Translation as Conquest: Sahagún and Universal History of the Things of New Spain 9783954871902

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Translation as Conquest: Sahagún and Universal History of the Things of New Spain VICTORIA RÍOS CASTAÑO

Iberoamericana • Vervuert / 2014

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PARECOS Y AUSTRALES Ensayos de cultura de la Colonia «Parecos de nosotros los españoles son los de la Nueva España, que viven en Síbola y por aquellas partes» dice Francisco López de Gómara, porque «no moramos en contraria como antípodas», sino en el mismo hemisferio. «Austral» es el término que adoptaron los habitantes de los virreinatos del Perú para publicarse. Bajo esas dos nomenclaturas con las que las gentes de indias son llamadas en la época, la colección de «Ensayos de cultura de la colonia» acogerá ediciones cuidadas de textos coloniales que deben recuperarse, así como estudios que, desde una intención interdisciplinar, desde perspectivas abiertas, desde un diálogo intergenérico e intercultural traen de la América descubierta y de su proyección en los virreinatos.

Consejo editorial de la colección ROLENA ADORNO Yale University MARGO GLANTZ Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México ROBERTO GONZÁLEZ-ECHEVARRÍA Yale University ESPERANZA LÓPEZ PARADA Universidad Complutense de Madrid JOSÉ ANTONIO MAZZOTTI Tufts University LUIS MILLONES Colby College CARMEN DE MORA Universidad de Sevilla ALBERTO PÉREZ-AMADOR ADAM Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa MARÍA JOSÉ RODILLA LEÓN Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa

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Translation as Conquest: Sahagún and Universal History of the Things of New Spain VICTORIA RÍOS CASTAÑO

IBEROAMERICANA • VERVUERT / 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ríos Castaño, Victoria.   Translation as conquest : Sahagún and Universal history of the things of New Spain / Victoria Ríos Castaño.        pages cm. --  (Parecos y australes ; 13)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-936353-16-3 (Iberoamericana Publ. Corp) -- ISBN 978-8484896593 (Iberoamericana) -- ISBN 978-3-86527-640-7 (Vervuert) 1. Sahagún, Bernardino de, -1590. 2.  Sahagún, Bernardino de, -1590. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España. 3.  Franciscans--Mexico--History--16th century. 4.  Nahuatl language--Early works to 1800. 5.  Indians of Mexico--History-16th century. 6.  Mexico--History--Spanish colony, 1540-1810.  I. Title. F1231.S33R56 2014 972’.02092--dc23 2014033403 Cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública o transformación de esta obra solo puede ser realizada con la autorización de sus titulares, salvo excepción prevista por la ley. Diríjase a CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos)sinecesitafotocopiaroescanearalgúnfr agmento de esta obra (www.conlicencia.com; 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47). © Iberoamericana, 2014 Amor de Dios, 1 – E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net © Vervuert, 2014 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 - D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net ISBN 978-84-8489-659-3 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-86527-640-7 (Vervuert) ISBN 978-1-936353-16-3 (Iberoamerican Publ. Corp.) ISBN 978-3-95487-190-2 (ePub) Dep. legal: M-31004-2014 Coverdesign: Carlos Zamora Type-setting: Carlos del Castillo Cover illustration: “Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca, Paynal y Tláloc”. Libro primero, fol. 1v, p. 10, Vol. I). Códice florentino. Gentileza de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO 9706 Este libro está impreso íntegramente en papel ecológico sin cloro Impreso en España

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To Ariane and Brian

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1 Sahagún’s Education and Franciscan Training in Spain . . . . . Sahagún’s Intellectual Origins: From Early Education to the University of Salamanca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sahagún’s Religious Education: The Friary of San Francisco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 2: Sahagún and the Spiritual Conquest of New Spain . . . . . . . . The Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sahagún’s Composition of Linguistic and Doctrinal Works in Nahuatl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Books on Antiquities and Geographical Accounts . . . . . .

37 39 47

63 66 82 99

Chapter 3: Sahagún’s Intellectual Models for the Composition of Historia universal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Sahagún and the Encyclopaedic Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 The Influence of Christian Works on Historia universal . . 129 Chapter 4: Inquisitorial Techniques as Sahagún’s Method of Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 The Inquisition in Spain and New Spain during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

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Olmos and Sahagún’s Application of the Inquisitorial Techniques to the Collection of Indigenous Data . . . . 169 The Origin of Sahagún’s Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Chapter 5: The Composition of Historia universal: Sahagún, the Respondents, and the Assistants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nahua Respondents’ Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Nahua Assistants’ Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sahagún’s Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

199 201 211 223

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Appendix I: Contents of Historia universal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Appendix II Comparison of Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Appendix III Sahagún’s Rearrangement of Contents.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313

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Acknowledgements On a warm spring afternoon in a cafe close to the Potsdamer Platz, I was enjoying the company of Romy Köhler, an early Sahaguntine scholar and expert on the Tonalamatl. We had just met in the library of the Ibero-American Institute , upon the happy coincidence that the two of us wanted to consult Paso y Troncoso’s facsimile of the Códices matritenses. Having finished the preliminaries of our getting-acquainted conversation, Romy asked me what I had “discovered” about Sahagún and I fired away: Sahagún was not a pioneering ethnographer but a cultural translator who had used confessional and inquisitorial techniques in order to collect data for the creation of an encyclopaedic reference manual in Nahuatl that would mirror those works he consulted himself as a preacher and confessor. Romy looked at me and said that I had drawn those conclusions in isolation. I could only agree and disagree. True as it is that my lack of direct interaction with colonial Latin American and Sahaguntine scholars—some of whom defend or repeat the idea that he is the father of anthropology in the New World—emboldened me at times to “speak against the master,” with the passing of the years, the reading of their studies has turned them into imaginary friends and colleagues with whom I have taken issue and nodded with delight whilst sharing the same common goal of continuing an understanding of Sahagún’s work. The list of scholars to thank is long but I would like to acknowledge, in particular, Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble —whose translation of the Florentine Codex allowed me the possibility of conducting research on Sahagún in the first place—, Louise M. Burkhart, Jesús Bustamante García, James Lockhart, and Alfredo López Austin. There is nothing in this study that they have not already said or suggested.

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I would also like to express my gratitude, in chronological order, to other people who have been involved, this time face-to-face, in my research; to Ovidi Carbonell i Cortés, for introducing me to the concept of cultural translation as an undergraduate at Salamanca; to Elke Ruhnau, for helping me with the Nahuatl language and inspiring in me so much fascination for the Nahuas; to Jeremy Lawrance and Adam Sharman for supervisory support as a postgraduate at Nottingham; to Tyler Fisher for showing me the art of proofreading; to my extraordinary colleagues and friends Jenny Mullen, and Carolina Miranda, Miguel Arnedo Gómez, and Nancy Márquez, from Victoria University of Wellington, for reading drafts, assisting me in the final stages, and being, overall, so good sport; and to Máiréad Nic Craith, from Heriot-Watt, for her professional and emotional support. I could not forget, although I must apologize for not recognizing them in name, the librarians of the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid and the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, who were always helpful and friendly. Last but not least; a big thanks to my very much beloved parents, brother, friends, and husband. We did it.

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Introduction The physician cannot advisedly administer medicines to the patient without first knowing of which humour or from which source the ailment derives. Wherefore it is desirable that the good physician be expert in the knowledge of medicines and ailments to adequately administer the cure for each ailment. The preachers and confessors are physicians of the souls for the curing of spiritual ailments. It is good that they have practical knowledge of the medicines and the spiritual ailments.

This is the opening paragraph of the first prologue to Universal History of the Things of New Spain (ca. 1577-1579), a twelve-book encyclopaedic work on the Nahuas.1 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún 1. The original paragraph, written by an indigenous amanuensis in sixteenthcentury Spanish and at times with inconsistent diacritic and idiosyncratic marks, reads: “El medico no puede Acatadamente aplicar Las medicinas al enfermo sin que primero conozca: de que humor, o de que causa proçede la enfermedad. De manera que el buen medico conuiene sea docto en el conocimiento de las mediçinas y en el de las enfermedades para aplicar conueniblemente a cada enfermedad la mediçina contraria. Los predicadores, y confesores, medicos son de las animas para curar las enfermedades espirituales: conuiene tengã esperitia de las mediçinas y de las enfermedades espirituales.” This quote appears in the Florentine Codex, the surviving manuscript of Universal History of the Things of New Spain (Historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España), which is hereafter referred to as Historia universal. “Universal” was the title page but it has been superseded in modern editions by “general.” This issue and the dates of composition are discussed in chapters II and III of this study. The title Florentine Codex, in allusion to the library where it was found, was suggested by Joaquín García Icazbalceta in Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI (1886), see 1954, pp. 358-359. The Florentine Codex comprises two columns; on the right, the original text in the Nahuatl language—the lingua franca of the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan—, and on the left, its translation into Spanish. For a list of contents, see appendix I. This study quotes

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begins with a simile on preachers and confessors as physicians of the soul in order to argue that, in the same manner that physicians cure by detecting a disease and applying appropriate medicines, churchmen must be able to identify and heal spiritual illnesses; the harmful, “idolatrous” beliefs that sickened the Nahuas. Sahagún’s fellow missionary, Fray Andrés de Olmos, reiterates this simile and argument in his prologue to Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios (1553), urging the “spiritual physicians” to employ the admonitions of this work as “medicines to better cure or discuss” indigenous superstition.2 The medicines that both Franciscans were dispensing was the Christian faith, inculcated through sermons and the administering of the sacrament of penance, two crucial proselytizing activities that required not only a sound knowledge of Nahuatl, but also of the Nahuas’ world in order to address them in a persuasive manner from the pulpit, and ask and understand their answers during confession. The physician-churchman comparison, established by the Church Father St. Augustine of Hippo in Book I of De doctrina christiana (ca. 426), concerning the Christian orator’s role for the conveyance of the evangelical message, was used by Pope Gregory the Great in his seminal treatise on the clergy’s duties Cura pastoralis (591). The simile was repeated throughout the centuries by other influential figures, like the French theologians Alain de Lille in his predication manual De arte praedicatoria (ca. 1199), and Jean

the edition and translation into English of the prologues, written only in Spanish, and of the Nahuatl text and its translation into English by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, and is hereafter referred to by the abbreviation Flor. Cod. (for Florentine Codex), by Prologues or Book, and page; see Sahagún 1950-1982. A digitalized version of the Florentine Codex is available in the World Digital Library. As for the Spanish text of the Florentine Codex, this study quotes the edition of Josefina García Quintana and Alfredo López Austin, using the abbreviation of the title of their edition, Hist. gen. (for Historia general), also by Book and page; see Sahagún 1988. 2. The relevant quote reads: “[E]spirituales médicos [tienen esta] medicina […] para mejor curar o hablar desto,” Olmos, 1979, p. 24. Translations into Spanish are hereafter the author’s unless otherwise stated. This treatise is a free translation from Spanish into Nahuatl of the Franciscan Martín de Castañega’s Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerías (1529). Castañega and Olmos’s texts are inscribed in the tradition of witchcraft manuals like Henry Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus maleficarum (1486) and expound heretical beliefs and activities, such as the witches’ worship of the Devil.

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Gerson in his predication and confessional Opus tripartitum (ca. 1408), and the Spaniard Martín de Azpilcueta in his confessional Manual de confessores y penitentes (1549).3 Sahagún and Olmos’s use of the comparison reveals their connection to an evangelization tradition that they were continuing in New Spain. Historia universal and Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios are products of a collaborative effort to compose works that best suited their mission, and which ranged from grammars, vocabularies, and dictionaries that codified the indigenous languages, to translations of doctrinal and liturgical texts and the creation of new ones. In this regard, Sahagún explains that a grammar with an appended vocabulary, a “history” (Historia universal), a collection of chants, and another of sermons were the resulting works of the 1558 commission he received from his Franciscan Order to write “in the Mexican language that which seemed to me useful for the indoctrination, the propagation and perpetuation of the Christianization of these natives of this New Spain,” emphasizing again that all these works were conceived as “a help to the workers and ministers who indoctrinate them.”4 3. Tentler, 1977, pp. 100-102, Bustamante García, 1989, p. 653; 1992, p. 272. 4. “[E]n lengua mexicana, lo que me pareciese, ser vtil: para la doctrina, cultura, y manutencia, de la cristiandad, destos naturales, desta nueua españa, y para ayuda, de los obreros, y minjstros, que los doctrinan,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 53. Sahagún names these works as “arte de la lengua mexicana, con un vocabulario apendiz,” “historia” or “doze libros,” “canticos” or “cantares,” and “postilla” in ibid., pp. 54-55, 71. Traditionally, scholars refer to the “cantares” and the “postilla” as part of Sahagún’s “doctrinal encyclopaedia,” a term that enters into opposition with the “historia,” for Historia universal; an encyclopaedia on the world of the Nahuas. See for instance Schwaller, 2003, p. 265, and Hernández de León-Portilla, 2011, p. 91. The grammar and the vocabulary are lost and the collection of chants or “cantares” could be Psalmodia christiana y sermonario de los sanctos del año (1583), the only work that Sahagún saw published in his lifetime. It has been edited and translated into English by Anderson, see Sahagún 1993b, and into Spanish by José Luis Suárez Roca, see Sahagún 1999. The “postilla” is catalogued in the Edward E. Ayer Collection of the Newberry Library as comprising a Sermonario or Sermones de dominicas y de sanctos en lengua mexicana, “Exercicios quotidianos,” “Veynte y seis addiciones,” and an “apendiz;” see Schwaller, 2003, p. 265. The last three parts have been edited and translated into Spanish as Adiciones, apendice a la postilla y exercicio quotidiano by Anderson, see Sahagún 1993a. In his 1999 article, nevertheless, Anderson expresses doubts about the survival of the “postilla” that Sahagún mentions; see pp. 43-44. Other works attributed to Sahagún include Colloquios y doctrina christiana, Evangeliario or Evangeliarium, epistolarium et lectionarium aztecum sive mexicanum, Arte

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Of the corpus of texts for the “physician of the soul” that came about from Sahagún’s 1558 appointment, Historia universal has been the centre of attention of a massive bibliography from the twentieth century onwards. At times both this work and Sahagún have been decontextualized and another simile has been created, that of Sahagún as a pioneering anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. The evolution of his status from sixteenth-century missionary to first anthropologist of New Spain and, by extension, father of modern anthropology in the New World, started with Alfonso Toro’s 1922 conference paper on the linguistic and ethnographic value of Sahagún’s work and with Wigberto Jiménez Moreno’s 1938 edition of Historia universal.5 Jiménez Moreno observes that Sahagún applied to his collection of data “the most demanding method an ethnographer could use,” conducting research as a “conscientious ethnographer.”6 Ángel María Garibay Kintana followed suit in Historia de la literatura náhuatl, dedicating a chapter to “missionary-ethnographers” that includes Olmos, Sahagún, Fray Toribio de Benavente-Motolinía, and Fray Diego Durán.7 Garibay Kintana praised Sahagún in particular for his monumental “Encyclopaedia on the culture of the Nahuas of Tenochtitlan,” describing him as a “brilliant forerunner of scientific anthropology and ethnography both for the general conception and for the execution.”8 In subseadivinatoria, Kalendario mexicano, latino y castellano, and Manual del christiano. For a study of contents and editions, see Bustamante García 1989 and 1990. The Franciscan chronicler Juan de Torquemada lists further works, now lost. These are Vocabulario trilingüe and Vida de San Bernardino de Siena, and other texts that are clearly associated with the administering of sacraments, such as Platica para despues de el bautismo de niños, Regla de los casados, Impedimento de el matrimonio and Los mandamientos de los casados. See Torquemada, 1975, III, p. 488, Zulaica Gárate, 1939, pp. 197-200, and Bustamante García, 1990, p. 214. In their 1973 studies of Sahagún’s works, Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer also offer an exhaustive list of editions and translations. 5. Toro delivered his talk “Importancia etnográfica y lingüística de las obras del Padre Fray Bernardino de Sahagún” at the XX Congreso Internacional de Americanistas; see Toro, 1923. 6. “El más exigente método que un etnógrafo [...] pudier[a] usar […] [y actuó como] concienzudo etnógrafo,” Jiménez Moreno, 1938, pp. xiv-xv. 7. Georges Baudot elaborated on Garibay Kintana’s chapter and converted it into a monograph, see 1995. 8. “Enciclopedia de la cultura de los nahuas de Tenochtitlán […]. [G]enial precursor de la antropología y la etnografía científicas [t]anto por la idea general como por su ejecución,” Garibay Kintana, 1953-1954, II, pp. 65, 67.

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quent decades an accumulation of works has continued to echo Jiménez Moreno and Garibay Kintana’s statements in biographies of Sahagún, and edited volumes and articles on Sahagún and Historia universal.9 What is more, the attribution of the title of anthropologist is not restricted to scholarly studies; it has been disseminated among the general public through commemorations and institutional awards. In Mexico, the academic prize Premio Fray Bernardino de Sahagún is annually awarded by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia to the best work in ethnology and social anthropology, and in Spain, since 1966, a memorial plaque in one of the oldest buildings of the University of Salamanca—where Sahagún studied—, and a statue in his hometown, have these words engraved respectively: “To the memory of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún […], distinguished researcher of the language and culture of the ancient Mexicans, and father of anthropology in the New World;” “missionary and educator of peoples, father of anthropology in the New World.”10 9. See, amongst others, the biographies written by Florencio Vicente Castro and José Luis Rodríguez Molinero, Bernardino de Sahagún: Primer antropólogo en Nueva España (siglo XVI) (1986), and by Miguel León-Portilla, Bernardino de Sahagún: Pionero de la antropología (1999, published in English as Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist, 2002); edited volumes like J. Jorge Klor de Alva, Henry B. Nicholson, and Eloise Quiñones Keber’s The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico (1988); and several articles, like José Antonio Jáuregui’s “Bernardino de Sahagún: pionero de la antropología social” (1994), León-Portilla’s “Fray Bernardino de Sahagún y la invención de la antropología” (2002), and William Kavanagh’s “Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: El precursor, tan escasamente conocido, de la antropología sociocultural” (2012). León-Portilla’s defence of Sahagún as “the father of ethnological investigation in the New World” is also found in his 1974 essay, p. 243, and in his 2000 article “¿Qué nos dice hoy Bernardino de Sahagún?,” translated into English in 2003 as “Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer of Anthropology.” More recently, in his inaugural lecture of the third colloquium “El universo de Sahagún: Pasado y presente,” (Puebla, 6-7 October, 2011), León-Portilla insisted that Sahagún was “not only a missionary, but [also] an outstanding ethnologist, linguist, and expert of the culture of Mexico […]. [He] developed a method that anthropologists use nowadays” (“no solo fue un misionero, sino que fue un destacado etnólogo, lingüista y conocedor de la cultura de México […]. Él desarrolló un método que ahora usan los antropólogos,” cited in Paula Carrizosa’s 2011 online article). 10. “A la memoria de fray Bernardino de Sahagún [...] [,] investigador insigne de la lengua y la cultura de los antiguos mexicanos [,] padre de la antropología en el nuevo mundo;” “misionero y educador de pueblos [,] padre de la antropología en el nuevo mundo,” Ballesteros Gaibrois, 1973, pp. 124-125.

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Three main recurrent reasons can be put forward to understand why Sahagún has been perceived as a pioneering anthropologist, or for that matter, as an ethnographer and ethnologist, since there is no consensus to situate him in one or another category. The first reason rests on the fact that, on some occasions, Sahagún expresses a sincere and profound admiration for the Nahuas’ rhetorical and physical skills, education, medical knowledge, and solemnity of their religious cult, even to the point of regarding some of their lost policies as superior and regretting the destruction to which the Spaniards subjected them.11 Sahagún’s recognition of the Nahuas’ value and level of perfection, in his own words “quilate” (carat), has been compared to an anthropologist’s fascination with the cultural Other.12 His motive for being in New Spain and committing to the composition of Historia universal seems to be put side by side with an attitude proper of indigenismo that celebrates the cultural Other on its own.13 The second reason that has positioned Sahagún as a pioneering anthropologist has to do with the contents of Historia universal. Undeniably, its twelve books compile a variegated range of material—on gods, ceremonies, mythology, astrology, rhetoric and moral philosophy, fauna and flora, and the description of the life and duties of kings, lords, and merchants—, all of which is reminiscent of the subject matters studied by social anthropologists, namely; other peoples’ “ecologies, their economics, their legal and political institutions, their family and kinship organizations, their religions, their technologies, their arts, etc.”14 Many scholars from France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the United States have drawn on this encyclopaedia on the world of the Nahuas for 11. For a juxtaposition of Sahagún’s condemnation and praise of the Nahuas’ beliefs and customs, see Sahagún’s first prologue to Book I, Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 47-50, and the Spanish version of chapter XXVII of Book X, which has been translated into English by Anderson and Dibble, ibid., pp. 74-85. 12. Ibid., p. 47. 13. León-Portilla speaks of Sahagún’s indigenismo, arguing that “in his eagerness to know the culture of the Other, [Sahagún] came to appreciate them and even to admire them for what they were” (“en su afán de conocer la cultura del Otro, llegó a apreciarlo, más aún a admirarlo por sí mismo,” 1999, p. 212). For a similar argument, see also León-Portilla, 2003a, p. 6. 14. This is Edward E. Evans-Pritchard’s list of fields of research in social anthropology; cited in Asad, 1973, p. 11.

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their anthropological studies, which reinforces the notion that, if modern anthropology is concerned with the same themes as Sahagún was, Historia universal is a testament of pioneering interest in anthropological research and Sahagún, as his compiler, one of its precursors.15 Moreover, the nature of Historia universal makes it an unparalleled source; contrary to other so-called “missionaryethnographers” like Motolinía or Durán, Sahagún wanted to leave a written record of how the Nahuas spoke and did not tamper with the Nahuatl text as openly as his contemporaries, who eventually composed their “ethnographic” works in Spanish.16 In this vein, León-Portilla argues that Sahagún organized material into an encyclopaedia “without altering or distorting in any way his texts.”17 His work is “purer,” so much so given the method that he applied to his collection of data in the Nahuatl language, whereby he enquired Nahua elders, whose answers were transcribed by several Nahua assistants or “colegiales”—former students at the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco—working under his direction. This method of data collection has raised two controversial arguments. The first bestows upon the Nahuas—elder respondents and assistants—the authorship of the early Nahuatl manuscripts of Historia universal; the Códices matritenses.18 Garibay Kintana cham15. Some of the many anthropological and ethnographic studies that have relied on the contents of Historia universal are Saville 1920, Kirchhoff 1940, Schultze-Jena 1950, Davies 1988, and Ortega Ojeda 2008. 16. Sahagún initially envisaged the creation of a three-column page work—with the original text in Nahuatl in the central column, the translation into Spanish on the left, and scholia or lexicographic notes on the right. The first to be finished was the Nahuatl text in 1569, which was transferred to the right-hand column of the Florentine Codex. Further discussion on this matter appears in chapters II and V of this study. 17. The relevant quote reads: “[A]fter a long process of analysis—without altering or distorting in any way his texts—[he structures] everything that has been collected into an encyclopaedia” (“tras largo proceso de análisis—sin alterar o violentar de alguna forma sus textos—estructur[a] todo lo allegado al modo de una enciclopedia” León-Portilla, 1999, p. 207). 18. The Códices matritenses are divided between the library of the Royal Palace (Biblioteca del Palacio Real) and that of the Royal Academy of History (Real Academia de la Historia) in Madrid. They comprise the Primeros memoriales of Tepepulco (ca. 1559-1561) and the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco (1561-1565), including the “Segundos memoriales” (ca. 1561-1562), the “Memoriales en tres columnas” (ca. 1563-1565), and the “Memoriales con escolios” (ca. 1565); see Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer, 1973, pp. 190-191, and Dibble, 1982, pp. 12-13. Paso y

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pioned this assertion in his introductory study to the 1956 edition of Historia universal. He maintains that while the translation into Spanish of the Florentine Codex is Sahagún’s, the early texts, and it can be presumed those that were copied in the Nahuatl column of the codex, are “undeniable testimony of what the indigenous people said and wrote; [these texts] are more their work than Sahagún’s.”19 Informed by this contention, Garibay Kintana and León-Portilla initiated the series “Fuentes indígenas de la cultura náhuatl: Textos de los informantes de Sahagún” (“Indigenous sources of the Nahuatl culture: Texts of Sahagún’s informants.”)20 Garibay Kintana edited his translation into Spanish of the religious songs of chapter I of the Primeros memoriales as Veinte himnos sacros de los nahuas (1958), and León-Portilla several paragraphs of the same chapter, on gods, ceremonies, and attires, as Ritos, sacerdotes y atavíos de los dioses (1958).21 In his appendix to this edition León-Portilla highTroncoso published a partial facsimile reproduction of the Códices matritenses; see Sahagún 1905-1907, and the Biblioteca Digital Mexicana has made the codex of the Royal Palace available online. For an examination of contents, see Ballesteros Gaibrois 1964 and Bustamante García 1990, and for a description of the manuscript of the Royal Academy of History in particular, see Ruz Barrio 2010, and relevant articles in Hidalgo Brinquis and Benito Lope 2013. 19. “[Es] indudable testimonio de lo que dijeron y redactaron los indios, es obra de éstos más que de Sahagún,” Garibay Kintana, 1956, I, p. xi. This is also Klor de Alva’s view. “[A]uthorship and authority,” he claims, “must be primarily attributed to the informants and trilingual native scholars, the colegiales, who worked with [Sahagún],” 1988, p. 34. 20. It needs to be noted that the meaning of the term “informants” leads at times to confusion. It is applied either to both the Nahua elders and the assistants or, as the majority of scholars does, only to the elders, who provided Sahagún with information during his enquiries; see for example Dibble, 1982, p. 13, Lockhart, 2004 (first edition 1993), p. 28, Rabasa, 1993, p. 103, Nicholson, 1997, p. 13, León-Portilla, 1999, p. 206; 1999a, p. 74, and more recently Alcántara Rojas, 2007, p. 123. 21. To these publications followed Garibay Kintana’s Vida económica de Tenochtitlán: Pochtecáyotl (arte de traficar) (1961) and López Austin’s Augurios y abusiones (1969). Articles that similarly stress the authorship of the “informantes” are Estrada Quevedo 1960, and León-Portilla 1990. Donald Robertson and Jesús Bustamante García took issue with the attribution of the Códices matritenses to the “informantes.” Robertson argued that Garibay Kintana and León-Portilla were overlooking Sahagún’s main role as active, dominant, and controlling mind of the whole enterprise, and Bustamante García that their claim mirrored nationalist interests; see 1966, p. 625, and 1990, p. 237, respectively. Entering into dialogue with Robertson, León-Portilla indicated that the texts were attributed to the informants “in order to point out with precision the source from which the friar obtained the

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lights the purity of these early texts because it is in them that readers can appreciate “the mentality and the words of the natives”— who were given an opportunity to speak up—, in opposition to Sahagún’s translation into Spanish, which shows his.22 The second controversial assertion on Sahagún’s method of data collection is that it represents, as suggested by Toro and Jiménez Moreno, “the most demanding an ethnographer could use.” This idea has since been voiced by several scholars throughout the decades and constitutes the third and most widespread reason to support the simile of Sahagún as a pioneering anthropologist. In no attempt to mislead readers, these scholars firmly admit that Sahagún’s proselytizing purpose was quite distinct from that of the modern anthropologist.23 Hence, “the aptness of this label,” as Henry Nicholson states, “derives from his use of a technique for obtaining information about the native culture that remarkably anticipated what is currently recognized as one of the most effective methods of recording accurate ethnographic data.”24 Nicholson’s contemporary reading of Sahagún’s method calls for a revision of the manner in which Sahagún describes his modus operandi in the second prologue to Historia universal. Overall, the whole process consisted of three “cedaços” or “escrutjnios,” that is, sieves or examinations that involved the systematic collection, comparison, and writing of data and its arrangement in three different locations; Tepepulco (Hidalgo), Tlatelolco, and Mexico City.25 During his stay in Tepepulco, from 1558 to 1561, Sahagún composed a “minuta o memoria” (“an outline or summary of all the topics to be narratives, and also to emphasize his method of fieldwork,” 1974, p. 246. As for Bustamante García’s comment, León-Portilla refuted it by focusing on citing those passages in which Sahagún attests to having collected oral and pictorial information from Nahua elders; see 1999, pp. 111-112. 22. The relevant quote reads: “[I]n order to know directly the mentality and the words of the natives it is necessary to turn to the informants’ texts, and in order to appreciate Sahagún’s thought [...] his Historia [in Spanish] must be consulted instead” (“para conocer directamente la mentalidad y las palabras de los indios es necesario acudir a los textos de los informantes; para apreciar en cambio el pensamiento de Sahagún [...] debe consultarse su Historia;” see Sahagún, 1992, p. 164). 23. See, for instance, Nicholson, 1997, p. 3, and León-Portilla, 2000, p. 730; 2002, p. 16, and 2003a, p. 5. 24. Nicholson, 1997, p. 3. 25. Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 55.

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considered,”) and then requested the lord and leaders of the town to assign him “capable and experienced people” who knew, he says, “how to give me the information regarding that which I should ask of them.”26 Sahagún explains that the information supplied by this group of Nahua elders was collated and transcribed by the group of Nahua assistants who had been his former students at the College of Tlatelolco. He returned to Tlatelolco in 1561, where he and his assistants gathered further material from another group of knowledgeable elders so that, he specifies, “all I brought written from Tepepulco was amended, explained, and expanded.”27 Finally, in 1565, Sahagún moved to the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City where “for three years, alone,” he remarks, “I examined and reexamined my writings [...] [,] amended them and divided them into Books.”28 Sahagún notes in passing that in Mexico City he again obtained more data from a new group of respondents, whom he names the Mexicans. These, he says, “amended and added many things to the twelve Books” as the assistants were writing a clear copy. 29 The interpretation of this passage by Luis Nicolau d’Olwer, Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois, and León-Portilla—three of Sahagún’s biographers who have studied how his 1558 commission unfolded in the three different locations—is that Sahagún was the “creator of the method of anthropological investigation,” that he enquired the Nahua elders time and again “not because of human mistrust, but because he had scientific sense,” and that “because of his outline, method, and achievements of his investigation [...] he has been named with reason the father of anthropology in the New World.”30 These 26. The original text reads: “[U]na minuta o memoria de todas las materias de que habia de tratar,” “[y pedi] personas habiles, y esperimentadas con qujen pudiese platicar: y me supiesen dar razon de lo que los preguntase,” ibid., pp. 53-54. 27. “[S]e emendo, declaro, y añadio, todo lo que de tepepulco truxe escrito,” ibid., p. 54. 28. “[P]or espacio, de tres años, pase, y repase, a mjs solas todas mjs escripturas: y las torne a emendar: y diujdilas por libros,” ibid., p. 55. 29. “[Los mexicanos] emendaron, y añadieron muchas cosas, a los doze libros,” ibidem. 30. Nicolau d’Olwer’s biography of Sahagún was first published in French in 1949. His quote in Spanish reads: “[C]reador del método de investigación antropológica,” cited by León-Portilla, 1999, p. 15, from a 1952 translation printed in Mexico City by the Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia. Ballesteros Gaibrois’s quote reads that Sahagún is dissatisfied with the elders’ answers in one place: “[N]o por

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opinions are briefly developed by Nicolau d’Olwer and Howard F. Cline who, borrowing modern terminology, posit that Sahagún “designed a strikingly modern questionnaire, […] carefully selected the best-equipped informants […], crosschecked his data […], [and] empirically used a rigorous method of ethnographical research, a method that might be called interview/roundtable agreement.”31 Thus, Sahagún is said to have himself selected the group of “informants,” with whom he discussed matters related to their culture following a “modern questionnaire” in a relaxed “roundtable agreement.” This approach raises certain reservations. It is true that since Sahagún was interested in recording vocabulary in texts that would illustrate the Nahuas’ manners of speech, he would at times have allowed them to respond to his questions more or less freely. However, on other occasions, Sahagún enquired the Nahuas on their pre-Hispanic deities, ceremonies, and beliefs, which he condemned as diabolical and zealously wanted to obliterate. This fact does not help to conjure up the image of relaxed interview sessions during which the Nahuas would have replied without measuring their words and Sahagún would not have dwelt on questioning the data that he found unsatisfactory. It is in regard to Sahagún’s attitude that Klor de Alva adopts an even more debatable stance than Nicolau d’Olwer and Cline’s, claiming that upon doing “fieldwork,” Sahagún struggled against the boundaries of his scholastic training […]. His methodological and ideological approach [...] marks the beginning of an objective and thorough ethnographic procedure that justifies calling its first consistent practitioner the ‘father of modern ethnography’ who, anticipating twentieth-century attitudes, […] was conscious of the fact that meaningful research in the field implied the study of reality as free from preemptive judgments as Christianity permitted.32 desconfianza humana sino por sentido científico,” 1973, p. 102, and León-Portilla’s that: “[C]on razón—por su esquema, método y logros en su investigación—ha sido llamado él […] padre de la antropología del Nuevo Mundo,” 1999, p. 212. LeónPortilla reiterates this idea in several studies, including 1974, p. 243; 2000, pp. 727723; and 2002, p. 22, translated into English in 2003a, p. 8. This popular statement of Sahagún as “father of anthropology in the New World” is also found in the latest collected volumes devoted to Sahagún and Historia universal; see León-Portilla, 2011, p. 51, Connors, 2012, p. xii, and Ladero Quesada’s 2013 prologue. 31. Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer, 1973, pp. 188-189. 32. Klor de Alva, 1988, pp. 37-38.

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For Klor de Alva, Sahagún attempted to trespass across his own ideological presuppositions rather than to abide by them. The mission that took him to New Spain and kept him engaged in the evangelization of the Nahuas for the rest of his life, although acknowledged, can be relegated to a secondary stage. Klor de Alva and other scholars who brand Sahagún as a pioneering ethnographer take into account, to a more or less extent, Sahagún’s clerical training and the environment in which he operated. However, once this “caveat” has been mentioned, they shift their focus of attention to superficial coincidences that are shaped by twentieth-century premises. Sahagún behaved in a manner similar to that of a modern-day anthropologist because he lived with the Nahuas, mastered their language, conducted fieldwork by designing questionnaires and interviewing informants in three different locations, and eventually reported collated results in a unique encyclopaedic work that covers the same subject matters that are of interest to present-day anthropologists. Scholars who have questioned these coincidences and the accuracy of categorizing Sahagún as an anthropologist appeal to the anachronism of the term. Influenced by the historian Jesús Bustamante García, Walden Browne openly contends that Sahagún’s work is born out of “a context that was alien to the nineteenth-century disciplinary organization of knowledge in which anthropology introduced itself into a university setting,” and that the reason behind this anachronistic label lies on some scholars’ intent, above all León-Portilla’s, to legitimize “nationalistic claims of Latin American invention of a scientific discipline.”33 If scholars accept that Sahagún is a missionary and pioneering anthropologist, they have to count on the misinterpretations and the pitfalls that this simile contracts for both anthropology and Sahaguntine studies. Tzvetan Todorov is adamant that although Sahagún put “his own knowledge in the service of the preservation of the native culture,” which has been and will be beneficial to anthropological studies, the fact that Historia universal is a 33. Browne, 2000, pp. 54-55; see also Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 216217; 1990, p. 237. The anachronism is also highlighted by Louise M. Burkhart and John F. Schwaller in their reviews of León-Portilla’s biography of Sahagún— see Burkhart, 2003a, pp. 351-352, Schwaller, 2003a, p. 145—, and by David Mauricio Solodkow in his 2010 article; see p. 204.

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precious source in the study of Mesoamerican anthropology does not make Sahagún an anthropologist.34 In this sense, Lockhart believes that the contents of Historia universal “had a great deal in common not with the ethnographic tradition but with the current of interest in texts and ‘tropes’ that is so strong today in anthropology.”35 Sahagún wished to preserve full original texts on topics that have been classified in our time as of anthropological value, not because he was a pioneering ethnographer but rather as a sixteenth-century philologist who wanted to illustrate the Nahuas’ vocabulary, concepts, commonplace metaphors, and idioms. As Solodkow also maintains, Sahagún is a missionary fulfilling conversion purposes; he is not “rescuing” the indigenous word and recording objective information on the world of the Nahuas to preserve it for its own sake. His title of “father of anthropology” is ironic, paradoxical, and counterproductive for the origins of the discipline because Sahagún is applying his own Eurocentric perception of the world to the portrayal of the Nahuas’ culture, which becomes an object to transform and even to make disappear.36 In Browne’s opinion, crediting Sahagún with the foundation of modern anthropology has had a detrimental effect on Sahaguntine studies in that at times this attribution has diverted scholars’ attention away from the fact that Sahagún’s socially constructed knowledge of reality belonged to a different time and place. A proper understanding of the man and his work requires contextualizing him in his sixteenth-century mindset, insisting on his confines of Spanish Catholicism and the prejudices that “supplied the terms of his interpretation,” and forgetting anthropology and ethnography, which “create 34. Todorov, 1984, p. 237. He continues arguing that “Sahagún is not an ethnologist, whatever his modern admirers may say […]. [H]is work [Historia universal] rather relates to ethnography, to the collecting of documents, that indispensable premise of ethnological work,” ibid., p. 241. 35. Lockhart, 2004, pp. 28-29. 36. Solodkow, 2010, pp. 204-209, 219-220. He draws these conclusions following John Keber, José Rabasa, and Walter Mignolo’s focus on Sahagún’s prejudices during the implementation of his so-called “scientific” method of data collection and the writing of Historia universal. Johannes Fabian, 1983, and Carlo Ginzburg, 1989, have also warned that the superficial connections between anthropology and the gathering of information about the Other in inquisitorial trials and colonial encounters undermine the scientific approach for which anthropology aims.

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interpretive blind spots and close off discussion before it even gets started.”37 Amongst a number of studies focusing on Sahagún and his socio-cultural milieu, those by Robertson, Bustamante García, and Browne deserve to be mentioned for having broken new ground.38 Robertson associated Sahagún’s organization of contents with the medieval encyclopaedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, and Bustamante García examined the links of Historia universal with Ambrosio Calepino’s lexicographic work Cornucopiae, and with the rhetorical recommendations and encyclopaedic models of Augustine in De doctrina christiana and De civitate dei contra paganos. As for Browne, he has demonstrated the manner in which Sahagún struggled to give form to all his material within a medieval “pagan Summa,” which made sense of the new and alien environment that the world of the Nahuas meant for him and his European contemporaries. Continuing Bustamante García and Browne’s line of investigation, the purpose of the current study is to contextualize the three main reasons underpinning Sahagún’s title of pioneering anthropologist within the socio-political and ideological structures of sixteenth-century Spain and America. Thus, Sahagún’s sincere and profound admiration of the Nahuas’ level of perfection or “quilate” is framed within the achievements and aspirations of the College of Tlatelolco, and conceived as part of the debates, on both sides of the Atlantic, on the rational capacity and natural ineptitude of the indigenous peoples. Historia universal will be argued as a work that inserts the Nahuas into the subject matters of the Christian Universal History, and also as one of Sahagún’s 1558 intended doctrinal works; a reference text for preachers and confessors that combines the contents and categorization of knowledge found in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, collections of sermons, treatises of vices and virtues, and confession manuals. These were all texts that he fully consulted for the first time while taking his vows at the Friary of San Francisco in Salamanca, and which he felt were needed in New Spain for the conversion of the Nahuas. Sahagún’s sixteenth-century missionary experiences buttress that during his gathering of 37. Keber, 1988, pp. 53-54, Browne, 2000, pp. 7, 55. 38. See Robertson 1966, Bustamante García 1989; 1992, and Browne 2000.

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data he conducted research, not only in the manner of a philologist who wished to codify the Nahuatl language the way it was spoken, but also as a confessor and inquisitor-like friar who interrogated penitents and offenders of Christianity, and whose method of data collection is informed by confession and inquisitorial techniques. Notwithstanding the importance of Sahagún’s respondents and, primarily, of his assistants for the creation of Historia universal, the contention of this study is that Sahagún is the heart of the whole project. He designed a content outline and elaborated the questionnaires in order to elicit the information he judged relevant, asked questions to different respondents, ensured that the collation and writing of the texts in the Nahuatl language met the linguistic and content quality he demanded, and adjusted material to his intellectual taxonomies. In the understanding that when fulfilling all these tasks Sahagún did not do anthropology, this study aims to suggest a new overarching label that covers every step of the composition process of Historia universal and that, contrary to the title of pioneering anthropologist, can be assigned without reservations. Paradoxically, theoretical problematizations of anthropology and ethnography, the very fields that are said to have obstructed further consideration of Sahagún and his work, lead the way to this new label. In their introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography James Clifford and George E. Marcus explore the manner in which ethnography decodes and encodes foreign cultures, and compare the production of ethnographic writings with the act or process of translating. This view was expressed already in the 1950s by the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt. Ethnographers, keen to grasp and interpret cultural Others, adapt and confine them outside their real context. In doing so, the problem of describing how members of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own […]. Eventually, we try to represent their conceptions systematically in the logical construct we have been brought up to use.39

39. Cited in Asad, 1986, p. 142. He quotes from Lienhardt, 1954, p. 97.

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According to Lienhardt, the comprehension of the cultural Other—or, as he notably calls it by the custom of the time, “the primitive”—means accommodating it within the target language and the ethnographer’s cultural parameters. Drawing similarities between ethnography and translation, Talal Asad and Vincent Crapanzano likewise state that ethnography is an act of cultural translation, and that their practitioners behave as translators who interpret the world they are living in and render the foreign familiar.40 Like translators, ethnographers provide written results in accord to their societies’ cultural and literary conventions. It could not be otherwise because, as Asad observes, their texts are “addressed to a very specific audience, which is waiting to read about another mode of life and to manipulate the text it reads according to established rules, not to learn to live a new mode of life.”41 The translators-ethnographers’ observations exist within their own textual constructs, and they find it difficult to separate from or transcend the conventions of representation laid down by their discipline, institutional life, and contemporary society. Therefore, ethnographers and translators use, and might abuse, their authority when making their interpretation of the cultural Other convincing for the target audience with whom they wish to create or maintain a bond, which results in texts that are “incomplete, only partially committed to truth.”42 For its part, translation studies adopted the phrase “cultural translation” to broaden and deepen the understanding of translation as process and product. Reflecting on Asad and Crapanzano’s arguments, Ovidi Carbonell i Cortés holds that translation is a cultural contact “a superior level of interaction [that] takes place whenever an alien experience is internalized and rewritten in a culture where that 40. Crapanzano alludes to the German translator and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who in his 1923 article “The Task of the Translator” holds that “all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages,” Benjamin, 1969, p. 75. In this sense, Crapanzano asserts that ethnography is a way of giving sense to unfamiliar languages, cultures, and societies; the ethnographer is a messenger who “presents [them] in all their opacity, their foreignness, their meaninglessness; then, […] he clarifies the opaque […] and gives meaning to the meaningless. He decodes the message. He interprets,” 1986, p. 51. 41. Asad, 1986, p. 159. 42. Clifford and Marcus, 1986, p. 6.

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experience is received.”43 Translation implies not only the analysis of the source text and its transcodification into the target text, but also the rendering of a culture, a unit of translation in itself, into another. The act of translating becomes an interaction and a process that demand sensitivity to the broader issues of context, history, and convention, which affect the way in which translators encode and decode messages.44 The study of cultural translation, as a transaction and a process that shape the writing of a text, casts translators into a wider social situation and involves the analysis of a number of extra-textual constraints. These comprise the ideology of the translator; the roles of the commissioner, the source-text producer, and the target receiver or user with culture-specific knowledge and expectations; and the purpose or skopos of the translation.45 Ethnographers and anthropologists, aware of how these extra-textual constraints can be detrimental to representing the cultural Other in an objective manner, might struggle against their preconceptions, whereas cultural translators see themselves entitled to and are expected to recur to them. Colonial encounters throw light upon an invaluable field to explore the development of cultural translations and the extra-textual constraints that dictated them; the sixteenth-century encounter of the Old World and the New emerging as an illustrative scenario.46 43. Carbonell i Cortés, 1996, p. 81. He similarly defines cultural translation as “the semiotic, anthropological, ideological, sociological, and even artistic and political process that occurs when certain cultural manifestations are reinterpreted in another context” (“el proceso semiótico, antropológico, ideológico, sociológico y hasta artístico y político que se da cuando unas manifestaciones culturales se reinterpretan en otro contexto,” 2004, p. 59). 44. This is for example Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere’s view, see 1990. 45. For further reference on this so-termed functional approach to translation, see Katharina Reiss and Hans J. Vermeer 1984, and for a study on translation as a transactional process, see Justa Holz-Mänttäri 1984. Bassnett draws upon these existing theories in order to list the extra-textual constraints under which translations are conditioned as: “How a text is selected for translation, for example, what role the translator plays in the selection, what role an editor, publisher or patron plays, what criteria determine the strategies that will be employed by the translator, how a text might be received in the target system,” see 1998, p. 123. 46. Álvarez Rodríguez and Vidal Claramonte, 1996, pp. 2, 6, Carbonell i Cortés, 1997, pp. 67-71. Carbonell i Cortés has paid particular attention to the cultural translation of the Orient as studied by Edward Said in Orientalism. A case in point is that of Silvestre de Sacy, commissioned by the Institut de France in 1802 to contribute to the Tableau historique de l’érudition française. Sacy selected

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A number of conquerors, chroniclers, and missionaries incorporated the colonized peoples within their universal scheme and conceived “new” territories and inhabitants according to their Christian, medieval, and classical tradition, ultimately complying with the power strategies and desires of the empire at the service of which they operated.47 Their works ensured the survival of knowledge that otherwise would have fallen into oblivion, and at the same time have retained the colonizer’s discourse, purposes, and invented image of the “New World.” Sahagún and Historia universal belong to this context. Behaving as a cultural translator, he relocated the world of the Nahuas, in itself a translation unit, into his target culture by adhering to a series of extra-textual constraints; namely, his scheme of knowledge and beliefs and his commissioners, audiences, and purposes.48 The intention of this study is therefore to reconsider his socalled pioneering ethnographic method and the ethnography-like contents of Historia universal as pertaining to a cultural translation process that, under these extra-textual conditions, can be divided Oriental texts of different kinds, from geographical works to Arabic poetry, and annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on them according to his mindset. In doing so, he canonized a biased view of the Orient, leaving an anthology of texts that passed down through generations of students and scholars. See Said, 1978, pp. 126-129, Carbonell i Cortés, 1996, pp. 83-89. 47. Edmundo O’Gorman 1961 (first edition 1958), Margaret T. Hodgen 1964, and John H. Elliott 1970 were first to suggest this line of enquiry. The list of scholars who have followed is very prolific and includes, amongst others, Antonello Gerbi 1985 (first edition 1975); Anthony Pagden 1982 and 1993; Tzvetan Todorov 1982; Anthony Grafton 1992; José Rabasa 1993; Walter Mignolo 1995; Barbara Fuchs 2001; David Lupher 2003; and Sabine MacCormack 2007. For edited volumes on this matter, see also Fredi Chiappelli et al. 1976; Rachel Doggett et al. 1992; Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis 1993; and Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold 1993-1994. 48. Mercedes López Baralt has applied the label of “translator of cultures” (“traductor de culturas”) to Fray Ramón Pané, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and Guaman Poma de Ayala; 2005, p. 21. In a more recent study she states that El Inca Garcilaso, in particular, is a translator of cultures; an anthropologist avant la lettre who rescued the memory of his mother’s world and laid the foundations of ethnology like Pané, Sahagún, and Guaman Poma, see 2011, p. 16. Rather than “anthropologist avant la lettre,” the current study proposes the term “cultural translator” in the understanding that, at least in Sahagún’s case, associating the method of data collection and the “rescue” of the word of the Nahuas with pioneering anthropology, ethnography or ethnology incurs, as aforementioned, problems of interpretation for both Sahaguntine studies and these disciplines.

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into three main interrelated stages, sometimes occurring simultaneously. These are the design of a content outline and a series of questionnaires; the gathering, comparison, and codification of data; and its arrangement into a written text. The interpretation that this study makes of Sahagún’s own account of the composition process of Historia universal stands as follows. In 1558, commissioned to elaborate a body of texts in the Nahuatl language for the evangelization of the Nahuas, Sahagún designs a minuta, the content outline from which the subject matters of his entire project derive. One of his planned works is a wide-ranging description or “history” of the world of the Nahuas. For its production he lays out a series of questionnaires that are based on his minuta, and which originate from the compartmentalized template of knowledge that is necessary in order to present the Nahuas in a recognizable and coherent manner to his first target audience of preachers and confessors. In Tepepulco and Tlatelolco, the Nahua elders’ answers and accounts undergo an accommodation to Sahagún’s cultural beliefs and classification of knowledge, as collected material is filtered, drafted, and organized by the Nahua assistants under his supervision. In Tepepulco, he commands them to confine data into paragraphs, singleline definitions, and lists of vocabulary. In Tlatelolco, he expands this information and envisages the composition of a three-column page work that he thinks best adjusts to its proselytizing aims—with the Nahuatl source, lexicographic glosses, and translation into Spanish. Finally in Mexico City, Sahagún structures all the manuscripts into an encyclopaedia of twelve books to which, after the enquiring of a third group of Nahua respondents, he says that more data was added. The twelve books in the Nahuatl language constitute the product of the translation process, which, embedding the world of the Nahuas into his Christian discourse, proselytizing purposes, and audience of churchmen, he submits to a Provincial Chapter for approval around 1570. The continuation of the work from 1575, a two-column page manuscript in Nahuatl and Spanish, responds to a different audience and purpose, that of Spanish officials of the Council of the Indies who are gathering information about New World territories and peoples.49 49. The scope of this study is to concentrate on the relocation of the world of the Nahuas into an encyclopaedia and does not deal with Sahagún’s translation of

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The title of this study, Translation as Conquest, serves as a twofold metaphor that associates translation, conquest, and conversion and claims the role of Sahagún as the controlling mind of the translation process and as the editor of the cultural translation product.50 First, Historia universal is Sahagún’s appropriation of the Nahua world; it is a compilation of data that was relocated within a new ideological space defined by his sixteenth-century authoritarian scrutiny and perceptions. Second, since Historia universal was produced to support the apparatus of colonial power exercised by the Spanish Empire, Sahagún placed his knowledge in its service, participating in the colonization of the Nahuas. The accumulation and classification of data for the composition of Historia universal is inextricably linked to the equation of power and knowledge. It is Sahagún’s colonial position to create a corpus of works that would subject the Nahuas to his Christian culture that propelled the translation of their world into a doctrinal reference text.51 Needless to say, this study disputes neither the value of Historia universal as an inestimable and exhaustive source about the Nahuas nor the involvement of the Nahua elders and, above all, of

the Nahuatl version of Historia universal into Spanish. For an overall analysis of the New World missionaries’ approach to translation, see Brotherston 1992 and Zimmermann 2005, and for Sahagún’s translation, in particular of Books I, VI, and XI, see Máynez 1991; Sautron 2000; Palmeri Capesciotti 2001; and Ríos Castaño 2009. The Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex is currently being translated more literally into Spanish by a group of scholars under the direction of León-Portilla and the co-ordination of Pilar Máynez Vidal and José Rubén Romero Galván. Some of these translations have been published in the journal Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl; see for instance Máynez 2013. 50. The semantic connection between the words translation, conquest, and conversion is highlighted by Vicente L. Rafael, who sees in them an act of “changing a thing into something else,” a process of “crossing over into the domain—territorial, emotional, religious, or cultural—of someone else and claiming it as one’s own,” 1988, p. ix. The idea is also suggested by Ilarregui, 1996, pp. 175, 182. 51. The equation of power and knowledge is reminiscent of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, in which he contends that the birth of sciences was not supposed to lead humankind to truth and freedom but to control and discipline so as to render people docile and servile, see 1977, pp. 27-28. For a similar argument on Sahagún’s work, see Keber, 1988, pp. 62-63, Rabasa, 1993, p. 162, Solodkow, 2010, p. 206, and above all Martiarena Álamo, 1998, pp. 197-198, 210-211.

