafted by Aztec or Nahua painter-scribes (Nahuatltlacuilopl.tlacuiloque) that were then glossed in detail and supplemented by a lengthy text written in Spanish by a legal scribe. The manuscript crossed the Atlantic soon after, perhaps as early as the 1550s... It has functioned since the 17th century as a sort of Rosetta Stone for Mexican pictorial writing. Recent exhibitions have described it as one of the most important ‘treasures’ among the magnificent collections of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where it has been held since 1659.
It is unclear if the codex ever reached Spain, and also unclear how it ended up in the hands of its first recorded owner: André Thevet (c.1516-90), a French traveller and author of books on the Americas, royal cosmographer to the Valois court. By 1587, it appears, the codex had passed to Richard Hakluyt (c.1552-1616)...

Pic 2: The foundation of Tenochtitlan in a copy of the Codex Mendoza (L) and in Purchas’s ‘Pilgrimes’ (R) (Click on image to enlarge)

After Hakluyt’s death in 1616, the manuscript went to Samuel Purchas (c.1577-1626), an English cleric and the author of an immensely popular travel compilation that would be of great importance to the codex’s early modern reception...
Although theCodex Mendozahas never left the Bodleian Library since its arrival, it continued to move - not physically but through publication. Its paper travels began with Samuel Purchas’s widely readHakluytus Posthumus: Or, Purchas His Pilgrimes, which includes a 52-page chapter on theMendoza, reproducing the original and adding commentary. Purchas explained that although his book introduced the letters of other modern and ancient nations, including Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic and Persian, as well as Egyptian and Ethiopian hieroglyphs, this precious Mexican manuscript was the only known full-fledged history of and by a foreign nation, addressing their rulers, economics, religion and customs.

Pic 3: Scenes of daily Mexica/Aztec life from the Codex Mendoza, reproduced from woodcuts in Purchas’s ‘Pilgrimes’ (Click on image to enlarge)

For Purchas, theCodex Mendozarepresented much more than a collectible example of exotic writing: it constituted a unique indigenous source about the Aztec world. Indeed, theMendozawas extraordinary at that moment. A small number of pre- and post conquest Mexican manuscripts were then held in various collections across Europe, but nobody knew how to make sense of the former and almost nobody saw the latter. The Spanish-language text made theMendozaone of the very few Mexican manuscripts that Europeans found legible. The fact that it was a history - a highly regarded genre at the time - mattered greatly to Purchas’s assessment of the codex, helping to prove Aztec governance and civility and to establish the Aztecs as a sophisticated civilisation. Purchas’s high esteem for the manuscript is evidenced by the decision to reproduce it almost in its entirety, which involved having the Spanish text translated into English and also commissioning a large number of woodcut reproductions of the figures, a laborious and costly choice. Indeed, no other American manuscript was publicly reproduced in print in its entirety before the 19th century.

Pic 4: Old age in Aztec times depicted in the Codex Mendoza and in the 1625 reproduction by Samuel Purchas (Click on image to enlarge)

Purchas’s version of theCodex Mendoza had enormous impact. Between 1625 and the publication of Lord Kingsborough’s nine-volumeAntiquities of Mexico1831-48), Purchas’s print translation provided the source material for no fewer than six other titles in nine different editions, many of them influential and widely read works. For two centuries, the numerous authors who wrote about theMendoza based their information and images on Purchas’s edition, and to a lesser degree on later publications based on it. This meant that they knew the pictographs as black-and-white woodcuts rather than as vividly coloured drawings, and that they did not fully realise the Spanish textual presence. Still, thanks to Purchas, theMendozamay well be the single most reproduced and studied New World manuscript.

Source:-
• Bleichmar, Daniela (2021) ‘Codex Mendoza’, inNew World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities edited by Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, Institute of Latin American Studies/School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Pictures source:-
• All photos by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore.

This article was uploaded to the Mexicolore website on May 08th 2025

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Lesson plan for teachers: learn to read and write an Aztec codex

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