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Sahagún’s assistants in its composition. Rather, it strives to give a fuller understanding of the problematic nature of Sahagún’s legacy. Chapter I offers an overall picture of the translator’s ideology, centring on Sahagún’s scholastic and early humanist education, his religious instruction, and the missionary environment that he imbibed before leaving for the New World. The forging of his cultural presuppositions is explored in order to examine how he was to understand the Nahuas and shape the writing of Historia universal the way he did. The chapter starts by outlining the sixteenthcentury Spanish curriculum at grammar schools and at the University of Salamanca, where Sahagún probably attended the Faculty of Arts. It looks at courses that he is likely to have studied as well as the influence exerted by the renowned professors who taught at Salamanca at the time. A second section of the chapter is concerned with Sahagún’s religious schooling and missionary training in the Friary of San Francisco in Salamanca, a distinguished Franciscan centre of studies even after the imposition of the Strictissima Observantia rule. An analysis of the missionary work that the Franciscan Order undertook in the Canary Islands, in conquered Muslim lands like Granada, and in the New World is intended to assist in the understanding of how Sahagún was to conduct himself as an active member of the conversion of the Nahuas. Consequently, chapter II deals with Sahagún’s contribution to the proselytizing project masterminded by the first Bishop of Mexico, Fray Juan de Zumárraga. Thus, it examines Sahagún’s role as a tutor at the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco and the evolution of his approach towards the composition of works in the Nahuatl language. Two of the arguments that have been put forward to name Sahagún a pioneering anthropologist—Sahagún’s praise of the Nahuas and, contrary to other “missionaries-ethnographers” like Motolinía or Durán, his decision to write the text in the Nahuatl language in order to preserve the purity of the documents—are put into context by unpacking the extra-textual elements surrounding the production of Historia universal; namely, the patrons, the instructions or “cultural translation” brief, the target audiences, and the purposes. These lead to the presentation of the work as being constructed upon three interrelated axes. First, within the framework of the Spiritual Conquest, Historia universal is an auxilia-

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ry reference book for preachers and confessors that also codifies Nahuatl as the language of evangelization; second, within the debates on the “uncivilized” indigenous peoples, it is a document that proves the virtuous qualities of the Nahuas and their value to become Christians; and third, within the royal requests for accounts of the New World, it is a work that complies with colonial demands at the Council of the Indies. After this contextualization of Sahagún and Historia universal, the subsequent three chapters focus on the cultural translation process that Sahagún describes in his second prologue. To begin with, chapter III explores the first and third stages of the translation process; the intellectual and literary sources Sahagún considered for the design of the content outline in which he was to categorize the world of the Nahuas, and upon which he also modelled the arrangement of material into a final twelve-book encyclopaedia. Following Bustamante García’s statement that Sahagún did not follow one model in particular but amalgamated different ones, this chapter looks at some of the conventions of representation that he could have used as a template, including classical and medieval encyclopaedias and doctrinal texts.52 The exposition of links and comparisons between Historia universal and these archetypes are succinct and perfunctory, based on titles of books, chapters, and relevant paragraphs. However, this study opens up discussion about different religious models that could have influenced Sahagún, such as confession manuals and treatises of vices and virtues, which might stimulate further research on the matter. Added to this, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that the themes of Historia universal, coinciding with those dealt with by present-day anthropology, ethnography, and ethnology, echo Christian doctrine and works of encyclopaedic nature in which churchmen had to be fully instructed for their evangelical mission. Chapter IV similarly unveils Sahagún’s method of data collection, which only on the surface equates to that of present-day ethnography, as informed by confessional and, above all, inquisitorial techniques. This argument is based on the fact that in the same manner as Sahagún resorted to the intellectual models that he knew for the composition 52. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 716.

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of doctrinal works, he imitated the contemporary methods of enquiry and data collection with which he was well acquainted. In proving it, this chapter analyses the influence exerted by Olmos, inquisitor and first missionary to compose texts on the indigenous peoples’ cultures, and Sahagún’s involvement in inquisitorial practices. The chapter also tries to describe the first and second stages of the translation process, speculating on how Sahagún designed questions by drawing on the intellectual archetypes of his outline, and how these questions might have been asked and answers received. His method of data collection is therefore portrayed as an imposition of his Eurocentric stratification and conceptualization of knowledge, rather than formed free of ideological strictures and ethnographic in the modern sense. Finally, chapter V engages with the second and third stages of the cultural translation process; the relocation of source-culture information into Sahagún’s target text. The first section of the chapter provides an insight into the Nahua elders and assistants’ background, social status, and cultural knowledge, which aims to contribute to the exploration of the roles that they played during the translation process. The section attempts to show that, already during the composition of the Códices matritenses, data was very likely censored by the Nahua elders and inescapably omitted, partially registered due to the impossibility of transferring the totality of oral and visual codes into a written one. Furthermore, oral and pictorial data was filtered through Sahagún’s questionnaires, recorded in writing, collated, and drafted by his assistants according to a Eurocentric taxonomy of hierarchical encyclopaedias and religious texts that was palatable to the work’s target audience of churchmen. The product of the cultural translation process with which this chapter is concerned, the Nahuatl texts of the Códices matritenses and the Florentine Codex, is a striking testimony of polyphony; the fusion of the voices of the Nahua elders, Sahagún, and his assistants. Nevertheless, those voices are not represented on equal terms for it is Sahagún and his assistants who have the ultimate say. Thus, a second section of this chapter continues to unravel their manipulation of the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex and examines the Eurocentric references that they entered throughout its folios.

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CHAPTER 1 Sahagún’s Education and Franciscan Training in Spain Little is known of Sahagún prior to his departure from Spain in 1529. The Franciscan chronicler Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta, who met him in his lifetime, reports in Historia eclesiástica indiana that Sahagún hailed from the town in the province of León that bears his surname, which he adopted in accordance with the common usage of his order when becoming a Franciscan.1 Nothing but speculation exists as regards his family name of “Ribera” or “Ribeira” and the social position of his parents, and again Mendieta is the only source to account for Sahagún’s education, noting that “as a student in Salamanca he took his religious vows in the Friary of San Francisco in the same city. Once he had been taught sufficiently in theology he left for New Spain.”2 Articles and books that have sought to 1. Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 186, Ricard, 1966, p. 39. Sahagún also refers to his hometown in Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 46. Mendieta recounts that Sahagún passed away in the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City in 1590, being “older than ninety years of age” (“de edad de más de noventa años,” Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 187). This item of information and an inquisitorial document of 1572 that reads on its margins “witness, bernardino de Sahagún, on oath, age, 73” (“testigo bernardino de Sahagun juramento hedad 73,” cited in Baudot, 1990, p. 15) confirm his date of birth in 1499. 2. “[S]iendo estudiante en Salamanca, tomó el hábito de religión en el convento de S. Francisco de aquella ciudad. Y enseñado bastantemente en las letras divinas, pasó a esta Nueva España,” Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 186. Sahagún’s family name was suggested, without quoting sources of reference, by Beltrami, 1830, II, pp. 168169, and Chavero, 1877, p. iii. The surname, adopted by converso families of the

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reconstruct Sahagún’s life and argue the case for his Spanish intellectual background have traced his origins to the town of Sahagún and the University of Salamanca.3 The familiarity with classical authors that he must have gained in Salamanca, his passion for the education of the Nahuas and the acquisition of their language, and his portrayal of the Nahuas as virtuous human beings has resulted in an overall tendency to qualify him as a humanist. Nevertheless, in his overarching and meticulous doctoral dissertation Bustamante García concludes that Sahagún’s linguistic and ethnographic-like work on the Nahuas stemmed not only from classical but also from medieval analytical and descriptive models.4 Sahagún, Bustamante García stresses, blends late medieval knowledge with Humanism and, led by the necessity of the New World environment, applies and modifies humanist premises, Franciscan mysticism, and Nominalism.5 This recognition of Sahagún as a man who was imbued with influences other than Humanism likewise resonates in Browne’s work. The fact that Sahagún lived in Spain until his late twenties and was not strictly shaped by the rigidity of a single intellectual movement ensured his ability to adapt his learning to a given context. As Browne maintains, Sahagún’s way of proceeding “is less the inevitable result of ‘humanistic baggage’ brought over from Europe than a mode of discourse that was galvanized or propelled into motion by the particular circumstances of sixteenth-century

north, presumes a Jewish ancestry. For further reference, see León-Portilla, 1999, p. 30, and Vicente Castro and Rodríguez Molinero, 1986, p. 23. 3. Biographical details on Sahagún first appeared in Mendieta and were reproduced by Beltrami 1830, Chavero 1877, and García Icazbalceta 1886. Biographies published in the second half of the twentieth century include Nicolau d’Olwer’s, 1952 [1949, first edition] (translated into English, 1987), which is a conjugation of literary style and history, and Ballesteros Gaibrois’s, 1973, which attempts to present Sahagún as a pioneer of anthropological knowledge to a Spanish audience. This perception is sustained in the biographies written by Vicente Castro and Rodríguez Molinero 1986, and León-Portilla 1999 (translated into English, 2002). The works of Emilio Martínez Torres 1996 and Jaime Septién 2006 deal with Sahagún’s biography by underscoring his religious role. Vicente Castro and Rodríguez Molinero 1986; Bustamante García 1989, 1990, and 1992; Morocho Gayo 2000; and Espino Martín 2000 have brought to the fore the nature of studies and specific subjects with which Sahagún must have been acquainted. 4. See Bustamante García 1989 and 1992. 5. Bustamante García, 1992, p. 364.

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New Spain.”6 In the process of spreading the Christian faith, Sahagún employed some of the humanist linguistic developments that circulated in Salamanca, such as the codification of vernacular languages and the study of languages in their original texts, which the humanist Elio Antonio de Nebrija advocated. Once in New Spain, Sahagún also continued a Franciscan training that benefited from a multiplicity of religious sources, as exemplified by the structure and contents of Historia universal. Availing itself of Bustamante García and Browne’s position, that in Sahagún a number of intellectual tendencies permeates through a scholastic and humanistic education, and also bearing in mind his Franciscan training, this chapter reconstructs Sahagún’s studies at the University of Salamanca and the Friary of San Francisco so as to determine, in later chapters, how this trajectory shaped him intellectually and impacted the composition of Historia universal.

Sahagún’s Intellectual Origins: From Early Education to the University of Salamanca Sahagún’s elementary instruction at a Castilian primary school or Escuela de primeras letras would have started at the age of six. He may have attended a boarding-regime Casa de estudio or a centre of studies associated with the ecclesiastical Studium generale of the town of Sahagún, which had been granted to the Benedictine Friary of San Facundo in 1403 and achieved the status of university in 1534. Another possibility is that Sahagún was educated at any of the many schools in the region. In order to strengthen their authority, noblemen like the Counts of Luna, Grajal, and Benavente funded the tuition of their relatives and servants’ children by paying teachers who ran schools in the small towns of Laguna de Negrillos, Benavente, Villalón de Campos, and Grajal, the latter neighbouring Sahagún.7 During his first years of schooling, Sahagún acquired reading and writing skills in the vernacular together with the rudiments of arithmetic and some simple prayers by memorization of 6. Browne, 2000, p. 91. 7. Fuente Fernández, 2000, pp. 56, 60, Morocho Gayo, 2000, p. 189.

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ABC-primers, and repetition of exercises in Spanish grammars and reading notebooks.8 Once he had mastered the fundamentals, he kept making progress in a grammar school; an Escuela de gramática or Ciclo de latinidad, terms that foreground the study of Latin grammar as central to secondary education. The University of Salamanca incorporated a minor faculty known as Escuelas menores or Cursos de artes that, in the manner of a grammar school, prepared pupils for university studies, but there is no evidence to conclude that Sahagún attended it.9 In the absence of concrete proof, a picture of Sahagún’s intellectual trajectory is dependent upon inferences and extrapolations based on contemporary research on sixteenth-century Spanish grammar schools and universities.10 During Sahagún’s years in Spain, schools, colleges, and universities thrived. The number of universities specifically jumped from six to thirty-two in fifty years; the University of San Facundo in Sahagún’s own town being a prime example. This cultural thrust was promoted by religious beliefs and intellectual trends, social and political developments, and job opportunities. Old-established centres like Salamanca, whose students were dispatched as officials and missionaries to the New World, recorded the largest cohort since its foundation, with students flocking to register in Arts, Law, Medicine, and Theology.11 Thus, Salamanca became renowned in Europe as a breeding ground for theologians, philosophers, and scientists. In its classrooms cosmography and geography came about as essential disciplines to map the world, an undertaking that at the behest of the emperors Charles V and Philip II aimed to advance control upon the Spanish Empire and favour its expansion.12 The leading printing centre of Salamanca was also smoothing the transition from traditional Scholasticism to the humanist Renaissance 8. Kagan, 1974, p. 9. 9. The oldest archives at the university containing lists of registered students date from 1530. See Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 16-17. 10. See for instance Garibay Kintana 1956, I, Vicente Castro and Rodríguez Molinero 1986, and Bustamante García 1990. 11. Kagan, 1974, p. 32; 1982, p. 58, Morocho Gayo, 2000, p. 190. 12. Cosmography was reconstituted as a science in fifteenth-century Spanish universities after the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s geography and the revalorization of classical geographers such as Strabo and Pomponius Mela. See Portuondo, 2009, p. 3.

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that was unfolding at the time. In fact, the curriculum at Salamanca during Sahagún’s student days was illustrative of this period of change. Medieval thought, depending on biblical auctoritates that oriented towards meditation, prayer, and limited scientific knowledge, coexisted with an incipient Humanism that wrestled to make an impact through new readings of texts, commentaries, and imitatio of classical authors like Cicero in prose and Virgil in verse.13 The figure propelling this humanist shift was Nebrija, an “opponent of scholastic barbarism,” as he presented himself, who upon his return from Italy occupied the chairs of Latin and rhetoric at Salamanca on several occasions from 1474 to 1513.14 Inspired by Lorenzo Valla’s De elegantiis linguae latinae (1435), in his classes Nebrija alternated Aristotle and Augustine with Pliny’s Historia naturalis and, pursuing the recuperation of classical Latin, the critical analysis of celebrated authors like Cicero, which he understood as the best way to achieve elegance and pertinence of thought.15 Reluctantly teaching Latin with Alexander Villa Dei’s Doctrinale (1199), which he branded as a work of spurious scholastic Latin, Nebrija encouraged innovative pedagogical changes to the university curriculum.16 He produced the manual Introductiones latinae (1481)—reprinted on a large scale in the early 1500s—, the Diccionario latino-español (1492), and the Vocabulario español-latino (ca. 1495). Needless to say, as a humanist, Nebrija’s innovation and intellectual drive was not reduced to the study of classical Latin. He elevated vernacular Spanish by publishing its first grammar in 1492, and championed its status behind the famous sentence “language has always been a companion to the empire.”17 Motivated 13. Beltrán de Heredia, 1970, II, pp. 22-23, Flórez Miguel et al., 1999, p. 20. 14. Fuertes Herreros, 1984, pp. 58-61, Somolinos d’Ardois, 1999, pp. viii-xi. 15. Espino Martín, 2000, pp. 216-217. 16. Together with Villa Dei’s grammar, Eberardus de Bethune’s Graecismus (1212) and Thomas of Erfurt’s De modis significandi (ca. 1310) were still in circulation for the learning of Latin. The three manuals were structurally disorganized and offered an artificial representation of the language, riddled with mistakes and neologisms that reflected the work of writers whose native tongue was not Latin, but who were chosen as authorities because, contrary to great authors of antiquity, they did not contravene Church teaching. For a thorough examination of these works, see Black, 2001, pp. 74-82. 17. “[L]a lengua fue siempre compañera del imperio,” cited in Hinojo Andrés, 1998, p. 70. In proclaiming the importance of the Spanish language, Nebrija de-

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by the ideal of achieving and providing the studia humanitatis or overarching education in a diversity of disciplines, he also engaged his attention in the development of biblical studies and science. He sought a renovation of the Church by directing his linguistic-philological method to the study of the Sacred Scriptures, and laid bare his passion for geography, cosmography, and geometry in works such as In cosmographiae libros introductorium (1499) and Tabla de la diversidad de los días y las horas (ca. 1515).18 Like-minded humanists, who were willing to recuperate the magnificence of pure classical Latin and similarly promoted the studia humanitatis, were Lucio Marineo Sículo and Lucio Flaminio; lecturers of rhetoric at Salamanca from 1484, and between 1504 and 1509, respectively. Their campaign in favour of the study of Latin and rhetoric in its original sources as a conduit to eradicate intellectual “barbarism” and in order to consolidate moral conduct was bitterly attacked by professors like Sánchez de Arévalo, who held the view that their programme of studies undermined the raison d’être of the university.19 This confrontation influenced Salamanca students, some of whom became teachers themselves, and whose thought may have permeated through to Sahagún. If one considers a typical trajectory, it was probably in 1514 that Sahagún, aged around fifteen, landed in Salamanca.20 He could have pursued five years of study at the grammar school of the university, the Escuelas menores or Cursos de artes, where the debate between Scholasticism and Humanism was evolving, and upon completion of his secondary studies, he perhaps enrolled at the Faculty of Arts or Escuela mayor de artes. Since Mendieta merely observes that as a clares an “alliance” with the nationalist Hispanic utopia nurtured by the Catholic Monarchs, and he also echoes his mentor Lorenzo Valla, who had fought for the establishment of Latin spoken in papal Rome as an international language. For further reference, see Jensen, 1996, p. 64. 18. Flórez Miguel et al., 1999, p. 29. 19. Ibid., pp. 34-39. 20. This is Garibay Kintana’s suggestion. For a conjectural chronology of Sahagún’s life, see Garibay Kintana, 1956, I, p. xxi. Nebrija and one of Sahagún’s contemporaries, Hernán Pérez de Oliva, began their studies in the city at the age of fourteen or fifteen; Nebrija, coming from Seville in 1455, and Pérez de Oliva from Córdoba around 1508. See Flórez Miguel et al., 1999, pp. 25, 60. Cortés was similarly sent to Salamanca at the age of fourteen; see Elliot, 1989, p. 29.

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student in Salamanca Sahagún entered the Friary of San Francisco, where he was “taught sufficiently in theology,” another possibility is that he became a novice while attending grammar school, and continued an education in arts and theological studies at the friary. In doing this, Sahagún would have acted like many other Franciscans who did not aim for an academic degree but for the titles of confessor and preacher, which still entailed the obligatory attendance of grammar school and the study of the disciplines of the degree in Arts.21 The educational system and syllabus of early sixteenth-century Spanish grammar schools was built upon the scholastic programme of studies from the second half of the fifteenth century, which embraced the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), as key subjects to develop linguistic competence and basic abilities for the comprehension of and commentary on a corpus of literary texts.22 Medieval learning methods varied from the declamation of passages and mnemonic exercises to the composition of commentaries, the imitation of authors, and the quaestio disputata. The “disputed question” consisted of debates that fostered critical comparisons of statements in authoritative texts. Students stood for or against a statement or “question,” usually about matters of Church dogma, as articulated by medieval religious authorities like St. Thomas Aquinas and classical ones like Aristotle.23 In the hands of a pro-Nebrija tutor Sahagún would have been educated in the reading, commentary, and emulation of the ancient texts of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Otherwise, he would have received training in Latin in the late medieval curriculum of grammars like Villa Dei’s Doctrinale, or similar ones like the Graecismus and the De modis significandi.24 Aside from these manuals, a mixture of 21. Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 16, 18, Zaballa Beascoechea, 1990, p. 9. 22. Kagan, 1982, p. 58. 23. Espino Martín, 2000, p. 212, Kagan, 1974, p. 31. For further information, see also Grafton and Jardine, 1986, pp. 1-28. Sahagún incorporated the quaestio disputata in a digression on whether the Nahuas had been in contact with Christianity before the arrival of the Spaniards. See his Spanish version of Book XI in Hist. gen., XI, pp. 814-815. 24. It was not until 1538 that Villa Dei’s “nefarious grammar,” as Nebrija called it, was finally removed. For further reference, see Rico, 1978, p. 126.

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classical, Christian, and pagan medieval texts comprised the list of sources from which Sahagún would have learnt Latin; texts that upheld moral qualities, such as the widely-circulated compilation Auctores octo, including Facetiae, Disticha, and a Latin translation of Aesop’s fables, Plautus and Terence’s comedies, religious poetry, and passages from historical works. Facetiae prescribed schoolboys’ manners and Disticha gathered a collection of ethical sayings attributed to Cato. The inculcation of good morality also came from the works of Plautus and Terence, who recommended sexual continence and marital fidelity as the basis for a virtuous life. As for historical works contributing to linguistic training and to the students’ moral and political education, the Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri IX of Valerius Maximus, a legacy of the Middle Ages, still retained its position as popular reading. Together with Livy, and Sallust and Tacitus to a lesser degree, Maximus informed students like Sahagún about the institutions of the Roman republic and the early empire.25 As previously mentioned, once Sahagún completed grammar school, he might have continued his studies at the Faculty of Arts at Salamanca or learnt the disciplines of the degree in Arts at the Friary of San Francisco. The curriculum of Arts equipped him to become one of the youngest teachers and scholars at the College of Tlatelolco in times that demanded missionaries at the forefront of evangelization. His selection around 1536 saw him surrounded by a group of “remarkable and distinguished tutors,” who recognizing Sahagún’s intellectual worth must have appointed him in the teaching of Latin to work together with, and finally replace, none other than the canon law graduate Fray Andrés de Olmos.26 Sahagún’s competence in Latin as well as his knowledge of other 25. Grendler, 1995, p. 781, Jensen, 1996, pp. 64-75. The works of some of these authors are catalogued in the library of the College of Tlatelolco, which shows that Sahagún and his brethren resumed their studies and taught knowledge they had received in Europe. Interestingly, a translation into Nahuatl of some of Aesop’s fables has been attributed to the students of Tlatelolco. An edition of this translation has been made available by Kutscher, Brotherston, and Vollmer 1987. 26. “[N]otables y gravísimos maestros,” Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 40. One of them was the French Fray Arnaldo de Bassacio, a “very acknowledgeable theologian,” and “erudite man” (“profundo teólogo” and “doctísimo varón,” ibid., pp. 118, 175).

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disciplines that he taught at the college, such as natural and moral philosophy, perhaps responded to his studies in Arts at Salamanca.27 The three-year course dictated that students had to read three years of Latin, together with ancient and new logic in the first year; logic and natural philosophy in the second; and natural and moral philosophy in the third. In addition, these subjects were combined with the study of Greek, Hebrew, poetics, rhetoric, Psalter, music, astrology, and physics. Given that the Franciscans did not necessarily aim for academic degrees, it is not known whether Sahagún eventually obtained the title of Bachiller or that of Licenciado en artes, a sine qua non step towards the study of a major degree in Theology.28 The texts in which Sahagún would have become versed depended on the university’s statutes and the tutor’s choice. Generally speaking, the Spanish reading programme was still old-fashioned.29 In spite of the transmission of Italian Humanism through the contact with its intellectuals and representatives, which resulted in the diffusion of classical works and the translation of Italian humanists’ texts, Spain’s departure from medieval Scholasticism proved slow and hesitant. In early sixteenth-century Italy Cicero and Seneca’s purity of language, stylistic elegance, urbanity, and civic virtues were praised above Aristotle or Aquinas; yet, in the Salamanca curriculum Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Ethics, together with Peter of Spain’s Summulae logicales, a thirteenth-century reference 27. Natural philosophy examined the physical universe that was perceptible to the senses, and therefore pertained to the study of the properties of objects in the natural world, whether plants, animals, or minerals. Moral philosophy discussed the ethical dimension of the human being, such as behaviour, sin, and punishment, and was found in religious works like Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and in classical ones like Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics. 28. In order to become a Bachiller, Sahagún would have demonstrated his expertise and aptitude to argue on a topic, assigned beforehand, in front of an examination panel. To become a Licenciado, he would have specialized, taking logic for one year, and natural and moral philosophy for two years, after which a panel would have examined him on any matter studied. See Fuertes Herreros, 1984, pp. 24-26, and Valero García, 1988, p. 165. 29. The Libros de claustros of the first decades of the sixteenth century—files with regulations and the minutes of university meetings—are lost. Nonetheless, an exposition of the curriculum at Salamanca and a robust analysis of surviving sources are available in Beltrán de Heredia, 1970, II.

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manual on Aristotelian logic, persevered as main readings. The classical-authors syllabus gained strength throughout the years to take in auctoritates like Pliny, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Laurentius, Juvenal, and Virgil, but it was not until 1531 that Cicero and Seneca counted amongst favourites.30 This concentration on classical authors when Sahagún was already in New Spain does by no means exclude his exposure to Humanism.31 In his Salamanca years at least two of Nebrija’s former students, Hernando Alonso de Herrera and Hernán Núñez de Guzmán, were disseminating Nebrija’s legacy in the study of arts. Herrera excelled as a professor of grammar and rhetoric at the University of Alcalá, where he published an edition of George of Trebizond’s manual of rhetoric (Venice, 1433-1434), a “best-seller” in the field that fell back upon classical authors like Cicero and endorsed the social value of rhetoric as an indispensable element of instruction for secular life. Upon his return to Salamanca in 1513, Herrera imparted his classes through Trebizond’s book, launching an attack on supporters of medieval auctoritates and their elevation as untouchable doctrine, and calling instead for an open, non-dogmatic attitude that marked another essential feature of Humanism; the freedom to interpret classical texts.32 In one of his most celebrated works, the Breve disputa de ocho levadas contra Aristotil y sus secuaces (1517), Herrera takes issue with Scholasticism by adhering to the conventions of the dialogues or colloquies and confronting two groups of interlocutors; scholastics versus humanists. An intermediary character of the humanist party is Herrera’s colleague, Núñez de Guzmán, whose academic career at the university set off in 1527 after taking up a chair in rhetoric. Núñez de Guzmán also committed many years to the study and teaching of Pliny’s Historia naturalis, and contributed to the codification of vernacular Spanish by compiling popular sayings in Refranes castellanos o proverbios en romance (1555).33 That Sahagún was familiar with the works and the intellectual trends about which Herrera 30. Flórez Miguel et al., 1999, p. 122, Hankins, 1996, p. 120. 31. In his prologue to Book I of Historia universal Sahagún cites Virgil and Cicero as eminent authors whose works codified the purity of Latin. See Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 50. 32. Esperabé Arteaga, 1914, p. 360, Flórez Miguel et al., 1999, p. 46. 33. Flórez Miguel et al., 1999, pp. 47-48.

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and Núñez de Guzmán taught and wrote is attested by the texts he directed and co-wrote in New Spain. Thus, the first religious disputes between Nahua priests and Franciscans are fictionalized in Colloquios y doctrina christiana; Pliny’s influence on the depiction of flora, fauna, and mineralogy makes its presence in Book XI of Historia universal; and Book VI of Historia universal is devoted to rhetoric and moral philosophy, containing Nahua discourses, sayings, riddles, and metaphors.

Sahagún’s Religious Education: The Friary of San Francisco For the arduous task of pioneering evangelization only the most prepared and well-educated churchmen are believed to have left for the New World. Based on this and on details about the early life of one of Sahagún’s fellow missionaries, Fray Martín de Hojacastro, some scholars have surmised that Sahagún was ordained a priest around 1524.34 This assumption might be overridden by the fact that also well-prepared lay friars went to New Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century, including Fray Pedro de Gante, the so-called “Fathers” Fray Andrés de Córdoba and Fray Juan de Palos, and Fray Juan de San Francisco who, like Sahagún, arrived in 1529.35 What is known is that, as Sahagún affirms, he took his vows in the Friary of San Francisco and became an “Observant […] friar of the order of our Seraphic Father Saint Francis.”36 If he pur34. Garibay Kintana, 1956, I, p. xxi, Vicente Castro and Rodríguez Molinero, 1986, pp. 42-44, León-Portilla, 1999, p. 37, and Morocho Gayo, 2000, p. 190. Hojacastro spent one year as a novice in the Friary of Bernardino de la Sierra, in Burgos, and five or six years at the faculties of Arts and Theology, becoming a priest at age twenty two; see Bustamante García, 1990, p. 21. 35. See Mendieta, 1973, II, pp. 154, 166, 181, 276. Mendieta refers to the pioneering friars Córdoba and Palos with the deferential title of “Padre” or “Father,” which is not to be mistaken with that of priest. 36. “[F]rayle [...] de la ordẽ de n[uestr]o seraphico padre san francisco de la observancia,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 46. Garibay Kintana puts forward 1516 as the year when he entered the friary, see 1956, I, p. xxi. There are no extant books of novices or ordinations to verify his entry and the development of his ecclesiastical career. In 1809, San Francisco was reduced to ruins by the French army, and in 1835 most of the Franciscan archives of Spain were dispersed or destroyed. See Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 16-17.

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sued the same career as other Observant Franciscans he would not have aimed at an academic degree in Theology, concentrating instead on obtaining the titles of confessor and preacher within his order, which, as aforementioned, involved the learning of the subject matters of a degree in Arts and a life-long dedication to the study of theological matters.37 Steeped in history and celebrated for its religious and intellectual calibre, San Francisco was the most prestigious friary in the Franciscan province of Santiago and offered Sahagún the opportunity to attain appropriate missionary recognitions and skills. Its foundation dates back to the arrival of the Franciscans in the city in 1231. Initially running under royal auspices for Franciscan scholars, it quickly came to achieve the category of Studium generale, a higher education institution that because of its association with the University of Salamanca provided many scholars and tutors.38 After the 1422 constitution of the university the ties with San Francisco grew to the point of dictating that any student of theology could also attend classes in the friary. Nevertheless, by the time Sahagún joined the Franciscans in the early sixteenth century, and although its reputation as an intellectual hub prevailed, the truth is that the friary was undergoing a certain decline. The period of change and tensions between proponents of Scholasticism and Humanism that the university was experiencing coincided with the end of a prolonged conflict within the Franciscan Order between Observants and Conventuals. The first, previously known as Spirituals, upheld a rigorous application of St. Francis of Assisi’s vows of poverty, austerity, and piety, whereas Conventuals refused such asceticism. The Observants triumphed during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and in 1495 their leader, the Pri37. See Zaballa Beascoechea, 1990, p. 9. 38. Rodríguez Cruz, 1990, p. 226. The Crónica de la Provincia Franciscana de Santiago 1214-1614, escrita por un fraile anónimo del xvii informs that the friary started to receive royal donations with Prince Fadrique, son of Fernando III, so that there was “always in it the study of sacred theology, and so that it was always in the company of and adorned by churchmen who studied, and by a great number of teachers and scholars whose works and preaching and doctrine served God’s Church” (“siempre en él estudio de sagrada teología, y estuviese siempre acompañado y adornado con religiosos que estudiasen, y con cantidad de maestros y doctores tales que, con sus letras y predicaciones y doctrina sirviesen a la iglesia de Dios,” see Castro, 1971, pp. li-lii).

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or of the Friary of Extremadura Fray Juan de Guadalupe, introduced the Strictissima Observantia rule, which called on Franciscans to return to the earlier practices of the Church. Consequently, the friars had to live in strict abidance to the Gospel, be very active preachers and, in keeping with the concept of humility, withdraw from intellectual life.39 This approach translated into university scholars being obliged to retreat to their friaries and university students having to turn down academic titles. The Franciscans of Salamanca, however, seem to have maintained their educational focus much better than others. The Strictissima Observantia rule was not observed closely in their friary and, despite the general trend within the order of pushing for the suppression of study, its friars still enjoyed a solid theological and intellectual scholarship. For example, contrary to Observants who had to leave the University of Valencia between 1515 and 1525, those from San Francisco continued to publish books and did not abandon their teaching positions until 1532.40 The reason probably lies in the patronage of Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, a former student of Salamanca himself. One of the most powerful figures, politically and intellectually, of early modern Spain—he fulfilled throughout his life the roles of confessor to Queen Isabella, Franciscan provincial in Castile, Archbishop of Toledo, and Inquisitor General—, Cisneros spoke in support of St. Francis’s vows. However, he also had the authority to oppose the stance of friars raising suspicions against studying and battled for a meticulous training of the clergy, who, he believed, could only be made worthy of their office through cultural instruction. A patron of learning, his protection of San Francisco came about because for him the friary exemplified the manner in which the compliance with the Strictissima Observantia rule successfully combined with the cultivation of knowledge; the two pillars on which he had founded the University of Alcalá around 1504.41 At Alcalá Cisneros planned to educate the clergy through a revitalization of theology, for which he implemented a more critical 39. Phelan, 1970, pp. 45-46. 40. Beltrán de Heredia, 1970, II, p. 241. 41. In Alcalá Cisneros established a number of schools for religious orders or colegios menores, which is indicative of his desire to maintain other centres, like San Francisco, as educational and intellectual bastions for friars. See Poole, 2004, p. 69.

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and scientific analysis of patristic sources like Jerome and Augustine, and reinforced a humanist programme in the delivery of classical languages. One of his greatest undertakings was the elaboration of the Polyglot Bible (1517-1522) in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, which laid emphasis on a rigorous linguistic examination of the Sacred Scriptures as “a light to guide and free Christians” from falsehoods and corruptions.42 Furthermore, with a view to distinguishing his university from that of Salamanca, Cisneros introduced new pedagogical methods like the Modus parisiensis and its three vias or routes for the study of philosophy and theology. Initiated, as its name indicates, at the University of Paris, the Modus parisiensis urged students to make immediate use of the theory explained in classes by practising a series of oral exercises in the form of disputes and repetition of information, which gave way to a more active participation at regular intervals in the lecture hall. As for the teaching vias, these integrated the study of three theological subjects; Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Duns Scotus’s works on metaphysics, and a more recent theological intellectual trend known as Nominalism.43 The latter, also referred to as via moderna, had become current in the fourteenth century with scholars like William of Ockham and his analysis of language through logic, and was reinstated in the university curriculum at the beginning of the sixteenth century thanks to professors like the Dominican John Mair at the University of Paris. Departing from the scholastic harmony between faith and reason, Nominalism abided by a man-centred critical contemplation of the world, which measured up to Humanism in that it argued for the capacity of human reason to elucidate moral problems and search for truth as the path to knowledge and progress. The contention of the nominalists was that the human being possessed the capacity to capture and express reality through the direct observation of nature, a realization that would eventu42. Bataillon, 1966, pp. 30-32. For further information on the Polyglot Bible, see pp. 33-43, and Bustamante García, 1990, p. 23. With this project Cisneros also aimed to attract some of the most noteworthy scholars of his time. Nebrija and Núñez de Guzmán accepted his invitation but Erasmus, whose works were still well received in Spain in the 1520s, declined it. See Bataillon, 1966, pp. 279-315. 43. Muñoz Delgado, 1964, pp. 76-79.

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ally give rise to an empirical method in science and to geographical and astronomic discoveries.44 With respect to the study of biblical and classical languages, defenders of Nominalism nurtured the study of the philosophy of nature and language in connection with sciences and mathematics, designing a technical language according to which grammatical and rhetorical elements were used in propositions and reasoning to reinterpret, for example, Aristotelian and Stoic thought.45 Augustine was one of the auctoritates to have seemingly discussed linguistic matters as Nominalism perceived them, and thus his works De magistro, De trinitate, and De doctrina christiana were re-examined under the nominalist lens. For Augustine, Nominalism claimed, language was embedded within a world of sensation and perception, where the sounds of words responded to the physical realm, and their meanings to the soul.46 Inspired by Alcalá’s new pedagogical system, Salamanca embraced the Modus parisiensis and included Nominalism within its reading programme. In 1508, a plenary staff meeting of the Faculty of Theology set up new chairs of logic, natural philosophy, and theology that conformed to nominalist theories, and appointed two professors from the University of Paris; Domingo de San Juan de Pie del Puerto for the delivery of mathematics and astronomy, and Juan Martínez Silíceo for natural philosophy. Other important nominalist professors were Juan de Oria, who held chairs in nominal logic and philosophy between 1509 and 1523, and Pedro Margallo, who taught logic, ethics, and philosophy from 1517 to 1522.47 The innovations of Cisneros’s university must have reached Sahagún 44. Fuertes Herreros, 1984, pp. 38-39. 45. Humanists like Juan Luis de Vives levelled criticism at this strict formalism. Vives posited that logic should not be detached from real problems and that the nominalists, in their quest to adapt grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics into a logical language, ruined Latin to the extent that Cicero would not have been able to understand them. See Muñoz Delgado, 1986, pp. 119-120. During the second half of the sixteenth century, Nominalism was to be discarded for its tendency towards verbosity, as opposed to plain language, and for its exaggerated dialectic, which blurred the understanding of theological sources. See Muñoz Delgado, 1964, p. 205, and Andrés Martín, 1983, p. 622. 46. Watson, 2008, pp. 247-266. 47. Espino Martín, 2000, p. 210. In Salamanca Nominalism appears to have fallen into disgrace after Oria was accused of heresy for denying the Trinity. See Beltrán de Heredia, 1970, II, p. 18.

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either as a student at the university or within the confines of the Salamanca friary. San Francisco still offered its friars the right set of circumstances to be able to both teach at the university and receive religious instruction by attending its classes, which helped to imbibe from nominalist theories and interpretations of patristic figures like Augustine. What is more, likely thanks to Cisneros’s support, when Sahagún began to consolidate theological knowledge, lessons in the friary focused on the study of the works of different scholars, such as Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and St. Bonaventure, without preferences being imposed on one author or another.48 Aside from providing Sahagún with the intellectual approach of the time towards the learning of religious doctrine, the friary honed Sahagún’s practical experience in homiletic skills, which, as St. Francis advocated, was the Franciscans’ primary means of disseminating the Christian message. In fact, the Franciscans aided secular priests in public preaching and, usually during high points of the ecclesiastical year, such as Lent, in the administering of the Sacrament of Penance.49 Like any other Franciscan centre of studies, San Francisco prepared all members of its community in these Christian functions throughout their lives. Regarding the delivery of sermons, accomplishing and cementing their rhetorical expertise represented one of the friars’ daily routines. To serve as an example, the 1490 Constitutions of the Observant Chapter of Kreuznach (Germany) dictated that the community of friars ought to attend the reading of service sermons, and rehearse and preach before their brethren on a regular basis. Likewise in Salamanca, through the guidance of tutors and well-versed Franciscan preachers who assessed their peers’ progress, Sahagún would have developed his homiletic skills, which proved vital to the composition of sermons in New Spain, and possibly acted as an assistant to younger novices, a teaching experience that perhaps motivated his appointment as one of the youngest tutors at Tlatelolco. During his training in the writing of sermons Sahagún would have consulted the Artes praedicandi or Artes faciendi sermones, preaching manuals that contained systematic expositions of rhetori48. Andrés Martín, 1976, I, p. 106. 49. Roest, 2000, pp. 315-320.

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cal techniques for moral and biblical instruction. In their pages Sahagún learnt about the sermo modernus structure, which, although open to modifications if and when circumstances obliged, recommended a clear-cut division of sermons into theme and subthemes that had to include quaestiones or sentences of auctoritates—mostly patristic sources—, metaphors and similes, and stories or exempla. Nonetheless, unlike other mendicant orders that adhered to the techniques of the Artes praedicandi, the Franciscan also complied with the precepts of two of its most celebrated rhetoricians; the “Doctor Admirabilis” Fray Roger Bacon and Fray Ubertino of Casale. Both authors commended clarity and simplicity as the highest rhetorical virtues, welcomed the practice of the imitatio or emulation of model sermons, and hammered on the necessity of adapting the Christian message to different audiences. This explains why Franciscan libraries abounded in sermon collections or florilegia, such as those of early Franciscans like Anthony of Padua and Observant preachers like Jean de la Rochelle, John of Wales, and Bernardino of Siena. For the adaptation and imitation of sermons the Franciscans also counted on numerous preaching reference books and other auxiliary sources.50 The list comprised biblical commentaries like Padua’s Concordantiae morales sacrorum bibliorum; treatises on vices and virtues; confession manuals; collections of exempla; collections of biographies of saints and Christian chronicles, like the Catalogus friburgensis sanctorum fratrum minorum of Friedrich von Amberg (d. 1432); and collections of sentences and of summarized theological themes of the Church fathers. Further literature included Latin dictionaries, collections of sayings, and popular encyclopaedic works, like Pliny’s Historia naturalis, St. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, in which preachers chose metaphors and stories from the natural world.51 50. Ibid., pp. 280-284. 51. Ibid., pp. 211, 286-289. For an extensive overview of late medieval and Renaissance texts used in religious instruction, see also Roest 2004. The use of natural histories and bestiaries as works from which preachers sourced exempla and similes has been examined by Domínguez García and García Ballester in their introduction to the first three books of Juan Gil de Zamora’s Historia naturalis, 1994, and by Clark 2006.

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Apart from instructing friars in religious studies and training them as preachers and confessors, the Friary of San Francisco operated as a diffusion centre of stories and news about the conversion of infidels and idolaters. Upon conversations with his brethren, Sahagún must have heard of the Franciscans’ far-off missionary experiences. Early stories about their travels to remote kingdoms went back to the first half of the thirteenth century. Two emissaries of the Pope and the French Crown, Fray John of Plano Carpini and Fray William of Rubruck, ventured to the Far East to hasten the reconquest of the Holy Places and a conversion of the Asia that was under the control of Genghis Khan, which would leave the Muslims of Asia Minor and the Eastern Mediterranean surrounded almost on all sides by Christian powers. The reports that the two men wrote—Carpini; Historia mongolorum (1245-1247), and Rubruck; Itinerarium (1253-1255)—, were intended to supply the Pope and other leaders of the Church with first-hand accounts of the potential hostile adversaries whom they attempted to convert. Carpini condensed all his observations in a text concerning their physical appearance, habits, and manner of living; their behaviour, both “good” and “bad” conduct; their laws and customs; and their “superstitious” traditions. For his part, Rubruck focused more on Asiatic sects and creeds, temples, and rites. Carpini’s work was added to the Vatican Library and disseminated amongst later generations of readers by Vincent of Beauvais’s encyclopaedia Speculum historiale (1244-1254), which due to its popularity saw nine editions in the fifteenth century. As for Rubruck’s, some portions of his report were made available in the Opus maius (1264) of Fray Roger Bacon, when advising missionaries to undertake the study of manners and customs of pagans for the interests of conversion.52 Closer to home, Sahagún was aware that the Franciscans had reaped a reputation for their zealous commitment to the spread of Christianity after the conquest of the Canary Islands by Henry III of Castile in 1402. Around 1416, the islands were under the exclusive responsibility of the Franciscans, many of whom hailed from the Friary of La Rábida (Huelva), where Christopher Columbus at times resided during the years between his voyages. Not much 52. Hodgen, 1964, pp. 90-94, 103-104, Baudot, 1995, pp. 74-75, and 2001.

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is known about their proselytizing methods, except that education constituted one of the founding pillars, and that both indigenous clergymen and laymen contributed to evangelizing the rest of the population and instructing them in Spanish ways of life.53 Added to their presence on the Canary Islands, the Franciscans had been rendering unfaltering services to the Christian cause in the Muslim areas of the Iberian Peninsula since 1486. During the conversion campaign of Granada in particular, they adopted two different approaches. Fray Hernando de Talavera, the first bishop of the city, applied gentle measures of slow evangelization, like the adjustment of external manifestations of Muslim culture to the Christian liturgy, and pleaded with clergymen and missionaries to learn the neophytes’ language. For Talavera, the mastery of Arabic was instrumental to the preaching and expansion of the Christian faith. With this purpose he commissioned Father Pedro de Alcalá to write the Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua arauiga (1505), which was composed with the help of “alfaquies” or wise ministers of Islam. Aside from an Arabic grammar, Alcalá’s work contained a short catechism, a bilingual confession manual, and a Spanish-Arabic vocabulary; all of them deemed indispensable sections for the use of the language with indoctrination purposes.54 Moreover, Bishop Talavera regarded the education of Muslim children as a means to start the development of effective evangelization and acculturation for the sake of future generations of Christians. He founded a school where children learnt to read and write in Spanish and were taught the fundamentals of Christian doctrine.55 Nevertheless, Talavera’s “respectful” approach towards conversion did not produce immediate visible results, which, coupled with the Catholic Monarchs’ desire to accelerate the process, led to the 1499 appointment of Cardinal Cisneros and his more severe methods. Amongst urgent actions, he introduced forced conversions on a mass scale and ordered the burning of Arabic manuscripts in Granada. In 1502, 53. Garrido Aranda, 1979, p. 215. 54. Ibid., 1980, pp. 115-116. A list of sixteenth-century doctrinal texts for the conversion of the Moors is available in Resines, 2002, pp. 37-39. 55. Resines, 2002, pp. 43-44. Fray Juan de Guadalupe, leader of the Strictissima Observantia rule, is also known to have built up a Franciscan house in Granada for the evangelization of Muslim children. See Garrido Aranda, 1980, p. 35.

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he gave the unconverted the choice of baptism over a period of two months or exile, a measure that resulted in the swift recast of mosques into churches and Muslims into apparent Christians. His next step was to summon two synods, which resolved the celebration of further coercive mass baptisms and, along the lines of Talavera’s methodology, the creation of grammars of Arabic and doctrinal works tailored for the neophytes, and the foundation of schools that taught children Christian values.56 During his years at San Francisco Sahagún would have been privy to news not only about the conversion methodology for Muslims under Talavera and Cisneros but also of papal bulls and laws that advocated the conversion of the indigenous peoples in New World territories, and which would have predisposed him to take the decision of embarking for New Spain. On 24 January 1518, when Sahagún was probably residing in the friary, Pope Leo X issued the bull Sacri apostolatus ministerio, authorizing Charles V to continue the establishment of the New World Church that had been initiated by his grandparents.57 Only six years later, Charles V 56. Garrido Aranda, 1979, pp. 108-110. Fuchs examines this Christian confrontation with Islam in 2001, specifically in chapters III and IV. Noticeably, Talavera and Cisneros’s methods likened to those the Franciscans were to apply to the conversion of the indigenous peoples of New Spain. In a 1555 letter to the Council of the Indies several friars from the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City, including Fray Francisco de Bustamante, Fray Toribio de Benavente-Motolinía, Fray Juan Focher, and Fray Juan de Gaona, compared their evangelical work to that of other brethren who had evangelized Muslims, thus highlighting their own suitability for the conversion process in the New World. “[W]hen the kingdom of Granada was conquered,” they write, “the first ministers of the Church were those of our order, who began to plant the seeds of faith by demonstrating exceptional behaviour and doctrinal skills” (“cuando se ganó el reino de Granada los primeros ministros que aquella iglesia tuvo fueron los religiosos de nuestra orden, e comenzaron a plantar la fe, con gran fundamento de vida y doctrina,” cited in Garrido Aranda, 1980, p. 36). 57. Colonization and conversion worked hand in hand since Columbus returned from his first voyage. On 4 May 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter caetera, which awarded the Catholic Monarchs territorial dominion in the New World and assigned to them the defence of religious orthodoxy in their new realms. Further papal bulls supported the ambitious colonization and proselytizing enterprise of the Spanish Crown. On 28 July 1508, Pope Julius II issued the Universalis ecclesiae regiminis, which named Ferdinand “patron of every bishopric, […] absolute lord of the Indies” (“patrón de todos los obispados, […] señor absoluto de las Indias,” cited in Kobayashi, 1974, p. 183). See also Cuevas, 1946, I, p. 124, and Morocho Gayo, 2000, p. 85.

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formally created the Council of the Indies, and in its founding charter he stressed that the evangelization of the indigenous peoples was imperative above any other matter.58 The significance of the Christian mission was endorsed by influential figures like Hernán Cortés, who in his fourth letter to Charles V on 15 October 1524 requested the dispatch of “churchmen of good life and example” so that they joined the Franciscans who had already set foot in New Spain.59 As Sahagún would have known, the arrival of missionaries of his order was the result of a series of negotiations with Pope Leo X and his successor Adrian VI. In April 1521, Leo X granted ecclesiastical powers to the Franciscans Fray Juan Glapión and Fray Francisco de los Ángeles of the province of San Gabriel (Extremadura) and issued the papal bull Alias felicis recordationis, which, in the absence of priests and bishops, gave missionaries the same power as secular clergy in the administering of the sacraments. Follow58. The relevant instruction is recorded in the first volume of Recopilación de leyes de los Reinos de las Indias as: “We order and in our position commission those in our Council of the Indies that, casting aside any other benefit and interest, they hold matters relating to conversion and [Christian] doctrine as main duties. They should above all endeavour and occupy all their efforts and knowledge in the provision and nomination of sufficient ministers for this, as well as every possible means which is necessary and convenient so that the indigenous peoples convert and preserve their knowledge of God our Lord, for the honour and praise of this sacred name” (“Mandamos, y cuanto podemos encargamos, a los del nuestro Consejo de las Indias que, pospuesto todo otro respecto de aprovechamiento e interés nuestro, tengan por principal cuidado las cosas de la conversión y doctrina y sobre todo se desvelen y ocupen con todas sus fuerzas y entendimientos en proveer y poner ministros suficientes para ello, y todos los otros medios necesarios y convenientes para que los indios y naturales se conviertan y se conserven en el conocimiento de Dios nuestro Señor, honra y alabanza de este santo nombre,” cited in Borges, 1970, p. 181). 59. Cortés’s passage reads: “Every time I have written to your sacred Majesty I have explained to your Highness about the proclivity that there is amongst some of the natives of these parts so as to be converted into our sacred Catholic faith and be Christians. With this purpose I have beseeched your Cesarean Majesty to supply churchmen of good life and example” (“Todas las veces que a vuestra sacra majestad he escrito he dicho a vuestra alteza el aparejo que hay en algunos de los naturales destas partes para se convertir a nuestra santa fe católica y ser cristianos; y he enviado a suplicar a vuestra cesárea majestad, para ello, mandase proveer de personas religiosas de buena vida y ejemplo,” Cortés, 1986, p. 184. See also Mendieta, 1973, I, p. 112). For a primary source reading on the evangelization of New Spain, see Mendieta’s chronicle. Cuevas 1946, Ricard 1966, and Duverger 1987 remain valuable secondary readings.

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ing suit, in May 1522, Adrian VI’s Exponi nobis fecisti or Omnimoda reinforced Leo X’s decision by transferring his own apostolic authority for the conversion of the indigenous peoples to all members of mendicant orders in areas where there was no resident priest or bishop.60 In New Spain the Franciscans preceded any other order, and those who had accompanied Cortés during the conquest of the Nahua Empire, Fray Pedro Melgarejo and Fray Diego Altamirano, received three distinguished Belgian brethren in August 1523; Fray Juan de Tecto (Johann Dekkers), confessor of Charles V and professor at the Sorbonne; Fray Juan de Aora (Johann van den Auwera), a former student of the University of Paris; and Fray Pedro de Gante (Pierre de Gand), who is thought to have been a relative of Charles V.61 Upon reaching Mexico-Tenochtitlan, a city in a period of reconstruction, they withdrew to Texcoco where, judging it essential for the success of their mission, they dedicated themselves to learning the Nahuatl language. Less than a year later, on 13 May 1524, a contingent of missionaries selected in the province of San Gabriel, known as the Twelve, arrived to lay the foundations of the ideal they represented with their number; the Church of the Apostles uncorrupted by European vices.62 Conversant with the privileged position of his order and the need for missionaries in the New World, in the years prior to his departure Sahagún must have expressed an interest in the nature of the indigenous peoples to whom he was to bring the Christian message. Columbus’s first letter to his sponsor Luis de Santángel on 15 February 1493, in print soon afterwards, was one of those early readings available to the general public. With its portraits of the 60. Greenleaf, 1961, p. 8, Ricard, 1966, p. 22, Duverger, 1987, pp. 31-32, Roest, 2000, p. 320. Mendieta includes Alias felicis recordationis and Exponi nobis fecisti in Historia eclesiástica indiana. See 1973, I, pp. 114-119. 61. Mendieta, 1973, II, pp. 153-155, Baudot, 1995, pp. 73-75. 62. Mendieta, 1973, I, p. 127. This group of Franciscans, as Sahagún relates in Colloquios y doctrina christiana (ca. 1564), was composed of the Superior Fray Martín de Valencia; the ordained friars Fray Francisco de Soto, Fray Martín de la Coruña, Fray Juan Juárez, Fray Antonio de Ciudad Rodrigo, Fray Toribio de Benavente-Motolinía, Fray García de Cisneros, Fray Luis de Fuensalida, Fray Juan de Ribas, and Fray Francisco Jiménez; and the lay brothers Fray Andrés de Córdoba and Fray Juan de Palos. Mendieta gives accounts of their lives and works in the fourth and fifth books of his chronicle; see 1973, II.

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Tainos of Hispaniola as naked, coy, and guileless in contrast with the Caribs, depicted as bellicose and ferocious cannibals, the letter spurred the curiosity of ecclesiastics and lay men alike.63 This stereotypical dichotomy of naïve and non-materialistic “children” versus barbarian anthropophagites took root and turned into a heated topic of debate in European universities. Sahagún, either in his classes at Salamanca or in the friary, would have engaged in an exchange of views on their temperament and, like many of his educated contemporaries, wondered whether it was right to enslave them and wage war so as to compel them to serve God and adopt a Christian-European conduct.64 In the first decade of the sixteenth century, the French scholar John Mair, whose ideas circulated in Salamanca through recently-appointed nominalists, was convinced that the indigenous peoples were the natural slaves to whom Aristotle referred in Books I and III of Politics; devoid of an ability for self-governance, they would no less but benefit from a “civilizing” intervention.65 Other sources on the inhabitants of the New World with which Sahagún would probably have been acquainted tended to esteem their moral qualities, fictionalizing them according to characters and values redolent of classical texts. By way of example, the Italian humanist Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, protégé of the Catholic Monarchs and a renowned figure within the intellectual circles of Salamanca, recuperated classical myths, such as that of the Amazons for the description of indigenous women, which was published in the first part of his De orbe novo (1511). Looking to Mar63. Delgado Gómez, 1993, p. 5. In the same vein, the caption of one of the earliest pictures of New World peoples, printed about 1505, states: “They go naked […]; they have well-shaped bodies […]. They have no personal property, but all things are in common. […] [T]hey also war with each other and without art or rule. And they eat one another,” cited in Hanke, 1959, pp. 4-5. 64. Ibid., pp. 6-8. Given Cisneros’s influential presence on the friary of Salamanca, Sahagún might have heard of the three Hieronymite friars that Cisneros had sent to the Island of Hispaniola in an attempt to put a halt to the enslavement of the Caribbean indigenous peoples based on the allegation of cannibalism; Adorno, 2007, p. 102. 65. Elliot, 1970, p. 26, Pagden, 1993, p. 20. Aristotle’s argument was also considered by the humanists Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Fray Francisco de Vitoria, founder of the philosophical School of Salamanca and professor at the university from 1526. Adorno points out that for Vitoria and Sepúlveda “natural slavery consisted of a hierarchical relationship between those with the talent and training to rule and those who were better off being ruled by others,” 2007, p. 113.

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tyr d’Anghiera’s work, Professor Hernán Pérez de Oliva, who was teaching natural and moral philosophy in Salamanca around 1526, wrote Historia de la invención de las Indias (1528) and Conquista de Nueva España (ca. 1531), in which he transformed the indigenous caciques into noble savages and Roman orators, who articulated their suffering at the hands of the conquerors by expressing themselves as elegantly as a Titus Livy.66 The cruelty and injustices that Pérez de Oliva voiced in fiction likely appeared to Sahagún and other contemporaries as a reality thanks to missionaries who, living in New World lands, denounced Spanish settlers. Official documents like Charles V’s 1526 “Real Cédula que los indios naturales de la Nueva España no puedan ser esclavos ni herrados” (“Royal decree that the Indians of the New Spain be neither enslaved nor branded”) attested to the enslavement of the indigenous peoples as a common post-conquest practice.67 Likewise, the “Ordenanzas sobre el buen tratamiento de los indios” (“Ordinances on the proper treatment of the Indians,”) dispatched the same year, condemned the Spaniards’ ruthless behaviour towards the indigenous peoples and gave prominence to conversion difficulties, of which friars, particularly those in preparation to leave for New Spain, would have been mindful. Drawing on denunciations probably made by the Franciscans, the piece informs that captains and officials ignored the Crown’s desire of bringing the indigenous peoples to the understanding of the Christian faith and that, moved by their greed, they were not serving “our Lord and our Emperor, [and] hurt and killed many of the said Indians.”68 While the document calls attention upon the indigenous peoples’ rationality and capacity to become Christians, “through preaching and the good example of knowledgeable people and good churchmen,” the task that lay ahead to duly evangelize such a large population presented itself as strenuous and daunting.69 In 1529, in a letter writ66. Elliot, 1970, p. 26, Hodgen, 1964, p. 31, Bustamante García, 1992, pp. 252-253. 67. The decree is cited in Konetzke, 1953, I, p. 87. 68. The original text reads: “[No están al] servicio de nuestro Señor y nuestro Emperador [,] hirieron y mataron a muchos de los dichos indios,” ibid., p. 89. 69. “[C]on predicación della y ejemplo de personas doctas y buenos religiosos,” ibidem.

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ten by Gante to his former Franciscan community in Flanders, he cited his schedule of obligations towards the “unfaithful” as consisting of: “[P]reaching and teaching day and night. In daytime I teach how to read, write, and sing. At night I read Christian doctrine and preach. […] Every time I go outside to preach I spend plenty of my time destroying idols and erecting temples to our true God.”70 The passage shows that the conversion methods in which Sahagún was about to partake coincided with those applied to the conversion of Muslim territories, that is, the education of children, the preaching of the Christian faith, and the removal of signs counteracting it. Given his studies and Franciscan training in Salamanca, Sahagún perhaps thought himself prepared for these proselytizing activities. However, once in New Spain he was to discover that the Christianization of the Nahuas necessitated more than superficial preaching and education, the destruction of their idols, and the construction of Christian buildings.

70. The translation of the Latin text into Spanish reads: “Mi oficio es predicar y enseñar día y noche. En el día enseño a leer, escribir y cantar: en la noche leo doctrina cristiana y predico. […] Cada vez que salgo a predicar tengo sobrado que hacer en destruir ídolos y alzar templos al Dios verdadero,” cited in Cuevas, 1946, I, p. 177.

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CHAPTER 2: Sahagún and the Spiritual Conquest of New Spain A member of a twenty-strong group of Franciscans set on liberating from “diabolical tyranny” the unfaithful of whom Gante spoke in his letter, Sahagún arrived in New Spain by the end of October or the beginning of November 1529. Their “war” against the Devil, referred to at the time as a “Spiritual Conquest,” was supposed to have come forth upon the arrival of the Twelve, who had received specific preparation at the Observant Friary of Santa María de los Ángeles, in Extremadura.1 As Mendieta narrates with very emotionally-charged language, “armed with sacred warnings and sound advice for war,” Fray Martín de Valencia and his brethren had been transformed into “knights of Christ,” ready to conquer those lands in which “the king of darkness […] was so powerful and kept such a stronghold.”2 Nevertheless, once in New Spain 1. The term “Spiritual Conquest” applied to the Christianization process of the New World has been mostly propagated by Robert Ricard in The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523-1572 (1966). 2. Mendieta’s original text depicts the Twelve as “arma[dos] con santas amonestaciones y saludables consejos para la guerra,” and “caballeros de Cristo,” who were to fight the “príncipe de las tinieblas [que] tan apoderado y enseñoreado estaba,” see 1973, I, p. 124. During the first half of the sixteenth century, the first bishop of New Spain, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, also alludes to conversion in bellicose rhetoric, examples of which are “Christian conquest,” “apostolic conquest,” and “spiritual war waged against the Devil” (“conquista cristiana,” “conquista apostólica,” and “guerra espiritual que se hace al demonio,” see García Icazbalceta, 1947, III,

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the Twelve had blunted their weapons, opting for massive baptism and the spread of the Christian faith as far as their knowledge of the indigenous languages allowed them, in the belief that the indigenous peoples were abandoning their ancestors’ religion and truly coming to Christianity.3 Newly-arrived friars like Sahagún, although suspicious that “with so little knowledge of the language and so little preaching” their brethren had achieved such miraculous results, as he would recount at the end of his life, trusted them and followed suit. Sahagún explains in this respect: “[W]e left the weapons that we had sharpened against idolatry and by advice and persuasion of these fathers we began to preach about moral issues, on articles of faith and the Seven Sacraments of the Church.”4 Reality, as he must have fathomed in his first missionary years in Tlalmanalco and Xochimilco, was proving to be othpp. 92, 243). In a missive for Philip II on 2 June 1544, Zumárraga similarly exposes the grinding tasks involved in the transmission of “knowledge about the true God to the vast population of barbaric nations […] that left the Devil’s domain […], [and used to be] cheated by Satan’s shrewdness, [so that] the door of the apostolic conquest is opened […] and the door of the tyrannical is closed” (“conocimiento del verdadero Dios a las muchas gentes de naciones bárbaras […] salidas del señorío del demonio […], engañadas por la astucia de Satanás, [para que] se abra la puerta a la conquista apostólica […] y se cierre la puerta a la conquista tiránica,” cited in García Icazbalceta, 1947, IV, p. 175). This metaphor of leaving behind Satan and opening one door to enter the apostolic space epitomizes the Augustinian opposite forces of the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena. Zumárraga’s simile is also in tune with sixteenth-century images of fortifications of the soul besieged by the Devil, as constructed by St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Teresa of Ávila. See Redden, 2008, pp. 14-15. 3. Motolinía, for example, described what he perceived as miraculous acceptance, and even demand, of the evangelical message in his Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, written between 1536 and 1541. On the sacrament of baptism “many of them come,” he observes, “some of them begging, others importuning, others asking for it by kneeling, others raising their hands, moaning, making themselves small; others demand and receive the sacrament, weeping and sighing” (“vienen […] muchos […], los unos van rogando, otros importunando, otros lo piden de rodillas, otros alzando y poniendo las manos, gimiendo y encogiéndose, otros lo demandan y reciben llorando y con suspiros,” see Motolinía, 1985, pp. 225-256). 4. Sahagún’s original quote reads: “[C]on tan poca lengua y predicación [...] [d]ejamos las armas que traíamos muy afiladas para contra la idolatría, y del consejo y persuasión de estos padres comenzamos a predicar cosas morales acerca de los artículos de fe y de los siete sacramentos de la Iglesia,” cited in García Icazbalceta from Sahagún’s prologue to his Arte adivinatoria (ca. 1585), 1954, p. 382. In this manual Sahagún reproduces the Nahua day-signs of the Tonalamatl or sacred calendar, which he understood as superstitious “judiciary astrology.”

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erwise. The ingenuous approach of some brothers was conducive to the foundation of a Church on the basis of a population that appeared on the surface to have converted wholeheartedly, but which in truth retained its own religious practices. The Nahuas, Sahagún would years later recognize, “did not abhor and did not renounce their gods and their culture, and thus they were baptized, not as true believers as they pretended, but as deceitful ones who received the faith without leaving the false one they had with many gods.”5 As Sahagún experienced soon after his arrival, the Nahuas neither accepted nor understood the word of God, let alone the meaning of the sacraments, indicative of which were their continuous celebration of ancient rites and ceremonies in private, and the fact that they only adopted the new religion for fear of being punished. Conscious of these circumstances some Franciscans restored the “weapons” with which they had been furnished in Spain. They began to compose linguistic and religious works, for which they needed to master the indigenous peoples’ languages and investigate their cultures, in order to persuade the indigenous peoples to move away from their pagan practices and beliefs. This obliteration and substitution approach of the Spiritual Conquest that, equating evangelization with study, also fostered the education of the indigenous peoples was propelled by Bishop Zumárraga. A former Provincial of the province of La Concepción and Custodian of the Friary of Abrojo (Valladolid), he had been appointed as Bishop of Mexico and Protector of the Indians by Charles V in 1527. In these capacities Zumárraga defended the indigenous peoples from colonial exploitation, informed himself of their social conditions, and made 5. “[N]o detestaron ni renunciaron a sus dioses con toda su cultura, y así fueron baptizados no como perfectos creyentes como ellos demostraban, sino como fictos que recebían [sic] aquella fe sin dejar la falsa que tenían de muchos dioses,” ibidem. Sahagún criticized the proselytizing endeavours of some first missionaries in the Spanish translation of Books IV, X, and XI of Historia universal and in the prologue of Arte adivinatoria. In 1572, he even denounced Motolinía to the Inquisition for the interpretation that he had made of the Tonalamatl. Ignoring its “idolatrous” nature, Motolinía had praised it and, as a consequence, perpetuated its circulation. For further reference, see Baudot 1990, and Sahagún’s refutation of what seems to be Motolinía’s text in appendix to Book IV, Flor. Cod., IV, pp. 139-142.

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recommendations for their economic and social betterment.6 To be noted is the role that he played in the foundation of schools for Nahua children, such as the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco for the male elite, and of the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México.7 Within the group of Franciscans who worked in line with Zumárraga’s conversion methods were, aside from Sahagún, Fray Francisco de Bustamante, Fray Juan Focher, Fray Juan de Gaona, Fray Martín de Hojacastro, Fray Andrés de Olmos, and Fray Jacobo de Tastera or Testera. Erudite men, they became excellent preachers and authors or co-authors of treatises in the indigenous languages that they mastered, and occupied posts of political and religious responsibility.8 In Sahagún’s case, over fifty of his sixty years of evangelical mission were to be spent on Zumárraga’s proselytizing binomial of study and conversion, broadly speaking, on pedagogical activities at Tlatelolco and on the elaboration of linguistic and doctrinal works in Nahuatl.

The Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco The transfer of European culture to the indigenous peoples through the education of their children constituted a significant factor in the successful occupation of the colonies because it operated as a mechanism that could curtail resistance during the imposition of 6. Greenleaf, 1961, pp. 34-36. The government or First Audiencia of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán considered Zumárraga’s exercise of functions as Protector a serious interference of power, and attacked and challenged Zumárraga and his friars’ authority to convert and defend the indigenous peoples. A vivid description of the state of affairs and events can be found in Zumárraga’s letter to Charles V on 27 August 1529. See García Icazbalceta, 1947, II, pp. 169-245. Zumárraga consented to the abolishment of his Office of Protector after his consecration as bishop in Valladolid in 1533, but he still continued defending the indigenous peoples’ rights against Spanish and indigenous leaders’ abuses. For further information on Zumárraga as Bishop, Archbishop, Protector, and Apostolic Inquisitor, see García Icazbalceta’s introduction, 1947, and Carreño 1950. 7. Zumárraga also opened schools for girls and introduced the first printing press into the colony, where linguistic and doctrinal texts in indigenous languages were published, see Cuevas, 1946, I, pp. 274-277, and Greenleaf 1961, pp. 3637. For a study of primary sources, see Zumárraga’s personal writings in García Icazbalceta 1947. 8. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 627.

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the colonizers’ worldview and ways of life. Cognizant of this, as early as 29 March 1503, the Catholic Monarchs sent an instruction to Nicolás de Ovando, Governor of the Island of Hispaniola, soliciting that: In each of the settlements and nearby churches a house must be built. Here all the children who live in each of the settlements are to be gathered twice a day. A chaplain will teach them to read and write, and to make the sign of the cross, to bless someone or something, as well as how to go to confession, and say the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Creed, and the Hail Holy Queen.9

In the same manner as in the Canary Islands and Granada, officers of the Church were enlisted to teach very elementary skills of reading and writing in Spanish and the principles of the Catholic faith to the bulk of indigenous children, expecting to estrange them from their ancestral traditions. As for the children of the elite, inculcating them with Christian values maximized their political usefulness. They could be harnessed to impose control over the rest of the indigenous population, which, in turn, ensured the prolongation of their privileged status under Spanish rule. Compared to the education of commoners, that of the upper-class minority required more sophistication; a task for which the Franciscans were selected not only in Hispaniola but also in New Spain.10 Soon after their settlement in Mexico City, the Franciscans established an educational system for the indigenous aristocracy under the wing of Cortés, one of whose decrees demanded that: “[I]f there is a lord or lords in the town or the towns [...], that lord or lords must bring their male chil9. “[H]aga hacer en cada una de las […] poblaciones y junto con las […] iglesias una casa en que todos los niños que hubiere en cada una de las […] poblaciones se junten cada día dos veces para que allí el […] capellán los muestre a leer y a escribir y santiguar y signar y la confesión y el Paternóster y el Avemaría y el Credo y el Salve Regina,” cited in Konetzke, 1953, I, p. 11. 10. The seventeenth ordinance of the Leyes de Burgos (Laws of Burgos, 1513) specifically states on the treatment of the indigenous peoples on Hispaniola: “[W]e decree and command that all the children of the caciques who live on the said island and will live from now onwards, aged thirteen and under, will be given to the friars of the Order of St. Francis” (“ordenamos y mandamos que todos los hijos de los caciques que hay en la dicha isla y hubiere de aquí en delante de edad de trece años abajo, se den a los frailes de la orden de San Francisco,” cited in Konetzke, 1953, I, p. 48).

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dren to the city or town or place which is neighbouring and, if there is a friary there, he must give them to the friars so that these instruct them in the things of our sacred Catholic faith.”11 Gante was one of these first Franciscans to educate the Nahua elite, a mission that he briefly described in his 1529 letter to his former brothers in Flanders. By 1531, he had set up a school in the chapel of San José, near the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City, where, within the context of a boarding school that disconnected children from their families and kept them in permanent contact with the Franciscans, the boys imbibed from the Christian culture. They learnt how to read and write in Spanish and Nahuatl, and even attained a basic knowledge of Latin.12 Exceeding Gante’s first venture to teach Latin as part of the curriculum, the most ambitious Franciscan educational institution, the Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de Tlatelolco, was officially inaugurated on 6 January 1536. Years later, the report that the Franciscans composed for the investigation of the Council of the Indies, carried out by the then visitador or inspector Juan de Ovando, details that the institution was founded: [W]ith the intention that these Indians, knowing Latin and understanding the mysteries of the Sacred Scriptures, would be rooted in the faith more deeply and would confirm others who did not know so much, and would help the churchmen who did not understand the language well, interpreting what they were told to the people.13

11. “[S]i hubiese señor y señores en el pueblo o pueblos […], traiga los hijos varones que el tal señor o señores tuviesen a la ciudad o villa o lugar donde fuese vecino; y si en ella hubiese monasterio, los dé a los frailes de él para que los instruyan en las cosas de nuestra santa fe católica,” Cortés, 1963, p. 349. 12. Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 155. Gante also continued the indigenous training of boys in masonry, carpentry, shoemaking, and tailoring. 13. The original passage of this report, the “Relación y descripción de la provincia del Santo Evangelio de México” (“Account and description of the Province of the Santo Evangelio of Mexico”) reads: “[C]on intento que estos indios, sabiendo latinidad y entendiendo los misterios de la Sagrada Escritura, se arraigasen en la fe más de veras y confirmasen en ella a los otros que no sabían tanto, y ayudasen a los religiosos que no entendían bien la lengua, interpretando al pueblo en ella lo que les dijesen,” cited in García Icazbalceta, 1889, II, p. 70. There are several studies on this college, see for example Ocaranza 1934, Steck 1944, Kobayashi 1974, Gonzalbo Aizpuru 1990, and Burkhart’s introductory study, 1996, pp. 55-73. In 1564, the death of the second viceroy of New Spain, Luis de Velasco, who had upheld the institution from its opening, marked the beginning of the end for the college.

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The Franciscans mainly aspired to two goals in the establishment and sustainability of Christianity. First, the incorporation of the Nahua elite to a deeply-rooted Christian faith was thought to ease the conversion of their ordinary subjects. Acculturated into Christendom and exerting an example, Nahua students could persuade the rest of the population into the new religion when applying their entitlement of sovereignty and hierarchical rights. Second, their training as linguistic aides qualified them to collaborate closely with the friars in the production of linguistic and religious texts in Nahuatl and in the preaching of the Christian faith.14 Tantamount to an early sixteenth-century primary and secondary European institution, the College of Tlatelolco schooled Nahua pupils, usually entering at the age of ten or twelve, in late medieval Scholasticism and Humanism. Most students spent three years, during which they were taught to read and write in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin through the subjects of the seven liberal arts of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, together with moral and natural philosophy, and Christian doctrine.15 The library, founded with the generous donation of Zumárraga’s personal library and expanded throughout the sixteenth century, hoarded an exhaustive inventory of some of the works that were deployed in their education.16 For the study of of rhetoric, Latin, and culture, the catalogue item14. Zumárraga’s support for the production of texts in the Nahuatl language was unconditional. Regarding the translation of the Sacred Scriptures he claims in his Doctrina breue (1543): “I wished [...] that [the Gospel and St. Paul’s Epistles] were translated into every language of the world […] because there is no doubt that the first step towards Christendom is to somehow know about [it]” (“desearía yo que [el Evangelio y las Epístolas de San Pablo] estuviesen traducidas en todas las lenguas de todos los del mundo [...] porque no hay duda sino que el primer escalón para la cristiandad es conocella [sic] en alguna manera,” quoted in García Icazbalceta, 1947, II, pp. 25-26, and in Bustamante García, 1990, p. 51). 15. Steck, 1944, p. 25, Kobayashi, 1974, p. 277. The teaching of Latin to the Nahuas has been studied by Osorio Romero 1990. The curriculum, the learning methods, and the textbooks were chosen by Franciscan tutors of high intellectual calibre, not only Spanish, but also French like Focher, former Doctor in Law at the University of Paris. The programme of studies was, when required, adapted to the necessities of the time. For example, some students learnt the same trades offered in Gante’s school of San José in order to earn a living and courses on medicine were created after the measles and smallpox epidemics of 1545 and 1576. 16. See catalogue in Mathes, 1982, pp. 32-33, 47-77, 93-96.

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ized Nebrija’s Introductiones latinae and a copious list of collections and works by classical authors such as Cicero, Virgil, Pliny, Seneca, Quintilian, Sallust, Juvenal, Livy, Aesop, Cato, Caesar, and Plutarch. This selection of books shows that the Franciscans favoured a humanist approach in the learning of Latin. With regards to instruction in Christian faith, the Franciscans stayed current with adapted catechisms for the indigenous peoples, such as the Dominican Fray Pedro de Córdoba’s Doctrina christiana para instruccion e informacion de los indios, por manera de historia (1544), and Zumárraga’s Doctrina breve muy provechosa de las cosas que pertenecen a la fe catholica (1543). The coexistence of contemporary texts, such as the humanists Thomas More’s Utopia and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Opera omnia, with Augustine’s Opuscula, the works of the Franciscans’ preferred authors—Aquinas, Scotus, and Durandus—, and the nominalist John Mair, reveals that the College of Tlatelolco was more than a centre of indigenous education; it was also a centre of Franciscan study. Just as the Friary of San Francisco in Salamanca or any other in which the French and Belgian friars who came to New Spain had taken their vows, the substantial inventory of the Tlatelolco library was geared at pedagogical and doctrinal ends that facilitated the goals of the missionising process. Some of the tutors were Fray Arnaldo de Bassacio, “an erudite of clear intellect,” who was the first to teach Latin, and composed sermons and brief doctrinal treatises in Nahuatl; Focher, who imparted rhetoric, logic, and natural and moral philosophy, composed a Nahuatl grammar, and focused on “the study of letters and sciences that he had learnt in his youth;” and Gaona, “with excellent knowledge of Latin, and a rhetorician [...], very adept preacher, and above all, erudite theologian,” who similarly taught Latin, rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, and composed Christian treatises in Nahuatl.17 Other tutors were Bustamante, “very well taught in divine letters,” who was involved in the 17. Mendieta describes Bassacio as “docto y de claro ingenio [...] [que escribió] diversos sermones y mucha doctrina;” Focher as dedicated to “el estudio de las letras y ciencias, que en su juventud había aprendido;” and Gaona as “excelente latino y retórico […], muy adepto predicador, y sobre todo, profundísimo teólogo,” 1973, II, pp. 195, 202, 280. For a description of other tutors and lecturers, see also Kobayashi, 1974, pp. 303-313.

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teaching of the aforementioned disciplines, and Olmos, a graduate of canon law from the University of Valladolid, who taught Latin for a brief period of time, composed sermons, and pioneered early investigation into Nahua culture.18 Regarding Sahagún, he resided in Tlatelolco more than half of his life in New Spain, as a scholar committed to the enterprises that Zumárraga advocated; that is, teaching, pastoral care, and catechistic instruction of Nahua students; the study of Nahuatl and Nahua culture; and the composition of texts for conversion.19 At first, junior in age and education if compared to the other tutors, Mendieta remarks that Sahagún was entrusted with the teaching of elementary courses such as “the instruction and indoctrination of the boys [...] [who were] taught with more perfection how to read and write, and to learn Latin.”20 With the passing of the years, Sahagún also gave lessons in “medicine, […] and things regarding governance and virtuous habits,” and in 1572, as main supervisor of the college, he tried to bring back the splendour of its former years, in that “he took care of sustaining and improving the college.”21 Despite keen support from religious and political authorities like Zumárraga and Viceroy Velasco, the educational and intellectual activities at Tlatelolco did not run peacefully but faced hostility from the outset. The encomenderos and some missionaries, like the Dominican Fray Domingo de Betanzos, contended that the indigenous peoples were incapable of embracing Christianity and that 18. “[M]uy enseñado en las divinas letras,” Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 208. Olmos was Zumárraga’s confidant. They arrived in New Spain in 1528, only one year after working together in the eradication of an alleged upsurge of witchcraft around Biscay; Baudot, 1995, p. 124. 19. Some of Sahagún’s stays in Tlatelolco can be inferred from his first two prologues to Historia universal and from chapters XXVII and XXVIII of his Spanish version of Book X. These stays spanned from 1536 until around 1540; from around 1545 until around 1558; from 1563 until 1565; in 1572, and from 1574 until 1590. See Bustamante García, 1992, pp. 259-260. During these years, in the company of learned tutors and with access to the catalogue of the library, Sahagún must have continued to broaden his knowledge of not only religious studies but also of classical authors. 20. “[L]a instrucción y doctrina de los niños […] a enseñarse más perfectamente a leer y escribir y a saber latinidad,” Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 187. 21. “[M]edicina, […] y cosas de policía y buenas costumbres,” [...] “se ocupó en sustentar y mejorar el colegio,” ibidem. See also Mathes, 1982, p. 31.

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they could only serve the Spaniards as a workforce.22 Conversely, the physical violence and enslavement that the indigenous peoples suffered at the hands of the colonizers provoked heavy-duty antagonism from the Franciscans. Echoing ongoing debates in Spain and New Spain on the indigenous peoples’ level of rationality and capacity of receiving the faith, in an emotive letter sent to Charles V on 6 May 1533, Tastera, the Franciscan Provincial, challenged those voices that distrusted the indigenous peoples’ intellect and abilities in the name of his entire community. Enumerating a comprehensive list of achievements, principles, manners, and actions proving contrary, he answered his rhetorical question, “how is it possible that they are considered of no capacity?,” in these terms: [W]ith such sumptuous edifices, with so much skill in the making of tributes, rule in governance, and in the division of people and their services, in the learning of speaking skills, courtesy, style, and the high commendation of things […]; [with so much skill in] the celebration of weddings [...], the distribution of inheritance by a will, without a will and by election, punishment of crimes and irregular behaviour; [with so much skill] in welcoming honourable people who enter their towns; [with so much skill] in the expression of sadness till the tears come. Finally, they are very able to be educated in and observe ethical, political, and economic life.23

Tastera extols the indigenous peoples’ qualities by emphasizing their manifestation of feelings and by making meticulous reference 22. As Adorno points out, although with some exceptions, theologians, jurists, and missionaries did not doubt the indigenous peoples’ condition as true human beings. For her discussion on the question of the nature of the indigenous peoples in the 1530s and 1540s, see 2007, pp. 103-105. Charles V sought remedy and issued ordinances like one dispatched from Granada in 1526 requesting from churchmen “true information about the quality and ability of those Indians” (“información verdadera de la calidad y habilidad de los dichos indios,” see Konetzke, 1953, I, p. 95). 23. “¿[C]ommo se sufre ser incapaces con tanta sunptuosidad de edifiçios, con tanto primor en obrar de tributos, arte en presider, repartir por cabezas, gentes, serviçios, crianza de hablar é cortesia y estilo, exagerar cosas; [con tanto primor en], casamientos […], suçesiones ex testamento et ab intestato, sucesiones por election, puniçion de crimenes y excesos, [con tanto primor en] salir á reçebir á las personas honrradas quando entran en sus pueblos, [con tanto primor en] sentimientos de tristeza usque ad lacrimas, […]; finalmente, muy ábiles para ser desçiplinados en vida etica politica é yconomica?,” cited in Konetzke, 1953, I, p. 95, and Toreno, 1877, I, p. 65.

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to every European discipline that requires intellect, whether architecture, government, rhetoric or law. What is more, he asserts that they possess the competence to progress in life, were they granted proper instruction. These good qualities refer to adults, because for children Tastera likewise poses the question “what can we say of the children of the natives of this land?,” in order to reply: They write, read, sing plain and organ songs, and in counterpoint. They compose singing books and teach others. Music and enjoyment of ecclesiastical singing is performed principally by them, and they preach to the peoples the sermons that we teach them, reciting them with very good spirit.24

In this paragraph Tastera enunciates his personal accomplishment as a tutor in Champoton (Yucatan), where he taught the boys of the aristocracy, as well as the daily activities in other schools like San José, and later on in the College of Tlatelolco.25 Equally important, Tastera confirms that the indigenous children, properly indoctrinated, became crucial to Charles V’s wish of spreading Christianity. Despite this wholehearted verbalization of support of the indigenous peoples, as years went by, debates on their intellectual capacity escalated. Their strongest advocate, the Dominican Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, brought his condemnations against the Spaniard’s defamatory and degrading attitude, greed, and brutality to the attention of Charles V on several occasions.26 As a result, the emperor suspended military expansion in the New World in 1550, and 24. “¿[Q]ué diremos de los hijos de los naturales desta tierra? [...] Escriven, leen, cantan canto llano é de organo é contrapunto, hazen libros de canto, enseñan á otros, la musica é regozijo del canto eclesiastico en ellos está principalmente, é predican al pueblo los sermones que les enseñamos, é dizenlo con muy bien spiritu,” ibidem. 25. Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 187. 26. In 1514, Las Casas did away with his life as an encomendero on the Island of Hispaniola and consecrated himself to the indigenous peoples’ cause while residing in Puerto Rico, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chiapas, where he was bishop for a short period, and Spain; see O’Gorman, 1967, I, pp. lxxxiv-lxxxix. Cardinal Cisneros appointed him “Protector of the Indians,” or as Las Casas terms it “Provider and Universal Protector of all the Indians” (“procurador y protector universal de todos los indios.”) For a more recent consideration of Las Casas’s works in his socio-cultural milieu, see Adorno, 2007, pp. 61-98.

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called for the appointment of a group of theologians and councillors who were to take existing discussions on the treatment and capabilities of the indigenous peoples to the Council of the Indies.27 In the so-called Valladolid debates or controversy of 1550-1551, in which the main issue at stake was whether it was legitimate to wage war on the indigenous peoples and subject them to Spanish rule, Las Casas argued for their right to sovereignty and peaceful Christianization, while the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda pointed to their ineptitude and justified a violent intervention to rule over them, as endorsed in the 1510s by John Mair.28 With the debates remaining unsettled, between 1555 and 1559, Las Casas countered the pervasive derogatory opinion of the indigenous peoples and resorted to the completion of Apologética historia sumaria (ca. 1559). Initiated in the 1530s, the primary objective of his work, as spelled out in the prologue, was for the reader “to learn about all of these infinite nations of this so vast world that have been defamed by some, […] publishing that they were not peoples of good reason, [that they] lacked civilized policy and ordered republics.”29 Las Casas’s wide-ranging work of 267 chapters gathers information on the indigenous peoples from the Island of Hispaniola,

27. Hanke, 1974, p. 67. At the Juntas or Board of Valladolid of 1542, Las Casas had exposed the gruesome behaviour of the Spaniards—depicted in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552)—, which prompted Charles V to promulgate the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) for the proper treatment of the indigenous peoples; see O’Gorman, 1967, I, p. lxxxvii. In 1550, Charles V even directed the Franciscans to undertake the mission of informing indigenous slaves that they were his free vassals; see Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 74. For further production of letters and ordinances for the good or “proper treatment of the Indians” (“para el buen tratamiento de los indios”) by Charles V and Philip II, see Mendieta, 1973, II, pp. 72-84. 28. Sepúlveda displayed his main theories in two treatises; Democrates alter sive de justis belli causis apud indios (ca. 1547), and Apologia pro libro de justis belli causis (ca. 1549). He did not refute the indigenous peoples’ innate rational capacity and natural intellect; rather he characterized their “barbarity” as a product of custom, subject to improvement by contact with Christians who were, in his own words, “más humanos,” that is to say, more civilized. On this, see Adorno, 2007, pp. 83, 115-116. For further reference on the Valladolid debates, see Hanke 1974, Lupher, 2003, pp. 44-103, and Adorno, 2007, pp. 82-83, 97-124. 29. “[C]ognoscer todas y tan infinitas naciones deste vastísimo orbe infamadas por algunos, […] publicando que no eran gentes de buena razón […] carecientes de humana policía y ordenadas repúblicas,” Las Casas, 1967, I, p. 3.

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New Spain, and Peru, regarding their geographical space, natural resources, physical appearance, family relationships, social order, governance, professions, education, traditions, and religion. Las Casas compares the New World natural environment, indigenous cultures, and lifestyle with classical antiquity, and at times expresses his preference for the indigenous.30 For instance, in chapter CXXXII of Book III, after having briefly portrayed the ancient temples of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the New World, he puts them all side by side to conclude that: “[T]hese [New World] peoples demonstrated themselves to be more civilized than others and more advanced, not only in the election of their gods but also in the building of temples in their honour.”31 A similar recognition of the rationality and even superiority of the indigenous peoples features in chapter CCXXIII of Book III. Las Casas contrasts education amongst the Greeks, the Persians, and the Nahuas with the intention of promoting the Nahuas’ moral awareness amongst his European readers. Evincing how the Nahuas gave advice on conduct to their young citizens, Las Casas ends up confirming that they “were equal to and surpassed [other peoples] in some substantial matters.”32 By “substantial matters” he refers to the speeches on social behaviour delivered by the Nahuas to their youngsters, and which he states that he came to know thanks to the translation from Nahuatl into Spanish of “some exhortations that another churchman of the Franciscan Order sent to me from the New Spain.”33 The Franciscan who dispatched these “exhortations” to Las Casas was Olmos; the faithful companion of Zumárraga, and another firm protector of the indigenous peoples.34 What Olmos had sent 30. For an investigation of Las Casas’s “comparative ethnology” and the sixteenth-century Spanish propensity to draw analogies between New World cultures and those of classical antiquity, in particular with the Roman civilization, see Lupher 2003. 31. “[A]questas gentes, no sólo en la elección de los dioses, pero también en los templos que les edifican, mostraron ser gentes más que otras muchas racionales, y les hicieron mucha ventaja,” Las Casas, 1967, I, p. 688. 32. “[S]e igualaron y a algunas sobrepujaron en cosas sustanciales,” ibid., II, p. 436. 33. “[U]nas exhortaciones que otro religioso de la orden de San Francisco me envió de la Nueva España,” ibid., p. 437. 34. See attribution to Olmos in Las Casas, 1967, II, p. 447. For information on classical antiquity Las Casas drew on its literature and history. For accounts of

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were Nahua huehuetlahtolli, literally meaning “ancient words,” or speeches, prayers, and salutations in which traditional religious, moral, and social concepts were conveyed in a beautiful and persuasive style, in this case, in order to instruct children and urge them to lead a respectful and prudent life.35 Olmos had compiled a large number of huehuetlahtolli and appended at least one of them to a surviving manuscript of his Arte de la lengua mexicana (1547).36 Yet, Olmos had not been the only friar to record them. In 1547, Sahagún also finished his own collection of huehuetlahtolli, which, together with compilations of sayings, conundrums, and metaphors, formed the Libro de la Rethorica y philosophia moral y theologia de la gente mexicana, eventually incorporated in Historia universal as Book VI.37 In the prologue to Book VI Sahagún restates what Las Casas and Olmos thought of these speeches; that they were emblematic of indigenous peoples who are “wise, superior, and effective rhetoricians.”38 Interestingly, this declaration by Sahagún bears the New World, he relied on data that he had collected during his stays in different areas of America and, for New Spain in particular, on material he also received from missionaries who, aware of Las Casas’s propitious use to defend the intellectual capacities of their indigenous neophytes, contributed to his cause. More information on possible sources is available in O’Gorman’s introduction, 1967, I. Johanna Broda has conducted research on the existing relationship between Olmos, Motolinía, Las Casas, Mendieta, and Torquemada’s chronicles on pre-Hispanic culture and believes that Las Casas availed himself of Motolinías’s accounts. See her comparative study in 1975, specifically pp. 144-145, 165. 35. The huehuetlahtolli were pronounced by Nahua priests, noblemen and noblewomen, ambassadors, merchants, and midwives on both secular and religious ceremonial occasions, such as for the investiture of kings, and as prayers to gods in times of drought and famine. For further reference, see Sullivan, 1974, pp. 99-108. Aside from Las Casas’s, other Spanish versions of huehuetlahtolli can be found in the works of Mendieta, Alonso de Zorita, Juan Bautista de Pomar, and Fray Juan de Torquemada; see Karttunen and Lockhart, 1987, p. 9. According to Baudot, the ones reproduced by Zorita and Torquemada are also Olmos’s, see 1995, p. 229. 36. The Franciscan Fray Juan Bautista Viseo published the huehuetlahtolli collected by Olmos, together with some Spanish translations, in around 1600-1601; see Karttunen and Lockhart, 1987, p. 9. For a contemporary translation into Spanish of Olmos’s huehuetlahtolli, see that of Librado Silva Galeana in Olmos 1988. 37. Graic Hanson, following Garibay Kintana’s comparison of Olmos and Sahagún’s collections, suspects that the huehuetlahtolli of Sahagún’s book had been in reality compiled by Olmos. See Garibay Kintana, 1953-1954, I, pp. 401-439, and Hanson, 1994, pp. 31, 33. 38. “[S]abios, Rethoricos virtuosos, y esforçados,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 65. Sahagún specifies that the Libro de la Rethorica y philosophia moral y theologia de

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out not only that he, like Olmos, appreciated the moral and rhetorical worth of the Nahuas, but also that, like Las Casas, he desired to promote their image as civilized human beings. For Sahagún, this codification of Nahuatl oral expression constituted the basis of his defence of the Nahuas’ intellect and capacities, which was to be followed by the production of a vaster work. When in 1558 the Highest Prelate of the Franciscan Order Fray Francisco de Toral delegates him to write what Sahagún deems useful for a robust evangelization, Sahagún is eyeing the possibilities that lie ahead. Given the influence of the academic Tlatelolco environment and the indispensable contribution of some of his former Nahua students to the composition of proselytizing works, Sahagún must have initiated one of the resulting texts from Toral’s commission, Historia universal, with contesting arguments on their ability to learn and reason—and therefore to become Christians—as one of his priorities. Tastera’s 1533 letter, operating as a Franciscan attempt to counteract false denigrations against the level of rationality of the indigenous peoples and to present them as anything but simple-minded, ready to receive Christianity, sees its scope enlarged in Sahagún’s Historia universal.39 As a matter of fact, some of the topics of this work are reminiscent of the achievements Tastera considers in order to supply evidence of the Nahuas’ high level of rationality and intellect, namely; information on their architecture, government, law, and rhetoric, as found in the appendix to Book II on buildings, and in Books VIII on kings and lords; IX on merchants; and VI on rhetoric of Historia universal. Reiterating the Franciscans’ arguments put forward by Tastera, Sahagún pursues his vindication of la gente mexicana, referred to hereafter as the Libro de la rethorica, was translated into Spanish in 1577, “thirty years after it was written in the Mexican language” (“después de treinta años que se escribió en lengua mexicana,” Hist. gen., VI, p. 466). Sahagún and his assistants might have added other huehuetlahtolli that they collected throughout the years to the final version of Book VI of Historia universal. Sahagún excluded those within the Primeros memoriales, on how judges admonished commoners and leaders, and how warriors, lords, and noblemen replied. These huehuetlahtolli have been translated into English by Sullivan, see Sahagún, 1997, pp. 230-242. 39. Bustamante García deals with Sahagún’s defence of the Nahuas in Historia universal in 1989, pp. 580-582, 610-612; 1992, pp. 274-276.

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the Nahuas in his prologue to Book I and in his Spanish version of Book X.40 In his prologue he eulogizes their glorious pre-Hispanic past explaining that “[i]t is said the knowledge or wisdom of this people was considerable […], they were perfect philosophers and astrologers, and very skilled in all the [mechanical] crafts.”41 In chapter XXVII of Book X, having translated the first section on the Nahuas’ professions, amongst them highly-skilled craftsmen and merchants who traded a large variety of products, Sahagún praises the Nahuas’ ability to learn, as aptly “as the Spaniards,” professions in geometry, which involves building [...]; also the profession of builder, and stonemason, and carpenter; also the professions of tailor and shoemaker, silkmaker, printer, scriber, tutor [...]. They can play flutes, shawms, sackbuts, trumpets, pipe organs; they know Latin grammar, logic and rhetoric, astrology, theology.42

Sahagún extends his digression to report on his Nahua students and assistants, acknowledging their remarkable aid in the conversion of the rest of the Nahuas by means of force and prayer.43 Concerning their aptitude to learn Latin, he disparages those “Span-

40. Both the prologue and the translation had been conceived by Sahagún as a reading for Spanish officials at the Council of the Indies, which is discussed in the final section of this chapter. 41. “[D]el saber o sabiduria desta gente ay fama […], fueron, perfectos philosophos, y astrologos, y muy diestros, en todas las artes mechanjcas,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 48-49. 42. “[C]omo los españoles [aprenden] oficios de geumetría, que es edificar […]; también el oficio de albañilería, y cantería y carpintería; también los oficios de sastres y zapateros, sederos, impresores, escribanos, letores […]; [saben] tañer flautas, cheremías, xacabuches, trumpetas, órganos; sabe[n] gramática, lógica y retórica, astrología, teología,” Hist. gen., X, pp. 626-627. 43. Sahagún writes in this sense: “These young men served very well in this task [...] to stamp out the idolatrous rites performed at night, and the drunken ceremonies and areitos [indigenous dances] that they did secretly at night [...] [.] [A]nd they detained them all [the Nahuas celebrating their ceremonies], and tied them up and took them to the monastery where they were punished by them and did penance. They taught them Christian doctrine and obliged them to attend the matins at midnight” (“[e]stos muchachos servieron mucho en este oficio […] para destirpar los ritos idolátricos, que de noche se hacían, y las borracheras y areitos que secretamente y de noche hacían […] y prendíanlos a todos y atábanlos y llevábanlos al monasterio donde los castigaban y hacían penitencia, y los enseñaban la doctrina cristiana y los hacían ir a maitines a la media noche,” ibid., pp. 631-632).

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iards and many other churchmen […], [who] laughed very much and mocked them, confident that no one would be able to teach Latin to so unable people,” countering that in only two or three years his students showed unparalleled competence and grasped “all the subject matters as regards the learning of Latin grammar, and to speak Latin, and to understand it, and to write in Latin.”44 It is this linguistic instruction that made them vital for indoctrination purposes. Accredited by their command of Latin, Sahagún avers that “they inform us about the properties of the words and the properties of their manner of speech,” and examine, proofread, and amend “the incongruities that we express in sermons or we write in doctrines” to the extent that, Sahagún continues to highlight, “anything that is to be translated into their language, if it has not been examined by them, will not read without defect; nothing can be written accurately neither in Latin, nor in Spanish, nor in their language.”45 Aimed at silencing the theoretical natural ineptitude of the indigenous peoples that was voiced in contemporary debates, the wording of Sahagún’s defence also coincides with Las Casas’s passionate argument in his prologue to Apologética historia sumaria. Like him, Sahagún throws light on the reasons and objectives behind the composition of Historia universal in its first prologue: All this work will be very useful to learn the degree of perfection of this Mexican people, which has not yet been known […] [.] They and all their possessions were so trampled underfoot and destroyed that no vestige remained of what they were before. Thus they are considered as barbarians, as a people at the lowest level of perfection, when in reality

44. “[E]spañoles y otros muchos religiosos [...], reíanse mucho y hacían burla, teniendo por muy averiguado que nadie sería poderoso para poder enseñar gramática a gente tan inhábil,” ibid., p. 634. However, the Nahuas were able to understand “todas las materias del arte de la gramática, y a hablar latín, y a entenderlo, y a escrebir en latín,” ibidem. For further reasons entertained by the Spaniards in order to undermine Nahua students and the Franciscan institution they, together with Sahagún and his fellow friars, represented, see pp. 634-635. 45. “[N]os dan a entender las propriedades de los vocablos y las propriedades de su manera de hablar, [...] las incongruidades que hablamos en los sermones o escrebimos en las doctrinas [...] [.] [C]ualquiera cosa que se ha de convertir en su lengua, si no va con ellos examinada, no puede ir sin defecto, escrebir congruamente en la lengua latina ni en romance ni en su lengua,” ibid., p. 635.

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As with Las Casas, Sahagún believes in the necessity of displaying the “quilate,”—literally, carat—; the perfection or precious qualities of the Nahuas. He is convinced that they exceeded nations famous for their governance, just as Las Casas extols the indigenous peoples’ temples and the Nahuas’ instruction of their children above that of some peoples in classical antiquity. Similarly, Sahagún blames the Spaniards for having defamed the Nahuas. In the same way that Las Casas criticizes those who, like Sepúlveda, have published works spreading the opinion that the indigenous peoples were uncivilized and incapable of self-rule, Sahagún accuses the Spaniards of having destroyed the Nahuas’ political and educational system to then vilify them as barbarians.47 Las Casas’s general defence of the indigenous peoples’ moral and rational values and Sahagún’s specific commendation of the Nahuas mirror the same goal; their insertion into the Universal History of the Christian discourse. Christian doctrine affirmed that humankind was linked through nature because individuals belonged to the human species, and within history, because God had created 46. “[A]prouechara mucho esta obra para conoçer el quillate desta gente mexicana el qual aun no se a conoçido […] [,] fueron tan atropellados, y destruydos, ellos y todas sus cosas: que njnguna apparentia les quedo, de lo que eran antes. Ansi estan tenjdos por barbaros, y por gente de baxissimo qujlate: como segun verdad, en las cosas de politia, echan el pie delante, a muchas otras naciones: que tienen gran presuntion, de politicos: sacando fuera algunas tyranjas, que su manera de regir contenja,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 47. The “tyranjas” or injustices attributed to the “tyranny of the Devil” obliged the Nahuas, Sahagún maintains, to even sacrifice their own children. His attacks on the Devil’s malign influence are likewise found in his prologue to Book II (Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 48-49) and in scattered comments within the Spanish translation of Book II. During the years of composition of Historia universal Sahagún cherished the hope of replacing the Devil’s power with that of God and the flourishing of his Church. In this respect he quotes St. Paul: “[G]race will abound where transgression abounded” (“abundara la gratia adonde abundo el delicto,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 48). 47. In his Spanish translation of Book X Sahagún disapproves of the Spaniards for having ruined the balance that the Nahuas had created between moral and natural philosophy; see Hist. gen., X, p. 627. Bustamante García discusses this matter in 1992, pp. 285-287.

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all equal and endowed all with an immortal soul that could guide them to eternal life.48 Las Casas postulates that humankind is one and that the indigenous peoples are his brothers, created by Divine Providence, a perception Sahagún echoes when recounting the Nahuas’ first occupation of the Valley of Mexico. They hailed from the north in search of the Christian Paradise, he states, “at least five hundred years before the incarnation of our Redeemer,” leaving no doubt about their worthiness of Christ and possibility of leading virtuous lives by accentuating that “it is most certain all these people are our brothers, stemming from the stock of Adam, as do we. They are our neighbors whom we are obliged to love, even as we love ourselves.”49 It is in this sense that in his prologue Las Casas also refutes the contention that “in the creation of so innumerable number of rational souls, the Divine Providence had neglected them,” and is confident that “[Divine Providence] determined to do and did very much for them, in this almost infinite part, as this one is, of the human lineage.”50 Traditional Christian doctrine avowed that, since history was unitary and covered all humankind, neither special histories nor chosen or privileged peoples existed. Las Casas abides by this conviction when discussing, for example, archi-

48. O’Gorman, 1967, p. lxvi, Todorov, 1991, p. 273. In Las Casas and Sahagún’s theological and ideological world the indigenous peoples as “cultural Others” simply meant “not us.” The “Other” does not carry the concept of radical otherness suggested by Emmanuel Levinas; Adorno, 2007, p. 5. 49. “[P]or lo menos, qujnjentos años, antes de la encarnacion de n[uestr]o Redemptor [...]. [E]s certissimo, que estas gentes todas, son n[uestr]os hermanos: procedientes, del tronco de Adam, como nosotros: son n[uestr]os proximos, a quien somos obligados a amar como a nosotros mismos,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 48-49. That every human being stemmed from Adam is Augustine’s answer in De civitate dei when spurning the belief in an antipodean subhuman breed; see Hodgen, 1964, pp. 52-53. Some of Sahagún’s contemporaries, such as Sepúlveda and the priest Francisco López de Gómara, invoked this statement. In Democrates alter sive de justis belli causis apud indios, Sepúlveda’s hero asserts that “[the pagans] are, and they are called, our brothers, our fellow creatures and sheep of the same shepherd,” cited in Adorno, 2007, p. 5. “The people are like us,” López de Gómara says in Historia general de las Indias (1552), “otherwise they would be beasts and monsters, and would not descend, as they do, from Adam,” cited in Elliott, 2009, p. 195. 50. “[L]a Divina Providencia en la creación de tan innumerable número de ánimas racionales se hubiera descuidado [...] por quien tanto determinó hacer y hizo, en tan cuasi infinita parte como esta es del linaje humano,” Las Casas, 1967, I, p. 3.

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tecture and education in different societies of classical antiquity and the New World. As for Sahagún, although he does not offer extensive comparisons with classical antiquity, he works on the production of a text that contains topics on the world of the Nahuas that are reminiscent of the ones in Tastera’s letter and Las Casas’s work. These topics, dictated in the Old World for the categorization of knowledge and description of people, embedded the Nahuas into the same subject matters of the Christian Universal History.51

Sahagún’s Composition of Linguistic and Doctrinal Works in Nahuatl Sahagún determined the composition of the Libro de la rethorica in order to pass on to his contemporary missionaries a written legacy of the Nahuas’ beautiful and ingenious rhetoric that substantiated the profundity of their thought.52 Nevertheless, this was not his sole intention. The completion of this 1547 document represented a milestone for a missionary eager to master Nahuatl, as Sahagún seems to have been since his arrival in New Spain, as well as for those Franciscans who, in a concerted effort to learn and codify the language for the writing of doctrinal works, must have welcomed the Libro de la rethorica as a unique contribution to their proselytizing endeavours.53 51. This is discussed in chapter III of this study. Sahagún’s comparisons between the world of the Nahuas and classical antiquity are scattered in different prologues and books. For example, in his first prologue to Historia universal he speaks of the city of Tula as having suffered “the adverse fortune of Troy” (“la aduersa fortuna, de troya,”) and equates the Cholulans to the Romans; the Mexicans to the Venetians; and the Tlaxcalans to the Carthaginians; see Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 48. In his 1585 prologue to the book on the conquest, Sahagún also takes for granted that giants lived in New Spain before the Great Flood, and that King Solomon had visited New Spain and gathered gold for the edification of his temple; see Sahagún 1989, pp. 148-149. 52. Sahagún’s introductory titles to many of his recorded huehuetlahtolli commend the Nahuas for being able to express very subtle emotions through highly admirable figures of speech and very fine metaphors. Some of these laudatory comments can be appreciated at the beginning of chapters I to XIX of Book VI, Flor. Cod., VI. 53. The Franciscans encountered a diversity of languages in New Spain, including Tarascan, Zapotec, Otomi, Maya, Mixtec, and Nahuatl; see Duverger, 1987, p. 170. Sahagún’s capacity and dedication to learning Nahuatl is confirmed

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The outset of Sahagún’s linguistic and cultural achievement sees him in the early 1530s learning Nahuatl with the help of elementary lexicons elaborated by fellow missionaries, such as Fray Francisco Jiménez’s.54 His subsequent continuous interaction with the students of Tlatelolco must have exerted an extremely positive impact on his progress and consolidation of the language. Mendieta outlined how the Franciscans, turning to the children whom they kept in their boarding schools, acquired knowledge of indigenous languages: They got into playing with them with sticks or pebbles […]. And [the friars] always had paper and ink in their hands, and upon hearing the word from the Indian, they wrote it, and the reason why he said it. In the evening, the churchmen would get together and communicated their writings to each other. The most able ones confronted the meaning of those words with Spanish as they thought most appropriate.55

Already in 1536, Sahagún had the chance of communicating in Nahuatl with some of his teenaged students of Tlatelolco. As their tutor of Latin he would have discussed Nahuatl terms with them and come up with Spanish and Latin equivalents, a linguistic exchange that, comparable to the seemingly childlike tactic portrayed in Mendieta’s passage, manifests itself as a sophisticated three-way linguistic activity. It involved the codification of Nahuatl in accorby Mendieta, who writes that “having arrived in this land, he quickly learnt the Mexican language” (“llegado a esta tierra, aprendió en breve la lengua mexicana,” 1973, II, p. 186). Mendieta names many of the friars who, like Sahagún, devoted themselves to the writing of texts in indigenous languages and cites the titles and nature of their works in Book IV, chapter XLIV of Historia eclesiástica indiana: “On how much the former Franciscans wrote in the Indians’ languages” (“[d]e lo mucho que escribieron los religiosos antiguos franciscanos en las lenguas de indios,” 1973, II, pp. 118-120). Numerous studies have examined some of the texts Mendieta mentions. See for example Zulaica Gárate 1939, Schwaller 1986, Castro y Castro 1988, Hernández Aparicio 1988, Hernández de León-Portilla 1988; 1998, Lockhart 1992, and edited volumes like Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística misionera by Zwartjes et al., 2005 and 2007. 54. Mendieta, 1973, I, p. 134. 55. “[S]e ponían a jugar con ellos con pajuelas o piedrezuelas [...]. Y tenían siempre papel y tinta en las manos, y en oyendo el vocablo al indio, escribíanlo, y al propósito que lo dijo. Y a la tarde juntábanse los religiosos y comunicaban los unos a los otros sus escritos, y los mejores que podían confrontaban a aquellos vocablos el romance que les parecía más convenir,” ibidem.

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dance with the orthographic conventions of Spanish, the debate on linguistic information and corroboration of meanings, and the translation of words into Spanish and Latin. Immersed in this teaching and learning environment, it is only three years later that Sahagún is singled out as interpreter in Zumárraga’s inquisitorial trial against Don Carlos Ometochtzin, Lord of Texcoco. Mendieta claims that Sahagún developed his competence to a degree that, by the end of his life, he had not been equalled by any other “in the secrets of [the language],” a linguistic command Mendieta continues to highlight by reassuring that no one “devoted himself so much to writing it.”56 Regardless of whether Mendieta exaggerated or not, the truth is that only in the following ten years up to 1549, which Sahagún spent in the friaries of Tlatelolco and Mexico City, he embarked on the creation of several works for conversion; the Sermones de dominicas y de sanctos en lengua mexicana, the Evangeliarium, epistolarium et lectionarium aztecum sive mexicanum, the Libro de la rethorica, and perhaps a trilingual vocabulary in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl.57 According to Bustamante García, an examination of these texts evidences an evolution in Sahagún’s linguistic approach towards the learning and the codification of the Nahuatl language that culminated with Historia universal.58 Sahagún wanted to adopt the pattern of two seminal lexicographic texts of his time, progressing from lists of words like Nebrija’s Spanish-Latin Vocabulario (ca. 1495) to the more sophisticated Ambrosio Calepino’s monolingual Latin dictionary Cornucopiae (1502). In addition, he broadened the scope of a proselytizing reference work from the Libro de la rethorica to the more variegated-themed Historia universal.59 A trilingual vocabulary that has been attributed to Sahagún, Dictionarium exbismensi [sic ‘hispaniensi’] in latinum sermonem, interprete Aelio Antonio Neprissensi. Lege foeliciter, helps to initiate this line of enquiry on the evolution of his approach. The text con56. The relevant quote reads: “[N]inguno otro hasta hoy se le ha igualado en alcanzar los secretos de ella [...] [,] ninguno tanto se ha ocupado en escribir en ella,” ibid., II, p. 186. 57. Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 403-406. 58. Ibid., 1989, pp. 29, 694; 1992, pp. 332, 336-341. 59. Ibid., 1990, p. 412; 1992, pp. 336-346. Nebrija and Calepino’s texts were available in the library of Tlatelolco. See Mathes, 1982, p. 32.

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sists of Nebrija’s Spanish-Latin vocabulary, copied literally from the second edition of 1516, of which seventy-two per cent of the entries are glossed in Nahuatl.60 Difficult as it is to date the manuscript, the primitive linguistic rationale upon which it builds places the beginning of its composition around 1540-1550.61 Forming part of the trilingual linguistic aspirations of the College of Tlatelolco, the vocabulary is a lexicographic source that may have been directed by Sahagún, if not by another tutor, and drawn on by the friars, their students, and assistants when working with the three languages in the comprehension of Latin and Spanish texts, and in the writing of sermons and translations into Nahuatl.62 Its initiator trusted Nebrija’s vocabulary as a reliable model without realizing that Nebrija’s work was only satisfactory for Latinate languages. As a result, the list of correspondences in Nahuatl was left unfinished. For example, the entry “Batalla” (battle or military unit) only registers these Spanish and Latin equivalents: “Batalla de gente a pie [/] phalanx, gis” (military unit of people standing), “Batalla real o la mas gruessa [/] subsidium” (real military unit or the largest), “Batalla puesta en guarnicion [/] praesidium, ii” (military unit in garrison), “Batalla tenida a cauallo [/] ala militaris” (battle upon a horse), and “Batalla la mesma pelea [/] proelium, ii” (battle; the fight in itself).63 The author or authors of this entry had two options; to leave a blank space for the Nahuatl version, as was the case above, or to come up with calques and strange circumlocutions, which is what happens with the related phrase “Batalla de gente a cauallo [/] turma, ae” (battle or 60. Also known as Vocabulario trilingüe, it belongs to the Ayer Collection of the Newberry Library of Chicago, manuscript 1478. Bustamante García has studied it in 1989, pp. 411-415; 1990, pp. 388-398, and Mary L. Clayton in her 1989 article. Bustamante García and Heréndira Téllez Nieto have identified the handwriting of a former student of Tlatelolco who became one of Sahagún’s assistants during the composition of Historia universal; see Téllez Nieto, 2010, pp. 192-195. 61. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 415; 1990, pp. 397-398. 62. Contrary to Bustamante García’s opinion, in her thorough 1989 study of the Vocabulario trilingüe Clayton sustains that nothing in this work ties it to Tlatelolco and Sahagún. The vocabulary might have been written outside an academic environment as a text to elucidate Spanish for the Nahuatl-speaking author and other speakers of Nahuatl. Added to this, the manuscript 1478 is not the original but a copy of an earlier trilingual manuscript, which explains the numerous mistakes the scribe made when misreading the handwriting. 63. Cited in Téllez Nieto, 2010, p. 110.

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military unit of people on horses), translated into Nahuatl as “iaoquizque cauallo ipaietiam” (battle upon horses or military unit that went on horses).64 Regardless of whether or not Sahagún took part in the creation of this trilingual vocabulary, the truth is that, like any other person learning and working with these languages at the time, he must have reflected on the impossibility of finding Nahuatl equivalents for Spanish and Latin terms. This difficulty would have spurred his desire to try a different tack to the codification of Nahuatl vocabulary. The introduction to the Sermones de dominicas y de sanctos or Sermonario, possibly started in the College of Tlatelolco between 1540 and 1548, provides some answers about the nature of his approach.65 In the first folio Sahagún explains that the sermons of this work, sixty-four following the liturgical calendar of Gospel readings for every Sunday, have not been 64. Aztec Manuscript Dictionary, 1957, fol. 28r. The awkward descriptive circumlocution in the Nahuatl language includes the loanword “cauallo.” To refer to a horse, during the first years of the colonization the Nahuas tended to use maçatl or deer, the only large quadruped and grazing animal known to them; see Lockhart, 1992, pp. 270-271. “Cauallo” is already used in colonial documents around 1548; see Karttunen and Lockhart, 1976, p. 55. It would be interesting to study whether, after experiencing problems with equivalents and due to the sheer quantity of treatises on the art of war that were in circulation, Sahagún viewed his earliest version on the conquest, composed around 1555, as a text out of which warfare terminology could be extracted, for instance, in order to speak about the Spiritual Conquest. In this respect, he writes in his prologue to Book XII: “I desired to write it in the Mexican language, not so much to derive certain truths from the account of the very Indians who took part in the Conquest, as to record the language of warfare and the weapons which the natives use in order that the terms and proper modes of expression for speaking on this subject in the Mexican language can be derived therefrom” (“qujsela yo escriujr en lengua mexicana, no tanto por sacar algunas verdades de la relacion de los mjsmos jndios [...] quanto por poner el lenguaje de las cosas de la guerra, y de las armas que en ella vsan los naturales: para que de alli se puedan sacar vocablos y maneras de dezir proprias, para hablar en lengua mexicana cerca desta materia,” Cod. Flor., Prologues, p. 101). Nevertheless, Cline sustains that Sahagún may have characterized this chronicle on the conquest as a linguistic tool “to present potentially controversial material,” 1989, p. 3. 65. The Sermonario (ca. 1563) belongs to the Ayer Collection; manuscript 1485. Bustamante García has studied it in 1989, pp. 2-32; 1990, pp. 58-89, and Burkhart also describes its characteristics in 1989, pp. 200-201. After an examination of the text Dibble and Mikkelsen drew the conclusion that it was written by a Nahua scribe, which confirms Sahagún’s reliance on the Tlatelolco students for the composition of doctrinal works already in the 1540s; see 1990, p. 346.

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translated from any sermonary but newly composed to the measure and capacity of the Indians. They are brief in content, and written in adequate, beautiful, everyday language, easy to understand for everyone who heard it, the high and low-upper class, and the commoners; men and women.66

Sahagún stresses that he did not translate any of the Latin and Spanish sermons contained in the collections or florilegia to which he had access in the library of Tlatelolco or in San Francisco in Mexico City.67 Renouncing translation, he copies the ideas and structure of model sermons. That is to say, he employs a homiletic skill in which he was first trained at the Friary of San Francisco in Salamanca and adapts the Christian message to catch the attention of the widest Nahua congregation, including both genders and nobles and commoners alike. Bearing his Nahua audience in mind, he steers away from word-for-word translations and strange circumlocutions to which the translation of model sermons, like the rendering of Nebrija’s Spanish and Latin terms into Nahuatl, would have led him, and embraces the rhetorical devices of clarity and simplicity recommended by the Franciscan rhetoricians Fray Roger Bacon and Fray Ubertino of Casale; in Sahagún’s words “adequate, beautiful, everyday language.” Bustamante García and Susanne Klaus have indicated that several of these sermons emulate the language and 66. “[N]o traduzidos de sermonario alguno sino conpuestos nuevamente a la medida y la capacidad de los indios: breves en materia y en lenguaje congruo venusto y llano facil de entender para todos los que le oyeren altos y baxos principales y macegoles hombres y mugeres,” cited in Bustamante García, 1989, p. 5; 1992, p. 335. 67. Like in any other European Franciscan friary of intellectual standing, in the catalogue of the library of Tlatelolco numerous collections of sermons are listed. The authors and editors of some of the oldest editions are Nicholaus Denyse (1507, 1508), St. Vincent Ferrer (1513, 1515), Nicolaus de Hacqueville (1507, 1521), Johannes Herolt (1514), Olivier Maillard (1503), Osvald Pelbart (1517), Sancho Porta (1513), Jean Raulin (1515 and 1518), and Giacomo Voraggio (1533). Other auxiliary works with homiletic material of which Sahagún probably availed are Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum, libri IV, with three editions published before 1554; St. Bonaventure’s first book of sentences (1510); a catalogue of saints by Petrus de Natalibus, titled Catalogus sanctorum (1516); a treatise on virtues by Guillaume Perrault, titled Summae uirtutum (1512); and different works on theology, such as four volumes of St. Antoninus’s Summa theologica (1500), Alexander of Hales’s Summa universae theologiae (1489), and the Franciscan collection Monumenta ordinis minorum (1511). See Mathes, 1982, pp. 47-69.

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the structure of the huehuetlahtolli, combining Nahua moral philosophy and Christian dogma. Some of them, for example, incorporate Nahua forms of address like the vocative “notlazopiltzine,” meaning my precious one, and difrasismos or metaphorical expressions like “techtlanextiliz techtlauiliz;” “he emits light, he lights our way with a candle.”68 In addition, some of the opening paragraphs do not include a generic or abstract exposition of moral principles, characteristic of sixteenth-century European sermons, but pieces of advice similar to those in huehuetlahtolli uttered by parents when urging their children to behave humbly and respectfully towards others.69 In the 1540s, after over ten years of missionary experience and with sound knowledge of the Nahuatl language, Sahagún had grown aware that the auxiliary preaching sources that he was accustomed to using, like florilegia and Nebrija’s vocabulary, were linguistically and culturally insufficient, proving wanting in the New Spain proselytizing context. He thinks of the range of rhetorical devices in the form of exhortations, similes, and allegories within Artes praedicandi, as well as of collections of Church fathers’ sentences, of classical authors’ proverbs, and of exempla. However, he knows that deploying any of these texts implies the translation of concepts into Nahuatl, which could create artificial representations of the language and is counterproductive for simplicity and for his audience’s comprehension of the Christian message. In order to resolve this, Sahagún must have been on the lookout for new sources to imitate. Already in 1533, he would have heard of the Nahua abilities that the Provincial Tastera, on behalf of the whole Franciscan commu68. Klaus, 1999, pp. 108, 243. For further reference on the two-word or twophrase metaphors, termed difrasismos, see Máynez 2009. Bustamante García notes that, like the Sermonario, the Evangeliarium epistolarium et lectionarium aztecum sive mexicanum or Evangeliario (ca. 1563), which was begun in the 1540s, “is very far away from being a literal and servile translation of the corresponding pericopes of the Vulgate. On the contrary, [the Evangeliario] reflects a particular concept of what preaching and the reading of the Bible ought to be, and shows no hesitation in being expressed in a very polished and rhetorical style, elaborated upon the Nahuatl language” (“está muy lejos de ser una traducción literal y servil de las perícopas correspondientes de la Vulgata; por el contrario, refleja un concepto concreto de lo que debe ser la predicación y la lectura de la Biblia y no duda en expresarse en un estilo retórico muy acabado y elaborado sobre la propia lengua náhuatl,” 1989, p. 49). 69. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 7; 1992, pp. 347-348.

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nity, set down in his letter to Charles V. One of the praised capacities was the Nahuas’ rhetorical training or “crianza de hablar,” epitomized by the huehuetlahtolli.70 Years later, Sahagún is linguistically prepared to undertake, with the help of an undetermined number of Nahua assistants, the codification of their ancestors’ rhetorical style for evangelization purposes, the result of which is the auxiliary preaching source Libro de la rethorica. His linguistic approach to Nahuatl distanced from awkward translations and the registration of isolated words to take on instead the compilation of specific rhetorical terminology as pronounced in its context of use.71 In his decision to adapt information from the huehuetlahtolli and copy their metaphors and fixed phrases Sahagún was under the influence of classical and patristic theories. As a student of Latin and rhetoric at Salamanca and a tutor of Latin at Tlatelolco, one of the textbooks with which he learnt, and which he then perused in his classes, must have been Quintilian’s De institutione oratoria, an edition of which was available in the library of Tlatelolco.72 In the fifth chapter of Book X Quintilian expounds his imitatio technique. He recommends the writing of free translations from Greek into Latin by first interpreting the original, which involves the analysis of

70. Toreno, 1877, I, p. 65. Ruiz Bañuls has examined the thematic resemblances between the huehuetlahtolli and the Sacred Scriptures that must have called Sahagún and his contemporaries’ attention, see 2009, pp. 135-157. For her also insightful juxtaposition of the expression of moral virtues in Nahuatl and Spanish, see pp. 187-199. 71. Dibble argues in this sense that the profound understanding of Nahuatl and the mastery of metaphors was vital for conversion, 1974, p. 227. As previously stated, in the composition of this kind of linguistic auxiliary works Sahagún was not alone. Olmos had likewise extracted a list of fixed phrases and metaphors from his collection of huehuetlahtolli and compiled them in his final chapter of Arte de la lengua mexicana, titled “on the manners of speech that the elders had in their ancient discourses” (“de las maneras de hablar que tenian los viejos en sus platicas antiguas,” Olmos, 2002, p. 177). Olmos structured this section into entries in Spanish, for example, “farmer or person of low estate” (“labrador o persona baja,”) and “graceful child, born as a jewel adornment” (“niño gracioso nacido como joya fundida,”) which are followed by a relevant excerpt or explanation in the Nahuatl language so that churchmen knew when and how to use them; Olmos, 2002, pp. 178-179. For a partial translation of Olmos’s section by Sullivan, see Knab, 1994, pp. 226-232, and for a brief comparison of metaphors and their treatment in Olmos and Sahagún’s works, see Hanson, 1994, pp. 31-33. 72. Mathes, 1982, p. 64.

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the structure of the source text, and second, by rewriting the text, when students can add more of their own style.73 In the same vein, Sahagún considered that for the composition of sermons he needed a model of imitation to study and paraphrase; he regarded the emulation of exemplary works as the key to mastering the science of oratory and writing an inspiring speech. Another relevant figure that discussed the recurrence to models for uplifting sermons was Augustine; the Church father who had par excellence nurtured the rise of Christian rhetoric as an indispensable tool to approach pagans. Sahagún studied his work during his religious education in Salamanca and must have consulted the Opuscula volume of Augustine’s texts in the library of Tlatelolco.74 In the fourth book of De doctrina christiana (ca. 427 AD), Augustine revives his knowledge of Ciceronian rhetoric, which he had taught in his youth, and brings to the fore Cicero’s concept of the power of eloquence in order to capture the attention of an audience. Augustine exhorts the Christian orator to employ Cicero and Horace’s maxim of educating and pleasing (prodesse et delectare), also placing emphasis upon intelligibility as another of the preacher’s main responsibilities. For Augustine, in all human beings there is an inner truth to be awakened through the pronunciation of edifying sermons, in which selected words function as carriers of an evocative nature that facilitates the discernment of virtue from sin.75 The preacher, in uttering those words to his audience, is able to evoke ideas that help them to identify the path to be followed. This theory translates in Sahagún’s understanding that authentic oral representations of Nahua rhetoric and moral eloquence could be drawn on so as to unleash a mental process that 73. Quintilian, 1922, IV, pp. 113-127. The imitatio technique must have been one of the writing exercises that Sahagún asked his students to practise in their classes of Latin. He claims that they were able to “write heroic verses” (“hacer versus heruicus,” Hist. gen., X, p. 634), typical of classical epic like the Aeneid by Virgil, an author Sahagún eulogized as a Latin auctoritas, see Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 50. 74. Mathes, 1982, p. 48. Sahagún mentions De civitate dei in the prologue to Book III of Historia universal—see Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 59—, and dedicates some of the August psalms of Psalmodia christiana to Augustine; see Sahagún, 1993b, pp. 265-274. The importance of Augustine’s work for the construction of Historia universal is explored in chapter III of this study. 75. Sullivan, 2008, p. 93.

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would awaken the Nahua listener’s belief in the evangelical message.76 The codification of the Nahua rhetoric of ancient orators would enable him and other churchmen to grasp the Nahuas’ linguistic, moral, and cultural knowledge, which became instrumental to ensuring the composition of more instructional, pleasing, and convincing sermons, thanks to which the divine word would be circulated in an intelligible and sustainable manner—hence, Sahagún’s depiction of the language of the Sermonario as “adequate, beautiful, everyday language,” and his insistence that the Libro de la rethorica abounds in elegant and inspiring metaphors.77 Apart from supplying an auxiliary text for imitation, the composition of the Libro de la rethorica obeys another objective of Sahagún’s that was in tune with the works of contemporary intellectuals; the transformation of vernacular languages into a literary language, a “lengua autorizada” or of renown. Bustamante García holds the view that Sahagún echoes the linguistic theories of humanists like the Italian Cardinal Pietro Bembo, an influential figure in sixteenth-century 76. Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 704-707; 1992, p. 356. Along the same lines, Bustamante García proposes the influence of another patristic source within the Christian rhetorical tradition; St. Gregory’s Cura pastoralis, see 1989, pp. 653-654. 77. Flor. Cod., VI, p. 99. In this respect, Burkhart notices that the persuasiveness of the friars’ rhetoric “depended on their ability to borrow [indigenous] tropes [...] and apply them to Christian ends,” 1989, p. 188. Sahagún acknowledges this and for the composition of sermons he even encourages preachers to emulate, in particular, the nineteenth huehuetlahtolli of Book VI, on how a noble mother advised her daughter. He repeats this suggestion in the introduction of his translation into Spanish of the eighteenth and the nineteenth huehuetlahtolli. “Because of their language and style,” the passage reads, “these two speeches, if pronounced from the pulpit mutatis mutandis, would be of more use than many sermons for young men and women” (“[m]ás aprovecharían estas dos pláticas dichas en el púlpito, por el lenguaje y estilo que están, mutatis mutandis, que muchos sermones a los mozos y mozas,” Hist. gen., VI, p. 370). In Adiciones, apendice a la postilla Sahagún turns his own theory into practice. He admits to having composed the sixth admonition, in which “our mother the sacred Roman Church admonishes young people on how they have to live with prudence in public” (“nuestra madre la Santa Iglesia Romana amonesta a los jóvenes cómo han de vivir con externa prudencia,” 1993a, p. 105), by taking as a reference those huehuetlahtolli or “the admonitions through which the elders admonished their young people on how to live in public with prudence” (“las amonestaciones con las cuales los ancianos amonestaban a sus jóvenes acerca del vivir públicamente con prudencia,” ibidem). See also Anderson, 1999, pp. 151-152.

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Spain, and the Spaniard Juan de Valdés.78 The contention of Bembo in Prose della volgar lingua (1525) is that vernacular languages reached a cultivated stage provided that they possessed a grammar and literary authenticity. That is to say, when aspiring for recognition, languages ought to be enclosed within a fixed written corpus that integrated all their “correct” and “pure” uses. In Italy, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had “authorized” or certified the rhetorical and poetic excellence of the dialect of Tuscany. In Spain, Nebrija had published the first grammar of Castilian-Spanish, Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492). However, Castilian still lacked auctoritates to serve as a model of imitation and prove its purity. Valdés recognizes this pitfall and proposes turning to the codification of a popular linguistic patrimony, that of ancient sayings, which he articulates in this passage of Diálogo de la lengua, written in 1535: (Marcio) […] If you have not got books in Castilian, with the authority of which you can satisfy us […] [,] you can serve yourself of the manuscript of Castilian sayings that, you say, you and your friends compiled […]. (Torres) You are right indeed, because those sayings reflect very clearly the purity of the Castilian language. […] (Valdés) […] [T]he best the sayings have is to have been born from the people.79

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, gathering sayings and proverbs enjoyed popularity around Europe, and in Spain this fascination is portrayed in early works like Refranes que dicen las viejas tras el fuego (first known edition, 1508) by Don Íñigo López de Mendoza, the Marquis of Santillana, and in later collections like the one Valdés alludes to in general terms as a cuaderno. Valdés was doing nothing but to recall other intellectual figures of his time. When Sahagún studied in Salamanca, the Portuguese lecturer of rhetoric Arias Barbosa declared that rhetorical and ethical wisdom stemmed from sacred hymns and proverbs.80 Had Sahagún attended his class78. Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 680-686. 79. “(Marcio) […] si no tenéis libros en castellano con cuya autoridad nos podáis satisfacer […] [,] os podréis servir del Cuaderno de refranes castellanos que me decís cogiste entre amigos […]. (Torres) Muy bien habéis dicho, porque en aquellos refranes se ve muy bien la puridad de la lengua castellana. […] (Valdés) […] lo mejor que los refranes tienen es ser nacidos en el vulgo.” Valdés, 1982, p. 126. 80. Morocho Gayo, 2000, p. 185.

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es, he would have been imbued with the same ideas as was Núñez de Guzmán, former student of Barbosa in Salamanca and later professor of rhetoric, who published Refranes castellanos o proverbios en romance (1555) and who, in turn, influenced his student, Juan de Mal Lara, author of another compilation of sayings titled Philosophia vulgar (1568).81 It could be said that, like Valdés in Spain, in New Spain Sahagún felt equally confronted with the inexistence of Nahuatl auctoritates. Sure that the codification of oral tradition, in this case what he understood as Nahua rhetoric and moral philosophy, was the beginning of a project that would turn Nahuatl into a written prestigious language for evangelization, Sahagún mirrored the theories of Barbosa that had been materialized by Núñez de Guzmán. In his search for a literary model of reference and imitation that guaranteed accuracy and clarity of the language, Sahagún took to the task of producing the Libro de la rethorica, which comprised Nahua speeches together with sections of sayings, conundrums, and metaphors.82 The objective of creating a homiletic resource that codified and fixed the purity of Nahuatl as an “authorized” or verified language of evangelization evolved into a more ambitious project. When in 1558 Sahagún undertakes the completion of other auxiliary works “as a help to the workers and ministers who indoctrinate [the indigenous peoples],” one of these, Historia universal, is envisaged to function as a much more varied compendious source than the Libro de la rethorica.83 Sahagún tailors the project of a new work not only for the preacher, who speaks “against the evils of the State, in order to marshal his teachings against them” and open the Nahuas to the truth of Christianity, but also for “the confessor, in order to know how to ask 81. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 685; 1992, p. 352. 82. Ibid., 1989, pp. 679-687. One of the most acknowledged texts of this kind throughout Europe was Erasmus’s Adages (Paris 1500, Venice 1508, Basel 1515). It consists of classical proverbs, popular sayings, and metaphors, all with their explanations, which is what Sahagún provides in Book VI. Whether Sahagún modelled this book on Erasmus’s work is unknown but it is worth noting that Sahagún opts to mainly name the Nahua sayings as adagios (adages), rather than as refranes (sayings) or proverbios (proverbs); see Flor. Cod., VI, p. 219, and I, p. 81. 83. “[P]ara ayuda, de los obreros, y minjstros, que los doctrinan,” ibid., Prologues, p. 53.

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what is proper and understand what [penitents] may say.”84 The contents of Historia universal, like those of the Libro de la rethorica, are targeted at churchmen to copy the language and to learn about the Nahuas’ moral beliefs and culture, but they also operate as a means of deciphering what Sahagún terms as the Nahuas’ “idolatrous matters;” namely, the falsities and idolatries conjured up by the Devil in the form of the gods they worshipped, their festivities, their astrology, and their omens. As Sahagún maintains “[t]o preach against these matters, and even to know if they exist, it is needful to know how they practiced them in the times of their idolatry,” because this lack of knowledge generated situations in which “they perform many idolatrous things in our presence without our understanding it.”85 Even at the end of his life Sahagún perseveres in calling churchmen to avail of his investigations on Nahua culture, arguing that “both preachers and confessors will be able to understand what they can and must ask while administering confession, and what they can and must preach in their sermons in a fruitful manner.”86 For the creation of this new linguistic and encyclopaedic work Sahagún likely relied on the humanist notions of paidea and studia humanitatis, the universal or overarching education that Cicero and Augustine endorsed.87 In De oratore and De inventione Cicero defines the perfect orator as a man whose knowledge integrates rhetoric with civil law, history, geography, literature, philosophy, civil and natural sciences, and mathematics. Augustine, appropriating this wide-ranging knowledge for Christian orators or preachers, similarly welcomes an all-embracing instruction of the clergy that entailed the mastery of a number of disciplines. He prescribes these in his second book of De doctrina christiana as: 84. “El predicador de los Viçios de la Republica para endereçar contra ellos su doctrina [...] [,] el confessor para sauer preguntar lo que conuiene y entender lo que dixeren,” ibid., p. 45. 85. “Para predicar contra estas cosas y aun para saber si las ay: menester es, de saber como las vsauã en tiempos de su ydolatria [...] [,] en [nuestra] presencia hazen muchas cosas ydolatricas: sin que lo entendamos,” ibidem. 86. “[A]sí los predicadores como los confesores podrán entender lo que les pueden y deben preguntar en las confessiones, y lo que les pueden y deben provechosamente predicar en los sermones,” cited from the prologue to Arte adivinatoria (ca. 1585) in García Icazbalceta, 1954, p. 386. 87. Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 702-704; 1992, pp. 357-358.

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Historical narrative [with] human institutions of the past […], various studies of topography and zoology, and of trees, plants, stones, and other such things […], astronomy, [and] [...] arts, by which something is manufactured, whether it be an artefact that remains after a craftsman has worked on it (like a house or a stool or a vessel of some kind, and so on), or whether they provide some service for God to work with (like medicine, agriculture, or navigation), or whether the whole end product consists in action (as in dancing, running, and wrestling).88

Undoubtedly, the twelve books of Historia universal meet the incorporation of all these disciplines, and Sahagún wittingly refers to its nature as an all-covering “dragnet” that, also complying with its lexicographic dimension, brings to “light all the words of [the Nahuatl language] with their exact and metaphorical meanings.”89 He highlights this dual goal in several of his prologues; for example, in that of Book IV, on astrology, he addresses the reader as “[y]ou also have a great abundance of terms dealing with this matter,” and in that of Book XI, on the natural world, he explains that “there is a great abundance of words and many current expressions, very correct, and very common, very pleasing material. […] And so the present volume can be held or esteemed as a compendium [treasure] of the idioms and words of this Mexican language, and a very rich storehouse of the things which are in this land.”90 Interestingly, Sahagún conceives 88. The original text translated by Green reads: “Narratione autem historica cum praeterita etiam hominum instituta narrantur […]. In quo genere sunt quaecumque de locorum situ naturisque animalium, lignorum, herbarum, lapidum aliorumve corporum scripta sunt […]. Siderum, [autem cognoscendorum non narratio, sed demonstratio est, quorum perpauca Scriptura commemorate.] […] Artium etiam ceterarum, quibus aliquid fabricatur, vel quod remaneat post operationem artificis ab illo effectum, sicut domus et scamnum et vas aliquod atque alia huiuscemodi, vel quae ministerium quoddam exhibent operanti Deo, sicut medicina et agricultura et gubernatio, vel quarum omnis effectus est actio, sicut saltationum et cursionum et luctaminum,” Augustine, 1995, pp. 107-111. 89. “[U]na red barredera [de] todos los vocablos desta lengua con sus propias y methaphoricas significaçiones,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 47. 90. “Tienes tambien mucha copia de lenguaje: tocante a esta materia,” ibid., p. 62; “ai, gran copia de vocablos: i mucho lenguaje: mui proprio i mui comū: i materia mui gustosa. […] Ansi que, el presente volumẽ, se podra tener, o estimar, como vn tesoro, de lenguaje i vocablos desta lengua mexicana: i vna recamara, muy rica de las cosas que ai en esta tierra,” ibid., pp. 87-88. For a similar argument, see prologues to Books VI, VII, X, and XII. In his prologue to Book VII Sahagún even excuses himself for the desgusto or displeasure caused to the reader of the Nahuatl and the

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Book XI as a tesoro (a linguistic compendium or treasure), the term that gives title to the celebrated monolingual dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), consisting of definitions, etymology of words, and examples of use in classical and religious texts, and in Spanish sayings. The lexicographic “treasure” in which Sahagún finds inspiration for Historia universal is obviously an earlier work than Covarrubias’s; the Italian humanist Ambrosio Calepino’s Cornucopiae (1502). Sahagún mentions this dictionary in the prologue to Book I as follows: “When this work began, it began to be said by those who knew of it, that a [Calepin] was being made. And, even now, many keep on asking me: ‘How does the [Calepin] progress?’”91 Known by its author’s surname, the Calepin was an exhaustive monolingual Latin dictionary in which entries comprised grammar information, definitions, synonyms, and quotes from classical authors’ literature.92 While Sahagún may well have wished for a “Nahuatl Calepin,” a work in which, he implies, other friars also expressed an interest, he accepted the impossibility of such a worthwhile enterprise. “Certainly it would be very beneficial to produce so useful a work for those who desire to learn this Mexican language,” Sahagún agrees, but he laments that:

Spanish texts: “[T]here are many synonymous terms for [any] other thing, and a mode of expression or a sentence is said in many ways. This was done on purpose to know and record all the vocabulary of each thing and all the modes of expressing each sentence. And this is not only in this Book but in the whole work” (“de vna cosa van muchos nõbres sinonjmos: y vna manera de dezir o vna sentencia va dicha de muchas maneras, esto se hizo aposta, para saber y escreujr, todos los vocablos de cada cosa: y todas las maneras de dezir de cada sentencia: y esto no solamante en este libro pero en toda la obra,” ibid., p. 68). 91. “[Q]uando esta obra se començo, començose a decir, de los que lo supieron: que se hazia vn calepino: y aun hasta agora, no cesan muchos de me preguntar, que en que termjnos anda el calepino?,” ibid., p. 50. 92. To serve as an example, the entry “Ābdo,” “I hide or remove” from the infinitive abdere, is followed by its verbal forms and prepositions, by the synonyms “ab[s]condo, occulto, obtego, retrudo” (hidden, concealed, covered, pushed back), and by sentences of auctoritates who used it, like Livy, Cicero, and Virgil; see Calepinus 1620, unspecified page number. The Calepin became so popular across Europe that by the end of the sixteenth century it was a polyglot vocabulary including English, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish; see Bustamante García, 1992, p. 341. In New Spain, it influenced other linguistic works, like Fray Juan Baptista de Lagunas’s Dictionario breve y compendioso en la lẽgua de Michuacan (1574); see Zulaica Gárate, 1939, p. 172.

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[T]here has not been an opportunity, because Calepino drew the words, their meanings, their equivocal and metaphors from reading the poets, orators, and other authors of the Latin language, verifying everything said with the expressions of the authors; which source I have lacked, there being neither letters nor writing among this people.93

Sahagún resigns to the absence of Nahua written sources or auctoritates that could have given credit to the meaning and application of words, a concern already raised by Valdés. However, he is content with a no less impressive assignment; the production of a corpus with linguistic authority and, to this end, he and his Nahuatl assistants strove for the design of a three-column page format: “[T]he first in the Spanish language, the second in the Mexican language; the third is the explanation of the Mexican words.”94 Sahagún envisages an encyclopaedic work for preachers and confessors who would compare the translation into Spanish on the left with the Nahuatl-source text in the centre, and consult the relevant lexicographic glosses or notes relating to the Nahuatl text on the right. Reminiscent of the Calepin, this right-hand column contains entries with definitions in Spanish, grammatical features, collocations, and synonyms.95 Unfortunately for Sahagún, conforming to this rigorous linguistic structure was time-consuming and dependent on additional financial support which he was denied.96 Thus, this layout is only reflected in the surviving manuscripts of the “Memoriales con escolios,” believed to have been written in Tlatelolco around 1565. 93. “Ciertamente, fuera harto prouechoso, hazer vna obra tan vtil: para los que qujeren deprender esta lengua mexicana [...] [,] no a aujdo oportunjdad: porque Calepino saco los vocablos, y las significationes dellos, y sus equjuocationes, y methaphoras, de la lection, de los poetas, y oradores, y de los otros authores, de la lengua latina: autorisando todo lo que dize, con los dichos de los authores: el qual fundamento, me a faltado a mj: por no auer letras, nj escriptura entre esta gente,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 50. 94. “[L]a primera, de lengua española: la segunda, de la lengua mexicana: la tercera, la declaracion, de los vocablos mexicanos,” ibid., p. 51. 95. Sahagún also leaves notice of his objective on the top margin of one of the pages of the “Manuscrito con escolios,” where he writes that “the entire work has to be done in the manner of this manuscript” (“de la manera que esta este quaderno a de ir toda la obra,” Sahagún, 1905-1907, VI, p. 177). 96. Sahagún refers to the Franciscan disfavour that prevented him from completing this project in the second prologue to Book II, see Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 55-56.

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These include the first five chapters of what eventually became Book VII of Historia universal—on the sun, the moon, the stars, and the clouds—and chapters I, II, and part of III of Book X—on the Christian categorization of virtuous versus sinful people according to family relationship and age.97 Although a clean copy of the Nahuatl text, intended to occupy the central column, was finished in 1569, still at the end of 1575 Sahagún grieved that “[i]t has not yet been possible to put [the twelve books] in Spanish nor provide them with the scholia, according to the pattern of the work.”98 Sahagún, nonetheless, remained expectant of the utility of the work that had been completed until then. He neither elaborated a dictionary with entries arranged in alphabetical order, like the Calepin, nor the three-column page work with the glosses or lexicographic notes, but he “laid the groundwork in order that whosoever may desire can prepare [the Nahuatl Calepin] with ease;” a text in which future learners and speakers of Nahuatl would find “all the manners of speech and all the words this language uses, as well verified and certain as that which Virgil, Cicero, and other authors wrote in the Latin language.”99 97. For a facsimile reproduction, see Sahagún, 1905-1907, VI and VII. Anderson and Dibble edited and translated the “Memoriales con escolios” dealing with astronomy and meteorology in Flor. Cod., VII, pp. 34-81. 98. “[A]un no se an podido Romançar ni poner las escolias segun la traça de la obra,” ibid., Prologues, p. 46. 99. “[E]che los fundamentos, para qujen qujsiere, con facilidad le pueda hazer: […] hallarse han […] todas las maneras de hablar, y todos los vocablos, que esta lengua vsa: tambien autorizados, y ciertos: como lo que escriujo Vergilio, y Ciceron, y los demas authores, de la lengua latina,” ibid., p. 50. Sahagún even resorts to protecting the purity and veracity of the Nahuatl text by taking issue with those who criticized that he was inventing the language. Thus, in his prologue to Book VI he says: “In this book, it will be very clearly seen that (as to what some rivals have asserted, that all written in these Books, preceding this one and following this one, is invention and lies) they speak as intolerant and liars [...] [.] And, if they are asked, all the informed Indians will assert that this language is characteristic of their ancestors and the words they produced” (“En este libro se vera muy claro, que lo que algunos emulos an afirmado que todo lo escripto en estos libros ante[s] deste y despues deste son fictiones y mentiras: hablan como apassionados y mentirosos […] [,] y todos los indios entendidos si fueren preguntados afirmaran que este lenguaje es el propio de sus antepasados y obras que ellos hazian,” ibid., pp. 65-66). So far there has been no attempt to complete such a gigantic linguistic corpus of a “Nahuatl Calepin.” Máynez has nevertheless edited a dictionary of the Nahuatl terminology within the Spanish translation of Historia universal; see 2002.

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Books on Antiquities and Geographical Accounts The Nahuatl text of the right-hand column of the Florentine Codex was originally expected to lend itself as one of the three columns of a magnum opus for conversion purposes; an auxiliary text for preachers and confessors, developed for the Spiritual Conquest of the Nahuas. It was also a work that raised Nahuatl to the level of an accredited language and furnished terminology and examples of use for the writing of a future Nahuatl Calepin. Nevertheless, by the time the Nahuatl text had been finished, Sahagún’s project ended up enmeshed within a wider spectrum of works that stemmed from a related colonial political context—the imperial desire to know so as to control, for which the Franciscans’ investigation of indigenous peoples and their cultures was of central importance.100 Successful occupation, expansion, and facilitation of administrative and economic rule over the newly-acquired territories of the New World hinged on familiarity with the land, its resources, and its people. Both Charles V and Philip II were cognizant of this, and throughout the sixteenth century their cosmographers demanded and compiled so-named “descripciones,” accounts that incorporated to a large or lesser degree data on indigenous peoples and cultures. Thanks to these documents the emperors “read” their possessions and had an illusionary perception of the totality of the other side of the Atlantic that they ruled but had not visited.101 Commissions of this nature in New Spain date back to 1528. Charles V asked relevant authorities for the composition of a first Descripción de Nueva España that would report on the “extent and size of that New Spain, on its land and provinces, and on its populated settlements, and neighbouring settlements, and its area, and quality [of the land].”102 In several 1530 decrees, one of them the “Ordenanzas sobre el buen tratamiento de los indios de la nueua España” (“Ordinances on the proper treatment of the Indians of the New Spain”), the Crown began to call for the collection of more 100. This line of enquiry can be traced back to Anderson, 1982, pp. 35-37. 101. Craib, 2000, p. 19. 102. “[G]randor y tamaño de esa Nueva España, y sus tierras y provincias y de los pueblos dellas y de qué vecinos es cada pueblo, y qué termino tiene, y de la calidad dellos,” cited in Encinas, 1956, I, p. 342.

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than geographical accounts. Descriptions were to detail pre-Hispanic traditions, termed at the time as antiguallas or antigüedades (antiquities), such as on the quantity and nature of tributes, commoners’ duties to their indigenous leaders, and additional civil and political practices. Three writings originated from this 1530 royal request; an anonymous document known as “la orden que tenian los yndios en suceder en las tierras y valdios” (“the inheritance rule on lands and uncultivated lands that these Indians had,”) and two letters from the President of the Second Audiencia, Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal; one on pre-Hispanic political and economic organization in the Valley of Mexico, dated on 3 November 1532, and the other on judicial matters, on 15 May 1533.103 This material, nonetheless, proved insufficient to a Crown that wished for a further delving into indigenous antiguallas. In a missive from 19 December 1533, Charles V solicited the Second Audiencia for “a long and specific account,” that contained not only information on the “quality of the land […], hydrography, as well as reports on flora and fauna,” but also “a description of their pre-Hispanic times, [...] including their rites and traditions.”104 In order to meet a similar request, Mendieta documents that Ramírez de Fuenleal, Bishop Zumárraga, and the leading member of the Twelve, Fray Martín de Valencia, agreed on the nomination of Olmos, “(because he was the best speaker of the Mexican language who at the time lived in this land, and a verywell educated and discreet man),” so that he recorded “in a book the antiquities of these Indian natives, particularly of Mexico, Texcoco, and Tlaxcala.”105 Olmos was then to conduct research on preHispanic traditions and beliefs not only in order to satisfy the emperor’s demand, but also to acquire knowledge on the indigenous peoples with the aim of advancing conversion. For approximately twenty years, he visited several centres of the Nahua world, like

103. Bustamante García, 2000, pp. 41-45. 104. “[U]na larga y particular relación [de] calidades de la tierra […], hidrografía, así como informes sobre flora y fauna […] y noticias de la historia prehispánica […] poniendo sus ritos y costumbres,” cited in Solano, 1988, I, p. 4, and Bustamante García, 2000, p. 44. 105. “([P]or ser la mejor lengua mexicana que entonces había en esta tierra, y hombre docto y discreto) [...] [que sacase] en un libro las antigüedades de estos naturales indios, en especial de México y Texcuco y Tlaxcala,” Mendieta, 1973, I, p. 47.

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Huexotzinco, Cholula, Tepeaca, and Tlalmanalco, where he interrogated indigenous leaders, studied pre-Hispanic codices, and collected accounts. Combining his project with other Christian missions, during this time span he also commanded the building of two friaries—in Tecamachalco around 1540 and in Tampico in 1554—, and entered unexplored territories to evangelize the indigenous peoples of Hueytlalpan from 1539 to 1553.106 Around 1539, he completed the Tratado de antigüedades mexicanas, a collection of variegated cultural data on the origins of different communities, their mythology, sacrifices, ceremonies, and education of children. Four copies of this work were shipped to Spain, none of them to arrive. In 1546, he set off to redo the work, the result being a Suma or recompilation of the material that he had deployed for his earlier text.107 The urgency to comprehend indigenous religious practices, which was believed to smooth conversion, in conjunction with responsiveness to the vast extent of information that ought to be covered, saw other appointments simultaneous to that of Olmos. The Franciscan Chapter held at Pentecost in 1536 passed a motion that entrusted Motolinía with a similar enterprise. He carried out investigations and apostolic activities in Tlaxcala, and travelled extensively to other areas, such as to the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Puebla, and Guatemala. Although he produced a series of texts, only a mutilated version of two of them, Historia de los indios de la Nueva España and the Memoriales, are nowadays available to the general public.108 Like Olmos, in the first part of his “history” 106. Ibid., p. 49. For further reference, see Baudot, 1995, pp. 137-144. 107. Of this missing work, two portions that have been attributed to Olmos by Baudot and Wilkerson are the Códice del Museo de América, also known as Codex Tudela, and the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas. Juxtaposing preHispanic paintings with explanations in Spanish, the Codex Tudela incorporates data on the Nahua ritual calendar, with its movable feasts and ceremonies in honour of gods like Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, whereas the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas offers a more detailed portrayal of Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, and Huitzilopochtli. For further reference, see Wilkerson, 1974, pp. 27-78. In his study of the Codex Tudela, nevertheless, Juan José Batalla Rosado does not link the codex to Olmos’s investigations, see Batalla Rosado 2002. 108. See the inventory of texts that are considered to be part of Motolinía’s commission in Baudot, 1995, pp. 275-340. Historia de los indios and the Memoriales were published in the second half of the nineteenth century as Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, relación de los ritos antiguos, idolatrías y sacri-

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or description of New Spain, Motolinía is concerned with the compilation of data on gods, ceremonies, and beliefs, and devotes chapters V and VI specifically to movable feasts, astrology, calendrical knowledge, rites, and sacrifices. Contrary to Olmos, and aiming perhaps for a wide-ranging description—if not influenced as well by Charles V and Philip II’s demand for provision of information on the physical resources of their domains—, Motolinía also deals with the geography, flora, and fauna of New Spain. By way of example, in the third part of chapter X, he writes on “the abundance of rivers and water in these mountains, specially of two very remarkable springs; and on other particularities and qualities of these mountains; and on how tigers and lions have killed many people,” and in chapter XIX, he describes “the tree or cardoon called maguey, and many things that are made from it, such as food, beverages, materials for shoes and clothing, and on its properties.”109 During the second half of the sixteenth century, the emperors’ insistence on the creation of descriptions and maps of their New World possessions for the betterment of governance and maximization of resources continued to intensify upon the advice of Alonso de Santa Cruz; Charles V’s former tutor of astronomy and cosmography. Santa Cruz became their leading cosmographer between 1553 and 1567.110 Already around 1546, he drew to the attention of a high official, maybe the President of the Council of the Indies, at the time the Marquis of Mondéjar, the insufficiency of mostly graphic imagery of space to describe new lands. Santa Cruz recommended both the composition of more comprehensive itemized questionnaires, which enquired on tributes, geography, flora and fauna, discovery of the land, and indigenous peoples and their cultures, as well as the sysficios de los Indios de la Nueva España, y de la maravillosa conversión que Dios en ellos ha obrado (History of the Indians of the New Spain, account of the ancient rites, idolatries and sacrifices of the Indians of the New Spain, and of the marvellous conversion that God has worked upon them). 109. “De la abundancia de ríos y aguas que hay en estos montes [en] especial de dos muy notables fuentes; y de otras particularidades y calidades de estos montes; y de cómo los tigres y leones han muerto mucha gente,” Motolinía, 1985, p. 247; “Del árbol o cardo llamado maguey, y de muchas cosas que de él se hacen, así de comer como de beber, calzar y vestir, y de sus propiedades,” ibid., p. 292. 110. Bustamante García, 2000, p. 49. Santa Cruz’s duties are widely discussed in Mundy 1996 and Portuondo 2009.

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tematization of the influx of information. The questionnaires were to be dispatched to local governors and the answers, returned to Spain, examined and reworked for the production of a chronicle-atlas of the New World.111 Friars, in regular contact with the indigenous peoples and capable of communicating in their languages, were of utmost importance for the mission, as Charles V and Philip II recognized in at least two decrees sent to New Spain, dated 27 November 1548 and 20 December 1553. The latter called upon “churchmen to ask amongst them who spoke the language […] [and] [officials] to also obtain information about them.”112 Triggered by this or a similar call to search for missionaries who had sufficient knowledge of indigenous languages for the collection of data, Motolinía sent a letter to Charles V on 2 January 1555, informing him of “three or four friars,” who including himself, had “written on the ancient matters and traditions that these natives had.”113 Until then, it is known that at least five Franciscans had compiled information of this kind; Olmos, Motolinía, Fray Martín de la Coruña, Fray Francisco de las Navas, and Sahagún.114 La Coruña had completed the Relación de Michoacán (ca. 1553), a compendium on Tarascan mythology and judicial and political administration; Las Navas, a chronicle containing a Tlaxcalan calendar (ca. 1554); and Sahagún, the Libro de la rethorica (1547) and a first draft on the conquest of Mexico (ca. 1555)—eventually Book XII of Historia universal.115 Their works responded to a missionary project that looked to gather data on the indigenous peoples for a more effective Christianization, and complied, at the same time, with the royal demands of knowledge for the improvement of administrative control and exploitation of New World resources. This 111. The project and the questionnaires were informed by similar practices applied to the compilation of knowledge from the different regions of sixteenthcentury Spain. See Miguélez, 1915, pp. 1-7, Mundy, 1996, pp. 16-17. 112. “[L]os religiosos […] soliciten entre ellos los que supieren en la lengua, [y] que […] tambien os ynformeys de los tales religiosos,” cited in Puga, 1945, VIII, p. 141. 113. “[T]res o cuatro frailes hemos escrito de las antiguallas y costumbres que estos naturales tuvieron,” cited in Garibay Kintana, 1953-1954, II, p. 22 114. Garibay Kintana bestows upon Motolinía and these friars the label of “misioneros etnógrafos,” ibid., II, pp. 21-61. 115. For a description of La Coruña and Las Navas’s works, see Baudot, 1995, pp. 438, 474-476.

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crossroads of religious works on indigenous matters and royal and official authorities’ requests for similar documents was to be repeated in the case of Sahagún’s 1558 appointment. In this year, the recently-elected Highest Prelate of the Franciscan Order of New Spain was Fray Francisco de Toral, who, prior to his arrival in the 1540s, had participated in the evangelization of the Moors in Spain. Like Zumárraga, Toral promoted the correct use of the language of the neophytes and of those to be converted. As he had probably experienced, the absence of this practice resulted in superficial conversion, potentially giving rise to sins and the preservation of heretical attitudes against Christianity. In fact, Toral learnt Nahuatl and was one of the first missionaries to master Popoloc, a language in which, according to Mendieta, he wrote a grammar and several doctrinal works.116 Recognizing the conversion benefits of these and other texts similar in contents to the ones resulting from the assignments so far given to Olmos and Motolinía, Toral requested of Sahagún the creation of more, this time, “in the Mexican language,” “for the indoctrination, the propagation, and perpetuation of the Christianization of these natives of New Spain.”117 Sahagún explains that he carried out the duties of his appointment with the help of some Nahua assistants in three places. In Tepepulco, for nearly two years, he began to garner information and dictated to his assistants the Postilla and the Cantares, after which he returned to Tlatelolco. By 1565, he was living in the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City, where the doctrinal works were rewritten, and in 1569, in the midst of suspicions and attacks against the authenticity and practicality of Historia univer116. Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 209. See also Vicente Castro and Rodríguez Molinero, 1986, pp. 123-124, and Morales, 2007, pp. 26-27. 117. “[E]n lengua mexicana […] para la doctrina, cultura, y manutenencia, de la cristiandad, destos naturales, desta nueua españa,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 53. There exists the possibility that Sahagún suggested to Toral the necessity of continuing with the composition of auxiliary doctrinal works in Nahuatl, such as the Libro de la rethorica of 1547 and the Sermonario and the Evangeliario, initiated in the 1540s. Upon his appointment as Highest Prelate, Toral is likely to have secured financial support for Sahagún’s commission. In fact, it is known that in 1560 Toral set sights on allocating funds for the College of Tlatelolco; the ideal environment for the writing of Sahagún’s texts. On this, see reproduction of Toral’s letter to Philip II in Morales, 2007, pp. 26-27.

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sal in particular, the first clean copy of the twelve books in the Nahuatl language was finalized.118 In 1570, Sahagún submitted these twelve books to the assessment of a provincial Chapter Meeting that esteemed his undertaking as “writings of much worth [that] should be supported so that they might be completed”—in all likelihood according to the threecolumn format to which Sahagún aspired.119 Despite this propitious reaction, the new Franciscan Provincial Fray Alonso de Escalona confiscated Sahagún’s writings and scattered them throughout the province. Escalona acted in the capacity of representative for a group of missionaries who regarded the complete abandonment of indigenous religious rites and beliefs as the most effectual evangelization strategy. To them Sahagún’s work was an expensive and counterproductive project which, rather than contributing to battle the Nahuas’ ancient religious practices, perpetuated them.120 A favourable turn for Sahagún occurred when Fray Miguel Navarro, former Provincial of the Franciscan Order, was elected as envoy to a general Franciscan Chapter Meeting to be held in Rome in 1571. Expecting to receive from Spain the support that had been refused in New Spain to complete Historia universal, Sahagún handed over to Navarro and to his travel companion, Mendieta, “a summary of all the Books and of all the chapters of each Book and the prologues wherein all that contained in the Books is briefly stated.”121 Sahagún’s hope was eventu118. Sahagún’s exposition of the working scheme and the evolution of his entire commission is available in the prologue to the second book; Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 53-56. 119. “[E]scrituras, de mucha estima, y que deujan ser fauorecidas: para que se acabasen,” ibid., p. 55. 120. The Franciscans were at loggerheads; one band fostering an intellectual approach to conversion, as contended by Cisneros in Spain and by Zumárraga in New Spain, and another band, rigorous in their vow of poverty, restricting the reach of learning. As aforementioned, the conflict was so fierce that in 1572, deprived of his work and belligerent in his argument that the investigation of indigenous cultures was crucial to prevent idolatry, Sahagún even denounced Motolinía to the Inquisition for a wrong promotion of the “idolatrous” Tonalamatl; see Baudot 1990. On the confiscation of Sahagún’s manuscripts, see Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer, 1973, p. 193, Dibble, 1982, p. 14, and Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 478-480. 121. “[V]n sumario, de todos los libros, y de todos los capitulos de cada libro, y los prologos: donde en breuedad se dezia, todo lo que se contenja, en los libros,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 56. For further reference, see León-Portilla, 1999, pp. 156-157, and Morales, 2007, p. 28. Nothing is known about the whereabouts of

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ally fulfilled in part. With the arrival in New Spain of Fray Rodrigo de Sequera as Commissary General in 1575, Sahagún explains that he retrieved his drafts and that Sequera appointed him to compose a work with “the Mexican language in one column and Spanish in the other, to send them to Spain, because the most Illustrious Señor Don Juan de Ovando, President of the Council of the Indies, wanted them.”122 This brief precluded the third column of lexicographic notes; useful for preachers and confessors in the execution of their activities, but irrelevant for the new targeted audience of Spanish officials. Sahagún and his assistants resumed the translation that had commenced during the Tlatelolco stage, as reflected in the “Memoriales con escolios,” and at least one final two-column page manuthe summary. In order to support his case, in 1570, Sahagún also sent to Pope Pius V a Breve compendio de los ritos idolátricos que los indios de esta Nueva España usaban en tiempo de su infidelidad (Brief compendium of the idolatrous rites that the Indians of this New Spain practised in their time of unfaithfulness), which comprised most of Book I and chapters I-XIX and XXIV of Book II of Historia universal with minor variations; Dibble, 1982, p. 15. The Breve compendio, conserved in the Vatican archives, has been analysed by Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 347-350, and edited by Bosh de Sousa 1990. 122. “[L]a lengua mexicana en vna coluna, y el romance en la otra, para los embiar a españa: porque los procuro el Illustrissimo señor, don Juan de ouando, presidente del consejo de indias,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 56. In the same passage Sahagún is certain that Ovando knew of his work thanks to the summary that Navarro and Mendieta had taken to Spain. Other possibilities cannot be ruled out. Ovando might have been previously acquainted with Sahagún’s work thanks to the “Relación y descripción de la provincia del Santo Evangelio de México” (“Account and description of the Province of the Santo Evangelio of Mexico,”) a report Ovando received around 1569 during the performance of his office as inspector or visitador of the Council of the Indies; see León-Portilla, 1999, p. 154. Likewise, the Archbishop of New Spain Pedro Moya de Contreras had informed Ovando of Sahagún’s work on several occasions, as he states in a letter to Philip II, dated 28 March 1576: “[I]n taking charge of this request [for accounts and descriptions of New Spain], I came to hear about an old Franciscan friar, whose name is Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, and who is the best speaker of the Mexican language in all of this New Spain. In order to know about the most essential things on the true description of these natives he has a general one on all the things of this New Spain, which are related to this purpose […] [and] of which I notified the President don Juan de Ovando in past shipped letters” (“andando en esta demanda, vine a saber de un fraile franciscano antiguo, que se llama fray Bernardino de Sahagún y la mejor lengua mexicana de toda la Nueva España. Que en lo más esencial para la verdadera historia de los naturales tiene hecha una general de todas las cosas desta Nueva España tocante a este propósito [...] de que en los navíos pasados di aviso al presidente don joan de Ovando.” Cited in Bustamante García, 1989, p. 372, and in León-Portilla, 1999, p. 172).

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script was finished around 1577-1579. Nevertheless, like his first 1558 commission, this second one of 1575 was to end up ensnared in a crucible of conflictive opinions in both royal and religious circles regarding its nature and appropriateness. Dissatisfied with the performance of the Council of the Indies and resolved to remove irregularities, Philip II had appointed Ovando as visitador to supervise the functions of the Council from 1566, and afterwards as its President in 1571. Ovando committed to bringing under control the governance of New World territories. In 1569, he formulated the creation of the Leyes de Indias (Laws of the Indies), a meticulous compilation of laws dealing with New World affairs that was expected to put a halt to the negligence he had observed. In the “Ordenanzas Reales al Consejo de Indias” (“Royal Ordinances to the Council of the Indies,”) dated on 24 September 1571, one of the resolutions that he decreed was the composition of an ambitious Libro de las descripciones de Indias, which he intended to incorporate in the second book of his compilation of laws. New World authorities were urged to supply and, if necessary, learn detailed information on land and inhabitants, because, as Ovando claims, “matters can neither be understood nor treated as they should, if they are not first learnt by the people who should know about them.”123 For the centralization of such a pursuit Ovando created the post of Cronista mayor or cosmographer-chronicler of the Council a month later, on 20 October 1571, which was occupied by Ovando’s diligent secretary, Juan López de Velasco.124 Plunging himself into the grand project of his predecessor Santa Cruz, López de Velasco increased the sophistication of the questionnaires and with them the answers or 123. “[P]orque ninguna cosa puede ser entendida ni tratada como debe, cuyo sujeto no fuese primero sabido de las personas que de ella hubieren de conocer,” cited in González Muñoz, 1971, p. viii. This Libro de las descripciones de Indias had to be an account “of all the things of the State of the Indies, on land as well as on sea, natural and moral, perpetual and temporal, ecclesiastical and secular, past and present” (“de todas las cosas del estado de la India, así en la tierra como en la mar, naturales y morales, perpetuas y temporales, eclesiásticas y seglares, pasadas y presentes,” ibidem). 124. Ibid., p. viii, González Boixo, 1999, p. 228. A description of the cosmographer-chronicler’s duties is found in Book II, chapters XII and XIII of Las leyes de Indias, con las posteriores a este código vigentes hoy y un epílogo sobre las reformas legislativas ultramarinas, 1889.

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reports that were produced.125 The exhaustive “Ordenanzas para la formación del libro de las descripciones de Indias” (“Ordinances for the composition of the book on the description of the Indies,”) dated in El Escorial on 3 July 1573, is a testament to Ovando, López de Velasco, and Philip II’s wish for “enquiries, descriptions, and accounts of all the State of the Indies and of each part therein.”126 The document emphasizes the role that viceroys, governors, and highranking churchmen ought to play in the implementation of the royal request, and dedicates a wide section to display the breakdown of contents that this Libro de las descripciones de Indias needed to comprise; namely, information on cosmography, geography, hydrography, flora and fauna, and moral history. Amongst other items, the latter had to include data on traditions, religion, food, beverages, dwelling, trade, government, warfare, finance, and the discovery and conquest of the lands. With reference to government, the book also had to contain data on legislation approved so far in the New World; information on public professions, ranging from judges to carpenters; census of Spaniards and indigenous peoples; treasury books; data on distribution of lands and indigenous inhabitants; and descriptions of ports, mines, and tithes, as well as of missionary orders, and ecclesiastical and civil matters.127 Whilst Sahagún supervised a clean copy of the two-column page work for Ovando and López de Velasco’s project, a royal decree of April 22 1577 commanded from the Viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríquez, the immediate dispatch of Sahagún’s texts. Phil125. The reports dispatched from the New World authorities and local officials were named Relaciones geográficas in the nineteenth century. For an examination of these documents and in particular those requested from New Spain under Charles V and Philip II, see Solano 1988, I, Manzano 1991, I, Baudot 1995, and Bustamante García 2000. The latest analysis of the method of data collection and of the colonial governments’ involvement in the project is found in Brendecke 2012. 126. “[A]veriguaciones, descripciones y relaciones de todo el estado de las Indias y de cada parte de él,” cited in Solano, 1988, I, pp. 16-17. 127. For a reproduction of the extensive document, see ibid., pp. 16-74. In the sixteenth century at least six questionnaires were sent to New World administrators and local officials, dated 1563, 1569, 1573, 1577, 1584, and 1592; ibid., p. xxiv. Awaiting responses for the creation of the Libro de las descripciones de Indias, López de Velasco served himself of already collected material and completed an advance in 1574, the Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias; see ibid., p. xxiv. An edition of his text is available with an introduction by González Muñoz 1971.

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ip II’s order was occasioned, not because of the interest Sahagún’s work had for the Libro de las descripciones de Indias, but because after Ovando’s death in 1575 and the Council of Trent’s decisions to forbid the circulation of works on indigenous cultures and written in indigenous languages, a reversal of Spanish Crown policies was brought about.128 Obeying the royal petition, Sahagún confirms to have submitted two manuscripts; one to Viceroy Enríquez and another one to Sequera.129 Sahaguntine scholars agree on the existence of the two manuscripts, but not on their nature. For some, the first manuscript, now lost, was a text similar to the two-column page Florentine Codex that has survived—Sahagún would have given it to Viceroy Enríquez and it has been titled for this reason the “Enríquez Manuscript.” For others, what Viceroy Enríquez received was only the clean copy of the twelve books in the Nahuatl language that was finished in 1569.130 As for the second manuscript that Sahagún handed in, this time to Sequera, Sahagún states that it was a work in Spanish and Mexican lavishly illustrated; a description that coincides with the Florentine Codex.131 Regarding the 128. The 1577 decree signed by Philip II demanded documents of this type to be sent to the Council of the Indies “without there remaining the originals or copies of them [...], [and] not to permit anyone, for any reason, in any language, to write anything concerning the superstitions and the way of life these Indians had” (“sin que dellos quede original ni tratado alguno [...] [y] no consentir que por ninguna manera persona alguna escriba cosas que toquen a supersticiones y manera de vivir que estos indios tenian,” cited in Anderson, 1982, pp. 36-37). See also García Icazbalceta, 1889, II, p. 267, and León-Portilla, 1999, pp. 167-168. 129. The relevant text reads: “I sent [the books] to him [Philip II] through don Martín Enríquez […]. After this, Father Fray Rodrigo de Sequera took them, […] in the Mexican language and Spanish, profusely illustrated” (“se los envié por mano del Sr. D. Martín Henríquez [...]. Llevólos después desto el P. Fray Rodrigo de Sequera, [...] en lengua mexicana y castellana, y muy historiados,” Sahagún, 1982, p. 37). This passage belongs to a final paragraph of the 1585 version of Book XII on the conquest, in which Sahagún laments not knowing the whereabouts of those manuscripts. See also Bustamante García, 1990, p. 452, and León-Portilla, 1999, p. 177. 130. León-Portilla, following García Icazbalceta, argues against the existence of the bilingual “Enríquez Manuscript” that has been put forward by Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer 1973, Glass 1978, and Baudot 1995. For a whole discussion, see León-Portilla, 1999, pp. 171-178. 131. Bustamante García believes that the “Enríquez Manuscript” and the Florentine Codex are the same text, and that other documents alluded to by Bishop Moya de Contreras are the Códices matritenses. For his comprehensive explanation, see 1990, pp. 341-344.

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completion date of this second manuscript and its arrival in Spain, conflicting views again arise. It could have been finished in 1577 and entrusted to Sequera, who sent it to Spain in the fleet of April, 1578, arriving in Madrid in autumn. Another option is that, completed in 1578-1579, it was taken to Spain by Sequera, who returned in 1580.132 No certainty exists to determine whether this last copy of Historia universal reached the Council of the Indies for an examination of its “superstitious” contents or whether Philip II, a collector of exotic objects, took possession of it so as to satisfy a personal interest. What is known is that the manuscript entered the Medicea Laurenziana Library of Florence before 1588. The Italian bibliographer Angelo Maria Bandini first brought its existence as a three-volume bound manuscript of the Palatina collection to the attention of scholars in 1793. Amid others, two conjectures have been proposed to explain the appearance of the work in this library. It was either sent to Florence for the approval of Pope Gregory XIII or Sixtus V, or was delivered by the Spanish ambassador Luis de Velasco—son to Viceroy Velasco, who had supported the College of Tlatelolco—to Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, as a present during negotiations to marry the daughter of a Spanish Duke with a member of the Medici family.133

132. The contention of León-Portilla, 1999, p. 178, Schwaller, 2003, p. 269, and Bustamante García, 1990, p. 341 is that the Florentine Codex was concluded in 1577; that of Anderson and Dibble in their introductory essays to the Florentine Codex is that it was finished one or two years later, see 1982, pp. 15, 37. León-Portilla suggests that Sequera probably ordered a copy of the Spanish text immediately after his arrival in Spain. This work is known as the Tolosa Codex and was edited by Carlos María de Bustamante, see Sahagún 1829-1830. In this first edition Bustamante used the title “historia general,” a colophon that the scribe of the Spanish manuscript had added by mistake; see Dibble, 1982, pp. 15-16, and Bustamante García, 1990, p. 334. For further reference on the Tolosa Codex, see Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 229230, 334-336, 461, and Hidalgo Brinquis et al. 2013. 133. Dibble, 1982, p. 16, and Schwaller’s 2003 article. Bustamante García defends the possibility that the Florentine Codex arrived in Spain in 1578 and was soon afterwards given as a wedding present to the Grand Duke, a patron of the arts and a collector of Persian and Egyptian manuscripts; see Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 348-349; 1990, p. 342. For a more recent study on the manuscript’s arrival in Florence as part of the Grand Duke’s private library, see Rao 2012, and for a study on its reception at the Medici court, see Markey 2012.

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CHAPTER 3: Sahagún’s Intellectual Models for the Composition of Historia universal The Spanish and Nahuatl manuscript of Historia universal that arrived in Florence bound together two main objectives associated with two types of audiences. The right-hand column contained a copy of the text in the Nahuatl language that Sahagún had originally projected to occupy the centre of a three-column page auxiliary work for preachers and confessors. The Spanish text of the left-hand column merged two translation briefs; the translation that began in Tlatelolco for the missionary target reader, some surviving texts of which can be appreciated in the “Memoriales con escolios,” and the translation that was finalized bearing in mind the request from the Council of the Indies.1 What concerns this chapter is how Sahagún determined the range of topics of Historia universal that he judged of use for churchmen, and which happened to be of relevance for Ovando and López de Velasco’s project. To this end, exploring Sahagún’s imitation of intellectual models, a classical 1. For example, the Spanish column of Book X of the Florentine Codex contains the Spanish translation of virtuous versus sinful people of the “Memoriales con escolios,” replete with adjectives, synonyms, and fixed phrases envisaged for a missionary audience. Sahagún excuses himself to the reader in Spain for the frustration and displeasure that these chapters might raise, giving notice that the original aim of the section was to resemble the linguistic and moral content of a treatise of vices and virtues; see Hist. gen., X, p. 585.

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and homiletic skill to which he was accustomed, comes up as a logical assumption. As a matter of fact, when in his second prologue to Historia universal Sahagún spells out that at the commencement of Toral’s proselytizing commission he devised “an outline or summary in Spanish of all the topics to be considered. This is which is written in the twelve Books and the Apostilla and Canticles,” he is stating that, from the moment of his appointment, he is banking on the omnipresence of classical and sixteenth-century Christian cultural categories, which he thought of and called to mind in his mother tongue, for he remarks that this is the language in which he wrote his outline.2 Garibay Kintana was first to point at the influence of Theophrastus’s description of virtues and vices, Valdés’s Diálogo de la lengua, Erasmus’s Adages, Flavius Josephus’s Antiquitates judaicae, and, specifically on natural philosophy, Aristotle’s history of animals, the works of Albert of Cologne, and Pliny’s Historia naturalis.3 In this vein, Ascensión Hernández de León-Portilla has more recently noted that, when dealing with archetypes for the portrayal of the Nahuas, Sahagún acted as a pioneering ethnographer. He “approached texts of the Nahua culture with a view to transform the unknown into the known, creating a bridge of analogies be2. “[Hize] en lengua castellana, vna mjnuta, o memoria, de todas las materias, de que auja de tratar: que es lo que esta escripto, en los doze libros: y la postilla, y canticos,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 53. 3. Garibay Kintana, 1953-1954, II, pp. 67-68, 71; 1956, II, p. 46, III, p. 88. He discusses in particular the correspondences between Historia universal and Pliny’s books on animals in 1953-1954, II, p. 70-71, which has been the object of study in Luisa Pranzetti 1998 and Ilaria Palmeri Capesciotti 2001. To date, a significant list of possible influences has been further developed. For an understanding of the overall structure of Historia universal Robertson put forward the medieval encyclopaedia De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, see 1959, pp. 170-171 and 1966; Bustamante García, some passages of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and De civitate dei, see 1989, pp. 706-717; 1992, pp. 355-364; and Robertson and Hernández de León-Portilla, St. Isidore of Seville’s Originum sive etimologiarum or Etymologiae, see Robertson 1959, p. 196; 1966, p. 622, and Hernández de León-Portilla, 2002, pp. 52-53; 2007, pp. 75, 83. Inspiration for specific books within Historia universal has also been highlighted; the Book of Proverbs for Book VI by Sullivan, 1963, pp. 93-94; the Floreto de Sant Francisco and Tesoro de los pobres for Book X by Arcelus Ulibarrena, 2000, p. 694, and Viesca Treviño, 2002, p. 176; and Johann Von Cube’s Hortus sanitatis for Book XI by Escalante Gonzalbo, 1999, pp. 52-59. As regards illustrations, Peterson has established similarities between those of the Florentine Codex and a sixteenth-century book of trades, Panoplia omnium artium; see 1988, pp. 281-283.

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tween cultures,” and moulded Nahua culture “in a twelve book edifice, an encyclopaedia rich in content and harmonized within an order proper to the human thought.”4 Hernández de León-Portilla’s words prompt a revision of Sahagún’s pursuit of coming to terms with foreignness. In fact, this chapter seeks to illustrate how in the composition of Historia universal Sahagún did not unify his knowledge of the Nahua world according to a permanent, immutable, and innate understanding of the world that was “proper to the human thought” in general terms. As a sixteenth-century missionary whose schooling, beliefs, and knowledge organization was substantially dissimilar to the Nahuas’, his “bridge of analogies” was neither negotiated with his Nahua respondents and assistants nor intended as bi-directional. Rather, it was unidirectional, one in which knowledge on the “unknown Nahua world” was subdued and relocated throughout the years into his “known” European categorization of knowledge. Thus, this chapter elaborates on Sahaguntine scholars’ analysis of the subject matters and the classification that Sahagún wished for Historia universal, which he says to have first conceived in Tepepulco and which, given the evolution of contents from the early drafts of the Códices matritenses to Historia universal, were expanded. The search for a number of potential sources or antecedents that inspired him calls for an examination of textual terminology—including the titles “historia universal” and “doze libros,” as well as the titles of works he mentions in Historia universal, like the Calepin— and for a review of several works, such as some of the books he consulted as a student in Salamanca and in the exercise of his missionary duties in New Spain.

Sahagún and the Encyclopaedic Tradition In his prologues to Historia universal Sahagún refers to this work as “historia” and “doze libros,” but it is the allusion to the number 4. “[S]e acercó a los textos de la cultura náhuatl con la mirada de convertir lo desconocido en conocido creando un puente de analogías entre culturas,” [la moldeó] “en un edificio de doce libros, en una enciclopedia rica en contenido y armonizada dentro de un orden propio del pensamiento humano,” Hernández de León-Portilla, 2007, pp. 60, 87.

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of books in which the magnum opus is divided that dominates in his later writings of 1582-1585.5 Perhaps a mere idiosyncrasy on Sahagún’s part, his meticulous reworking of material so as to organize it into twelve books, and his decision to name it as such can also be interpreted as a sign that he did not take numerology slightly. The number twelve had a symbolic tradition relating to totality, the all-embracing “dragnet” of which he was in pursuit. In the Roman numerical system twelve was the number whereby the celestial sphere was measured, of the Zodiac signs, the hours of the day, and the number of months in a year. Christianity attributed a spiritual meaning to the number as a multiple of three and four. Four were the winds, the elements, and the seasons; three were the days of the creation and the Trinity, and the sum of the two numbers, seven, stood for the number of planets and days of the week. Moreover, the mystical number twelve bespoke the choice of God—for instance, the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the Twelve Disciples—, to the point of dictating that reality had to give in and adapt to the number.6 As repositories of this belief in the number twelve as a symbol of completeness and divine choice, the Franciscans attached supreme importance to the number. Mendieta narrated that the Twelve Franciscans who arrived in New Spain in 1524 had been thirteen originally; two of them were unable to embark in the end and the remaining eleven friars concurred that only one more, Fray Juan de Palos, was chosen “so as to comply with the number twelve.”7 Abiding by the pervasive symbolism that the number enjoyed in his community, Sahagún could also have striven to adjust his amassed material into, not eleven or thirteen, but into the twelve books that embodied the first encyclopaedic auxiliary work for the evangelization of the Nahuas. The notion of totality that number twelve stood for finds expression in the most well-known title of “historia,” which appears

5. Bustamante García, 1992, p. 329. These titles appear in Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 46, 51, 53, 55, 71, 73. 6. The Tribes of Israel were in fact thirteen but the Old Testament maintains the number as twelve; see Hopper, 1938, pp. 83-86. 7. The relevant quote reads: “[I]n order to make the number twelve, the rest agreed without hesitation on the election of Fray Juan de Palos” (“porque viniérase cumplido el número doce, eligieron los demás con mucho acuerdo a Fr. Juan de Palos,” Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 166).

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coupled with the adjective “universal” in the “Memoriales en español” (ca. 1569-1571).8 In sixteenth-century Spain, the meaning of history, although connected to chronicles and annals, did not solely adhere to a chronological exposition of past events in its strictest sense. According to Covarrubias, “any narration told […] in an extensive manner is named historical, like the history of animals, history of plants, etc. And Pliny entitled his vast work […] Natural history.”9 This definition of the term historia survived in the Diccionario de autoridades (1726-1792) as “description that is made of natural things, animals, plants, minerals, etc., like Pliny’s History, Father Acosta’s, Dioscorides’s, etc.”10 Thus, a “history” on New World matters was not restricted to reports of events, be it encounters and battles as in the case of Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. It was closer to 8. The “Memoriales en español” is a surviving draft including some translations from Nahuatl into Spanish of several gods, which can be consulted in Sahagún, 1905-1907, VII. The title of the draft reads: “Universal history of the things of the New Spain, divided in twelve books, in the Mexican and the Spanish languages” (“Historia Vniversal, delas cosas de la nueua españa: repartida en doze libros, en lengua mexicana, y española,” ibid., p. 401 (fol. 1v), cited in Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer, 1973, p. 193, and Dibble, 1982, p. 15). A royal document of 22 April 1577 confirms that the title “historia universal” was the one recognized by Philip II and the Council of the Indies. “Thanks to some letters that have been sent to us from those provinces,” the document states, “we have learnt that Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, of the Franciscan Order, has composed a Universal History of the most notable things of that New Spain, which is a very copious recollection of all the rites, ceremonies, and idolatries that the Indians practised in their times of infidelity, and which is divided into twelve books and written in the Mexican language” (“Por algunas cartas que nos han escripto de esas provincias, habemos entendido que fray Bernardino de Sahagún, de la Orden de San Francisco, ha compuesto una Historia Universal de las cosas más señaladas de esa Nueva España, la cual es una computación muy copiosa de todos los ritos, ceremonias e idolatrías que los indios usaban en su infidelidad, repartida en doce libros y en lengua mexicana,” cited in León-Portilla, 1999, 167). A letter sent by the Archbishop Moya de Contreras to Philip II on 28 October 1577 also refers to the “Universal history made by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún” (“Historia universal hecha por fray Bernardino de Sahagún,” cited in Hernández de León-Portilla, 2002, p. 50). 9. “Cualquiera narración que se cuente [...] largo modo se llama histórica, como historia de los animales, historia de las plantas, etc. Y Plinio intituló su gran obra […] Natural historia,” Covarrubias, 1987, p. 692. 10. “[D]escripción que se hace de las cosas naturales, animales, vegetales, minerales, &c. como la Historia de Plinio, la del P. Acosta, la de Dioscórides, &c,” Diccionario de autoridades, 1963, p. 162. See also Bustamante García, 1992, pp. 329-330.

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Motolinía’s Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, Las Casas’s Apologética historia sumaria, and Fray José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias, all of which accommodate accounts of the indigenous peoples’ world. The nature of those accounts and how they were to be set out was reflected by the accompanying adjective, such as “verdadera” (true) and “apologética” (in defence of). In Sahagún’s title the linguistic preference of “universal” aligned with his desire to insert the Nahuas into the Christian Universal History, and very likely to encompass entirety scrupulously, as inferred from Covarrubias’s definition of the adjective as that “which has knowledge of many different things and speaks of them scientifically.”11 This definition is once again evocative of the overarching “dragnet” voiced by Sahagún for Historia universal, and by which he understands a wide-ranging body of knowledge that, characterized by its linguistic rigour in language and content, was to serve any Christian orator looking for information on the Nahua culture. This attempt to deal with such a gamut of items of knowledge is precisely what drew Ovando and López de Velasco’s attention to Sahagún’s work, and made it desirable to the Council of the Indies for the production of the ambitious Libro de las descripciones de Indias. To be also noted is that the analogous correspondence of subject matters in Historia universal and the El Escorial Ordinances of 3 July 1573, which demanded a comprehensive work on New World territories and peoples, can only mean that Sahagún shared with the rest of his educated contemporaries an overall picture of what a work on another society or culture had to comprehend. In other words, Sahagún, his fellow missionaries, officers of the Council, and cosmographers like López de Velasco participated in the prototypes or conventions of representation of their time, according to which, following Covarrubia’s example of a full-fledged history-description, encyclopaedias like Pliny’s Historia naturalis constituted a textual model. In spite of its antiquity—Pliny completed his encyclopaedia around 77 AD—Covarrubia’s choice of this work over another in his definition of “history” was based on its notoriety. Widely quoted throughout the medieval period, and persistent in the late fif11. “[Qu]e tiene noticia de muchas cosas diferentes y habla en ellas científicamente,” Covarrubias, 1987, p. 986.

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teenth century, as attested by several imprints like those of Venice from 1469 to 1499, Historia naturalis was still perused well into the sixteenth century.12 Its survival may be explained by its valuable eclectic nature. Overriding previous separate works, Pliny brought together information from about five hundred authors and arranged it into a vast work that comprises some 2,500 chapters in thirtyseven books. Not designed for continuous reading but for reference, the work addressed the readers’ wish to know about natural history—botany, zoology, minerals, geography, and astronomy—; the cultivation of cereals; therapeutic remedies; and technical data, such as on the elaboration of oil and wine.13 Cataloguing a similar range of topics on the Nahua world, Historia universal has justifiably received the rubric of encyclopaedia and its conceptual framework been viewed as: [A]nother piece in a continuous and evolving line of human thought that originates with the systemic Greek studies of animals, passes through the Latin natural histories, and arrives in the New World in the form of medieval encyclopaedias which included all beings in rigorous hierarchical order, beginning with the Trinity and ending with mineral forms.14

Sahagún probably internalized the belief in the human capacity to systematize knowledge, in the manner López Austin avers, either in Salamanca or during his continued studies at Tlatelolco. The Greek 12. The number of medieval texts that rely on Historia naturalis as a source includes Isidore’s Etymologiae, Honorius Inclusus’s Imago mundi, Juan Gil de Zamora’s Historia naturalis, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, and Domenico Bandini’s Fons memorabilium universi. For further reference, see Collison’s second chapter, 1964. 13. Ibid., pp. 25, 32, Somolinos d’Ardois, 1999, p. vii. 14. López Austin, 1974, p. 120. Garibay Kintana suggests the title of “Enciclopedia de la cultura de los nahuas de Tenochtitlán” (Encyclopaedia on the culture of the Nahuas of Tenochtitlan, 1953-1954, II, p. 63), arguing that “it includes everything that was covered within the preserve of the human activity, from religious ideas to the smallest detail and the particularities of popular knowledge, and the ideas that governed the techniques and craftsmanship of the groups of the Anahuac and others” (“se incluye todo cuanto cabía en el dominio de la actividad humana, desde las ideas religiosas hasta la ínfima pequeñez de los pormenores del saber popular y las ideas que regían la técnica y la artesanía de los grupos de Anáhuac y de los demás,” ibidem). For a similar argument, see Todorov, 1984, pp. 236-237, and Browne, 2000, p. 128.

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notion of all-inclusive learning or paidea, which Aristotle set forth in Organon and De anima, taught him to nurture a state of mind that observed, defined, and classified ideas and surrounding realities by establishing hierarchies.15 Certainly, his exposure to these abstract concepts runs parallel to his consultation of encyclopaedias of which, as indicated in chapter I of this study, he must have availed for the performance of his homiletic duties, likely extracting terminology, exempla, and similes. The encyclopaedias that have been suggested by several Sahaguntine scholars are Pliny’s Historia naturalis, St. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (ca. 620-623), and the Franciscan Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (ca. 1240-1260). Historia naturalis and Etymologiae were popular in Spanish educational and intellectual environments. Regarding the former, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, Francisco López de Villalobos printed its first lavishly annotated edition as the Glossa litteralis in primum et secundum naturalis historiae libros (1524), whilst Nebrija imparted classes on Historia naturalis at the University of Alcalá and Hernán Núñez at Salamanca.16 An edition of Pliny’s books on natural philosophy, titled Filosofía natural, reached the library of the College of Tlatelolco, so the chances that Sahagún, as a tutor of Latin and natural history, drew on its passages on zoology, botany, medicine, and minerals are high.17 In fact, Juan Badiano, one of his potential students and later a tutor at Tlatelolco, put lessons on Pliny to good practice, as he was taught or as he taught them, citing Pliny as an authority in the treatise on pre-Hispanic medicine Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (1552).18 With 15. Knowledge classification into categories stems from Organon, whereas the investigation of the essential nature of things appears in De anima. See Collison, 1964, p. 31, and Hernández de León-Portilla, 2002, p. 52. 16. Somolinos d’Ardois, 1999, pp. viii-xi. The first translation of Pliny’s work into Spanish was written by Francisco Hernández de Toledo, Philip II’s archiater. Hernández finished his translation in New Spain around 1575, where he had travelled to gather information on natural history and medicine; Hernández de LeónPortilla, 2002, p. 53. 17. Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 187, Mathes, 1982, p. 32. 18. For example, the “medicine that produces saliva in mouth-dryness” (“medicina que en la sequedad produce saliva,”) is said to be “found in the small guts of the chickens, the Indian eagle and the dead dove, as Pliny attests to” (“se encuentra en el vientrecillo de las gallinas, milano de Indias y palomo muerto, según lo ates-

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respect to Etymologiae, despite its unavailability in the library of Tlatelolco, it was a celebrated encyclopaedia with which Sahagún must have been acquainted. In his childhood, Sahagún must have known that the pilgrims who passed through his town walked on the Camino de Santiago, setting off for the nearby city of León, where Isidore’s body rested after having been moved from Seville in order to protect it from Muslim profanation.19 Years later, as a religious man of letters, Sahagún would have learnt that Isidore had designed a Christian encyclopaedia to educate Visigoth rulers in the culture of Christianity, and that in its pages he had struggled for two informing principles that resound strongly in Historia universal; those of encyclopaedism and linguistic purity.20 Like Pliny, Isidore arranged all the information thematically, covering what constituted the pillars of knowledge at the time in twenty books that brought together the Seven Arts and additional disciplines such as law, theology, physiology, geography, architecture, mineralogy, agriculture, and military science. Isidore’s will to enhance the understanding of classical authors and to faithfully imitate their Latin style drove him to group under all these disciplines the etymologies of many terms as well as excerpts and passages by numerous classical auctoritates.21 This concentration of statements from not only classical but also patristic sources in one single work ensured the survival of Etymologiae in manuscript form throughout the centuries. With around a thousand copies of more or less illustigua Plinio,” Cruz and Badiano, 1952, p. 63). Badiano adapted and translated into Latin what an indigenous physician of the college, Martín de la Cruz, communicated in Nahuatl. For further reference, see edition of Cruz and Badiano’s text by Guerra 1952, a historical introduction by Somolinos d’Ardois 1991, and Viesca Treviño’s 1995 article. 19. Hérnandez de León-Portilla, 2002, p. 54. 20. Hodgen, 1964, p. 55, and Díaz y Díaz, 2004, p. 180. Etymologiae was one of the encyclopaedias used in grammar schools and in friaries like that of San Francisco in Salamanca; Roest, 2000, p. 211. 21. Barney et al., 2006, pp. 13-15. Isidore’s most cited authors are Virgil (over 190 citations), Cicero (over 50), and Lucan (around 45). Other much-cited authors are Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, Persius, and Aristotle. Isidore was also influenced by the Latin grammarian Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who in the late second century wrote De significatu verborum, a lexicon in which he entered quotes from Roman authors, and the etymology and the meaning of many words as linked to mythology and the antiquities of Rome.

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trated parchments scattered in European monasteries, its readers did not need to consult expensive original copies of those auctoritates and, as an outcome, Isidore’s work impacted upon lexicons and encyclopaedias of the later Middle Ages, one of them being Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum.22 Like Pliny and Isidore’s works, Anglicus’s Christian encyclopaedia multiplied rapidly in manuscript copies from the thirteen to the fifteenth centuries and, in Anglicus’s case, it was translated into Dutch, English, French, Italian, and Spanish.23 Sahagún, who must have had access to De proprietatibus rerum in the Friary of San Francisco in Salamanca, would have called it to mind once in New Spain because, as Robertson notices, the matching classification of knowledge in both works is highly remarkable: [Both begin] with the Divine (Sahagún, Books I, III; Bartholomaeus Books I, II), [proceed] to the Human (Sahagún, Books VIII, IX, X; Bartholomaeus, Books III, IV, V, VI, VII) and then to the Mundane, containing information on nature in the form of an herbal, lists of animals, and geological and geographical information (Sahagún, Book XI; Bartholomaeus, Books VIII to the end in Book XIX). In addition, within each of these divisions, one proceeds from the superior to the inferior—Trinity to angels, man to his illnesses, the heavenly bodies to the earth, and then to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, terminating in the mineral world.24 22. Etymologiae is known to have played a leading part in Guillelmus Brito’s Summa—an alphabetic dictionary of encyclopaedic proportions—, Thomas of Cantimpré’s Nature of Things, and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius. Etymologiae also touched upon works as disparate as Sir John Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels and John Gower’s Confessio amantis. See Collison, 1964, p. 35, and Barney et al., 2006, pp. 25-27. 23. Hodgen, 1964, pp. 59-60. For a consultation of the translation of Anglicus’s text into English, see John of Trevisa (ca. 1398) in Anglicus 1975-1988. This study quotes Fray Vicente de Burgos’s translation into Spanish, published in Tolosa in 1494; see Anglicus 1994. 24. Robertson, 1966, p. 623. He believes that another “book of natural philosophy” (“libro de filosofía natural,”) to which Mendieta alludes as available to Sahagún, was Anglicus’s; see Robertson, 1966, p. 624. Another possibility is the fifteenth-century Hortus sanitatis by the German physician Johann von Cube. Aside from iconographic resemblances with the illustrations of the Florentine Codex, Escalante Gonzalbo has observed a related scheme of animal representation, particularly as regards the lion and the eagle, 1999, pp. 52-59. Von Cube’s descriptions, nevertheless, might as well be indebted to Anglicus’s work or to another text influenced by him.

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This contrast of content classification justifies a connection between the two works and evidences that Historia universal fits perfectly within the medieval hierarchical taxonomy of encyclopaedias that Anglicus’s epitomizes. A similar comparative exposition of general contents in Historia universal and in the works of Pliny and Isidore leads, nevertheless, to the conclusion that Sahagún might have based the underlying structure and contents of Historia universal likewise on any of these two, if not on another work reflecting an equivalent taxonomy. After all, Pliny and Isidore’s works were sources upon which Anglicus cemented his encyclopaedia, and the three were reference books that coincided in a number of generic fundamentals or consistencies. The following pages compare, in a general manner, the arrangement of contents and the nature of some topics in Sahagún, Pliny, Isidore, and Anglicus’s works. This exploration is intended to sound out which subject matters of Historia universal mirror those of the European encyclopaedias, as well as the influence they exerted upon Sahagún’s treatment and categorization of knowledge.25 To begin with, Pliny divides his work into thirty-seven books, widely speaking: I preface, contents and sources; II cosmography, astronomy, and meteorology; III-VII geography and ethnography; VIII-XI zoology and inventions; XII-XIX botany; XX-XXXII medicine, pharmacology, and magic; and XXXIII-XXXVII metallurgy, mineralogy, and the fine arts. Like Anglicus, Pliny supplies information by moving from the celestial sphere to men and animals on Earth, which is followed by descriptions of plants and medicines, and subsequently of metals and precious stones. The strongest resemblance between Historia naturalis and Historia universal, as first pointed out by Garibay Kintana, is perceived in the arrangement and contents on natural history in Book XI of Historia universal and Pliny’s books VIII-XI on zoology, XII-XXV on botany, and XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXVI, and XXXVII on minerals.26 In the two works animals and 25. Appendix II of this study contains a chart juxtaposing the breakdown of contents in the four encyclopaedias. 26. Garibay Kintana, 1953-1954, II, pp. 70-71. Unlike Pliny and Sahagún, Anglicus includes this material in a different order. Birds appear in Book XII; fish in Book XIII; minerals in Book XVI; botany in Book XVII; and other animals in Book XVIII. What is more, Anglicus arranges entries in an alphabetical order. As

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plants are portrayed according to where they live or grow, and the properties that characterized them, whether medicinal, poisonous or edible, and even human. Amongst other topics, both depict the bees’ production of honey, human hunting-techniques to catch turtles, remedies to abate the pain provoked by the bite of a scorpion, and the behaviour of serpents.27 As regards these, Pliny describes them in chapter XXXV of Book VIII as an innumerable kind, distinguishing horned snakes, snakes with little horns, and with a twin head, like the amphisbaena. Immediately afterwards, he attributes to them a human characteristic. “This deadly animal has one emotion or rather affection,” Pliny explains, “they usually roam in couples, male and female, and only live with their consort. Accordingly, when either of the pair has been destroyed the other is incredibly anxious for revenge: it pursues the murderer.”28 In the same way, chapter V of Book XI of Historia universal classes serpents into those with rattles, like the tecutlacoçauhqui in the first paragraph; two-headed, like the maquizcoatl in the third; and horned, like the maçacoatl in the fourth. The tecutlacoçauhqui is said to live with its mate, communicate by hissing, and be capable of building such a strong relationship with it that “when one is killed, although one is dead, the other pursues [the killer]; it goes to strike him.”29 As with Pliny, in the portrayal of Historia universal the snake emerges as a loyal and vindictive creature.30 for Isidore, he dedicates Book XII to brief passages on the depiction of animals of burden, fish, birds, small insects, and snakes, and scatters information on trees and herbs in Book XVII; and of stones and metals in Book XVI. 27. The descriptions of bees, the turtle, and the scorpion appear in Sahagún, Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 93-94, 59-60, and p. 87, respectively. Pliny has corresponding information in Books IX and XI; see 1967, III, pp. 441-453, 187-191, and 485-489, respectively. For further coincidence of topics and their treatment, see Palmeri Capesciotti, 2001, pp. 207-214. 28. The original text translated by Rackham reads: “[U]nus huic tam pestifero animali sensus vel potius affectus est: coniugia ferme vagantur, nec nisi cum pari vita est. itaque alterutra interempta incredibilis ultionis alteri cura: persequitur interfectorem,” Pliny, 1967, III, p. 63. 29. The original text in Nahuatl reads: “[I]n jquac ce mjctilo in manel vel omjc ce, in oc ce tetoca, techoponjtiuh,” Flor. Cod., XI, p. 76. The edition of the original and the translation into English quoted here and hereafter are Anderson and Dibble’s in Sahagún 1950-1982. Their translation sought to maintain the old-fashioned tone of classical Nahuatl by imitating the English style of the King James’s Bible (1611). 30. The revengeful snake was a widely circulated topos in Europe, as indicated by Pranzetti, 1998, pp. 77-80. She has also discussed another topos, that of the

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Although Historia naturalis appears to have informed Sahagún’s outline of natural data and its arrangement, for other fields of knowledge it is Etymologiae that might have proven more advantageous to him. Touching succinctly upon, and proceeding with a rich variety of data from divine to mundane matters, Isidore’s work gathers numerous topics that have a counterpart in the twelve books of Historia universal.31 Book VIII of Historia universal, on kings and lords, exemplifies this well, in that the majority of its thematic elements, including the description of markets, adornments, attire, hairstyle, hobbies, games, food and drink, houses, judicial procedures, and education, are identifiable in Isidore’s work. This indicates that either Sahagún was versed in the information that Isidore covers or that he had employed a later work, which influenced by Isidore, reproduces the same categories of knowledge.32 As a Christian encyclopaedia, other similarities with Historia universal follow. Isidore offers data on the hierarchy of the Christian Church, religious tasks, ceremonies, and sacred buildings; elements that are treated in Books I and II of Historia universal. Nevertheless, the possible impact of Etymologiae on Sahagún’s conception of an encyclopaedia on the Nahuas expands beyond a selection of subject matters and their distribution. Just like Sahagún does in relation with Nahuatl and the Nahua world, Isidore had aimed at leaving a legacy of the classical world and at contextualizing the use of Latin by tackling the explanation and description of a variegated number of items, such as medicines, precious stones, metals, plants, animals, arms, secular and non-secular clothing, and home utensils. chaste turtledove, and established a relationship between Sahagún and Anglicus’s texts rather than with Pliny’s. In her opinion the depiction of this bird accords with the symbolic Christian values of two Christian rhetorical manuals: Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, written at the end of the thirteenth century, and Rhetorica christiana (1579) of the Franciscan Diego Valadés. Valadés would have taken his vows in the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City and might have taught at Tlatelolco. See Pranzetti, 1998, pp. 79-80, and Palomera, 2003, pp. x-xi. 31. Hernández de León-Portilla suggests Isidore’s influence in Books VIII, IX, and X of Historia universal; see 2007, p. 83. 32. A potential model is Olaus Magnus’s Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus, a 1555 edition of which was available in the library of Tlatelolco; Mathes, 1982, p. 60. The illustrations and the subject matters of some of its books—ranging from beliefs, ways of life, and wars amongst the peoples of northern Europe—are at times strikingly similar to those of Historia universal.

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For his “verification” of the language Isidore makes use of auctoritates; classical and patristic sentences and comments—in Sahagún’s words the “fundamentos” that he laments to have lacked for a Nahuatl Calepin. Whereas lexicographic works like the Calepin showed Sahagún how to quote auctoritates as part of a dictionary, it was an encyclopaedia like Isidore’s that demonstrated how to present another society and culture and at the same time display a reflection of its language. By way of example, in chapter XXXI of Book XIX Isidore writes about hair adornments worn by Roman women: The diadem (diadema) is a head ornament for matrons, interwoven with gold and gems […]. The nimbus is a transverse headband made of gold, sewn onto a linen cloth, and is worn by women over the forehead. Plautus [...] says: the more I look at her, the more she is crowned with a nimbus.33

It is a curious coincidence that Sahagún decided to incorporate similar details in the fifteenth chapter of Book VIII of Historia universal. Here Nahua women’s hairstyles are depicted as: They had hair hanging to the waist, or to the shoulders; or the young girls’ lock of hair; or the hair [twisted with black cord and] wound about the head; or the hair all cut the same length. [Some] cut their hair short, [so that] their hair reached to their noses. It was cut and dyed with black mud—[so] did they place importance upon their heads; it was dyed with indigo, so that, their hair shone.34

A reader of Isidore’s text grasps that Roman female status was easily determined by hair ornaments—a diadema is for matrons—, and that precious head ornaments were made of gold, gems, and linen cloth. A reader of the Nahuatl text learns about the differ33. The original text translated by Barney et al. reads: “Diadema est ornamentum capitis matronarum ex auro et gemmis contextum [...]. Nimbus est fasciola transversa ex auro adsuta in linteo, quod est in fronte feminarum. Plautus [...]: Quo magis eam aspicio, tam magis nimbata est,” Isidore, 2006, p. 390. 34. “[T]zonqueme, quatequeque, atzotzocoleque, maxtlaoa, motzonquetzaltica, qujquatequj in jntzon, qujiaiacanepanoa in jntzon: tlatetecoa, mopatinemj, qujmamaujizmati in jntzontecon: moxiuhqujlpa, injc pepetlaca intzon,” Flor. Cod., VIII, pp. 47-48.

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ent lengths of hair cut—long to the waist and to the shoulders, and short—; about styles—twisted and tied up with a cord—; and about natural products to dye hair—with black mud and indigo. As aforementioned, a notable difference between both passages lies in the fact that, like Calepino in his Latin dictionary, Isidore quotes Plautus as an authority to prove how the term “nimbus” was used. Sahagún, on the contrary, conceives Historia universal as a work that could establish linguistic authority and be deployed in the production of a Nahuatl Calepin. For Isidore, the verification or “authorization” of use of Latin words also entailed the explanation of their etymology, a painstaking task that, as stressed in the title of his encyclopaedia, Isidore carries out throughout. His etymologies, however, are at times neither accurate nor convincing. For example, “on the names of stars and their origins” of Book III he writes that “Orion shines in the south, in front of the tracks of Taurus. It is named ‘Orion’ from urine (urina), that is, from a flood of waters, for it rises in the winter season, and troubles the sea and the land with waters and storms.”35 Unaware that the constellation received its name from a Greek mythological figure of a giant hunter, Isidore’s perseverance to reveal the etymology of Orion makes him rely on phonological traits and create convoluted and far-fetched connections. In other cases, such as with regard to the etymology of birds’ names, Isidore is certain that an onomatopoeic approach is the rule rather than the exception. In Book XII on animals, he asserts that “many birds’ names are evidently constructed from the sound of their call, such as the crane (grus), the crow (corvus), […] the screech owl (ulula), the cuckoo (cuculus) […] [,] et cetera. The variety of their calls taught people what they might be called.”36 Sahagún is likewise keen to attach an onomatopoeic etymology to many of the birds described in Book XI. For example, the owl is named tecolotl because it has a deep voice “when it hoots; it says, tecolo, tecolo, o, o,” and the cuitla35. “Orion austro ante Tauri vestigia fulget, et dictus Orion ab urina, id est ab inundatione aquarum. Tempore enim hiemis obortus mare et terras aquis ac tempestatibus turbat,” Isidore, 2006, p. 104. 36. “Avium nomina multa a sono vocis constat esse conposita: ut grus, corvus, [...], ulula, cuculus [...] [,] et cetera. Varietas enim vocis eorum docuit homines quid nominarentur,” ibid., p. 264.

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cochtototl, or curve-billed thrasher, is named after its song, because “it says cuitlacoch, cuitlacoch, tarati, tarat, tatatati, tatatati, titiriti, tiriti.”37 Another analogous procedure in both Isidore and Sahagún’s search for the origin of words rests on their shared emphasis on shapes, colours, and even items of nourishment that reminded them of another aspect of reality. For example, where Isidore accounts for the Milky Way on the grounds that it is “the road seen in the sphere of the sky, named for its brightness,” chapter IV of Book VII of Historia universal provides this etymology for a constellation, the citlalsunecuilli: The S-shaped stars. [These] were apart; they appeared by themselves, shining and shimmering. And for this reason were they called S-shaped stars—that they were similar to and very much like a [kind of maize] tortilla which was made, or an amaranth seed tortilla. [These] were, at both ends, twisted and rounded over.38

Isidore perceives the Milky Way as a road, bright and white as milk, and believes this association to justify the origin of the phrase. Similarly, Sahagún understands that the origin of the word citlalsunecuilli is unravelled on the basis of the physical similitude between the stars and the shining S-shaped amaranth seed tortillas. In his pursuit of etymologies, he might have asked his respondents why these stars—which in his Spanish translation he identifies as the Little Bear—received this specific name, to which they perhaps answered with the glittery twisted tortilla comparison. Another possibility is 37. “[T]latomaoa injc tlatoa: qujtoa tecolo, tecolo, o, o [.] [I]n qujtoa cujtlacoch, cujtlacoch, tarati, tarat, tatatati, tatatati, titiriti, tiriti,” Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 42, 51. Pranzetti suggests that Isidore’s onomatopoeic explanations are also adopted by El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in Comentarios reales (1609, 1616), see 1998, p. 78. Another source for El Inca Garcilaso and Sahagún could have been an author whom Isidore had read or an author who followed Isidore’s text. For example, in his first book of De institutione oratoria Quintilian explains that the word jackdaw (graculus) derived from the cry of the bird in question, and Anglicus cites Isidore to explain the onomatopoeic etymology of the owl and the crane; see Anglicus’s twelfth book, chapters VI and XVI, respectively. 38. “Lacteus circulus via est, quae in sphaera videtur, a candore dicta, quia alba est,” Isidore, 2006, p. 273. The Nahuatl text reads: “Citlalsunecuilli. Çan iioca onoc, iioca neztoc, tlanestitoc, cuecuepocatoc: Auh inic mitoa, citlalsunecuilli: ca quineneuilia, vel no iuhqui centlamantli tlachichioalli tlascalli, anoço tzooalli: nenecoc, cecentlapal quacoltic, quateuilacachtic,” Flor. Cod., VII, p. 13.

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that the Nahua assistants added an etymology at Sahagún’s request. What matters here is that he was willing to have this written down. Mindful of the possibility of a future Nahuatl Calepin, he possibly visualized the entry citlalsunecuilli as comprising its definition and etymology. With Pliny’s work appearing to stand as Sahagún’s main archetype for natural history, and Isidore’s for the combination of encyclopaedic and linguistic sensitivity, Robertson foregrounds a striking parallel that singles out Anglicus’s encyclopaedia as undoubtedly influential on Sahagún’s; the way in which some people are portrayed in Anglicus’s Book VI on the ages of the human being and properties, and in Sahagún’s Book X on the description of the Nahuas according to virtues and vices. In Anglicus’s first nineteen chapters, girls, matrons, midwives, servants, and masters are classified in paragraphs made of a list of vices and virtues that denote either reprehensible behaviour or commendation. For example, the bad or sinful servant is thought to be: [C]ommonly [...] a drunkard and negligent in the services with which he has to serve his lord, and he is a thief who steals his [lord’s] possessions. And in chapter XXX of his proverbs Solomon says about [the sinful servants] that a servant who is a drunkard and negligent will never be rich. He is commonly lazy when he should be diligent in the performance of his work.39

On the other side of the continuum, the good or virtuous servant is said to possess “many good conditions which are deemed memorable because he is clever and intelligent. And of such a servant, Solomon said in chapter XVII of his proverbs that the wise servant will govern over wayward children.”40 Unquestionably, this Manichean dichotomy, which consists of a list of nouns and adjectives, such as 39. Fray Vicente de Burgos’s 1494 Spanish translation reads: “comunmẽte […] borracho & negligente enlos seruiçios de q[ue] deue seruir a su señor y es ladron q[ue] le hurta los bienes. E destos dize salamon enlos .xxx. capitulos delos proverbios q[ue] seruidor negligẽte y borracho no sera jamas rico. El es comunmẽte oçioso qua[n]do deue ser diligente al tiẽpo dela obra,” Anglicus, 1994, chapter XVI. 40. “[M]uchas buenas cõdiçiones dignas de no ser oluidades. Ca es de buen ygenio y entendimiẽto. E de tal dezia salamon a los .xvij. capitulos d[e] sus proverbios. El sabio sieruo avra señoria sobre los hijos locos,” ibid., chapter XVII.

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“a drunkard,” “a thief,” “negligent,” and “lazy” versus “clever,” “intelligent,” and “wise,” comes together to render a well-presented profile of a servant. The maxims borrowed from the Book of Proverbs, like “a servant who is a drunkard and negligent will never be rich,” reassured a contemporary reader of the reliability and pertinence of the selected properties, originated in no less than the Old Testament. Like in Anglicus’s text, the classification of Nahua people from all walks of life in chapters I to XXVI of Book X—from family members (e.g., good and bad father) to rulers (e.g., good and bad lord) and professionals, such as craftsmen (e.g., good and bad carpenter)—is composed of a list of nouns, adjectives, and verbs referring to appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. For example, the virtuous or professional painter-scribe, the tlacuilo, is said to be: [A] craftsman, an artist, a user of charcoal, a drawer with charcoal; a painter who dissolves colors, grinds pigments, uses colors. The good scribe is honest, circumspect, far-sighted, pensive; a judge of colors, an applier of the colors, who makes shadows, forms feet, face, hair. He paints, applies colors, makes shadows, draws gardens, paints flowers, creates works of art.41

In contrast, the bad or poor-skilled tlacuilo is said to be “dull, detestable, irritating—a fraud, a cheat. He paints without lustre, ruins colors, blurs them, paints askew—acts impetuously, hastily, without reflection.”42 Like Anglicus’s passage on the servant, the two paragraphs on the tlacuilo record a copious number of adjectives— “honest,” “circumspect,” “far-sighted,” and “pensive” versus “dull,” “detestable,” and “irritating”—together with the most suitable collocations so as to elaborate on the activity of a painter, such as “to dissolve,” “to use,” “to apply,” and “to ruin colours.” In his quest for 41. Cited in Robertson, 1966, p. 625. The Nahuatl text reads: “[T]oltecatl tlachichiuhqui, tlatecullaliani, tlateculaniani, tlatlilani, tlilpatlac, tlapaltecini tlapallaliani. In qualli tlacuilo: mîmati iolteutl, tlaiolteuuiani, moiolnonotzani, tlatlapalpoani, tlatlapalaquiani, tlaceoallotiani, tlacxitiani, tlaxaiacatiani, tlatzontiani: tlacuiloa, tlatlapalaquia, tlaceoallotia, suchitlacuiloa, tlasuchiicuiloa, toltecati,” Flor. Cod., X, p. 28. 42. “[I]olloquiquimil, tequalani, texiuhtlati, tenenco, tenenenco, tlaticeoa, tlatlapalmictia, tlatlaiooallotia, tlanenecuillalia, tlaxolopicachioa, tlaciuhcachioa tlaixtomaoa,” ibidem.

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correct Nahuatl terminology to either extol and recommend or reprimand certain behaviour, Sahagún would have recalled this sinful versus virtuous template. In fact, in the Spanish version of Book X he cites the text typology that he is aiming to imitate. “Only words and not sentences are written,” because the chapters of this book mainly intend, Sahagún explains, “that words proper to this matter, on viciis et virtutibus can be spoken.”43 He conveys his goal to gather words, rather than to write a more grammatically-complex text, for two possible reasons. He thinks that words and fixed phrases are easier to accommodate as lexicographic glosses in the three-column page work that he had planned, and he is also trying to conform to the religious textual tradition of the treatises of vices and virtues, of which Anglicus was only one of its multitude of recipients.

The Influence of Christian Works on Historia universal Treatises and compilations of vices and virtues functioned as a valuable rhetorical tool. They facilitated the learning of moral philosophy as well as a vast number of synonyms and antonyms to the officers of the Church who, willing to inculcate Christian values and moral perfection as opposed to sin in the minds of their congregation, incorporated the portrayal of sinful and virtuous behaviour in the articulation of their sermons.44 The textual tradition dated back to Aristotle’s benchmark De virtutibus et vitiis libellus, in which he defined virtues such as prudence, humility, soberness, magnanimity, and their opposites; stupidity, wrath, cowardice, and vileness. Medieval Scholasticism, adopting Aristotle’s treatise as a model, gave rise to the proliferation of descriptions of virtues and vices, either as chapters within anonymous religious volumes and within renowned works like Anglicus’s or as treatises solely dedicated to virtues and vices. Thus, in the thirteenth century, the genre flourished thanks to the Italian rheto43. “[S]e ponen solamente vocablos y no sentencias [...] para que se sepan hablar los vocablos proprios desta materia, de viciis et virtutibus,” Hist. gen., X, p. 585. 44. Francis, 1942, pp. ix-x. As representative of other European countries, English Councils and Synods from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries compelled priests to secure for themselves a summula or compilation of vices and virtues.

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rician Guido Faba’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus, and the Dominicans Guillaume Perrault’s Summa de viciis et virtutibus and Laurens d’Orléans’s La somme des vices et des vertus or Somme le roi, which influenced the composition of works alike. Similarly, in his Secunda secundae of Summa theologiae (1265-1272) Aquinas devoted no less than 170 chapters to virtues and vices that circulated on their own as the seminal treatise De viciis et virtutibus. It is in this work that Sahagún must have learnt the division of virtues into theological (faith, hope, and charity) and cardinal (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance).45 Each of them, and their opposites, were illustrated by a string of synonyms that read like an entry of a thesaurus. For example, temperance was discussed as a virtue that produced modesty, sensitivity of shame, chastity, honourableness, moderation, sparseness, soreness, purity, and so on and so forth.46 In the lookout for intellectual models that adjusted to his projection of an encyclopaedic “Calepin-like” work for conversion, Sahagún embraced this fixed Christian representation of human values and behaviour as a template to create an analogous treatise for preachers in the Nahuatl language. In this respect, he argues in his prologue to Book X that “[in order] to provide more convenience and help to the preachers of this new Church, I have dealt with the moral virtues, according to the understanding, and practices and language these same people maintain regarding them.”47 Interestingly, Sahagún acknowledges that he has not adhered to the conventional arrangement of other writers. Instead, he has dealt with this subject by “[following] the order of the persons, the ranks, the crafts, and the trades which exist among these people, setting forth the goodness of each person and then the badness, with a multitude of nouns, adjectives and verbs.”48 In doing so, nevertheless, Sahagún 45. In his catalogue of the Tlatelolco library Mathes lists several copies of the first part of Aquina’s Summa, and it is very likely that the second part was also available; see Mathes, 1982, pp. 32, 67. 46. Aquinas, 1963-1981, XLII, p. 49. 47. “[P]ara dar mayor oportunidad y ayuda a los predicadores desta nueua yglesia en este volumen he tractado de las virtudes morales segun la intelligencia y pratica y lenguaje que la misma gente tiene dellas,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 73. 48. The original text reads: “No llevo en este tractado la orden que otros escriptores an lleuado en tratar esta materia, mas lleuo la orden de las personas digni-

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was still imitating the virtuous versus sinful descriptions of specific people that he must have observed in Anglicus’s encyclopaedia and in other religious auxiliary texts. One of these was Virtutum vitiorumque exempla, by the eminent Dominican preacher Nicolas de Hanappes (ca. 1225-d. 1291), still in use during the sixteenth century in its original Latin and translated into the vernacular.49 For instance, in a brief section of his work Hanappes dictated what was expected of virtuous versus sinful princes and prelates. “[A] good prelate,” Hanappes writes, “must be as a good father unto [the] people committed unto him [...], must animate and comfort the weaklims and tearful, [...] should defende the oppressed, [...] be a comforter of thafflicted [sic] [...], muste helpe the needy to have that that is necessayre for them [...], [and] punish transgressors.”50 In opposition, Hanappes continues: “[E]uil princes and prelates,” bring trouble to their lands, “they binde together [heavy] burthens [...], and laye them on mennes shoulders.”51 As observed in previous passages from Anglicus and Sahagún’s works, Hanappes’s encapsulates manners of conduct in a string of collocations and fixed phrases, including “to animate” and “to comfort people,” “to punish transgressors,” and “to lay burdens on men’s shoulders.” There exists another title that, cited in Historia universal, transpires as a source for Sahagún’s content outline and arrangement of material. In the prologue to Book III he is adamant about the need to pay attention to the Nahuas’ pagan mythology—the stories of “sorcerers” and “magicians” like Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl—, in the same manner as the “divine Augustine,” who “did not consider it superfluous or vain to deal with the fictitious theology of the gendades y oficio y tractos: que entre esta gente ay poniendo la bondad de cada persona, y luego su maldad con copia de nombres sustantiuos, adiectiuos y verbos,” ibidem. 49. The list of treatises of vices and virtues that Sahagún must have consulted before and after his arrival in New Spain would include texts in Latin, the language in which he quotes the genre, and Spanish translations, such as Flor de virtudes y vicios (ca. 1470) from Francesco Bruni’s Fiori di virtù and Vergel de consolación (ca. 1497) from Jacobus de Benevento’s Viridarium consolationis de vitiis et virtutibus; see Francis, 1942, pp. xxviii-xxxi, and Johnson, 1993, p. 33. In Tlatelolco Sahagún probably perused a 1512 edition of Perrault’s Summae uirtutum; see Mathes, 1982, p. 63. 50. Hanappes, 1561, chapter CI. 51. Ibid., chapter CII.

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tiles in his sixth book of the City of God.”52 One of the most canonical texts of the Christian tradition, Augustine resolved to write De civitate dei after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. He defended Christianity from the charges of being held accountable for the attack by characterizing the world as built out of two cities; the holy or virtuous, presided over by Christianity, and the wicked and sinful by paganism and idolatry. Augustine claimed that the sinful city brought numerous calamities and destruction because its gods were futile nonentities, and yet, relegating them to oblivion was also counterproductive for Christianization. Sahagún, reiterating Augustine’s words, argues that the acquisition of knowledge on the pagan fictions and falsehoods is necessary to furnish indispensable “armas” (weapons) for the Spiritual Conquest.53 Were churchmen well-informed of every matter concerning Nahua religion and cultural beliefs, they could make the Nahuas “come more easily, through Gospel doctrine, to know the true God and to know that those they held as gods were not gods but lying devils and deceivers.”54 In his prologue to Book III Sahagún goes on to state that for the furnishing of “weapons” to eradicate idolatry “not only that which is written in this third Book but also that which is written in the first, second, fourth and fifth Books will serve.”55 He justifies the presence of Nahua gods, ceremonies, mythology, astrology, and auguries in Historia universal as informed by Augustine’s precept. Furthermore, his specific allusion to Book VI of De civi52. “[E]l diuino Augustino no tuuo por cosa superflua ni vana [...] tratar de la theologia fabulosa de los gentiles, en el sexto libro de la ciudad de Dios,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 59. 53. Ibidem. Sahagún’s terminology conveys the simile of conversion as a war against the Devil, repeated in his prologue to Arte adivinatoria (ca. 1585), and equally communicated in Mendieta and Zumárraga’s writings, as seen in chapter II of this study. It is this defence of knowledge as an instrument for conversion, rather than as a means of surreptitious maintenance of the Nahuas’ religion, that set Sahagún at odds with Escalona and led to the confiscation of his manuscripts in the 1570s. 54. “[V]engan mas facilmẽte por la doctrina euangelica, a conocer el verdadero dios: y que aquellos, que ellos tenjan por dioses: no eran dioses, sino diablos mentirosos y engañadores,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 59. 55. “[Para esto] no solamente aprouechara, lo que esta escrito en este tercero libro, pero tambien lo que esta escrito, en el primero, y segundo, y quarto y qujnto,” ibidem.

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tate dei reveals that he is acquainted with Augustine’s neat exposition of pagan divine subject matters.56 Augustine reconstructed a schema on the theology of Roman superstitions and myths as was written by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro in Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum libri XLI (116–27 BC). No surviving copy exists of this encyclopaedic work, in which Varro devoted twenty-five books to human things and sixteen to divine ones. The latter, as described by Augustine, consisted of I “of all these things generally;” II – IV “of men” who were in charge of pagan cults (II pontiffs, III augurs, and IV clairvoyants); V – VII “of places” (V shrines, VI sacred temples, VII religious places); VIII – X “of times” (VIII festivals and holy days, IX games of the circus, X theatrical performances); XI – XIII “of sacred rites” (XI consecrations, XII private rites, XIII public rites); and XIV – XVI “the gods themselves” (XIV certain gods, XV uncertain gods, XVI principal and select gods).57 A perfunctory comparison of topics, based on the titles of books and chapters in Varro’s work and Historia universal, shows that unlike Varro, who places information on divine pagan knowledge after human things, Sahagún abides by the medieval hierarchical order of works like Anglicus’s and presents the Nahua pantheon, festivities, and beliefs at the beginning of Historia universal. Nevertheless, like Varro, although in a reverse order, Sahagún conceives three divisions in his classification of deities of Book I: Gods, goddesses, and minor gods, which are reminiscent of Varro’s three books on certain gods (Book XIV); uncertain gods (Book XV); and principal and select gods (Book XVI).58 What is more, incorporating the same kind of information on Nahua divine matters as Varro’s work did, Historia 56. Bustamante García discusses the influence of Augustine’s work on Sahagún and the production of Historia universal in 1989, pp. 706-717, and 1992, pp. 355-364. See also Browne, 2000, pp. 194-209. 57. Augustine, 1998, pp. 243-244. The first twenty-five books are: I “of all these things generally;” II - VII “of men;” VIII – XIII “of places;” XIV- XIX “of time;” and XX – XXV “of things.” 58. In his Spanish translation Sahagún establishes a comparison between some Nahua and classical gods, which is likewise found in the Codex Borbonicus and in Las Casas’s Apologética historia sumaria and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar océano; see Olivier, 2010, p. 394.

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universal consists of ceremonies in Book II (Varro’s VIII on festivals and holy days, and XI – XIII “of sacred rites;”) of religious hierarchy and buildings in the appendix to Book II (Varro’s II – IV “of men” who were in charge of pagan cults, and more specifically II on pontiffs, and V – VII “of places;”) of soothsayers in Book IV (Varro’s IV on clairvoyants); and of omens in Book V (Varro’s III on augurs). As for the content outline of the remaining books of Historia universal, it is possible that Sahagún also looked to another seminal work by Augustine; De doctrina christiana. Here, Augustine exposed his ideal of the effective Christian orator as conversant with all-encompassing knowledge in the language of his congregation. Specifically in Book II, he urged preachers to learn about history, natural history, astronomy, and “beneficial” or “useful” arts, which he divided into trades, professions, and physical activities like sport.59 In Historia universal these disciplines find a correlation in Book VII, with information on the Nahuas’ knowledge of astronomy and meteorology; VIII, on kings and lords; IX, on merchants; X, on professions and trades, and XI, on the natural world. The extent to which Historia universal complied with Sahagún’s objective of providing churchmen with a reference work for the evangelization of the Nahuas has been the object of several studies.60 As an addition to this debate, the following paragraphs seek to showcase other outstanding examples of the manner in which Sahagún drew on information within Books I and XI, and probably X, of Historia universal for homiletic and sacramental purposes. To begin with, in the appendix of Book I Sahagún includes a religious refutation in 59. Bustamante García, 1992, pp. 358-363, Augustine, 1995, pp. 107-111. The relevant passage is already cited in chapter II of this study. Chapter XIX of Book II of De doctrina christiana also repeats the classification of divine pagan knowledge into satanic magic, soothsayers, omens, and other superstitious practices that is found in more detail in De civitate dei. 60. Dibble put forward this line of enquiry in 1974. Scholars who have analysed relevant passages of Psalmodia christiana, Colloquios, Sermonario, and Adiciones, apendice a la postilla so as to demonstrate how Sahagún and his assistants tried to apply indigenous rhetoric within Historia universal to the expression of the Christian message are Baudot 1982, Anderson 1983; 1999, Burkhart 1988; 1989; 2003, Bustamante García 1989, Klaus 1999, Schwaller 2005, and Alcántara Rojas 2007. Anderson likewise examined the insertion of sayings and metaphors of the Libro de la rethorica in an anonymous calendar of saints’ days known as Santoral mexicano, see 1966.

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Nahuatl that, adapting several chapters of the Book of Wisdom, and written according to the rhetorical-Aristotelian tradition, condemns as diabolical the Nahua deities displayed in the previous pages of Book I.61 Commencing in the form of a sermon addressed to a Nahua congregation, called “notlaçopilhoane” (“my dear children,”) the refutation tells of the evil wickedness to which the Nahuas had been subjected. Immediately afterwards, almost every god and goddess is listed in the same order of appearance as in Book I, described by copying, even word by word, only the most unfavourable attributes for which they were worshipped. Thus, Huitzilopochtli is regarded as “a common man, a sorcerer, an omen of evil, a madman, a deceiver, a creator of war, a war-lord,” and Tezcatlipoca, of whom chapter III says that he was praised by the ancients as “a true god; his abode was everywhere—in the land of the dead, on Earth, in heaven,” is denied this status, vilified as a man who, when “walk[ing] upon the Earth he quickened war; he quickened vice, filth; he brought anguish, affliction to men.”62 Sahagún’s exposition comes to demonstrate that, paying heed to Augustine, he put into practice his firm conviction that the retention of knowledge of the Nahuas’ “diabolical” religion was crucial. In this case, knowledge of the Nahuas’ gods functioned as “weapons” projected into a Christian mode of expression and lent itself to write a refutation that, when preached, substantiated the validity of the Christian message. Equally important for the composition of edifying and compelling sermons, as Sahagún underlines in his prologue to Book XI, is the familiarity with local nature. “In order to give examples and make comparisons in the preaching of the Gospel,” he asserts that “a knowledge of the things of nature is certainly, not the least noble jewels in the coffer.”63 Even Jesus Christ preached by making 61. Johansson explores the diction and the constitutive parts of this refutation in his 2011 article. 62. “[M]aceoalli, naoalli, tetzaujtl, atlacacemelle, teiscuepanj, qujiocuianj, iauiotl, iautecani. […] [V]el teutl, noujan ynemjan, mictlan, tlalticpac, ilhujcac: in iquac nemja tlalticpac, [iaoiutl qujiolitiaia], iehoatl qujiolitiaia in teuhtli, in tlaçolli, cococ, teupouhqui,” Flor. Cod., I, pp. 67-68. For the same passages in chapters I and III of Book I, see pp. 1, 5. 63. “No cierto es, la menos noble joia, de la recamara, de la predicacion euangelica: el conocimjento, de las cosas naturales: para poner exemplos, i comparaciones,” ibid., Prologues, p. 87.

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reference to nature, Sahagún continues, and “the more familiar these examples and comparisons are to the hearers, the more used the words and the language are, the more effective and beneficial they will be.”64 Sahagún seems to allude to Augustine’s belief in the pronunciation of selected evocative words as the basis to discern virtue from sin and guide neophytes towards the Christian truth. Added to this, he appears to recollect those Artes praedicandi and florilegia thanks to which he honed his homiletic skills, and which dictated, following Cicero and Augustine, the juxtaposition of prodesse et delectare. Keeping indigenous congregations attentive and helping them to grasp abstract notions meant the inclusion of beckoning stories and striking similes and metaphors. In fact, Sahagún’s intended homiletic use of Nahuatl terminology on fauna, flora, and mineralogy echoes that of rhetorical images associated with nature, which were scattered throughout the sermons of distinguished preachers like the Dominican St. Vincent Ferrer, whose work was present in several collections of sermons held in the Tlatelolco library. For instance, Ferrer’s sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins likens people with self-doubt to ants; fragrant flowers to Jesus Christ’s good deeds; and the Trinity to the tree of life—the bark, the log, and the heart of the log.65 Sahagún could have copied and translated these similes from Ferrer’s texts, however, as a Franciscan preacher who had experience in the adaptation of texts for a particular audience, he was conscious that overlooking the inadequacy of literal translations endangered the conveyance of the Christian message. Book XI represents his wish for a text in Nahuatl that described the natural world surrounding his Nahua congregation. He expected preachers to consult it in order to obtain vocabulary and rhetorical devices that would cap64. “[I] estos exemplos, i, comparationes: quanto mas famjliares fuerẽ, a los oientes i por palabras, i lenguage mas vsadas, entrellos, dichas: tanto serã mas efficazes: i provechosas,” ibidem. 65. Cátedra, 1994, pp. 526-567. See Ferrer’s “Sermon que fabla como se deven vencer los siete pecados mortales” (“Sermon that explains how the Seven Deadly Sins must be defeated,” ibid., pp. 525-532). Olmos has been attributed the adaptation into Nahuatl of Ferrer’s Sermones de peccatis capitalibus pro ut septem petitionibus orationis dominicae opponuntur. For further reference, see Baudot’s 1976 and 1990a articles and his 1996 edition of Olmos’s Los siete sermones principales sobre los siete pecados mortales.

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ture the Nahuas’ attention and smooth the introduction of rigorous doctrinal theory. Sahagún took care to integrate in Psalmodia christiana y sermonario de los sanctos del año (1583) some Nahuatl terms for flora and fauna that had been collected for Book XI.66 A prime example is the first psalm of April, “Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” which is made up of references to flowers, trees, birds, and insects radiating their liveliness during the celebration of Easter Sunday. The paragraph on the trees reads: “You ceibas, you taxodiums, you cypresses, you firs, you pine trees [...], now is the time that you renew your flowers, your leaves, that you form tufts, that you put forth shoots.”67 For the writing of this passage, Sahagún seems to have looked to portrayals of trees and their properties as recorded in the second paragraph of chapter VI of Book XI, which depicts the cypress, the fir, the pine tree, the taxodium, and the ceiba as tall, thick, and splendorous.68 The description of these trees, and of the cypress in particular, consists of a number of collocations on their natural cycle, such as “it sprouts, grows, enlarges, develops, forms terminal growth, forms branches, forms branches in different places, forms foliage, leaves. Thus buds burst open; it forms blossoms; it blossoms.”69 In his quest for similes that would instil the miracle of resurrection in the Nahuas’ mind, Sahagún employed the linguistic repertoire that is reminiscent of spring and the vigorous and festive beginning of the life cycle. With the help of his Nahua assistants he introduces some of these collocations in the second part of the psalm sentence (“you renew your flowers, your leaves, [...] you form 66. In his introductory study of Psalmodia christiana Anderson connects the pre-Hispanic poetry and songs of the Cantares mexicanos and the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España—full of allusions to flowers, birds, and precious stones—with some passages of the psalms and sermons of Sahagún’s text; see Anderson, 1993b, pp. xxx-xxxi. On the hybrid nature of Psalmodia christiana, that is, the expression of Christian doctrine through Nahuatl terminology and preHispanic similes, see also Burkhart 1989; 2003, Schwaller 2005, and Alcántara Rojas 2007. 67. The original text translated by Anderson is: “In tipuchotl, in taueuetl, in titlatzca, in toiametl […], ie vncã, ie imma in ticiãcuiliz in musuchio in matlapal, in tizcaloaz, in ticeliaz,” Sahagún, 1993b, p. 109. 68. Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 106-118. 69. “[M]ozcaltia, mana, mooapaoa, izcalloa, momatia, momamatia, moqujllotia, amatlapaloa, xotla, moxochiotia, xochiova,” ibid., p. 107.

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tufts, [...] you put forth shoots,”) ensuring that a correct linguistic usage and an appropriate evocation of the “resurrection” message was rendered.70 The final proposed example that verifies the usefulness of Historia universal for proselytizing objectives centres on the first chapters of Book X in relation with the confessors’ duties in New Spain. In his Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, Motolinía claims that the introduction of the sacrament of penance in 1526 brought about a significant increase of work with which the Franciscans had to grapple. According to him, the number of contrite indigenous penitents outnumbered that of confessors to the extent that people had to wander from one monastery to another in search of one.71 Nevertheless, rather than the scarcity of friars, it was the quality of the delivery of the sacrament that caused the most serious difficulties. In a majority of cases friars were linguistically and culturally unprepared to ask questions and understand answers in the indigenous languages. Even in those cases in which confessors had a grasp of the language, astute penitents probably manipulated the rules of confession and made answers unintelligible by exploiting verbal exuberance and terminological impenetrability that hid or attenuated the circumstances of sin.72 Sahagún expresses his concern about this phenomenon in the first prologue to Historia universal: In order to know how to ask what is proper and understand what they may say pertaining to [the confessor’s] work, it is very advisable to know what is necessary [...]. To preach against these matters, and even to know if they exist, it is needful to know how they practiced them in the times of their idolatry [...]. And the confessors neither ask about them, nor think that such a thing exists, nor understand the language

70. Sahagún and his assistants also drew on the information that they had about flowers. On this, see in particular the descriptions of the fragrant eloxochitl, cacahuaxochitl, and izquixochitl and their inclusion in the psalm “On the Day of the Stigmata of Blessed Francis;” Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 201-202, and Alcántara Rojas, 2012, p. 126. 71. Motolinía, 1985, pp. 165-166. Óscar Martiarena Álamo has examined the introduction of aural confession to the indigenous peoples and the most recurrent problems missionaries like Sahagún, Fray Alonso de Molina, and Fray Juan Bautista Viseo had to face; see 1999. 72. Gruzinski, 1989, pp. 105-106.

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to inquire about it, nor would even understand [it], even though [the penitents] told them of [idolatrous matters].73

In this revealing paragraph his experiences as a confessor resonate strongly. When attempting to administer the sacrament, Sahagún would have striven to understand what his penitents articulated, whether they had performed idolatry, and if so, of which type, in order to absolve or assign appropriate penance. His fellow confessors, Sahagún argues, neither knew how to ask nor how to interpret what was being heard, which meant that pagan and idolatrous sins were easily bypassed.74 With the intention of rectifying this adverse scenario, Sahagún fell back upon confession manuals that told him what constituted the penitents’ sins. This information came to form part of his outline or summary of contents and helped him to create questions for the compilation of relevant material that could aid confessors in the interrogation and the understanding of their penitents’ answers.75 One of the most widely disseminated confession manuals of Sahagún’s times, undergoing numerous reprints in the 1550s in Coimbra, Medina del Campo, and Salamanca, was the Manual de confessores y penitentes (1549) by the professor of canon law at Salamanca, Martín de Azpilcueta. The Salamanca edition of 1556 reached the library of Tlatelolco, a fact that makes Azpilcueta’s manual a credible model for Sahagún’s decision regarding subject matters for Historia universal, if not at the earliest writing stage of Tepepulco, per-

73. “El confessor para sauer preguntar lo que conuiene y entender lo que dixeren tocante a su officio: conujene mucho que [sepa] lo neçessario [...]. Para predicar contra estas cosas y para sauer si las ay: menester es, de saber como las vsauã en tiempos de su idolatria […]. Y los confesores ni se las preguntan ni piensan que ay tal cossa: ni sauen lenguaje para se lo preguntar ni aun lo entenderan aunque se lo digan,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 45-46. 74. For further reference, see Martiarena Álamo, 1999, pp. 118-124. 75. Klor de Alva implies this statement when asserting that Historia universal reflects “the categories of sinful beliefs and practices commonly employed in confessional guides,” 1988, p. 42. Nevertheless, he does not pursue this further by drawing parallels between themes within Historia universal and those of confession manuals, focusing instead on the argument that the face-to-face sacrament of confession led Sahagún, a pioneering anthropologist, to the creation of an ethnographic method to interview informants.

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haps at that of Tlatelolco.76 The epitome of many other confession manuals, Azpilcueta’s comprised a lengthy definition of penance and instruction on the sacrament, information about clerical and lay sins, and possible questions to be asked. These questions were mostly organized around sins against the Ten Commandments and the Seven Sacraments, sins related to the Five Senses and to virtues and vices, and sins committed by specific penitents depending on their status and profession.77 To begin with, Azpilcueta’s suggested questions on sins against the First Commandment match the overall contents of several books of Historia universal. Some of his questions, cited in full for their relevance, put this argument on view: Whether [the penitent] believed in any heresy […]. Whether he conjured the Devil in a prayer so as to learn about something or to receive help for something […]. Whether he learnt necromancy or any other magic art, or made use of it, or deliberately wanted to learn it or to use it [...]. Whether he went to or sent for sorcerers or called them to go to his house so as to ask them [...] [,] or he cast curses [...] and tacit invocations of demons […]. Whether he asked or wanted to ask soothsayers about a theft or about something secret […]. Whether he believed and took to be true that someone is forced to do good or evil depending on the planet or constellation on which he is born […]. Whether upon hearing birds’ singing, animals bellowing or crying out, coming across a hare or a pregnant woman, he takes to be true that something bad will happen to him [...]. Whether after tripping by the door when about to leave he returns inside, or whether upon sneezing when he is getting up he goes back to bed, [and] these and other similar vanities.78 76. Mathes, 1982, p. 49. Other well-known confession manuals with which Sahagún must have been familiar were Confessionale-Defecerunt by the Dominican Archbishop St. Antoninus (1389-1459), and Arte de bien confessar (1524) by the professor of thomistic theology at Alcalá and Salamanca Pedro Ciruelo; Homza, 1999, p. 39. In the library of Tlatelolco Sahagún also had the opportunity to consult the editions of Alessandro Ariosto’s Explicit enchyridion seu interrogatorium confessorum (1540) and that of the confessional included within Jean Gerson’s Opera (1517); see Mathes, 1982, pp. 48, 56. 77. Tentler, 1977, pp. 89-90. 78. “Si creyo alguna heregia […]. Si conjuro al demonio por manera de ruego, para saber del alguna cosa, o para recebir ayuda en alguna obra […] [,] si aprẽdio nigromancia o algũa otra arte magica, o uso della o deliberadamente la quiso aprender o usar […] o si fue, o embio alos hechizeros, o los llamo a su casa, para les preguntar […] [,] o hizo hechizos [...] & invocaciones de demonios tacitas […] [.] Si pregunto o quiso preguntar a adeuinos algun hurto, o otra cosa secreta […], si creyo y tuuo por

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One cannot fail to notice that the first five books of Historia universal, concerning “idolatrous” beliefs and pagan religious practices, supply details correlated to Azpilcueta’s questions; Book I on the “diabolical” gods that the Nahuas worshipped; II on the feasts and sacrifices in their honour; III on their necromancers and magicians; IV on the influence of Nahua calendrical signs upon peoples’ behaviour; and V on omens. Azpilcueta’s questions also trigger an association with the doctrine of Church Fathers like Augustine, who would have been an inspirational source for the definition of particular sins against the Ten Commandments. For example, in chapter XX of Book X of De civitate dei, Augustine deprecates the pagans who, tricked by the demons, believed that they could predict the future “by means of herbs and stones and animals, and certain kinds of sounds, and words and figures and drawings, and even by observing certain movements of the heavenly bodies in the turning heavens.”79 Similarly, in De doctrina christiana Augustine depicts omens that concur with Azpilcueta’s queries, such as someone returning to bed because he had sneezed whilst putting on his shoes, or staying at home because he had tripped when about to leave his house.80 What these observations come to demonstrate is the fact for the design of his content outline—in this case what was constitutive of sin—Sahagún is receiving an analogous discourse from several pervasive sources, in the same way as the different encyclopaedias he consulted would have told him of equivalent contents and structures. There exists, nevertheless, a very distinctive correspondence that points to confession manuals as a source for the content outline of Historia universal. As aforementioned, in the first section of Book cierto que alguno por planeta o constellacion en que nace […] es forçado a hazer mal o bien […]. [S]i por oyr cantos de aues, aullar, o bramar animales, encontrar la liebre, o muger preñada, cree por cierto, q[ue] algun mal le ha de acontecer, […] si por tropezar a la puerta, quando quiere salir, se torna para dentro, o por esternudar, quando se levanta se acuesta otra vez, estas vanidades y otras semejantes,” Azpilcueta, 1557, pp. 75-78. 79. The original text translated by Dyson reads: “Et quod [ei uidetur] herbis et lapidibus et animantibus et sonis certis quibusdam ac uocibus et figurationibus atque figmentis, quibusdam etiam obseruatis in caeli conuersione motibus siderum,” Augustine, 1998, p. 409. 80. See Augustine, 1995, pp. 92-93, and Azpilcueta, 1557, pp. 77-78.

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X Sahagún devotes chapters IV to XXVI to the description of people according to their social status, professions, and trades. The list is long and includes, amongst others, gold casters, copper finishers, lapidaries, carpenters, stone cutters, masons, singers, wise men, physicians, sorcerers, attorneys, solicitors, tailors, weavers, procurers, buffoons, farmers, horticulturists, merchants, cooks, fishermen, and a range of sellers. Equally, in chapter XXV of his confession manual, which is in itself a repository of previous manuals, Azpilcueta tailors particular questions to “kings and lords, judges, lawyers and attorneys […], witnesses, scribes, teachers and professors, students, physicians and surgeons, trustees, tutors and guardians, hospital administrators and providers, clerics.”81 For example, the suggested questions for physicians, which Sahagún might at a certain point have phrased whilst administering the sacrament of confession, are: Whether he used his knowledge on medicine or surgery without knowing enough about it […], or knowing about it, he did not follow its rules, or he was notably negligent in checking the infirm or in visiting them […]. Whether doubting about whether a given medicine could very much damage the infirm or not, he gave it to them just as an experiment or to avoid people saying that he did not know, or in order to earn money, or for any other reason […]. Whether when it was necessary to cut a limb, he did not ask for someone who was known to be able to cut it properly, or made it cut [even though] he doubted whether this would damage [the infirm].82

Upon reflecting on these questions, Sahagún was probably reminded of the virtuous versus sinful binary opposition that he read in treatises of vices and virtues. He must have considered that the good 81. “Reyes y señores, jueces, abogados y procuradores, […], testigos, escriuanos, maestros y doctores, estudiantes, medicos y cirugianos, ejecutores de los testamentos, tutores y curadores, administradores y proveedores de los hospitales, clerigos,” Azpilcueta, 1557, index. 82. “[S]i uso de la arte de medicina o cirugia, sin saberla bastantemente [...]: o sabiendola, no siguio las reglas della, o fue notablemente negligente, en estudiar, o en visitar a los enfermos […]. Si dudando de alguna medicina, si le dañaria notable[mente] al enfermo, o no, la dio por la experimentar, o porque no dixessen [que] no sabia: o por ganar: o por otro respecto […]. Si siendo necesario cortar algun miembro, no hizo buscar alguno, de quien se creya, que se lo co[r]taria bien, o le hizo cortar, dudando que ello le seria dañoso,” ibid., pp. 552-553.

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physician was learned and took genuine care of his patients. In Azpilcueta’s words, he “used his knowledge on medicine or surgery” in a correct manner and had no doubt about which medicine to dispense. These are in essence the main underlying characteristics of the related paragraph on the good or professional male Nahua ticitl, understood by Sahagún as a physician, which are recorded in Book X of Historia universal: [He is] a diagnostician, experienced—a knower of herbs, of stones, of trees, of roots. He has [results of] examinations, experience, prudence. [He is] moderate in his acts. He provides health, restores people, provides them splints, sets bones for them, purges them, gives emetics, gives them potions; he lances, he makes incisions in them, stitches them, revives them, envelopes them in ashes.83

On the contrary, according to Azpilcueta, the bad physician neither knew his profession—for he would cut limbs when unnecessary and dispense wrong medication—nor followed the rules; he even abused his position to satisfy personal interests. Along these lines the poor-skilled and devious ticitl is described in Book X as: [A] fraud, a half-hearted worker, a killer with his medicines, a giver of over-doses, an increaser [of sickness]; one who endangers others, who worsens sickness; who causes one to worsen. [He pretends to be] a counsellor, advised, chaste. He bewitches; he is a sorcerer, a soothsayer, a caster of lots, a diagnostician by means of knots. He kills with his medicines; he increases [sickness]; he seduces women; he bewitches them.84

These portrayals on virtuous or professional and sinful or unprofessional physicians might have been modelled upon Azpilcueta’s questions. Thus, the description of the professional one reads as an answer to the query of “whether he used his knowledge on medicine or sur83. “In qualli ticitl tlanemiliani, tlaiximatini, xiuhiximatqui, teiximatqui, quauhiximatqui, tlaneloaioiximatqui, tlaieiecole, tlaztlacole, iztlacole, tlaixieiecoani, tlapaleuia, tepatia tepapachoa, teçaloa, tetlanoquilia, tlâçotlaltia, tetlaitia, tlaitzmina, texotla, tehitzoma, teeoatiquetza, nextli teololoa,” Flor. Cod., X, p. 30. 84. “In tlaueliloc ticitl: ic tlaqueloani, itlaquelh quichioani tepâmîctiani, tepaixuitiani, tlaouitiliani, teouitiliani, tlatlanalhuiani, tetlanaluiani, nonotzale: nonotzqui, pixe, suchioa naoalli, tlapouhqui, tlapoani mecatlapouhqui, tepamictia, tlaouitilia, tepixuia, tesuchiuia,” ibidem.

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gery […] knowing about it, and how he does so.” For the unprofessional physician, the passage responds to Azpilcueta’s questions of “whether he used his knowledge on medicine or surgery without knowing enough about it […], or knowing about it, he did not follow its rules, or whether he gave medicines as an experiment, or for any other reason.” As for the answers put down on paper, Sahagún and his assistants ensured that these comprised relevant collocations of the physician’s “good versus bad” practices so that churchmen could retrieve specific Nahuatl terminology, like “a physician provides health,” “restores people,” “provides them with splints,” “worsens,” and “sickens.” In addition, these short sentences offer specificities on the indigenous culture and remedies, in that Nahua physicians are said “to envelope sick people in ashes,” to diagnose “by means of knots,” and, as sorcerers, to be able to “seduce” and “bewitch” women.85 Appealing to his objective of constructing a text that would serve the dual purpose of writing sermons and administering confession effectively, Sahagún seems to have combined the Christian virtuous versus sinful characterization of people with the human typology of penitents of confession manuals.86 Moreover, conscious of the existence of autochthonous penitents, Sahagún adds to the usual list of European trades the description of a wide range of Nahua sellers, such as sellers of capes, sandals, cotton, green stones, feathers, chilli, and cacao. For instance, the bad quachnamacac or seller of cotton capes and blankets is said to merchandize with:

85. One might think of the use Sahagún could have given to this linguistic and cultural information when talking with propriety in Nahuatl about the simile of the Christian preacher as a virtuous physician, as found in his first prologue to Historia universal, and of the pre-Hispanic priest as a sinful one. 86. Anglicus and Hanappes’s works, for example, dedicated limited space to the application of this dichotomy. There is a possibility that Sahagún had read a treatise of vices and virtues that solely contained the depiction of people according to ranks, professions, and trades. A contemporary author, Juan Pérez de Moya, who studied in Salamanca shortly after Sahagún, composed Comparaciones o vicios y virtudes: muy util para predicadores y otras personas curiosas (1584), where he arranges entries in a reader-friendly alphabetical order that directs readers to the descriptions of judges, teachers, noblemen, preachers, princes, kings, and wise men. Pérez de Moya either imitated other compilations of descriptions of virtuous and sinful people or was influenced by the chapters of confession manuals with questions addressed to specific penitents.

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spoiled large cotton capes—rotten ones; spoiled capes—spurious ones, patched, smoothed, darned, falsified by sewing, treated with maize dough, washed—washed with ashes, dressed with ashes, pounded, beaten, treated with an adhesive, with [thick] atole, with ground tortillas; of loose weave, sparse badly woven, coarse, pierced by [burnishing] stones; narrow, small, short—[like] little handbags; made of cotton waste.87

From this passage a confessor learnt about the potential sinful actions he should ask when administering the sacrament to the seller; namely, whether he deceived his customers by displaying spoiled goods and by treating these with different substances that modified their appearance in order to make them look new and of better quality. The confessor could start with general questions of this kind; “did you sell spoiled capes and blankets? Did you use any substance to make them look better?” What is more, the assimilation of specific vocabulary enabled the confessor to understand and reproduce the relevant terms and collocations in the language of the penitent; verbs like “to falsify,” “to treat with,” and “to pierce;” substantives like “dough,” “ashes,” “atole,” “tortillas,” and “stones;” and adjectives like “patched,” “smoothed,” and “darned.” This terminology was equally vital for the confessor to deepen his enquiry. In relation to this, Sahagún states that “were the penitent to touch upon one or two words,” that is, relevant words that could alert the confessor of a penitent’s censurable behaviour, then the confessor could “take these as a pretext to ask about any other matter upon which that word or words touch.”88 Thus, if the confessor heard the penitent exculpate himself from “treating” the capes, the confessor could let the seller know that he was privy to the “sinful” sellers’ practices, and could insist on enquiring whether the penitent 87. “[Q]uachpalan, quachpalaxtli, tilmapalan, tlachichioalli, tlachichitl, tlaixtectli, tlaixaquilli, tlapiquitzõtli, tlatexuilli, tlapactli, tlanextlatilli, tlanexquaqualatzalli, tlateuilli, tlatepitzinilli, tlatzacuuilli, atollo, tlaxcallo, tlaxcalaio, poxatic, caciltic, cacaciltic: tlatepepetlalli, tlatecocoionilli, pitzato, tepiton, titichtontli, titichpil, chitictontli, ichcacuitlaio,” Flor. Cod, X, p. 63. 88. “[S]i el penitente tocare un vocablo o dos [el confesor puede] tomar asilla para preguntar de alguna cosa que en aquel vocablo o vocablos se toca,” cited in García Icazbalceta, 1954, p. 384. This quote belongs to Sahagún’s prologue to Arte adivinatoria, in which he recommends confessors and preachers to deploy the material that he had collected in Historia universal.

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remembered ever treating his capes with adhesive, thick atole, or ground tortillas.89 That Sahagún himself must have used all this linguistic and cultural information in the administering of confession, just as he did when copying material from Books I, VI, and XI in the composition of a refutation, sermons, and psalms, remains a very likely hypothesis. What adds weight to this hypothesis is that his fellow missionary Fray Alonso de Molina benefited from the material that Sahagún and his assistants gathered for Historia universal. Both Franciscans were tutors and custodians of the College of Tlatelolco and maintained a “peer-reviewing” relationship in their creation of lexical and doctrinal texts in Nahuatl. Sahagún approved Molina’s first dictionary of Nahuatl, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana (1555), and Molina is thought to have proof-read some biblical translations from Latin into Nahuatl of Sahagún’s Postilla.90 Given this collaborative framework, Molina must have gotten hold of a copy of the early drafts of Historia universal whilst writing his confession manuals Confessionario breue and Confessionario mayor en lengua mexicana y castellana (1565).91 Like Azpilcueta’s and other confession manuals, Molina’s brief and expanded versions contain a chapter on questions tailored to specific penitents regarding their status, profession, and trade, and some of these questions are highly reminiscent of the description of people in Book X. For example, a seller of cloth and blankets should be asked: [D]id you close the holes [of spoiled blankets] so that you did not show those holes to the person who bought them [...] deceiving him in this way? Did you perhaps beat the sparsely-woven thin blankets 89. For a similar analysis of the information that confessors could elicit from the description of the virtuous and the sinful cacao seller, see Ríos Castaño 2011, pp. 35-36. 90. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 488. On Molina and Sahagún’s relationship see Hernández de León-Portilla’s 1999 article, and León-Portilla, 1999, p. 151. 91. In his introduction to the edition of Molina’s Confessionario mayor, Roberto Moreno presumes that Molina must have copied material from the works of some Franciscan brethren, whether Motolinía, Olmos or Sahagún, see 1984, p. 19. As regards the influence of Historia universal, Burkhart is first to suggest that “[s]uch a treatment of the Nahuatl information [virtuous versus sinful dichotomy in Book X] was potentially very useful in developing manuals for confessors,” see 1989, p. 22.

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in order to make them tighter [...] or did you treat them with paste to make them look thicker? Did you wash [the blankets] and falsify them by adding embroidered pieces of cloth on the borders? [...] Did you dye them?92

Molina appears to have adapted the gist or the underlying characteristics of the sinful and untrustworthy seller of cotton capes and blankets of Book X. The penitent should be asked whether he cheated people by selling spoiled blankets and whether he falsified them to look in perfect condition; tighter and thicker. Besides, Molina urges confessors to ask about specific spurious treatments, such as adding paste, washing, falsifying by sewing, and dressing or dying.93 Molina’s use of an early draft of Historia universal provides evidence that Sahagún’s desire to write works that fitted Toral’s brief of being valuable for “the indoctrination, the propagation, and the perpetuation of the Christianization” of the Nahuas was fulfilled in some measure.94 Nevertheless, the extent of Sahagún’s impact, in particular after Historia universal and other texts on indigenous matters were banned and dispatched to Spain, might have been limited to works written by friars who, residing in Tlatelolco and Mexico City, had access to surviving drafts. The influence of these permeated from one text to another, passing on through the works of 92. “[C]errasteles los agujeros, de manera q[ue] no mostraste al q[ue] las cõpro los dichos agujeros […] engañandolo dẽsta manera? Y las nauas q[ue] erã ralas, quiça las batiste, pa tupirlas […] o las engrudaste, para q[ue] pareciessen gruessas? Y las mantas […] lauastelas, y pusisteles cabeçones labrados […] haziẽdo trapãtojos […], teñistelas?,” Molina, 1984, p. 19. For the Nahuatl version, see folio 37r. 93. Molina’s questions on sins against the First Commandment also prove his recurrence to one of the manuscripts of Historia universal. Following the omens that Sahagún and his assistants recorded, Molina suggests asking: “Do you believe in dreams? Did you by any chance believe in omens associated with the barn owl, the owl, the weasel, the pinauiztli and tlalacatl beetles and the epatl [skunk] that peed in your house, or with cobwebs when these sometimes pass across your eyes, or when your eyelids tremble, or when you have hiccups, or when you sneeze?” (“Crees los sueños? o por vẽtura tuviste por agüeros a la lechuza, al buho, a la comadreja, al escarabajo pinauiztli, y tlalacatl, al epatl q[ue] se meo ẽ tu casa, o a los hilos de las telarañas q[u]ãdo algũas vezes pasan por tus ojos, o q[u]ãdo te tiẽblan los parpados d[e] los ojos, q[u]ãdo tienes hipo, o q[u]ãdo estornudas?,” ibid., p. 18. For the Nahuatl version, see folio 21v. 94. “[P]ara la doctrina, cultura, y manutenencia, de la cristiandad,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 53.

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churchmen to reach later generations and even other mendicant orders.95 A glimpse at the work of the Franciscan Fray Juan Bautista Viseo, who like Olmos and Sahagún committed himself to linguistic study for conversion purposes—he published Olmos’s collection of huehuetlahtolli—, permits an appreciation of how data recorded in Historia universal was extracted directly or through other sources. In his Confesionario en lengua mexicana y castellana (1599) Bautista repeats Molina’s questions, and in his Sermonario (1606) he expresses his debt to Molina and Sahagún’s linguistic and doctrinal works.96 In Advertencias para los confessores y ministros de los naturales (1600) Bautista copies the majority of the superstitions of Book V of Historia universal, citing as his source a Spanish manuscript, which he calls the second book of Sahagún’s trilingual vocabulary.97 Interestingly, Bautista directs Advertencias at the “con95. Churchmen who appear to have employed Sahagún’s work are the Jesuit Father Horacio Carochi and the Augustinian Fray Juan de Mijangos; see Sell 2010. Close parallels have been discovered between the collection of huehuetlahtolli of Book VI and two works of the first half of the seventeenth century, the Bancroft Dialogues and the Christian drama The Three Kings; see the preliminary studies by Karttunen and Lockhart 1987, and Sell and Burkhart 2004. 96. Sell, 2010, p. 191. 97. Bautista’s relevant quote in Advertencias reads: “[This work] continues to tell about some old superstitions that these natives had when they were gentiles, as the Father Fray Bernardino de Sahagún writes in the second book of his Trilingual Vocabulary. And it is advisable that confessors know about them so that if someone accuses himself of them [the confessor] understands them accordingly” (“[s]iguense algunas abusiones antiguas que estos naturales tuuieron en su gentilidad segun que escriue el Padre Fray Bernardino de Sahagun en el libro segundo de su Bocabulario Trilingue. Y es bien que los confessores las aduiertan para que si alguno se acusare dellas las entienda bien,” Bautista, 1600, p. 106). In his study of Sahagún’s organization of material Bustamante García indicates that during the third, fourth, and fifth rearrangements omens and superstitions were part of a second book, titled “on the sun, the moon, and the omens of each day of the year.” This book was later on split into Book VII, dealing with astronomy; Book IV with judicial astrology; and Book V with omens and superstitions, see Bustamante García, 1992, pp. 413-441. The manuscript that Bautista claims to have had in his hands could have been an early draft of the second book (“on the sun, the moon, and the omens of each day of the year.”) The allusion to a “trilingual text” can perhaps be interpreted as a three-column page manuscript similar to the surviving “Memoriales con escolios.” Another possibility is that the superstitions were included in the lost Arte de la lengua mexicana, con un vocabulario apendiz. Sahagún writes that this manual and the appended vocabulary, now lost, were completed during his stay in the Friary of San Francisco, around 1566-1569. See Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 55. For further reference on this work, see Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 389-400.

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fessors and ministers of the natives,” the same first intended readers of Historia universal. He is willing to transcribe those Nahua superstitions because, like Sahagún, he conceives them as proof of anti-Christian beliefs against which churchmen should warn, and because, as unorthodox beliefs, it is only within a doctrinal reference work condemning them that they should occupy a place. This accommodation of the world of the Nahuas to that of the churchmen, with whom Bautista and Sahagún shared evangelizing rationale and categories of knowledge representation, pervaded in the production of every work by the agency of friars. In Sahagún’s case, as an educated missionary of his time and in full awareness of a range of auxiliary sources for conversion, his project of writing a work that best incorporated an understanding of the world of the Nahuas for “the indoctrination, propagation, and preservation” of Christianity in New Spain led him, not to the adoption of just one model in particular, but to the selection of different ideas and passages within a range of sources—a choice he judged would eventually result in the most appropriate Christian encyclopaedia on the Nahuas. As discussed in this chapter, these sources would have comprised hierarchically-structured encyclopaedias used for homiletic purposes, collections of sermons, and additional doctrinal works like treatises of vices and virtues and confession manuals.

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CHAPTER 4: Inquisitorial Techniques as Sahagún’s Method of Data Collection Sahagún’s use of confession manuals is conceived in this study as a source on which he drew for his content outline of Historia universal and for advice on what questions to ask and how to obtain answers. Klor de Alva believes that the sacrament of penance is the point of reference to argue for a “confession-generated ethnography,” the beginning of a “thorough ethnographic procedure that justifies calling its first consistent practitioner the ‘father of modern ethnography’.”1 This thought-provoking statement by Klor de Alva is founded on the supposition that Sahagún extrapolated his Christian moral right to know and, moving beyond the Church and the sacramental context, inscribed the personal and social lives he elicited from his confessing informants as a written text.2 Nevertheless, confession in itself is a confidential oral encounter where no recollection of information in order to eradicate unorthodox practices features, let alone the involvement of different penitents for the comparison of their sins. Sahagún’s so-called “ethnographic procedure,” understood here as his techniques for gathering information on matters that are today regarded as ethnographic in nature, must not only have derived 1. Klor de Alva, 1988, pp. 39, 47. 2. Ibid., pp. 42, 47.

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from the procedure of interrogating the penitent while administering the sacrament, but also coalesced with another procedure with which Sahagún, prone to imitation and adaptation of sources for his proselytizing purposes, was acquainted.3 Martiarena Álamo paves the way to pursuing a new line of enquiry for the understanding of Sahagún’s method of data collection when revealing the similarities between the contents of Historia universal—particularly those books dealing with gods, ceremonies, and superstitions—, inquisitorial manuals like the Directorium inquisitorum (ca. 1376) by the Dominican Nicholas Eymerich, and the Inquisition’s edictos de fe, documents that were declaimed in squares and churches, and which listed blasphemous and heretical beliefs and actions. In the same way that Sahagún intended to create a text with the aim of removing what he considered idolatrous practices, inquisitorial manuals and edicts of faith advised inquisitors and Christians in general on the external signs by which one could identify heretics so as to prosecute them.4 Nevertheless, Martiarena Álamo neither examines the manner in which inquisitorial manuals promulgated interrogation procedures for the gathering and comparison of answers, nor does he address the fact that inquisitors wrote or supervised the writing of reports that contained declarations from witnesses and the accused, and contrasted those declarations. The current chapter aims to fill this gap and unfold the extrapolation of the inquisi3. Klor de Alva mentions that Sahagún may have applied “the interrogative regime to selected informants throughout Central Mexico in a systematic fashion, which is reminiscent of the Relaciones Geográficas,” 1988, p. 42. As discussed in the second chapter of this study, the sixteenth-century accounts that have survived stem from at least six questionnaires that were dispatched to the New World in 1563, 1569, 1573, 1577, 1584, and 1592; Solano, 1988, I, p. xxiv. Sahagún’s project came into full swing in 1558, and the 1563 questionnaire offers a scant number of items, so it is unlikely that this questionnaire had a major effect on his interrogative method. Instead, the connection between royal requests of accounts and an “interrogative regime of selected informants” might have derived, as this chapter intends to prove, from the first investigation on indigenous cultures at the behest of the Crown that was bestowed upon Olmos in 1533. 4. Martiarena Álamo, 1998, pp. 209-210. In this respect, Bustamante García indicates that Sahagún was a refined observer and an expert on indigenous matters, but he was so for his ultimate purpose of converting the Nahuas. For this reason, he says that Sahagún “no es un etnólogo, es un inquisidor” (“he is no ethnologist, he is an inquisitor,” Bustamante García, 1990, p. 376).

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tor’s techniques to the systematic gathering of information from Nahua “witnesses or accused-respondents,” and suggests that Sahagún’s method of data collection reflects not only confessional but also inquisitorial practices. Furthermore, this extrapolation would award the titles of “pioneering ethnographer” or “father of anthropology” that have been claimed by some Sahaguntine scholars, instead of to Sahagún, to Olmos. In Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chroniclers of Mexican Civilization (1520-1569) Baudot touches upon an enlightening association between Olmos’s inquisitorial activities against witchcraft in the north of Spain in 1527 and his investigations of indigenous cultures in New Spain soon after his arrival in 1528. Olmos possessed, Baudot observes, “the rigorous rules and the complex methods required for an ethnographic inquiry, which his personal experience in the matter of sorcery had given him. In fact, he was the only one who was prepared, because of [his] previous experience in Vizcaya.”5 Notwithstanding that Baudot links the inquisitorial techniques with Olmos’s method, he does not explore this avenue, perhaps blinded by his drive to extol Olmos’s achievement. On the contrary, he distances Olmos as much as possible from the abhorrent practices of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, retracting and finally stating that “when [Olmos] was first ordered to make a systematic inquiry into pre-Hispanic civilization, he had to invent almost everything: both the research methods and the presentation of the results.”6 Baudot may have avoided the thorny question of attributing to Olmos the application of the inquisitorial techniques to his method of data collection because it is at odds with eth5. Baudot, 1995, p. 127. Several scholars have noted in passing, without establishing a connection with Olmos’s inquisitorial expertise, that Sahagún built on Olmos’s “fieldwork.” See, for example, Garibay Kintana, 1953-1954, II, p. 30, Broda, 1975, p. 132, Martínez Rodríguez, 1981, p. xiv, Klor de Alva, 1988, p. 42, Segala, 1990, pp. 102, 105, and Hanson, 1994, p. 31. León-Portilla favoured this possibility and encouraged scholars to “inquire whether [Sahagún’s] method of direct interrogation was also influenced by somewhat similar procedures used by earlier investigators,” see 1974, pp. 242-243. In a more recent publication he states that Olmos was “precursor […] of the method of investigation” but that it was Sahagún who “years later developed it in a wider and more systematic manner” (“precursor […] del método de investigación […] [,] años más tarde [lo] desarrolló en forma más amplia y sistemática,” León-Portilla, 2011, p. 18). 6. Baudot, 1995, p. 170.

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nographic research. Olmos’s method agrees in some respects with present-day ethnography, such as the tasks of assembling different informants, retrieving and filtering information, and reporting accumulated material. Needless to say, inquisitors and ethnographers share neither motivation nor purpose or mode of thinking. Inquisitors undertook their investigations in order to prosecute individuals, whom they considered to be unorthodox practitioners, and with the determination of extirpating their anti-Christian beliefs. Accepting that Olmos’s “rigorous rules and complex methods” in New Spain were born out of inquisitorial techniques leaves room for controversy. With the claim that he employed an anthropological approach we are left to defend that inquisitors and friars, although willing to eradicate the indigenous religious system on which they reported, were pioneering ethnographers.7 In any case, what Baudot brings to light is the possibility of exploring how Olmos could have transplanted the inquisitorial mode of enquiry and how his successors, in this case Sahagún, imitated his procedure. As a matter of fact, the contention of this chapter is that Sahagún also applied the inquisitorial techniques of the Holy Office to his collection of data for Historia universal. This argument rests on two pillars. The first is the theoretical and procedural guidance Sahagún must have obtained from Olmos, which will be studied through the exposition of Olmos’s role as inquisitor in New Spain and the analysis of his inquisitorial method whilst conducting investigation on the Nahuas. The second is Sahagún’s first-hand experience of inquisitorial interrogations, and the examination of the underlying interrogation techniques he witnessed in 1539 as interpreter in Zumárraga’s trial of Don Carlos Ometochtzin, Lord of Texcoco.

7. Carlo Ginzburg has warned against the equation “inquisitor and pioneering ethnographer.” For his micro-historical approach to the study of the sixteenthcentury Benandanti, a group of north-Italian Christian dissidents accused of witchcraft, he gleaned biographical, historical, and cultural information from inquisitorial records. Ginzburg recognizes that the core of the material that sometimes historians and ethnographers obtain and their modus operandi are comparable to those of the Inquisition. The difference lies in purpose and approach. Present-day research aspires to collect objective data and understands that neither inquisitors were ethnographers nor were the Benandanti informants; they were subjected to situations of extreme duress that impacted their attitudes and answers; see Ginzburg 1989.

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The Inquisition in Spain and New Spain during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century In the Spain in which Sahagún lived before embarking for the New World, heretical or dissenting voices that challenged Christianity were present in a number of interrelated forms. Although baptized and brought up as Christians, many moriscos and marranos judaizantes preserved their ancestors’ traditions in secret. Some of them became Lutherans or Protestants, who in their attacks on Catholicism demanded a thorough revision of its dogma, and alumbrados or mystics, who, in conferring upon themselves a direct access to God, interfered with ecclesiastical authority.8 Inquisitorial records foreground that at the inception of the Holy Office its main target were the marranos judaizantes—in Barcelona, between 1488 and 1505, they were 99.3% of the accused, and in Valencia, between 1484 and 1530, 91.6%.9 If, as some of his biographers suggest, Sahagún belonged to a well-off Jewish converso family, he must have sought to avoid the possibility of raising suspicion within his community and being incriminated.10 The tentacles of the Inquisition permeated throughout sixteenth-century Spain, where tribunals were set up in official buildings, and the hunting and chastisement of heretics were public events.11 In fact, even in the case 8. For the purpose of countering doctrines that threatened its orthodoxy, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, instituted by the Church in 1231, was established in the Iberian Peninsula by the Catholic Monarchs in 1480. A 1478 papal bull issued by Sixtus IV acknowledged the existence of false Christians in Castile and Aragon, empowering Isabella and Ferdinand to fight them as cases of heresy. See Lea, 1922, I, p. 157, and Kamen, 1965, p. 137. 9. Haliczer, 1990, p. 61. 10. In search of objective material to demonstrate Sahagún’s Jewish ancestry, Rodríguez Molinero and Vicente Castro consulted the archives of León but they did not find any conclusive proof. They maintain, however, that Sahagún’s family name of “Ribeira” or “Ribera” was adopted by converso families of the north, and have put forward as evidence of Sahagún’s concerns about his Jewish origins a passage within a prologue to the vocabulary attributed to him that reads: “[S]o that it does not seem as if we have given occasion to the rabbis, who often distressed me in my youth” (“para que no parezca que hemos dado ocasión a los rabinos, que muchas veces me violentaron en mi juventud,” translated from Latin by Vicente Castro and Rodríguez Molinero, 1986, p. 23, and Bustamante García, 1990, p. 388). 11. The atmosphere of denunciation reached such a degree that petty accusations proliferated, affecting people who were reported for having smiled when hearing mention of the Virgin Mary; see Kamen, 1985, p. 163.

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that he did not descend from Jewish origins, from an early age he would have been exposed to the Inquisition’s role and commitment to extirpating heresy. Upon arrival at a place like Sahagún’s hometown, inquisitors summoned people over the age of twelve to listen to their edicto de fe, which was repeated after Sunday Mass. Informed or reminded of what constituted sin and a threat to Christianity, individuals were exhorted to aid the Inquisition in the accumulation of evidence for the prosecution of offenders.12 Most of the condemned were either flogged through the streets, while passers-by showed their hatred by hurling stones, or forced to repent in an auto de fe or ritual of public penance. In this widely-attended ceremony, standing for an act of reconciliation with Christianity, Sahagún would have observed those penitents wearing the gaudy garment, known as a sambenito or blessed scapular, the colour of which denoted the seriousness of their crime against the faith.13 From spectator to a Franciscan friar, defender of the word of God, Sahagún must have been concerned about the increasing number of accusations against Protestants and witches prior to his departure for New Spain. From 1521 onwards, confiscation and burning of Lutheran literature occurred frequently, like in Aragon and Valencia in 1521; Navarra in 1523; Toledo in 1530; and Salamanca in 1531. Between 1528 and 1534, some scholars and religious men were sentenced for possession and dissemination of 12. A typical sixteenth-century edicto against Jewish practices reads: “If you know or have heard of anyone who keeps the Sabbath according to the law of Moses, putting on clean sheets and other new garments, and putting clean cloths on the table and clean sheets on the bed on feast-days in honour of the Sabbath, and using no lights from Friday evening onwards; or if they have purified the meat they are to eat by bleeding it in water; or have cut the throats of cattle or birds they are eating, uttering certain words [...]; or have eaten meat in Lent and on other days forbidden by holy Mother Church […], or if they circumcise their children or give them Jewish names or if after baptism they wash the place where the oil and chrism was put; or if anyone on his deathbed runs to the wall to die, and when he is dead they wash him with hot water, shaving the hair off all parts of his body,” cited in ibid., p. 162. 13. Kamen, 1965, pp. 183-187. The auto de fe, due to its symbolic paraphernalia, became a public feast. The event occurred regularly and the number of those disciplined and handed over to the secular authorities for execution varied from one area to another. In Valladolid, between 1485 and 1492, around 56 people were sentenced to death, whereas in Toledo, between 1485 and 1501, the figure reached around 750; see ibid., pp. 189-190, 285.

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these works, such as the Franciscan Bishop Juan de Cazalla, Juan de Vergara—a professor of philosophy at the University of Alcalá and close friend of eminent Spanish churchmen of the time—, and Miguel de Eguía—printer and translator of Erasmus’s works.14 Years later, Sahagún would attest to the menace of Lutheranism in his first prologue to Historia universal, remarking that in the New World, contrary to Europe: “Our Lord God has willed to restore to the Church that which the demon robbed her of in England, Germany, and France.”15 Sorcery and the occult arts emerged as another source of heresy that preoccupied ecclesiastics. In his edictos de fe the Inquisitor General Alfonso Manrique, who occupied this post from 1523 to 1538, outlined six new clauses condemning the practice of magic, sorcery, divination, and astrology.16 As a friar and student of religious matters in Salamanca, Sahagún would have listened to these clauses when promulgated in edictos de fe, and informed himself of these superstitious perils in doctrinal works such as Augustine’s. A couple of years prior to leaving for the New World, he might also have heard of the unequal upsurge of witchcraft in the north of Spain, a situation that prompted Charles V to entrust Dominicans and Franciscans with the preaching of the faith amongst the rural population and with inquisitorial tasks. In his selection of appointments, Charles V remembered the at-the-time Custodian of the Friary of Abrojo (Valladolid), Fray Juan de Zumárraga, whom he had met during an Easter stay at the friary. The emperor believed him a most suitable candidate for “the office of the Holy Inquisition,” as Mendieta explains, “so that (since he was from Biscay and spoke the language of that land) he went to punish and rectify the abuse of the witches in Biscay.”17 To assist him in the extermination of these heretical beliefs and practices, Zumárraga, in turn, commissioned Olmos, another Basque-speaking Franciscan residing in the

14. Roth, 1937, pp. 163-165, Alonso Burgos, 1983, pp. 51-53, Kamen, 1985, pp. 68-71. 15. “[H]a querido [nuestro] señor dios: restituyr a la iglesia, lo que el demonjo la a robado, en inglaterra, alemanja, y francia,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 50. 16. Lea, 1922, IV, p. 184. 17. “[E]l oficio de la santa inquisición […] para que (pues era vizcaíno y sabía la lengua de aquella tierra) fuese a castigar y enmendar el abuso de las brujas [...] en Vizcaya,” Mendieta, 1973, II, p. 167.

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nearby Friary of San Francisco. In 1527, both men were involved in witchcraft trials against credulous women on whom a French wizard was said to keep a strong hold, and probably participated in the Council of Navarra’s prosecution of a group of women who had been accused by two girls of worshipping the Devil.18 Their competence in Basque, the language of the alleged witches and the witnesses, was decisive in their appointments, for they could understand their declarations and interrogate them without interpreters, whose intervention could make the process time consuming, add to the cost, and distort data. After their arrival in New Spain in 1528, it took Zumárraga and Olmos very few years before they resumed the experience that they had acquired as delegates of the Holy Office. Zumárraga was invested with the title of Episcopal or Apostolic Inquisitor by the Inquisitor General Manrique in June 1535, and entrusted with the prosecution of “the heretical corruption of customs and apostasy in the City of Mexico and in all [his] bishopric,” an office Zumárraga performed until 1543.19 The inquisitorial period that Sahagún witnessed in his first decades in New Spain, and in which he was to collaborate, represented the highest point of the Episcopal Inquisition by comparison with Zumárraga’s successors; the former Inquisitor of Toledo Francisco Tello de Sandoval until 1547, and the Dominican Alonso de Montúfar until 1571. Zumárraga conducted approximately 170 trial proceedings, the most prevalent charge being blasphemy, with over fifty-six trials, followed by thirty-seven concerning idolatry, sacrifice, sorcery, and superstition.20 Accompanied by his delegates, Zumárraga visited his jurisdiction every year to promulgate an edicto de fe and 18. García Icazbalceta, 1947, I, p. 16, Caro Baroja, 1961, pp. 242-243. The girls aged nine and eleven offered a full declaration and the names of the witches, whom they said they could identify by merely looking at their left eye. During this investigation Biscay, Logroño, Calahorra, and Pamplona were found to be “infested” with diabolical and superstitious rituals, and over one hundred and fifty women were imprisoned. For further reference, see Baudot, 1995, pp. 124-125, and Lopes Don, 2010, p. 30. 19. “[L]a herética pravedad y apostasía, en la ciudad de México y en todo vuestro obispado,” cited in García Icazbalceta, 1947, III, p. 72. The inquisitorial power that Zumárraga held in New Spain was nonetheless subject to the oversight of the Inquisitor General Manrique and the regional Holy Office of Seville; see Lopes Don, 2010, p. 47. 20. Greenleaf, 1961, p. 14, Lopes Don, 2010, p. 4.

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garner evidence of heresy and idolatrous acts.21 Although Zumárraga prosecuted Lutherans and Jews, he was particularly wary of pre-Hispanic religious practices, and determined that those indigenous neophytes of influential social status who relapsed into idolatry had to be tried in order to set an example. Indicative of his zeal is that only twenty-three days after setting up his inquisitorial tribunal in Mexico City, he put on trial two priests of the indigenous faith, accused of offering human blood to the god of the rain, Tlaloc. To these trial proceedings followed another against a nomadic sorcerer who claimed to foresee future events and possess powers to transform into animals. Contravening imperial orders, Zumárraga persevered to chase Nahua unorthodox practices, bringing to justice several indigenous leaders for secret celebration of pagan rituals, the hiding of idols, and heretical dogmatizing.22 During Zumárraga’s Episcopal Inquisition Olmos continued to perform inquisitorial activities as delegate or inquisitorial visitor, and is known to have been dispatched to the north and eastern areas of the bishopric, where he passed judgement on Don Juan, the leader of Matlatlan, in 1539. Olmos’s on-going warnings to reform this cacique, whom he had absolved from ex-communion two years before, came to an end. Upon a new visit by Olmos, Bartholo Rodríguez, a Spanish servant to official authorities and nahuatlato or interpreter of Nahuatl, denounced Don Juan for being a false Christian and for living in concubinage.23 In the course of his in21. For the autos de fe in Mexico City Zumárraga used to order a procession, which began in the administrative offices of the bishopric, and the reading of a sermon and an oath of fidelity to the Holy Office in its main square, the Zócalo. His sentences varied from the most common reconciliation with the faith through public floggings and fines to being sent to the galleys. For further reference, see Greenleaf, 1961, pp. 22-25. 22. In Charles V’s view newly-converted people should not be at the mercy of an inquisitorial jurisdiction but rather under the Viceroy’s control. Zumárraga’s dismissal of the royal stance and eventually his sentence to burn Don Carlos of Texcoco at the stake cost him his position; see ibid., p. 74, and Lopes Don, 2010, pp. 176-181. 23. The “Proceso seguido por fray Andrés de Olmos en contra del cacique de Matlatlan” (“trial brought by Fray Andrés de Olmos against the cacique of Matlatlan”) was edited by Luis González Obregón, see Procesos de indios idólatras y hechiceros, 1912, III. For an analysis of the trial proceedings and the accusations, see Greenleaf, 1961, pp. 63-64.

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vestigation Olmos unearthed that in November 1539, as customary every year, Don Juan had rejoiced with friends and subjects in the festival of Panquetzaliztli or “Raising of Banners,” honouring the god of war and the sun Huitzilopochtli. After interrogating several witnesses, Olmos accused Don Juan of idolatry, polygamy, and the fostering of anti-Christian propaganda. As punishment Don Juan received several lashes in a public act of contrition, was confined in the school of Hueytlalpan to learn the Creed, and had to build a church and a shrine for the Virgin. Olmos’s sentence bespoke a “political expedient;” instead of confiscating Don Juan’s possessions and banishing him from New Spain, he coerced him to set an example of spiritual acceptance of the new religion for his subjects, as well as to contribute to their conversion. Olmos’s 1540 report of the Matlatlan trial proceedings certifies how well-versed he was in the philosophy and methodology that underpinned the work of inquisitorial tribunals. In an introductory letter to Zumárraga, Olmos details the manner in which he had established his tribunal with the help of Bartholo Rodríguez. He adds the list of eight questions that he had designed for the interrogation process and a final report in which he had culled the declarations extracted from several witnesses. For the creation of the questionnaire and the comparison of answers that led him to reach a verdict, Olmos probably abided by the Spanish inquisitorial guideline Instrucciones del oficio de la Santa Inquisicion (1484) of the first Inquisitor General Fray Tomás de Torquemada, on which Zumárraga’s Inquisition is known to have operated.24 The manual comprises instructions on the tasks to be performed by the members of a tribunal, which was composed by the inquisitor or inquisitors, at least one notario or official scribe who took down the declarations, and additional officers who imprisoned and executed culprits. The interrogatorio or interrogation process consisted of different stages of questioning. Firstly, inquisitors obtained from the witnesses and the accused sociological and biographical data regarding age, occupation, residence, and family genealogy, including relatives’ occupations, residence, and marital status, amongst other items. These particulars were required to ratify whether those ac24. Greenleaf, 1961, p. 21.

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cused belonged to an old Christian family, and whether they had some connection with other suspects. Secondly, the inquisitor proceeded with general questions about heretical acts and, in the case of those accused, whether they knew the reasons for their imprisonment. Finally, the witnesses and the accused were exhorted to address “questions pertaining to the accusation,” that is, the alleged crime and additional people, places, and situations concerned.25 Prior to the interrogation of the accused, the inquisitor could have the chance of availing himself of inculpatory or exculpatory evidence that several witnesses would have provided and the scribe would have written down. This allowed the inquisitor to be in a position to compare the witnesses’ answers, transform them into questions for the accused, and upon a collation of answers ascertain whether or not the accused was lying. As prompted by Torquemada in his instructions, Olmos designed a list of eight questions that he methodically repeated to each of a series of witnesses. In order to write down the declarations that would help him to interrogate Don Juan, he had recourse to a notario or as he names him, escribano, the Spanish nahuatlato Rodríguez. Olmos began by enquiring “if they know the named cacique 25. For the interrogation process of the accused Torquemada recommends that: “Once the prisoner has been jailed, when the inquisitors decide it, they will request that he is brought to them. In the presence of a secret royal scribe and under oath, they will ask his name, age, profession, place of residence, and for how long he has been imprisoned [...]. Afterwards, in a consecutive manner, he will be asked to declare his genealogy as long as possible, beginning with his parents and grandparents [...]. He will declare the professions and the residences they had, to whom they were married, and their children [...]. The official scribe will write this genealogy in the trial proceedings document [...] [.] Having declared on all these matters, he will be asked in a general manner, whether he knows why he is in jail, and according to his answer he will be asked questions pertaining to his accusation,” (“[p]uesto el preso en la carcel, quando a los inquisidores parezca, mandaran traerle ante si, y ante un Notario real secreto, mediante juramento, le preguntaran por su nombre, y edad, y oficio, y vezindad, y quando ha que vino preso […]. Luego consecutivamente se le mandara que reclame su genealogia lo mas largo que se pueda, comēçādo de padres, y abuelos […] declarando los oficios y vezindades que tuvieron, y con quien fueron casados, y los hijos […] y el Notario escriuira la genealogia en el processo […] y aviendo declarado todas estas cosas, se le pregūte generalmente si sabe la causa de su prision, y cōforme a su respuesta se le hagan las demas preguntas que convengan a su causa,” Valdés, 1561, fol. 29). The text consulted for this study is the Compilacion de instrucciones del oficio de la Santa Inquisicion, an expanded edition of Torquemada’s Instrucciones.

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[Don Juan] and if they know whether he is baptized and married […] in the manner of the Church.”26 He then proceeded from general questions that corroborated that Don Juan was a baptized married Christian—and therefore conscious of his obligations—to the listing of the different charges he was levelling against Don Juan, articulated in a question-like format. Having already excommunicated him on charges of unorthodox conduct, Olmos aimed at confirming that Don Juan had relapsed into his former sins of heretical dogmatizing, concubinage, and idolatry. Thus, particular questions two to five read: 2. If [the witnesses] know that although baptized and married [Don Juan] has practised polygamy; with how many women; and what family relationship he has with these women. 3. If they know that he often gets drunk and brings others together to do so. 4. If they know that the cacique is a bad Christian, who hardly ever or never goes to church nor hears doctrine in his town, not even on Holy Days, although he lives very close, and whether he prevents others from doing so. 5. If they know that he is an idolater.27

The interrogation skills that Olmos unveils in his report recall Baudot’s statement that he had employed “the rigorous rules and the complex methods required for an ethnographic inquiry.” His modus operandi consisted of three main tactics. These are the creation of a questionnaire prior to the interrogation, which structured questions from general to particular; the repetition of the questionnaire to several witnesses in order to collect as many answers as possible and compare them; and the creation of new questions, at times after an unexpected item of information had been pronounced. Regarding this third tactic, the report shows that Olmos wound up 26. “[S]i conocen al dicho cacique y saben ser bautizado, casado […] en facie ecclesia,” Procesos de indios, 1912, p. 208. 27. “2. si saben que después del babtismo [sic] ó después de casado está amancebado, y con cuántas y qué parentesco las tiene. 3. iten, si saben que el dicho cacique se emborracha á menudo, y convoca á otros á lo mismo. 4. iten, si saben que el dicho cacique es mal xpiano, é que pocas veces ó nunca, aun las fiestas, entra ó está á la doctrina en la iglesia, en su pueblo, estando bien cerca, ó si impide á otros en lo dicho. 5. iten, si saben que es idólatra,” ibidem.

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the whole interrogation with a broad sweeping query on whether there was any matter of which he was not cognizant, and which witnesses wanted to expose: “Whether they know anything else about what has been discussed.”28 This last question proved crucial in the incrimination of Don Juan for several witnesses revealed that he had convened the festivity of Panquetzaliztli. During his interrogation of Don Juan, Olmos converted this and other answers obtained from previous questions into items of inculpatory evidence. Don Juan is then said to have unwillingly admitted that “it is true that last Sunday […] [we] celebrated the festivity of Panquetzaliztli [and] […] that what [I have] been asked about performing certain idolatrous acts [during the] year is true.”29 These three tactics bear strong resemblances with those in which Olmos had also trained as a confessor. For example, like many other confession manuals, in his Arte de bien confessar (1524) Pedro Ciruelo stresses that the interrogation of penitents ought to be organized in such a manner that guaranteed “a good examination of the penitent’s conscience.”30 A preliminary pattern of questions was aimed at gathering information about a penitent with whom the confessor was not acquainted: “[F]irst the confessor must ask the penitent, if he does not know him, which land or nation he is coming from, and which occupation and lifestyle he has, because this type of knowledge is necessary for the correct organization of questions.”31 Immediately afterwards, Ciruelo suggests that “the confessor should proceed with more specific questions,” which, as discussed in the previous chapter, varied from a series of questions regarding sins against the Ten Commandments to sins related to a given profession.32 During the penitents’ formulation of these answers, the confessor had to pay careful attention to the wording 28. “[S]i saben otra cosa acerca de lo sobredicho,” ibidem. 29. “[E]s verdad que el Domingo pasado […] hicieron la fiesta de Panquezaliztli [sic] [y] […] que es verdad […] lo que le fué preguntado de ciertas idolatrías que hizo en el dicho año,” ibid., p. 214. 30. The relevant quote reads: “[El] bien examinar la consciencia del penitēte,” Ciruelo, 1541, a iii. 31. “[P]rimero demāde el cōfessor al penitente si no lo conoce: de q[ue] tierra o nacion es: y q[ue] arte: y modo de uiuir tiene: por q[ue] este conocimiento es necesario al cōfessor para biē ordenar sus preguntas,” ibidem. 32. “[P]roceda el confessor en sus preguntas mas particulares,” ibidem.

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used. Sahagún himself echoes this tactic in his prologue to Arte adivinatoria, when reminding confessors of the manner in which they could come up with probing questions. Upon hearing one or two “suspicious” words, he claims, they should take these as “pretext to ask about any other matter upon which that word or words touch.”33 In the same year in which Olmos was prosecuting Don Juan in the north, Sahagún contributed to Zumárraga’s relentless battle against idolatry in Mexico City and its surroundings. Zumárraga relied on him and other friars with a high competence level of Nahuatl to render their linguistic services. In Sahagún’s case, he is known to have been involved in three inquisitorial cases against the indigenous elite; in the interpretation of Zumárraga’s speech at the auto de fe of two Nahuas accused of heretical dogmatizing—the Tlatelolcan leader Marcos Atlabcatl and his friend Francisco—, and in the interrogation of two lords; Miguel Pochtecatl Tlaylotla—who was tried for hiding sacred bundles of relics in honour of Huitzilopochtli—and the prestigious Lord of Texcoco, the second biggest city-state of the former Nahua Empire, Don Carlos Ometochtzin.34 Don Carlos was a protégé of Cortés, who upon occupation of Texcoco as a base to conquer Tenochtitlan had compelled his family to convert to Christianity. In the summer of 1539, Don Carlos was denounced by Francisco Maldonado, a leader of the neighbouring village of Chiconautla, for instigating indigenous subjects to return to their ancestors’ religious practices and for claiming polygamy as an entitlement. Maldonado testified in front of Zumárraga that Don Carlos had reprimanded his brother in law, the Lord of Chiconautla, for organizing processions and praying to the Christian God for rain. During the trial in Mexico City, details of Don Carlos’s life emerged as illustrative of a highly reproachable unorthodox conduct; he was said to have an extramarital relationship with a niece, to perform old sacrifices to invoke the aid of Nahua gods for the governance of his region, and to challenge the existence of God, the morality of the clergy, and the reputation of Zumárraga and Vice33. “[A]silla para preguntar de alguna cosa que en aquel vocablo o vocablos se toca,” cited in García Icazbalceta, 1954, p. 384. 34. See Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 46-47, and Lopes Don, 2010, pp. 136, 141.

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roy Mendoza. Don Carlos refuted all charges and Zumárraga condemned him for being a heretical dogmatizer. On 28 November, his properties were confiscated and two days later he was burnt at the stake.35 The transcript of the trial proceedings cites the priest Juan González as the main interpreter and three other Franciscans as collaborators.36 These were one of the Franciscan Twelve, Fray Antonio de Ciudad Rodrigo, Fray Alonso de Molina, and Sahagún, who that year resided in Tlatelolco and whose direct involvement is confirmed twice. On 22 June, he interpreted, together with Ciudad Rodrigo and Molina, the denunciation made by Maldonado and, on 15 July, Don Carlos’s declaration, this time with Ciudad Rodrigo and González.37 In order to speed up the interpreting process of July 15th and to ensure the maximum degree of translation accuracy, it is likely that González, who had interpreted the majority of the witnesses’ interrogations for over a fortnight, updated Ciudad Rodrigo and Sahagún about the different declarations and new inculpatory evidence against Don Carlos. Aside from these communications, Sahagún and Ciudad Rodrigo probably had access to the inquisitorial documents gathering the witnesses’ declarations. One of them stated that Don Carlos had summoned a group of relatives and delivered this speech: Who are these who tear us apart, and disturb us, and live above us, and are upon us, and subjugate us? Here I am, and there is the Lord of Mexico, Yoanizi, and there is my nephew Tetzcapili, Lord of Tacuba, and there is Tlacahuepantli, Lord of Tula. We are all equal and act similarly. No one can equal us because this is our land and our property, and our jewel and our possession. This is our domain, it belongs to us. Who are these who come here to give us orders and subjugate 35. For the full trial transcript, see Proceso inquisitorial del cacique de Tetzcoco, edited by Eusebio Gómez de la Puente in 1910. Greenleaf provides his analysis in 1961, pp. 68-74, and Lopes Don in 2010, pp. 156-174. 36. González is also known to have collected information on indigenous matters of which Sahagún benefited. He claims to have added information on lords and kings to the “Memoriales en tres columnas” (ca. 1563-1565) from “the account that the Technoca people gave to the Canon Juan González in painted and written documents” (“la relation que dieron los technucas al canonjgo Juan gonzalez en pintura y en escripto,” cited in Bustamante García, 1989, p. 268). 37. Proceso inquisitorial, 1910, pp. 1, 55.

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us, and who, although they are neither relatives nor share our blood, equate themselves to us?38

This alleged speech was converted into a question that Zumárraga asked Don Carlos in order to prove whether or not he had slighted the Spanish authorities and proclaimed the validity of his ancestors’ rules and traditions above the Spaniards’. Since the passage constituted strong evidence to inculpate Don Carlos, repeating the message in its whole extent must have been indispensable. This involved naming the lords and witnesses referred to and maintaining the rhetorical style of the huehuetlahtolli of which the passage is reminiscent. As Nahuatl experts, González, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Sahagún probably discussed and translated the meaning of certain Nahuatl difrasismos or metaphorical phrases, such as “our land and our property,” and “our jewel and our possession.” When reproducing the speech in Nahuatl to ask Don Carlos whether those had been his words they would have kept the phrases, which transmitted the feeling that this was Don Carlos’s authentic speech underlining the Nahuas’ right to govern on their own and follow their traditions. As for the other declarations that Sahagún might have read in advance, these amount to approximately thirty. The majority of witnesses were Nahuas who had interacted with Don Carlos at different times of his life. They hailed from all social classes, but they were mostly highborn men and women, such as the mayor of Texcoco, Don Antonio, and Don Carlos’s niece and mistress, Doña Inés of Iztapalapa. In the transcript of these interrogations the three basic tactics that Olmos used to retrieve data in Matlatlan are construed. The first tactic shifts from asking general ques38. The witness who made this declaration would have pronounced the speech in Nahuatl. It is not known who translated it into Spanish as: ¿[Q]uién son estos que nos deshacen, é perturban, é viven sobre nosotros, é los tenemos á cuestas y nos sojuzgan? pues aquí estoy yo, y allí está el señor de México Yoanizi, y allí está mi sobrino Tetzcapili, señor de Tacuba, y allí está Tlacahuepantli, señor de Tula, que todos somos iguales y conformes y no se ha de igualar nadie con nosotros; que esta es nuestra tierra y nuestra hacienda y nuestra alhaja y nuestra posesión, y el señorío es nuestro, y á nos pertenece; y quién viene aquí a mandarnos y á sojuzgarnos, que no son nuestros parientes ni de nuestra sangre y se nos igualan,” ibid., pp. 59-60. See also Lopes Don, 2010, p. 172.

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tions, so as to achieve a short sociological-biographical overview of witnesses and their relationship with Don Carlos, to particular ones on the accusation itself. Zumárraga or the members of his tribunal initiated contact with witnesses by enquiring “what is your name? Where are you from? What is your marital status? Are you baptized?” They progressed to questions relating to overall information they wished to obtain about Don Carlos, such as “do you know Don Carlos?” and “do you know his house?” Eventually, there were questions about Don Carlos’s alleged crimes, such as “has he got concubines?,” “does he criticize the processions?,” and “does he keep idols in his house?,” which contributed to the collection of evidence that could prove whether or not Don Carlos should be accused of unorthodox conduct, heretical dogmatizing, and the performance of idolatrous ceremonies.39 The second tactic—the repetition of questions to a variety of witnesses in an attempt to gather as much information as possible—helped the inquisitors to contrast and corroborate answers, and to elicit previously unknown, fortuitous information that led to revealing data. For example, after having searched one of Don Carlos’s houses and discovered several idols, Zumárraga asked who had deposited these. A man named Pedro of Texcoco said that he did not know. Another witness, Gabriel, confirmed that he had once seen some idols by a house wall, and that Don Carlos’s uncle, named Bernabé Tlalchachi, would know more on this matter.40 Additional data also gave form to the third inquisitorial tactic; the transformation of relevant answers into new questions. For the case, this strategy ensured that the subsequent witness, the very Bernabé Tlalchachi, pointed at Tlalchachi Coatecoatl, Don Carlos’s late uncle, as the man responsible for placing the idols by the house wall, although not with serious intentions, merely while “joking.”41 Reaching confirmation on the origin of Don Carlos’s idols, Zumárraga advanced in his enquiries to ask for what purpose Don Carlos kept them. After the interrogation of some witnesses it was eventually settled that he had used the idols during 39. Proceso inquisitorial, 1910, pp. 4-6. 40. Ibid., pp. 10, 12. 41. “[P]uso allí aquellos ídolos, jugando,” ibid., p. 13.

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the celebration of ceremonies, which was accepted as enough evidence to incriminate him. Supposing that Sahagún read the documents of the witnesses’ declarations, and, based on these, the questions designed in advance for the interrogation of Don Carlos, he would have become aware of the three main interrogation tactics used by inquisitors, which, as he would have immediately noticed, were equivalent to those he had learnt and exploited as a confessor. Even in the case that he had not consulted those declarations and questions, at Don Carlos’s final interrogation on 15 July, Sahagún realized how the inquisitorial method of data collection unfolded in the presence of the inquisitorial judge who enquired, the accused who answered questions created after sieving witnesses’ declarations, and the notario or official scribe who took down Don Carlos’s responses.42 During the trial Sahagún either interpreted or heard how González and Ciudad Rodrigo interpreted the questions that were formulated according to the usual template list on sociological and biographical background, that is, on Don Carlos’s origins, marital status, and Christian disposition. Evolution from general to specific questions took shape in the form of queries that proceeded from asking Don Carlos how many houses he possessed to whether he frequented one in particular; whether he went there by himself or with other people; whether he kept idols; and whether he worshipped those idols alone and performed sacrifices. Some of these questions were based on incriminating comments collected during previous interrogations of witnesses, and so were subsequent questions on Don Carlos’s encouragement of polygamy, the defamation of the missionaries, and the proclamation of the Nahua lords’ rules and traditions above the Spaniards’. 42. The interrogation of Don Carlos is available in ibid., pp. 55-60. Don Carlos spoke Nahuatl and the name of the translator, or translators, of the final transcript that contains his alleged declarations in Spanish remains unknown. González, who took part in many of Zumárraga’s inquisitorial tribunals, may have collaborated in this task together with the official scribe. Sahagún’s involvement cannot be discarded either. Lopes Don notes that the College of Tlatelolco possibly provided translation services for Zumárraga’s inquisitorial trials. Sahagún himself appears to have contributed to the interpretation of a pictorial testimony handed over by a Nahua painter during the prosecution of the keepers of sacred bundles. See Lopes Don, 2010, pp. 136, 141.

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Olmos and Sahagún’s Application of the Inquisitorial Techniques to the Collection of Indigenous Data When in 1533 Ramírez de Fuenleal, Fray Martín de Valencia, and Bishop Zumárraga agreed on the appointment of Olmos for the composition of the first account of indigenous customs and beliefs, it is possible that what determined Olmos’s eligibility was his expertise in inquisitorial techniques for the gathering of information, which he had acquired during his prosecution of witches in Spain together with Zumárraga. The opening lines of the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas that has been attributed to Olmos evinces how he would have extracted data from several sources: From the characters and writings they make use [,] and from the recounting of the elders [,] and from those who were priests and religious leaders in the time of their infidelity [,] and from the talk of the lords and leaders to whom the law had been taught [,] and who were kept in the temples so they could learn it [,] having assembled before me and having brought their books and pictures [,] which, according to what they demonstrated [,] were old and many of them dyed [,] the larger part anointed with human blood.43

Following his inquisitorial expertise Olmos summoned three types of “witnesses” or members of the indigenous community to whom he must have asked a series of questions, and whose answers he must have compared in order to write a final report. Highborn elders, in general, were appropriate to speak of common beliefs and to deliver ancient speeches; priests to inform him of religious practices; and lords and leaders to contribute with specific data concerning institutions and judicial matters. His respondents explained everything to him through pre-Hispanic pictorial documents, some of which 43. Cited in Wilkerson, 1974, pp. 72-73. The original text reads: “Por los caracteres y escrituras de que usan, y por relación de los viejos y de los que en tiempo de su infidelidad eran sacerdotes y papas, y por dicho de los señores y principales a quien se enseñaba la ley y criaban en los templos para que la deprendiesen, juntados ante mí y traídos sus libros y figuras que según lo que demostraban eran antiguas, y muchas dellas teñidas, la mayor parte, untadas con sangre humana,” Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, 1988, unspecified page number. The red-blood colourant could have been made out of cochineal or by using brazilwood chips; see Magaloni-Kerpel, 2012, pp. 60-61, and Baglioni et al., 2012, pp. 86, 93.

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were amoxtli; “books” or collections of parchments with paintings. Olmos understood these as proof of their demonic faith because he states that those books and pictures were anointed “with human blood,” a tendentious interpretation that is reminiscent of heretical rituals of which he heard in Biscay and read in widely-disseminated inquisitorial manuals like the Directorium inquisitorum (ca. 1376) by Eymerich and the Malleus maleficarum (1486) by Kramer and Sprenger.44 In his sixteenth-century Relación de la Nueva España, the chronicler Alonso de Zorita, who copied data from Olmos and Motolinía’s writings on the indigenous peoples, sheds more light upon how Olmos interrogated respondents by means of their pictorial documents: [Olmos says] that the Indians had information in accounts made of paintings, written with figures and characters. He made some Indians explain their contents in the Mexican language one by one. All of them agreed on the translation and he then translated it from the Mexican language into Castilian.45

The paragraph portrays Olmos as an inquisitorial judge who, treating each of his respondents as witnesses of a prosecution, interrogated them individually, demanding an explanation of the information contained in their paintings. Once he had the different versions on a particular subject, he compared them and reconvened his respondents. In a scenario similar to the final interrogation process of an accused, these agreed on what was the “true” or the most accurate transformation of their answers and explanations of the picto44. In his description of “invocators of the Devil” Eymerich notes that these heretics are like “the priests of Baal, who in invoking their God they offer him their own blood and that of animals,” Eymerich, 1973, p. 69. The influence of Malleus maleficarum, also known as “the witch hammer” or “the Bible of the witch-finder,” is traced in Castañega’s Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerías (1529) and in Olmos’s translation of Castañega’s work, Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios (1553). Witches are portrayed as infanticides sucking children’s blood and offering them in sacrifice; see Castañega, 1997, p. 86, and Olmos, 1979, pp. 124-125. 45. Zorita’s original text reads: “[D]ice que esto tenían los indios por memoria en pinturas escritas con figuras y caracteres y que lo hizo sacar en lengua mexicana [a] algunos indios a cada uno por sí y que todos conformaron en la traducción y que él lo sacó de la lengua mexicana en la castellana,” 1999, I, p. 330. See the translation into English in Baudot, 1995, p. 180.

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rial documents into the last “declaration,” which Olmos translated into Spanish.46 It needs to be added that his selection of knowledgeable respondents and the display of documents that supported or contributed to the writing of a report on a requested matter was not just an ordinary practice amongst inquisitors. The methodology was already used in Spain for the gathering of data on tributes, censuses, and geography, and was projected by royal chroniclers and cosmographers upon the creation of accounts of the New World.47 For example, the 1530 “Ordenanzas sobre el buen tratamiento de los indios de la nueua España” (“Ordinances on the proper treatment of the Indians of the New Spain”) requested that Nahua lords supplied “la pintura de los tributos,” that is, the images illustrating the taxes in the form of goods that they received from their subjects.48 Three years later, one of the royal documents that possibly prompted Olmos’s appointment to write a book on the indigenous peoples of Mexico, Texcoco, and Tlaxcala similarly urged the dispatch of the “resulting account together with anything that could be painted.”49 In his demand for painted documents from his respondents Olmos was therefore acting as an inquisitor who sought to garner the most accurate evidence of what he regarded as idolatry, and as a chronicler who complied with a royal ordinance. Another source to understand the inquisitorial nature of Olmos’s method is Mendieta. In his prologue to the second book of Historia eclesiástica indiana he expresses his indebtedness to Olmos’s material on gods, ceremonies, and “fables and fictions,” and narrates the terms in which Olmos had told him about his interrogation method. “[Ol46. The sentence “all of them agreed on the translation” opens up the possibility that Olmos was relying not only on respondents who provided him with information but also on at least one Nahua scribe who “translated” or relocated verbal and pictorial data into a written text in the Nahuatl language. 47. The methodology to collect data harks back at least to the fifteenth century. Accounts by the Church, the Military Orders, and the aristocracy coexisted with a more ambitious and holistic plan under the auspices of a widely-asserting monarchy that intended to gain knowledge of how to best exploit resources. See Blázquez, 1904, pp. 8-10. 48. Bustamante García, 2000, pp. 44-45. 49. The original passage reads: “[D]icha relacion [se envie juntamente con] [...] lo que se pudiere pintar,” ibidem. One of those texts might have been Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, which juxtaposes written texts and European representations of pre-Hispanic images and characters.

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mos] did it in this way,” Mendieta assures, “having seen all the paintings that the caciques and lords of these provinces had of their ancient traditions and beliefs, and having received an answer to everything he wished to ask from the eldest, he did of all of it a very copious book.”50 In the first chapter to his second book Mendieta recalls that “[Olmos] made a sum [of the information] from paintings and accounts that the caciques of Mexico, Texcoco, Tlaxcala, Huexotzinco, Cholula, Tepaca, Tlalmanalco and the rest of the administrative centres gave to him.”51 The interpretation of these two passages is similar to the explanation in Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, on how a number of respondents had been interrogated. The passages likewise confirm that Olmos culled and compared answers in several locations. Perhaps the scribe himself, although, like in the trial of the Lord of Matlatlan, assistance from at least one nahuatlato is very possible, Olmos harmonized data into an extensive book like the lost Tratado de antigüedades mexicanas seems to have been. Also to be highlighted in Mendieta’s account of Olmos’s methodology is his firm statement that Olmos was the “fountain from which all the streams related to this matter emanated.”52 In the same way as Olmos had shown Mendieta some of his writings and informed him about his method of data collection, other Franciscan friars who composed texts on indigenous matters, such as Motolinía and Sahagún, must have resorted to their pioneering brother for consultation.53 That Olmos was an influential figure in Sahagún’s 50. “[L]o hizo así […] [,] que habiendo visto todas las pinturas que los caciques y principales de estas provincias tenían de sus antiguallas, y habiéndole dado los más ancianos respuesta a todo lo que les quiso preguntar, hizo de todo ello un libro muy copioso,” Mendieta, 1973, I, p. 47. 51. “[L]o [...] coligió de las pinturas y relaciones que le dieron los caciques de México, Tezcuco, Tlaxcala, Huexotzinco, Cholula, Tepaca, Tlalmanalco y las demás cabeceras,” ibid., p. 49. 52. “[F]uente de donde todos los arroyos que de esta materia han tratado emanaban,” ibid., p. 47. 53. Broda also suggests this possibility in 1975, p. 132. The first propitious encounter between Motolinía and Olmos that allowed a discussion on how to enquire into indigenous matters may have occurred soon after Olmos arrived in New Spain. He was instructed to travel to Guatemala to find Motolinía, who had gone missing during an evangelization campaign. See Baudot, 1995, p. 127, and Broda, 1975, p. 130. Besides, Motolinía administered the sacrament of penance and participated in inquisitorial trials where he learnt how to extract and compare data, see Baudot, 1995, pp. 127, 258.

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case is grounded upon their contact in the early 1530s at the College of Tlatelolco. As Sahagún’s senior brother, Olmos must have exchanged with him his views on the schooling of the Nahuas and on the learning and codification of the Nahuatl language for their proselytizing activities. It cannot be a mere coincidence that in 1547 Olmos completed Arte de la lengua mexicana and Sahagún the Libro de la rethorica; two works that register excerpts of huehuetlahtolli and their entire elaboration.54 Olmos, experienced in the recording of data, likely explained to Sahagún how he had gathered respondents, enquired them and demanded the reciting of their stories, and cross-examined the compiled material. Significantly, it is in Tepepulco that, upon his 1558 commission, Sahagún initiates his investigations. In this town Olmos had founded a mission around 1528-1533 and spent five years gathering linguistic information whilst learning Nahuatl.55 Tepepulco had been a pre-Hispanic centre of political, religious, and cultural prosperity, famed for its ceremonies in honour of Huitzilopochtli. When deciding where to make a start, Sahagún might have settled on this destination after bringing to memory conversations with his precursor. Another possibility is that, in possession of a pictorial manuscript or another document originally drafted by Olmos in Tepepulco, Sahagún wanted to return to Olmos’s location of initial enquiry in order to evaluate or remedy “some lacunae or sections he did not understand.”56 In his prologue to Book II of Historia universal Sahagún describes the manner in which he first proceeded in Tepepulco: In the aforementioned village I assembled all the leaders with the lord [...] and requested that they afford me capable and experienced persons with whom I could confer and who would know how to give me the information regarding that which I should ask of them [...]. They assigned me as many as ten or twelve leading elders [...]. They gave me all the matters we [compared] in pictures […]. And the grammarians 54. Garibay Kintana proposes that Olmos and Sahagún worked together or that Sahagún was inspired by his senior; see Sahagún, 1956, II, pp. 41-42. Following Garibay Kintana, Hanson believes that the huehuetlahtolli attributed to Sahagún had been compiled by Olmos, see 1994, pp. 31, 33. 55. Garibay Kintana, 1956, II, pp. 128-129, Hanson, 1994, pp. 29-31. 56. Hanson, 1994, pp. 33-34.

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explained [the paintings] in their language, writing the explanation at the bottom of the painting.57

It seems as if, like Olmos, Sahagún established his own “inquisitorial tribunal.” Presiding as judge, he demanded the presence of several “witnesses” or respondents who, privy to pre-Hispanic local traditions and religious practices, responded to his questions by means of their pictorial documents. As for the recording of data, Sahagún counted on a small group of his former students of Tlatelolco who, acting as skilful secretaries, “declararon” or explained what the respondents meant, transcribed, and compared answers together with Sahagún.58 The frequency with which Sahagún summoned his respondents and whether he met them individually, in pairs or groups, is unknown. Sahagún only points out that his interrogations occupied him in Tepepulco for almost two years and in Tlatelolco for over a year. In this second location Sahagún was assigned, again upon request, up to ten of the most knowledgeable and articulate leaders. Contrary to his aim in Tepepulco, in Tlatelolco he envisaged not only the collection of new material coming from a different group of respondents but also the examination and discussion of those writings he brought from Tepepulco. In doing this, Sahagún’s method resembles that of inquisitors’ during the interrogation of a number of witnesses and the accused. He and his assistants collated declarations, which confirmed or refuted the veracity of their previous information and contributed to the gathering of new items, so that the Tepepulco 57. “En el dicho pueblo, hize juntar, todos los principales, con el señor del pueblo […] y pediles, me diesen personas habiles, y esperimentadas con qujen pudiese platicar: y me supiesen dar razon, de lo que los preguntase [,] […] señalaronme, hasta diez, o doze principales ancianos […]: todas las cosas que conferimos, me las dieron por pinturas […]. Y los gramaticos [las pinturas] las declararon en su lengua, escrjujendo la declaraction, al pie de la pintura,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 5354. The verb “conferir” in this passage is translated as “to compare,” according to Covarrubias’s definition of “to compare one thing with another” (“cotejar una cosa con otra,” Covarrubias, 1987, p. 348). 58. The terms used by Sahagún in the final sentence; “declarar” and “declaraction”, carry, as noted by Rabasa, “a judicial dimension that links the inquiries to inquisitorial investigations,” see 2011, p. 88. “Declarar,” translated by Anderson and Dibble as “to explain,” is defined by Covarrubias as the act of declaring or “making clear,” “what is occult, obscure, and not understood” (“[lo] oculto, obscuro, y no entendido,” see 1987, p. 300).

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writings were finally “amended, explained, and expanded.”59 The following pages attempt to describe how during the first collection of data in Tepepulco and during the examination, discussion, and expansion of data in Tlatelolco, Sahagún would have implemented the three main confessional and inquisitorial tactics described above, and other inquisitorial strategies that he learnt in Don Carlos’s prosecution. The Primeros memoriales (ca. 1559-1561) of Tepepulco, the earliest surviving document of Historia universal, serves as a starting point for this reconstruction.60 In first meetings Sahagún might have gauged the participation relevance of his respondents by interesting himself in their sociological and biographical details, which entailed asking each of them the same template of questions regarding age and place of birth, baptism date, and social status before and after the conquest. In order to obtain data on rituals and gods, which is what concerns chapter I of the Primeros memoriales, Sahagún probably selected those respondents who were more knowledgeable on religious matters, perhaps priests, as Olmos had done. To begin with, Sahagún might have proceeded from general queries, such as “who were your deities?” and “how many festivities did you hold in their honour?,” to specific ones, such as on gods’ attires and offerings with which he was unfamiliar.61 During this routine assembling of data, an undetermined number of respondents would have answered his questions, while one or more assistants transcribed and, if necessary, explained the answers to Sahagún. 59. “[S]e emendo, declaro, y añadio, todo lo que de tepepulco truxe escripto,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 54. The surviving manuscripts that were written in Tlatelolco, collectively known as the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco, have been dated from 1561 to 1565; see for instance Dibble, 1982, p. 13. If we are to rely on Sahagún’s statement in his prologue, the tasks of explaining and amending the material of Tepepulco and the addition of more material only took a period of over a year; see Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 54. 60. The Primeros memoriales is divided into four chapters, concerning rituals and gods, the heavens and the underworld, rulership, and things relative to the human being. For a facsimile reproduction by Paso y Troncoso, see Sahagún 19051907, VI, and for a translation into English by Sullivan, see Sahagún 1997. 61. Sahagún must have already known of many gods and ceremonies thanks to the works of other Franciscans like Olmos and Motolinía. Hanson thinks that Sahagún probably had in his possession some documents that had belonged to Olmos and that he “either incorporated and expanded Olmos’s work, or he simply assimilated it as his own,” 1994, p. 33.

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These would have comprised a list of gods’ names and attributes, a list of ceremonies, rituals, and offerings, and any other comment in connection with these topics. For subsequent meetings, Sahagún might then have requested his respondents to ponder more carefully the matters to be discussed and, like Olmos, to bring the paintings that would enrich explanations.62 According to the order of contents of chapter I “Rituals and Gods,” the Nahuas responded to this approximate questionnaire: “What festivities of the gods did you hold?, what offerings did you make to your gods?, who served in their temples?, how were gods arrayed?, what items were used in rituals?, what type of temples did you have?, who were the god-keepers?, what were the gods’ attributes?, how was the sun worshipped, what tasks were performed in temples?, and what supplications, oaths, and songs did you perform in honour of your gods?”63 It is not known whether this was the initial order of interrogation. Perhaps Sahagún designed a questionnaire to cover information in a more organized manner: First, Nahua gods; second, liturgy—including ceremonies, offerings, and supplications—; third, religious hierarchy; and fourth, temples. Answers to these questions might have been drafted in different stages and added to the Primeros memoriales for a later rearrangement of contents. Thus, it can be explained that information on gods, rituals in their honour, array, and attributes, is distributed in separate paragraphs rather than forming a single unit, as was later the case in Book I of the Florentine Codex. When in about 1561 Sahagún moved to Tlatelolco, he and his assistants gathered new answers from another group of respondents. As aforementioned, this was crucial for incorporating more data on a topic that had been touched upon in Tepepulco, and for the collation of the Tepepulco writings and the new accounts of Tlatelolco. For example, regarding the depiction of deities, the tenth paragraph of chapter I of the Primeros memoriales outlines the attributes of 62. There is no information regarding the origin of those paintings. They could have been folios of surviving amoxtli or isolated images and characters, drawn by some of the respondents. Another option is that a group of tlacuiloque, paintersscribes, was commissioned for the project or that Sahagún possessed pictorial manuscripts belonging to Olmos’s investigations, as suggested by Hanson; ibidem. 63. See the related answers, translated from Nahuatl into English by Sullivan, in Sahagún, 1997, pp. 55-152.

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some gods in a rough manner. Of Tlaloc, it is said that “he rains, thunders, and strikes [with lightning],” which is noticeably expanded if compared to the corresponding passage of Book I of Historia universal, drawing this wider picture: Tlaloc, the provider. To him was attributed the rain; for he created, brought down, showered down the rain and the hail. He caused the trees, the grasses, the maize to blossom, to sprout, to leaf out, to bloom, to grow. And also were attributed to him the drowning of people, the thunderbolts.64

It seems as if the respondents answered a question that was informed by the Tepepulco material; a query along the lines of “why was the rain attributed to Tlaloc?” The accounts of the so-called veintena ceremonies—the rituals performed during the twenty days of each of the eighteenth months of the solar calendar, the Xiuhpohualli—similarly illustrate how the comparison of data in both locations contributed to its ratification and expansion.65 For example, when asked about the ceremonies celebrated during the festival of Panquetzaliztli, the Tepepulco respondents focused on the fasting and singingdancing rituals that were practised in honour of their highest-ranked god Huitzilopochtli. Avoiding the issue of human sacrifice they merely noticed that some deaths occurred, not in the festival to worship him, but in the one for his deputy, Paynal. Perhaps suspicious of this claim, Sahagún enquired his Tlatelolco respondents on this matter, and they specified more clearly, after a question along the lines of “were people sacrificed only in honour of Paynal?,” that at the end of the festival a succession of captives and slaves were sacrificed on the pyramid of Huitzilopochtli, and in his honour, alongside the playing of music and the enjoyment of food and drink.66 64. The original text of the Primeros memoriales reads: “Qujavy. Tlatlatzinja. Tlavitequj,” ibid., p. 121, and the original text of Book I: “Tlaloc, tlamacazquj: ynjn ipan machoia, in qujiaujtl: ca iehoatl quiiocoaia, qujtemoujaia, qujpixoaia, in quijaujtl, yoan in teciujtl: quixotlaltiaja, qujtzmolinaltiaja, qujxoxuvialtiaja, quicueponaltiaja, quizcaltiaia in quaujtl in çacatl, in tonacaiotl. Yoan no itech tlamjloia, in teilaqujliztli, in tlaujtequjliztli,” Flor. Cod., I, p. 7. 65. Several authors have studied the representation of the ceremonies of the veintenas; see, for instance, Eloise Quiñones Keber’s 2002 edited volume. 66. For relevant passages, see the Primeros memoriales in Sahagún, 1997, pp. 64-65, and Book II in Flor. Cod., II, pp. 27-28.

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Regarding the series of questionnaires that Sahagún designed, López Austin has mapped them out by establishing comparisons between the contents of chapters and sections of each of the manuscripts, from the Primeros memoriales to the Florentine Codex. For example, for the gathering of information on gods in Tlatelolco, López Austin suggests this strict enquiring arrangement for each god: “1. What were the titles, the attributes, or the characteristics of the god? 2. What were their powers? 3. What ceremonies were performed in their honor? 4. What was [their] attire?”67 Sahagún seems to have recycled questions from Tepepulco, such as those on festivities in their honour, attributes, and array, and rearranged them to be asked in a more organized manner. Book I of Historia universal comprises the material that was eventually culled. Exemplifying the answers to each question, the first chapter characterizes Huitzilopochtli as: [For question 1] only a common man, just a man, a sorcerer, an omen of the evil; a madman, a deceiver, a creator of war, a war-lord, an instigator of war. [For question 2] For it was said of him that he brought hunger and plague—that is, war. [For question 3] And when a feast day was celebrated, captives were slain; ceremonially bathed slaves were offered up. The merchants bathed them. [For question 4] And he was thus arrayed: he had an ear pendant of lovely cotinga feathers; his disguise was the fire serpent. He had the blue netted sash, he had the maniple. He wore bells, he wore shells.68

The respondents’ rigidly formatted replies to each question, not only for this chapter but also for others of Book I, are said to mirror the chants and speeches memorized in childhood by monotonous retelling of oral tradition and by interpretation of pictorial documents in the Calmecac, the pre-Hispanic school attended by 67. López Austin, 1974, p. 123. 68. “[Ç]an maceoalli, çan tlacatl catca: naoalli, tetzaujtl, atlacacemelle, teixcuepanj: qujiocoianj in iaoiutl, iaotecanj, iaotlatoanj: ca itechpa mjtoaia, tepan qujtlaça yn xiuhcoatl, in mamalhoaztli. q. n. iaoiutl, teuatl, tlachinolli. Auh yn jquac ilhujqujxtiloia, malmjcoaia, tlaaltilmjcoaia: tealtiaia, yn pochteca. Auh ynjc muchichioaia: xiuhtotonacoche catca, xiuhcoanaoale, xiuhtlalpile, matacaxe, tzitzile, oiuoalle,” Flor. Cod., I, pp. 1-2.

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the Nahua aristocracy.69 Another possibility is that the assistants analysed the different respondents’ answers and summarized them when drafting the final text.70 What is here at stake is that, as proposed by López Austin, the contents of the manuscripts of Historia universal denote a pattern of organized questions that Sahagún, like Olmos, would have written prior to the interrogation of his respondents. In some cases the questionnaire was redesigned and expanded between Tepepulco and Tlatelolco, as observed when contrasting material on food, drink, diseases, and cures in the Primeros memoriales and the Florentine Codex. In other cases, Sahagún appears to have repeated a predetermined questionnaire without significant variation in both towns. The latter seems to occur in the collection of material on ceremonies. Relevant data in chapter I of the Primeros memoriales and Book II of the Florentine Codex maintains this organization: “1. What is the name of the feast? […] 2. Why is it called that (when the name arouses his curiosity)? 3. What human sacrifices or offerings were made for this feast? 4. How was the ceremony performed? 5. On what date of the Julian Calendar did this month fall?”71 Sahagún interested himself in the etymology of 69. López Austin, 1974, pp. 123-124. 70. This matter is discussed in the following chapter. Sahagún and his assistants’ manipulation of data would explain why the almighty Huitzilopochtli is reduced to “just a man,” a “madman,” and “a man of evil.” 71. López Austin, 1974, p. 125. The answers to López Austin’s suggested question, “on what date of the Julian Calendar did this month fall?,” are incorporated within the body of the text of the Primeros memoriales. For example, Panquetzaliztli is said to fall on 13 November; see Sahagún, 1997, p. 65. It is not known whether the respondents were familiar with the Julian calendar; were that not the case, the assistants and Sahagún’s adaptation of answers must be implied. In Book II of the Florentine Codex the written explanation of dates disappears and is replaced by two columns flanking the description of the ceremonies, the left-hand one with the Nahua solar calendar and the right-hand one with the Julian calendar. Each of these columns is at the same time composed by two vertical lines, the external one with numbers, referring to the number of days of the month in the Nahua and the Julian calendars, and the interior one with letters “a” to “g,” referring to the days of the week. Sahagún explains that this has been done “so it can be easily understood in what day of our months each of their feasts fall,” (“ansi se puede facilmente entender, cada fiesta de las suyas, en que dia caya, de los nuestros meses,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 57). At times, a marginal note close to one of the numbers informs of a Christian festivity or the day of a saint. This format was common in breviaries and manuals for praying, and Sahagún planned it in Tlatelolco, as observed in some drafts from this stage. See, for example, Sahagún, 1905-1907, VII, p. 195 (fol. 129v).

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the name, what the ritual involved, and the specific date. If the ceremony was still performed in secret it could be more easily discovered and denounced as idolatrous in sermons pronounced when it was expected to take place. Repeating a given questionnaire to a number of respondents in one town and another echoed the inquisitorial tactic of asking two different witnesses. In principle, it guaranteed the retrieval of more material and a greater degree of verification. Besides, asking questions in a systematic manner, that is, repeating a series of questions in the same order, facilitated the collation of replies. Whether Sahagún enquired his respondents “one by one”—as Olmos says to have done—, or whether he mixed individual interrogation with communal questioning, depended perhaps on the availability of the respondents and, above all, on the subject matter.72 For the collection of sensitive data on gods, rituals, and soothsayers—reprehended as “diabolical” by Sahagún, but valued by his respondents as their ancestors’ persecuted heritage—, it was important to obtain answers as accurate as possible. These allowed the identification of idols, beliefs, and clandestine ceremonies as well as their condemnation in the pulpit and the confessional booth. Therefore, Sahagún might have proceeded like Olmos, enquiring individually and afterwards convening a last group meeting during which the respondents, as the “accused” during his final interrogation, replied to the questions that Sahagún had designed from the collation of previous answers in order to confirm, correct, and clarify material; in Olmos’s words, “to agree on the translation.” This type of final group interview seems to have been applied to the scrutiny of the Xiuhpohualli, the solar calendar used for festivities. Sahagún worried that: “[T]here is disagreement on the beginning of the year in different parts. In some I was told that the year began sometime in January, in others, at the beginning of February, in others sometime in March.”73 Since he had settled to decipher once and for all when the Nahua year be72. Johansson puts forward the repetition of the questionnaire to groups of three to four members for one assistant; see, 1989, p. 323. 73. This quote appears at the end of the Spanish version of Book VII: “[D]iscrepan mucho en diversos lugares del principio del año. En unas partes me dixeron que comenzaba a tantos de enero; en otras, que a primero de hebrero; en otras, que a tantos de marzo,” Hist. gen., VII, p. 492.

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gan, which was indispensable to discern the exact dates of the preHispanic ceremonies, Sahagún says that in Tlatelolco: “I summoned many elders, the most experienced that I could count on, and together with the most skilled collegians, this matter was dealt with for many days. They all finally concluded that the year commenced on the second of February.”74 Engaging his most diligent assistants, who retained the nuances of the language he could not, and after many days of scrutiny; studying how answers varied, complemented, and overlapped, it was finally concurred that the solar calendar began on 2 February of the Julian calendar.75 For the gathering of data that did not necessarily compromise the faithfulness of the respondents’ answers and focused on the gathering of terminology, it is likely that a brain-storming session of questioning, during which the Nahuas expressed their ideas more freely, also took place.76 For example, two or three knowledgeable and responsive elders could have sufficed to discuss craftsmen’s goods, merchants’ banquets, lists of kings, and lords’ palaces and houses, that is, material that was incorporated in Books VIII and IX of Historia universal. An appealing topic, like how the ruler invited his subjects to a dance, is included within chapter XVII of Book VIII, on rulers’ performance of their office. The relevant passage starts as follows: First the ruler announced what song should be intoned. He commanded the singers to rehearse and practice the song and [to prepare] the two-toned drums, the rubber drum hammers, and the ground drums,

74. “[J]unté muchos viejos, los más diestros que yo pude haber, y juntamente con los más hábiles de los colegiales, se altercó esta materia por muchos días, y todos ellos concluyeron que comenzaba el año el Segundo día de hebrero,” ibidem. Gordon Brotherston points out that misinterpretation of the indigenous calendars was commonplace for missionaries. It was partly due to their imposition of the Christian calendar as the standard that dictated the comprehension of indigenous ones. For further reference, see Brotherston, 1992, p. 126. 75. In an undated letter sent to Sahagún when he was in Mexico City, his former assistant, Pedro de San Buenaventura, supplies precise details of when every Nahua festivity starts according to the Julian calendar. This tells us that Sahagún counted on his assistants to clarify matters for him, if not to provide further material, even from a distance. For a reproduction of the letter, translation from Nahuatl into Spanish, and brief study, see Bustamante García and Díaz Rubio 1983. 76. López Austin, 1974, p. 136.

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and all the properties used in the dance. And [he appointed the kind] of dance, him who would give the pitch, those who would lead, him who would beat the two-toned drum, him who would play the ground drum. All was first arranged, so that nothing would be left out.77

Upon a general question like “what did the ruler organize to entertain his subjects?” and the more specific “how did the ruler organize a dance?,” one of the respondents would have said that the ruler arranged all in advance; the song, the singers, and the choice of dance. Another respondent could have then taken his cue from these answers and elaborated on how the singers rehearsed and played the different types of drums. The possibility of collecting specialized terminology on instruments would have triggered the question “which drums did they play?,” to which the same or another respondent replied; the two-toned drums, the rubber drum hammers, and the ground drums. Finally, another respondent would have insisted that everything was first arranged, nothing was left out, and that the ruler even decided who gave the pitch, led, and beat the different drums. As for the writing of the answers and the editing process in order to reach a linguistically-accurate and congruous text, there are various options. Sahagún may have asked one of his assistants to jot down the answers as they were being uttered and, once the session was finished, to write a text that was proofread by another assistant. Another possibility is that Sahagún requested the presence of two assistants to take notes simultaneously so that they compared their notes and wrote the text together. Finally, once Sahagún had the answers transformed into a draft, he may have summoned assistants and respondents in order to, like Olmos did, agree on the writing of the Nahuatl text that was considered the most authentic and detailed reply in terms of linguistic expression and content. The former passage of Book VIII is indicative that, thanks to the inquisitorial strategy of enquiring different “witnesses-respondents,” Sahagún accomplished more than the confirmation of whether an 77. “[A]chtopa qujtoaia in tlatoanj, in tlein cujcatl meoaz, qujnnaoatiaia in cujcanjme: injc qujiehecozque injc qujchicaoazque in cujcatl, ioan teponaztli, olmaitl, veuetl: ioan in ixqujch maçeoallatqujtl, ioan netotiliztli, aqujn cujcaitoz, aqujque in teiacanazque, aqujn teponaçoz, aqujn veuetzonaz, mochi achto mocencaoaia injc atle itlacaujz,” Flor. Cod., VIII, pp. 55-56.

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answer was right or wrong. The variety of answers resulted in the writing of a prolific list of vocabulary in context that tied in with the lexicographic totality of the “red barredera;” the all-covering dragnet or comprehensiveness to which he aspired. As a matter of fact, the twelve books of Historia universal are laden with extremely long and monotonous descriptions made of lists of words and phrases that, as Sahagún sometimes reminds his audience, are disagreeable to read but necessary for the recording of the Nahuatl language.78 One such passage appears in the twenty-fourth chapter of Book II, on the feast of the fifth month Toxcatl, which includes the portrait of the slave who, assuming the character of Tezcatlipoca, was destined to be slain. Upon Sahagún’s question of who was chosen to become Tezcatlipoca’s impersonator, at least one respondent must have told him that this man needed to be “atle yiaioca” (devoid of physical imperfections).79 As an inquisitor who transformed a new item of information into another question, and a confessor who took a thought-provoking or suspicious word as an “asilla” (pretext) to further enquire, Sahagún would have been incited by the phrase “atle yiaioca” to quiz his respondents on what human characteristics were attached to the deity, which he might as well have understood as the Nahua canon of male beauty. The exhaustive description of such a man was recorded in this repetitive manner, beginning with his head and parts of his face: He was like something smoothed, like a tomato, like a pebble, as if sculptured in wood; he was not curly-haired, curly-headed; his hair was indeed straight, his hair was long. He was not rough of forehead; he had no pimples on his forehead; he did not have a forehead like a tomato; he did not have a baglike forehead. He was not long-headed, the back of his head was not pointed; his head was not like a carrying net; his head was not bumpy; he was not broad-headed; he was not rectangular-headed.80 78. See, for instance, Sahagún’s apology for the “desgusto” or displeasure caused to the reader in the prologue to Book VII, ibid., Prologues, p. 68. 79. Ibid., II, p. 66. Anderson and Dibble translate this phrase as “without defects.” Iaioca or yayoca literally means “guilty, reprehensible” (“culpable, vituperable,”) and together with “atle” is a fixed phrase meaning “irreprehensible, that cannot be reprehended in any manner” (“irreprensible, que no se puede repreender en nada,” Siméon, 1977, p. 159). 80. “[I]uhqujn tlachictli, iuhqujn tomatl, iuhqujn telolotli, iuhqujn, quaujtl tlaxixintli, amo quacocototztic, quacolochtic, vel tzõmelaoac, tzompiaztic, amo ixquachachaquachtic, amo ixquatotomonquj, amo ixquaxitontic, amo ixquaxiquj-

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Asking the same general question of “what was the impersonator like?” to several respondents, and the particular one pertaining to each part of head and face, whether hair, forehead, shape of head, eyelids, cheeks, eyes, and nose—as the passage continues—, gave Sahagún the opportunity to extract as much terminology as possible. For example, instead of contenting himself with a note on the captive being “long-headed,” he probably benefited from the involvement of more than one respondent articulating their own depictions. With his linguistic “dragnet” in mind, Sahagún may even have entertained the idea of a sort of vocabulary competition to which both respondents and assistants contributed. For the question “how was Tezcatlipoca’s impersonator’s head?” one of the respondents could have replied “not like a carrying net,” which inspired others to pronounce the synonymous “not bumpy,” and further adjectives like “not broad-headed” and “not rectangular-headed.” Another instance that lends itself to confirm this tactic of using a given term or an unexpected answer for the continuation of an enquiry surfaces in the second chapter of Book IV, on soothsayers. Sahagún requested information on the second day of the Nahua divinatory calendar, One Ocelot, an ominous day sign for those who were born on it. Upon hearing that this sign stood for misfortune, Sahagún expressed curiosity in what the Nahuas understood as “bad luck,” which his assistants wrote in this manner: “Those who were then born, whether noblemen or commoners, so it was said, would die in war, be taken away, abandoned, imprisoned, seized. And all bad was his lot; misery befell him. He only wallowed in evil [dust, rubbish] and he was covered with filth [dust, rubbish].”81 The porpiltic, amo quametlapiltic, amo cuexcochujtztic, amo quachitatic, amo quapatztic, amo quapatlachtic, amo quaoacaltic,” Flor. Cod., II, pp. 66-67. Repetition of lexical items and grammar structures is a rhetorical characteristic of the Nahuatl language, as observed, for example, in the huehuetlahtolli. Nevertheless, the entire description of Tezcatlipoca’s impersonator, of which only some lines are here transcribed, should not be understood as representative of the huehuetlahtolli style but as a compilation of several answers with different adjectives and expressions that have been collated and merged into a single paragraph. 81. “[A]uh in aqujque ipan tlacatia, y, in aço pilli, anoço maceoalli: iuh mjtoa iaomjquja, vicoia, caoaloia, calaqujloia, axioaia, ioan muchi amo qualli in jmâceoal, in jcnopil muchioaia, çan teuhtli, tlaçolli, ic mjlacatzotinemj, teuhtli tlaçolli cololotinemj,” ibid., IV, p. 5. Anderson and Dibble translate the rhetorical figure or difrasismo “teuhtli, tlaçolli,” literally meaning “dust, rubbish,” as evil and filth.

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trait of the miserable destiny thought to be held in store for those born under the One Ocelot sign could have stopped here. However, as soon as Sahagún perceived the difrasismo “teuhtli, tlaçolli,” he considered it worthwhile to delve into what type of conduct or actions the Nahuas judged as “filthy” behaviour.82 The passage on the One Ocelot then resumes with the answers that were likely given to a question along the lines of “why do you say that he was covered in filth?”: Because “he committed adultery, was an adulterer, adulterous, one who seized other skirts and blouses, one who remained on female navels.”83 In Sahagún’s Christian mind these answers stimulated and gave credence to the missionaries’ belief that for the Nahuas being “filthy,” or deviant from the social rules, was tantamount to “sinful.”84 Both Nahuas and Spaniards correlated filth with extramarital relationships and promiscuity, and Sahagún likely deemed these adjectives and fixed phrases as convenient to address sins of the flesh in sermons and during the administering of the sacrament of penance.

The Origin of Sahagún’s Questions Probing questions like “how do you describe the shape of the head?” or “why do you say that he was covered in filth?” are intrinsically intertwined with Sahagún’s linguistic and proselytizing purposes for Historia universal, and lead us to speculate on the origin of other queries, that is to say, on the texts and models on which he based 82. The metaphor “teuhio, tlaçollo” appears in Book VI on rhetoric and moral philosophy as “[d]usty, filthy. This saying was said of one who became a ruler by deception, who competed by deception […] [.] The rulership, or the food which thou eatest, are dusty, filthy” (“[t]euhio, tlaçollo. Injn tlatolli: ipan mjtoa in ichtecca tlatocati, in mochtaca tlaxtlavia […]: ca çan teuhio, tlaçollo in tlatocaiotl: anoço tlaqualli in ticqua,” ibid., VI, pp. 243-244). 83. “[T]epan iauh, tetlan aaquj, cueitl, vipilli tepan cana, icioaxic ietinemj,” ibid., IV, p. 5. 84. In his Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary Molina indicates that missionaries associated this metaphor with sin. He includes “teuhtli” as “dust,” followed by two related entries: “Teuhtli tlaçolli yc milacatzotinemi,” which he understands as “the one who lives badly, sinfully,” and “[t]euhtli tlaçolli nicololotinemi;” “living sinfully,” 1970 [1571], 112v. For an analysis of how friars used filth as a metaphor for immorality and disgrace in doctrinal works, see Burkhart, 1989, pp. 87-98.

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the creation of structured questionnaires that would fulfil those same purposes. Sahagún states that he made “an outline or summary in Spanish of all the topics to be considered” and that he obtained information from his Tepepulco respondents “following the sequence of the outline […] prepared.”85 This implies that he developed his questionnaires bearing in mind the same influential prototypes as he had for his content outline, whether religious texts like confession manuals or encyclopaedic like Pliny’s Historia naturalis.86 Furthermore, the subject matters of the Primeros memoriales are equivalent to those of the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco, in which they are mostly broadened. This means that Sahagún must have employed the Primeros memoriales in order to create questions, compare answers, and improve upon these with material from Tlatelolco.87 Book V of Historia universal, on omens and superstitions, showcases the manner in which Sahagún may have resorted to both confession manuals and the Primeros memoriales for the design of specific queries on this matter. Utilizing confession manuals to compile them is a logical assumption since, being a confessor himself, Sahagún must have consulted recommended specific questions— omens and superstitions appear in the section on sins against the First Commandment—in order to sound out whether penitents believed in them.88 For example, Azpilcueta’s Manual de confessores y penitentes suggests enquiring: 85. The relevant quotes read: “[H]ize en lengua castellana, vna mjnuta, o memoria, de todas las materias, de que auja de tratar,” and in Tepepulco material was collected “sigujendo la orden, de la mjnuta, […] hecha,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 53-54. 86. As regards the origin of questions, López Austin also points at the Book of Proverbs, Erasmus’s Adages, and Valdés’s Diálogo de la lengua for Book VI; Anglicus and Theophrastus’s works for Book X; and European works on astronomy for Book VII; see López Austin, 1974, pp. 134-135, 141. Several scholars have pondered the general manner in which Sahagún enquired the Nahua elders by applying his conceptual categories, see for instance, Villoro, 1989; 1999, pp. 15, 21-23, Mignolo, 1995, p. 196, Ilarregui, 1996, p. 177, Pérez López, 2000, pp. 5, 7, and Palmeri Capesciotti, 2001, p. 212. 87. In turn, it can be presumed that the material worked in Tlatelolco was put under the scrutiny of a third group of knowledgeable elders in Mexico City, which Sahagún, nevertheless, does not explain in much detail. 88. Considered human pretensions to guess the future, a constant uncertainty reserved to the will of Divine Providence, Sahagún disparages omens, with which he deals in the first thirteen chapters of Book V, and superstitions, described in the appendix, as “illicit and forbidden ways to know of the things which our Lord God has

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Whether upon hearing birds’ singing, animals bellowing or crying out, coming across a hare or a pregnant woman, he takes to be true that something bad will happen to him, [...] whether upon sneezing when he is getting up he goes back to bed, [and] these and other similar vanities.89

These questions or others along this line, appropriately adapted to his respondents, might have helped Sahagún in the retrieval of relevant answers on Nahua omens and superstitions, which, re-launched as suggested queries during the friars’ administering of the sacrament of penance, would in turn lead confessors to ascertain whether Nahua penitents were committing a sin against the First Commandment. Interestingly, Book V is composed of “tetzavitl,” frightful things or Nahua omens and superstitions for confessors and preachers that, in some measure, find equivalence to Azpilcueta’s “singing of birds,” “howling or bellowing of animals,” “coming across a hare or a pregnant woman,” and “sneezing.” In Tepepulco, Sahagún may have repeated questions similar to the ones Azpilcueta proposes, either after reading his or another confession manual. Exercising the inquisitorial and confession tactic of proceeding from general to particular questions, initially he may have expected broad information and set off with “what do you think when you hear or when you come across an animal?,” or “do you consider running into an animal a bad omen?” His respondents perhaps replied briefly, putting into perspective to what extent they swore by omens, which guided Sahagún on how to resume his interrogation on specific ones. Chapter II of the Primeros memoriales, on the heavens and the underworld, contains the respondents’ answers, listing up to seventeen tetzavitl that are defined in

not willed that we should know” (“[p]or caminos no licitos, y vedados: procuramos de saber: las cosas, que nuestro señor dios, no es seruido, que sepamos,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 63). To be noted is that, together with confession manuals, Sahagún’s reading of other doctrinal works comprising specific omens should not be excluded. For instance, in De doctrina christiana and De civitate dei Augustine cites some linked to sounds of animals, sneezing, and stumbling; see 1995, pp. 92-93; 1998, p. 409. 89. “[S]i por oyr cantos de aues, aullar, o bramar animales, encontrar la liebre, o muger preñada cree por cierto, q[ue] algun mal le ha de acontecer, […] [s]i por esternudar quando se levanta se acuesta otra vez, estas vanidades y otras semejantes,” Azpilcueta, 1557, pp. 77-78.

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one sentence each.90 In Tlatelolco, the majority of the Tepepulco omens remained and their description was significantly amplified, which is what was eventually transferred to Book V of Historia universal.91 The reason behind this coincidence in the manuscripts of the two different settings lies in the fact that, once in Tlatelolco, Sahagún applied another inquisitorial and confessional technique; the conversion of the Tepepulco material into questions. This argument can also be deduced from his concluding paragraph of Book V, in which he tells preachers and confessors that his list of omens and superstitions consists of only few of many more, prompting them to “seek them out, in order to understand them in confessions and to preach against them.”92 In other words, he could have produced a manuscript with a wide-ranging number of omens and superstitions, as collected in two separate locations, even three if we count on Mexico City. However, he decided to maintain the ones already gathered and elaborate on them. The first omen of the Primeros memoriales, also the first one in Book V, illustrates this clearly. For Sahagún’s general question of “what do you think may happen when you hear an animal cry?,” which corresponds to Azpilcueta’s question of animals howling and bellowing, the matching answer in the Primeros memoriales reads that “when someone heard a wild beast cry out it was said that [the person who heard it] would soon die in battle or sell himself [as a slave].”93 Sahagún must have used this piece of information to ask his new respondents from Tlatelolco what they thought about it. Thus, for a question along the lines of “did the person who heard this cry believe that he would die in battle or sell himself?,” the following answer appears recorded in the first chapter of Book V: “On this, 90. Sullivan translated them into English in Sahagún, 1997, pp. 174-176. For example, the first omen on the cry of the black-crowned heron reads that if a man heard it: “[I]t was said that he would die in battle” (“[M]itoaya ye yaumiquiz,” ibid., p. 174). 91. A draft of the omens that were further elaborated in Tlatelolco, as found in the “Segundos memoriales,” is available in Sahagún, 1905-1907, VII, pp. 388-400 (fols. 243v-249v), and has been translated into Spanish by López Austin 1969. 92. The relevant quote reads: “[P]redicadores, y confessores, busquenlas, para entenderlas, en las confessiones: y para predicar, contra ellas,” Flor. Cod., V, p. 196. 93. “[Y]n aca quicaquia tequani choca, mitoaya ye yaumiquiz, anoço monamacaz,” Sahagún, 1997, p. 174.

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they said, now he would perish in war, or die—he would die a slave’s death [...]. Perhaps he would be sold [into bondage]—he would incur a penalty; or he would have some of his children sold.”94 The Tlatelolcans confirmed the fear of death in battle as well as the possibility of enslavement, and added that not only those who heard this cry ran the risk of becoming slaves but also their children. What is more, they continued to provide further data on the interpretation of this omen as well as on the recommendations made by the Tonalpouhqui, the reader of day signs, to those who sought his advice.95 Azpilcueta’s omen about running into a hare serves as another point of reference to consolidate an understanding of Sahagún’s enquiry procedure. In Tepepulco he could have rephrased the omen as “what does the appearance of an animal, for example, a hare or a rabbit, foretell?,” for which the eighth omen of the Primeros memoriales says: “When a rabbit entered someone’s house it was said that this house would be destroyed, or he would flee.”96 The Tepepulco respondents clarify that, rather than encountering a rabbit, it was the action of the rabbit’s entering their houses that brought bad luck. Once in Tlatelolco Sahagún might have reformulated this item of information as “what do you think if a rabbit enters someone’s house?,” the replies to which were recorded in the seventh chapter of Book V as: “Likewise all regarded as an omen the rabbit [when it entered someone’s house]. The field workers, the people of the maize fields, said that now his house would be laid waste. Or else now someone would flee [from it]: he would follow the trail of the rabbit.”97 Like in the former example on the cry of animals, 94. “Ynjn, qujtovaia ie iaomjqujz; anoço ie mjqujz, tlalmiqujz […], aço monamacaz, motlanamjctiz: anoço ipilhoan ceme qujnmonamaqujliz,” Flor. Cod., V, p. 151. To be noted is the beginning of the sentence with “on this, they said,” which can be interpreted as either the respondents’ words so as to distance themselves from those who believed in the omen, and therefore committed a sin against the First Commandment, or most likely, as the assistants’ indirect speech annotation referring to the speakers. For a study on direct and indirect style in the transcription of the Nahuas’ oral testimony, see Pérez López 2000. 95. See the relevant passage in Flor. Cod., V, pp. 151-152. 96. “[Y]n tochtli yn aca ychan calaquia mitoaya ye tlalpoliviz in ichan anoço ye choloz,” Sahagún, 1997, p. 175. 97. “No ioan, netetzaujloia in tochin: in jquac aca ichan calaquja, qujtoa in mjllaca, in mjlpan tlaca: ie tlalpoliujz in jchan. Anoço ie aca choloz, ie contocaz in tochtli,” Flor. Cod., V, p. 167. It is again interesting to notice the phrase “all

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the Tlatelolcans again commented on what they knew about this omen. First, they made clear that it was the lower classes who took the omen for granted. Second, they voiced a related saying. For the Nahuas, “to follow the trail of the rabbit” or “to become a rabbit” meant a degeneration of conduct; those who followed its track deviated from “the straight path,” turning disobedient, lazy, and corrupt, which was thought to eventually cause the destruction of the person, and in this case, his or her home.98 Regarding the superstitions linked to coming across a pregnant woman and sneezing, which are not present in the Primeros memoriales, their inclusion in Book V can be explained because after his return to Tlatelolco Sahagún might have consulted Azpilcueta’s manual or another text making reference to them. Needless to say, this is only speculation, as is the possibility that, in conversation with other friars about his “Nahuatl Calepin,” these suggested other superstitions on which to enquire. In order to account for the origin of the two, what is of relevance is the manner in which Sahagún may have transformed omens and superstitions of which he had read or knew into a query, and how he might have adjusted his questions when these did not trigger an exact answer from the Nahuas. A prime example appears in chapters VIII, X, and XXX of the appendix to Book V. Chapter VIII explains that a pregnant woman was warned not to eat “tamales which had stuck [to the cooking pot]” because “she could not bear children. Her child would only adhere to and thus die in her womb.”99 Similarly, chapter X tells that if a pregnant woman went out for a walk at night she had to take the following precaution: “She placed a little of ash in her bosom. It was said that thereby she protected the child within her in order that she would not meet [an apparition] somewhere.”100 Contrary to the Spanish belief that is registered in Azpilcueta’s superstition of

regarded,” which indicates that different respondents had been asked individually or in a group, and that they had agreed on the interpretation. 98. This saying appears in Book VI; see ibid., VI, p. 253, and is analysed by Burkhart in 1989, p. 62. 99. The relevant sentence reads: “[I]ntla qujquaz ixqujuhquj tamalli, amo vellacachioaz: çan itech ixqujviz in jconeuh, ic mjqujz in ijtli,” Flor. Cod., V, p. 185. 100. “[I]xillan contlalia aqujton nextli, qujlmach ic qujpalevia in jtic ca piltontli: injc amo qujtenamjctiz cana,” ibid., p. 186.

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“whether upon coming across a pregnant woman, he takes to be true that something bad will happen to him,” for the Nahuas this sudden encounter did not seem to have been superstitious. Upon Sahagún’s question of “what do you think when you come across a pregnant woman?,” the respondents spoke of other auguries that existed in connection. This shows that in the Nahua culture pregnant women did not foretell a disgrace, and warded off from situations that were thought to bring along complications during pregnancy. Much of the same goes for Azpilcueta’s superstition of “whether upon sneezing when he is getting up he goes back to bed.” Chapter XXX of Book V tells that “[w]hen someone sneezed, they said, in times past: ‘Someone speaketh of me; someone saith well of me’. Or they said: ‘Someone speaketh ill of me’. Or they said: ‘Some people discuss me’.”101 These answers do not appear to concur with the superstition Sahagún knew. Perhaps after noticing that the phrasing of Azpilcueta’s query proved wanting, Sahagún modified it to a broader question like “what do you think if someone sneezes?” Former observations contribute to arguing that noticeable textual analogies in Historia universal and another work operate as a mechanism conducive to locating potential readings out of which Sahagún devised questions. Thus, Pliny’s Book VIII of Historia naturalis, acknowledged as one of his trustworthy models for the sections on fauna and flora of Book XI, can be proposed as a very likely text for him to have sourced queries. In reading Pliny, Sahagún would have noticed his tendency to describe animals according to their region or habitat, physical features, and other peculiar characteristics that define them. Concerning the porcupine, for instance, Pliny notes that: It is a native of India and Africa. It is covered with a prickly skin of the hedgehogs’ kind, but the spines of the porcupine are longer and they dart out when it draws the skin tight: it pierces the mouths of hounds when they close [them] with it [inside], and shoots out at them when further off. In the winter months it hibernates.102 101. “In jquac aca acuchoa, qujtoaia in ie vecauh: aqujn nechitoa, aqujn nechteneoa: anoce qujtoaia: aqujn nêchicoitoa, anoçe qujtoa: aqujque in noca mononotza,” ibid., p. 193. 102. The original text translated by Rackham reads: “Hystrices generat India et Africa, spinea contectas cute irenaceorum genere, sed hystrici longiores aculei et,

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The first chapter of Book XI of Historia universal conveys a very similar breakdown of features for the depiction of the ocelot. Like in the account of the porcupine, that of the ocelot begins with its habitat: “It is a dweller of the forests, of crags, of water,” and continues with a portrayal of its body and skin, which apart from enumerating physical properties executes Sahagún’s linguistic purpose: [It is] noble, princely, it is said […]. It is long: long bodied, straight, round like a pillar; squat not tall; thick, corpulent; hard-fleshed, very hard-fleshed; long-tailed; of gopher-like paws, very thick; wide-padded—of very wide pads; thick, fat of neck […]. It is varicolored, quite varicolored, spotted with black, blotched with black; white-chested, smooth, sleek.103

In both descriptions, the passage is brought to an end with a particular trait of the animal, in the porcupine’s case by stating that it hibernates, and in the ocelot’s by alluding to its distinct cry: “It growls, snarls, growls, roars like the blowing of trumpets.”104 The matching presentation of data in both texts is indicative of a textual analysis exercise. It is possible that Sahagún examined the structure of Pliny’s passages on animals during his classes in Tlatelolco, when, as suggested by Quintilian, he would have taught the imitatio technique that involved careful reading, critique, analysis, and translation or paraphrasing of a given text.105 On the lookout for a pattern of questions that encapsulated animal features, Sahagún would have recalled this exercise and deduced the most recurrent building blocks of which the passages in Pliny’s text are composed. Therefore, from the paragraph on the porcupine Sahagún would have figured out questions like “what is the name of the animal?, where does it live?, what does it look like?, what are its habits?,” which, cum intendit cutem, missiles. ora urgentium figit canum et paulo longius iaculatur. hibernis autem se mensibus condit,” Pliny, 1967, III, p. 89. 103. “[Q]uauhtla chane, texcalco chane, atlan chane: tecpilli, tlaçopilli […]. Veiac tlacveiac, melactic, temjmjltic, pachtic, amo uecapan: tomaoac, tlaque, nacatetic, nacatepul, cujtlapilhujiac, matôtoçantic, matôtomactic, macpalhueuei, macpalpapatlactic, quechtomaoac […]. Cujcujltic, cujcujlpatic: moholchapanj, motlilchachapatz, eliztac, tetzictic, alaztic,” Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 1-2. 104. “[N]analca, choca, tzâtzi, iuhqujn tlapitza,” ibid., p. 2. 105. Sahagún and his assistants must have used the imitatio technique for the writing of “versus heruicus,” as discussed in chapter II of this study; see Hist. gen. X, p. 634.

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asked to obtain information about the ocelot, accounts for the coincidence of the same underlying structure in both passages.106 As for the answers that were transferred to Book XI, these perhaps stemmed from various respondents, and even from the assistants, whose versions differed depending on the individual’s idiosyncratic approach to description, and ranged from what could have been a commonly pointed-out trait like “varicoloured” to a singular phrase that was sensed as ingenious and linguistically enriching, such as “[it] roars like the blowing of trumpets.” Demanding information on fauna or about a specific omen, the first being a tangible and animated entity, the second an existing belief in Spain and New Spain, did not necessarily raise severe problems of comprehension, which is buttressed by the fact that a considerable account of zoology and Nahua superstition was handed down. An altogether different scenario occurred when Sahagún conducted an enquiry on knowledge that diverged conceptually in its manner of explanation. This collision of European and Nahua worldviews is exemplified in Book VII on astronomy and meteorology, which ends up not doing justice to the Nahuas’ astronomical erudition. Sahagún must have moulded his questions in accordance with his presuppositions on the nature of the sky, the celestial spheres, and the universal rotation, that is to say, natural philosophy that he had learnt in Salamanca and possibly taught in his classes at Tlatelolco.107 Historia naturalis can again be put forward as one of the sources out of which Sahagún could have developed an underlying structure for the formulation of his questionnaire. Concerning, for example, the portrayal of the moon, Pliny depicts its phases in chapter XI of his second book as follows: 106. Other questions that Lopez Austin has reconstructed from the description of animals in Book XI are “[w]hat animals does it resemble?,” “[w]hy does it receive this name?,” and, with reference to their habits, “[w]hat does it feed on? What does it hunt? What sounds does it make?” See 1974, p. 145. As mentioned in chapter III of this study, that Sahagún may have deduced questions from an examination of Pliny’s text is also discernible in other corresponding passages of Historia naturalis and Book XI of Historia universal, such as on bees’ production of honey, the description of snakes according to their horns, human hunting techniques of edible animals, and remedies to abate a scorpion’s bite. 107. López Austin, 1974, pp. 120, 135. See also Bustamante García, 1992, p. 327.

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[T]he moon’s horns are always turned away from the sun, and […] when waxing she faces east and when waning west; and […] the moon shines 47 [and a half] minutes longer daily, from the day after new moon to full, and 47 [and a half] minutes less daily to her wane, while within 14 degrees of the sun she is always invisible.108

Upon reading this passage Sahagún perhaps surmised asking general questions like “how would you describe the changes of the moon?” and “how long do these changes take?,” to which the following answers were pronounced: When he [the moon] newly appeared, he was like a small bow, like a bent, straw lip ornament—a small one. He did not yet shine. Very slowly, he went growing larger, becoming round and disc-shaped. In fifteen days he was completely rounded and filled out, as he became entire and mature.109

In comparison with Pliny’s, the portrayal of the moon and its phases emerges as a more or less satisfactory attempt; more successful as regards the codification of language, less, in that celestial positions and precise mathematical observation is omitted. Recorded information on the Nahuas’ description of the lunar phases—“like a small bow,” “bent,” “disc-shaped,” “filled out”—attests to Sahagún’s linguistic pursuit and continues in a following paragraph with the inclusion of more adjectives, such as “very round, circular, red, a bright, deep red,” coupled with expressions like “[the moon] is already dying; now he slumbereth soundly, he falleth into a deep sleep.”110 In order to come up with all these appreciations and lexicographic varieties, the Nahua respondents, Sahagún, and his assistants could have resorted 108. The relevant quote reads: “Lunam semper aversis a sole cornibus, si crescat, ortus spectare, si minuatur, occasus, haut dubium est; lucere dodrantes semuncias horarum ab secunda adicientem usque ad plenum orbem detrahentemque in deminutionem; intra XIIII autem partes solis semper occultam esse,” Pliny, 1967, I, p. 207. 109. “In icoac iancuican, oalmomana coltontli: iuhquin teçacanecuilli, teçacanecuiltontli, aiamo tlanestia: çan iuiian, ueistiuhi, malacachiuhtiuhi, teuilacachiuhtiuhi. Castoltica, in vel malacachiui: teuilacachiui, in vel maci, in chicaoa,” Flor. Cod., VII, p. 3. 110. “[I]uhquin comalli, veipol: vel teuilacachtic, malacachtic: iuhquin tlapalli, chichiltic, chichilpatic […] [,] ie onmiqui, in metztli: ie uei in quicochi: ie ue in ic cochi,” ibidem.

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to making hand-gestures and drawing images, if not contemplating the moon together. Contrarily, when talking about intangible, abstract, or dissimilar conception of knowledge in European and Nahua cultures, the respondents did not answer as Sahagún was expecting. For example, from passages within Pliny’s text dealing with the universe, he would have read: [The Earth’s] shape has the rounded appearance of a perfect sphere. This is shown first of all by the name ‘orb’ which is bestowed upon it by the general consent of mankind [...]. Upheld by the same vapour between earth and heaven, at definite spaces apart, hang the seven stars which owing to their motion we call ‘planets’.111

Sahagún would have followed up with questions on the roundness of the Earth and the existence of planets, such as “what is the word for ‘Earth’?, why does it receive this name?, what is the word for ‘planet’?, how many planets do you know?” Neither Book VII nor earlier drafts on Nahua astronomy incorporated direct answers to these questions. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the Nahuas withheld their own conceptualization of the universe. To Sahagún, it appeared as if they had not exposed scientific knowledge—they did not tell him Nahuatl names for the planets, for example. What the respondents did, however, was to narrate fables, the real astronomic interpretation of which escaped Sahagún. For the moon they told him the fable of the rabbit and the moon, which recounts the journey of the satellite through what they theorized as the first of thirteen divisions above the Earth.112 Incapable of seeing the true value of those stories and of resigning himself to accepting his limitations when grasping foreign wisdom on the universe, Sahagún be-

111. The relevant passage reads: “Formam eius in speciem orbis absoluti globatam esse nomen in primis et consensus in eo mortalium orbem appellantium, […] inter hanc caelumque eodem spiritu pendent certis discreta spatiis septem sidera, quae ab incessu vocamus errantia,” Pliny, 1967, I, pp. 173-77. 112. This story was eventually added to Book VII, after the portrayal of the lunar phases; see Flor. Cod., VII, pp. 3-8. An indigenous pictorial representation in the Vatican Codex A reveals that the Nahuas conceived the universe as consisting of thirteen vertically superimposed levels above the Earth. For further reference, see León-Portilla, 1963, pp. 49-52.

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littled the Nahuas’ understanding on the topic as insufficient. He entirely dismissed the astronomical knowledge that the fables entail, insisting that “what [the Nahuas] understood of this subject of [...] natural philosophy [...] is very little and very crude.”113 His mindset made him despise fables and myths as simple and ridiculous fiction, tantamount to those “our forefathers, both Greek and Latin […] invented […] of the sun, the moon, some of the stars, water, land, fire, air, and of other created things.”114 Nevertheless, despite the lack of scientific weight with which Sahagún endowed this “fictitious theology of the gentiles,” as he terms it following Augustine, he admitted to the necessity of partly codifying it so that the Nahuas “be cured of their blindness by means of the preachers as well as the confessors.”115 It is not only to these religious readers but also to the Spanish officials working at the Council of the Indies that Sahagún feels compelled to convey his dissatisfaction with the contents of Book VII, regretting that: “[T]he subject-matter this […] book deals with is treated very crudely. This is because the natives themselves gave the account of the things treated in this Book very crudely, according as they understood them, in crude style.”116 He warns about 113. “[L]o que ellos entendian en esta materia, de […] Philosophia natural […] es muy poco y muy baxo,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 68. Information on the sun, in the first chapter of Book VII, was covered in the same manner as that of the moon. The passage focuses on providing adjectives on colours and shapes, and expressions pronounced at its sight, see ibid., VII, pp. 1, 34-38. The fable that the Nahuas narrated, that of the “Fifth Sun,” appears in Book II on ceremonies; see ibid., II, pp. 216-217. Sahagún remained unaware that the story unveils the Nahuas’ belief in a quadripartite universe, characterized by an endless struggle for supremacy between four cosmic forces or directions: East, North, West and South. According to LeónPortilla, in a Nahua century of fifty-two years, each of the four directions had a thirteen-year period of predominant influence. In order to keep the sun in motion there was a “Fifth Age,” a period of time that the gods of these four directions gave in to maintain harmony; see 1963, pp. 54-56. 114. “[N]uestros antecessores: ansi griegos, como latinos […] inuentaron [fabulas ridiculas], del sol, y de la luna, y de algunas, de las estrellas: y del agua, tierra, fuego, y ayre: y de las otras criaturas,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 67. Bustamante García argues that in Book VII, and also in Book III on mythology, Sahagún applied his knowledge of natural philosophy and moral theory to his questionnaires and his interpretation of the Nahuas’ answers; see 1992, p. 327. 115. “[Pues a proposito, que] sean curados de sus cegueras, ansi por medio de los predicadores: como de los confessores,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 67. 116. “[L]a materia de que se trata [...] va tratada muy baxamente. Esto es porque los mjsmos naturales dieron la relacion de las cosas, que en este libro se tratan muy

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the unpleasant feeling of reading what he regarded as unassuming facts in everyday language, the same reaction he must have undergone when interrogating his respondents on the sun, the moon, the stars, and the universe according to his European worldview. Sahagún’s request for information on Nahua astronomy clearly unveils the Eurocentric and authorial attitude that as a cultural translator he would have maintained during his collection of data. Far from conducting research as a pioneering ethnographer; willing to hear, understand, and explain a differing approach to the conceptualization of knowledge, he had expectations about the answers from the moment that he created his questions, and wanted material that conformed to his predetermined categories of knowledge.117 When the answers neither pleased him nor fitted within his project he would have despised, manipulated, and, in the worstcase scenario, discarded them. By way of another example, Sahagún interrogated his Tlatelolco respondents about the day-sign distribution of their sacred divinatory calendar, the Tonalamatl, and the respondents told him about the four directions or corners of the universe. These were succinctly recorded in the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco as the sign of the rabbit, initiating the year-count for the region of the South; that of the reed for East; the flint for North; and the house for West.118 Not an astronomer at heart but a missionary determined to eradicate anti-Christian beliefs, this already limited piece of data never saw expansion, and the signs ended up confined in the appendix to Book IV as pagan and superstitious astrology.119

baxamente, segun que ellos las entienden: y en baxo lenguaje,” ibid., p. 68. López Austin discusses Sahagún’s unappreciative attitude towards the information that he received in 1974, pp. 135-137. 117. Viesca Treviño notices a similar instance during the elaboration of the section on Nahua medicine, eventually included in Book X. The Nahua physicians probably faced questions that followed Galen and Hippocrates’s classical categorization of good versus bad medicine, that is, whether an illness was cured or not. This precluded the classification and understanding of illnesses according to Nahua thought; see Viesca Treviño, 2002, p. 184. 118. The relevant passage can be found in Sahagún, 1905-1907, VII, p. 269 (fol. 184r), and the translation from Nahuatl into English in León-Portilla, 1963, pp. 54-55. 119. See Flor. Cod., IV, pp. 137-138.

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CHAPTER 5: The Composition of Historia universal: Sahagún, the Respondents, and the Assistants The suspicion about the biased nature of the contents of Historia universal is nothing new and has been attributed not only to Sahagún but also to his Nahua respondents and assistants. López Austin, for example, concludes his reconstruction of Sahagún’s questionnaires wondering “[w]hat [...] the degree of veracity in the informants’ answers is” and “to what degree [...] the answers can be considered reflections of the ancient culture rather than merely the personal or class attitudes of the elderly informants.”1 Klor de Alva likewise argues that particularly in those books concerning religious beliefs “rather than practices that could be objectively described [...], what we have is a distilled version of what a Christian priest and Christianized colegiales would edit after listening to some judiciously self-censored responses.”2 As pointed out by López Austin and Klor de Alva, the contribution of Nahua respondents and assistants to Historia universal cannot be taken slightly and must be, as it has been indeed throughout the years, the object of scholarly debate. As discussed in the introduction of this study, Garibay Kintana perceived them as a Nahua “united front” when stating that the Códices matritenses constitute what “the Indians 1. López Austin, 1974, p. 148. 2. Klor de Alva, 1988, p. 47. For a similar reflection, see Broda, 1975, pp. 123124, and Todorov, 1984, pp. 230-231.

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said and wrote [...], the direct and clear writing in the language of their elders.”3 More recent studies, however, acknowledge the generational gap and separate them as two Nahua groups marked by their pre-Hispanic and post-conquest experiences. In reality, it is these experiences within the new colonial order that differentiates and shapes the assistants’ decisive input during the composition of Historia universal.4 The former students of Tlatelolco—whom Sahagún had taught Latin and trained to take notes, summarize, write cogent texts according to a European standard, and translate— worked side-by-side with him. They communicated with the elders during Sahagún’s questioning and drafted, proofread, and amended every document under his direction; from the Primeros memoriales to the Florentine Codex. Meanwhile, although the respondents supplied knowledge as requested by Sahagún, they had no chance to review or modify; no final say in how their accounts were treated and preserved in writing. Difficult as it is to determine the extent to which the Nahua respondents uttered accurate and unbiased information as well as the degree of manipulation exerted by Sahagún and his assistants, an analysis of the parts they all played during the production process of Historia universal can lead to more clarification. The aim of this chapter is therefore to shed light on the roles of Sahagún, his respondents, and his assistants during both data collection and the composition of the different manuscripts. In doing so, this chapter borrows Patrick Johansson’s semiotic triangulation scheme. Mirroring Roman Jakobson’s model of communication, Johansson identifies three communicative elements or vertices during the relocation of Nahua oral accounts and pictorial sources into a written text; an addresser, an ad3. “[L]o que dijeron y redactaron los indios [...], la redacción directa y neta en lengua de sus mayores,” Garibay Kintana, 1956, I, p. xi. 4. Some scholars who have acknowledged the assistants’ active role in the production of Historia universal, mostly in Books XI and XII, are Robertson 1959, Lockhart 2004 (first edition, 1993), Palmeri Capesciotti 2001, MagaloniKerpel 2003, and Olivier 2007, who has also demonstrated the survival of the respondents’ pre-Hispanic concepts in the categorization of animals. The assistants’ contribution to, as well as authorship of, a large corpus of catechistic texts and plays in the Nahuatl language has also been suggested by Lockhart, 1992, pp. 255-256, 401-402, and studied by Burkhart 1989; 1996, and Sell and Burkhart 2004.

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dressee, and the message that is eventually transcribed.5 The respondents, as addressers, conveyed the message through words, gestures, and tone of voice; a message that at times was also supported by their interpretation of pictorial documents. Sahagún and his assistants, as the addressees or recipients of the message, encoded the information up to the necessary level of alteration that guaranteed comprehension and the adjustment of the material to the linguistic-proselytizing purposes of Historia universal. The whole process is also identifiable with an intersemiotic translation scenario, wherein, as Jakobson notices, there exists a linguistic and cultural transmutation or “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.”6 In other words, when Sahagún asked questions created from European written sources, such as confession manuals and Pliny’s Historia naturalis, the respondents answered through verbal and non-verbal systems; oral and visual codes such as chants and pictorial documents that only they knew how to recite and interpret. Sahagún and his assistants transformed both verbal and non-verbal information into a non-verbal written code with which they were familiar, but which was unknown to the respondents.7 This linguistic and cultural transmutation empowers Sahagún and his assistants and is essential to demonstrate that, rather than the Nahua respondents and assistants, it was Sahagún and his assistants who formed a “united front,” working together and tampering with the texts from the outset of Sahagún’s project.

The Nahua Respondents’ Role Sahagún offers a brief and overall picture of the identity of his respondents in the second prologue to Historia universal. Those from 5. Johansson first applied the “triangulación semiótica” to the study of Historia universal in his 1989 article. He has referred to this approach in his 1993 monograph, and used it as a basis for his 1999 article, and in 2002, pp. 202-207, and 2004, pp. 32-33. 6. Jakobson, 1959, p. 232. 7. León-Portilla puts it in a similar fashion: “[T]he ‘texts’ in the indigenous language [...]—according to the friars and their native students—were transferred from an oral context and the codices to the alphabetical writing” (“los “textos” en lengua indígena […]—al decir de los frailes y sus estudiantes nativos—fueron transvasados de la oralidad y los códices a la escritura alfabética,” 1996, p. 15). For a similar argument, see also León-Portilla, 2003, p. 124.

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Tepepulco, he states, were “principales” or leaders who gave him all the matters that were discussed “in paintings, for that was the writing they employed in ancient times;” and those from Tlatelolco were likewise “highborn elders […] [,] very capable in their language, and in their ancient customs.”8 His respondents belonged to the Nahua aristocracy, the pipiltin, who were versed in the performance of the ceremonies and rituals documented in Books I and II, and to the highest social rank of the merchants, the pochteca, who spoke about their goods, precious clothing, and lavish ritual banquets; information that is found, for example, in Book IX on merchants and artisans.9 The pipiltin had received instruction from an early age at the pre-Hispanic Calmecac. In the regime of a boarding school, the wise masters of the Nahua community, the tlamatinime, owners of “the black ink, red ink,” literally meaning wisdom, had passed on to them their ancestors’ in cualli tlahtolli. The cualli designated songs, hymns to gods, and poems that combined intellectual and metaphysical speculation, whereas the tlahtolli, including huehuetlahtolli and teotlahtolli, concerned narrations on gods, rituals, cosmology, and historical accounts.10 As for the “paintings” that the pipiltin used in Tepepulco for the explanation of “their ancient customs,” it is not known whether these were the pre-Hispanic pictorial documents that codified their in cualli tlahtolli in amoxtli, or whether the “paintings” comprised substitute characters and images drawn for the occasion by a group of tlacuiloque; Nahua paintersscribes working under Sahagún’s commission.11 Since the assistants 8. “[P]or pinturas, que aquella, era la escriptura, que ellos antiguamente vsaban […]. [Los] principales ancianos, [...] [eran] muy habiles en su lengua, y en las cosas de sus antiguallas,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 54. 9. Sahagún does not name the individuals in his prologue. He mentions, nevertheless, the names of another group of respondents; indigenous physicians whose knowledge was transferred to chapter XXVII of Book X, on ailments of the body and medicines, and to chapter VII of Book XI, on medicinal herbs. See Flor. Cod., X, p. 163, and XI, p. 221. 10. Gruzinski, 1993, p. 9. For further reference on the Calmecac, see Calnek 1988. 11. León-Portilla in Sahagún, 1992, p. 14. The illustrations of the Primeros memoriales have been studied, amid others, by Baird 1988, Peterson 1988, Quiñones Keber 1997, and Nicholson 2002. After an analysis of the illustrations of the ceremonies of chapter I, Nicholson suggests that the more complex depictions, featuring “deities, deity impersonators, ritual celebrants, and further paraphernalia,

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are said to have written “the explanation at the bottom of the painting,” the second option seems likely, and is reinforced by the fact that the Spaniards, considering the amoxtli as living proof of idolatry, had confiscated and burnt them during the first years of conversion.12 Nevertheless, Sahagún did see amoxtli, the “books they had about [all their ancient customs] [that] were painted with figures and representations”—he had either brought with him some impounded by other friars for their investigations or his respondents had shown to him surviving ones.13 Educated in a cultural tradition that registered knowledge within an alphabetic-written medium, at the sight of Nahua pictorial documents, whether authentic amoxtli or substitute illustrations, Sahagún established a parallel between those “paintings” and European books, as evidenced by his opinion that: This people did not have letters or any characters. They could neither read nor write. They communicated with one another by means of representations and paintings. And all their ancient customs and books they had about them were painted with figures and representations in such a way that they knew and had records of the things their ancestors had done.14 were derived from “manuals” that Nahua priests used to plan” in order to manage rituals, 2002, p. 96. Quiñones Keber believes that some tlacuiloque were involved in the preparation of the layout of the Primeros memoriales. Contrary to the usual elaboration of European manuscripts, these Nahua artists painted the images and incorporated them into the folios before the assistants added the glosses and texts; see 1997, pp. 24, 33-34. The appointment of tlacuiloque in colonial projects has been examined by Batalla Rosado and Rabasa in their studies of the Codex Tudela, 2002, and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, 2011, respectively. 12. The relevant quote reads that the assistants wrote “la declaraction, al pie de la pintura,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 54. In asking his assistants to annotate explanatory comments to, for example, drawings of gods, their attires and ceremonies, Sahagún is adopting a procedure observed in the Codex Borbonicus and in further documents of investigations carried out by other friars, like in the Dominican Fray Pedro de los Ríos’s Codex Telleriano-Remensis; see Rabasa 2011. As for the destruction of amoxtli, see Lopes Don, 2010, pp. 3-5, for further reference. 13. [L]libros que tenjan de [todas las antiguallas suyas], estauan pintados, con figuras, y imagines,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 82. 14. “Esta gente no tenja letras, nj caracteres algunos, nj sabian leer, nj escreujr, comunjcabãse por imagines, y pinturas, y todas las antiguallas suyas, y libros que tenjan dellas, estauan pintados, con figuras, y imagines: de tal manera que sabian, y tenjan memorias de las cosas, que sus antepasados, aujan hecho,” ibidem. Sahagún reiterates this idea in Book X; see Hist. gen., X, p. 633.

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His remark on the Nahuas’ lack of “letters,” with their concomitant inability to read and write, and his omission of praise towards their “ancient customs and books,” solely alluded to as figures and images, suggest that Sahagún overlooks the nature of the Nahuas’ oral and pictorial means of expression. He conceives them as nothing more than mnemonic paintings that secured the memory of the past. However, far from simple auxiliary mnemonic devices supporting oral expression, the amoxtli were “read” or decoded in a sophisticated two-fold simultaneous operation in which sound and image complemented one another. The interpreter’s eyes scanned the documents, which refreshed and also inspired him to “make them speak” by modulating the intensity of his tone of voice as required by the signs, and by uttering the accounts and chants that he had learnt by heart.15 If exposed to folios with characters and images drawn by commissioned tlacuiloque, Sahagún would have trusted those paintings and not have realized that, in comparison with the amoxtli, they were already isolated images, distorted accounts that lost data and perhaps incited his respondents to conceal information. If exposed to the amoxtli, neither Sahagún nor his assistants were able to grasp in full the complexity of the Nahuas’ oral and pictorial information, which implied a possible manipulation on the respondents’ part. For Sahagún’s “uninitiated European eyes” and also for his assistants’, whose Calmecac training had been replaced by Franciscan schooling, the pictorial documents “vaulted a barrier that European senses are normally unable to cross.”16 15. Gruzinski, 1993, pp. 11-16. This action of “reading” the amoxtli was known as amoxohtoca, literally meaning to follow the path of the amoxtli, and tlapoa; to relate or recount something; see León-Portilla, 1996, p. 31; 2003, p. 42. The figures and representations, as Sahagún names them, consisted of three different “glyphs” or signs; pictograms, ideograms, and phonetic signs. Pictograms are objects and actions such as animals, plants, sacrifices, and gods; ideograms depict attributes or concepts by means of an image of an associated object (e.g., an eye means “to see;”) and phonetic signs stand for a verbalization of a reality (e.g., the glyph of Mixcoatl, literally meaning “cloud serpent,” consists of a painted cloud and a serpent). These signs are displayed as objects, characters, and geometric shapes, and their chromatic variations, together with the position occupied and grouping, determine their meaning and interpretation within the amoxtli. See Lockhart, 1992, pp. 327-329. 16. Gruzinski, 1992, p. 15. For a comprehensive study of pre-Hispanic pictorial manuscripts, see Nowotny 2005.

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The absence of information on the Nahuas’ sophisticated “writing-reading” system in Historia universal shows that Sahagún ignored its value and saw no need in enquiring about the encoding and decoding techniques of the glyphs in isolation and as part of amoxtli. This void has been investigated by scholars who at times have contrasted the content of written texts with matching surviving codices. Exemplifying this approach, León-Portilla has identified a painting of the fifteenth-century Codex Borgia with the ritual “zollin tlacotonaliztli” or offering of the bleeding quails, a daily ritual performed in honour of the sun that is included in chapter I of the Primeros memoriales and in the appendix of Book II of Historia universal.17 When telling Sahagún of their rituals, the respondents could have employed the relevant plate of this amoxtli or a similar painting, and reproduced what used to be uttered at the start of the ceremony. The recreation of a possible chant reads: And they greeted [the sun]; they said: “The sun hath come to emerge, Tonametl, Xiuhpiltontli, Quauhtleuanitl. But how will he do on his way? How will he spend the day? Perhaps something evil will befall his common people”. They said unto him: “Perform thy function! Work, O our lord!”. And this each day was thus done when the sun arose, [as] hath been said.18

The juxtaposition of the related painting and the whole written passage evinces the impossibility of preserving the complexity of the Nahua chant within alphabetic writing.19 In the case that Sahagún’s respondents “read” an amoxtli, as León-Portilla suggests, the colourful expression of pictograms, ideograms, and phonetic 17. León-Portilla, 1996, p. 96. He has also identified the confession ritual of Books I and VI of Historia universal with a painting of the Codex FejérváryMayer, and several passages of the Códices matritenses with paintings of the codices Fejérváry-Mayer, Borbonicus, and Vindobonensis Mexicanus I. See León-Portilla, 1996, pp. 99-104, and 2003, pp. 225-279. 18. “[Y]oan qujtlapalovaia qujtoaia [:] Oqujçaco in tonatiuh, in tonametl, xiuhpiltontli, in quauhtlevanjtl: auh quen onotlatocaz quē cemilhujtiz, cujx itla ipan mochivaz in jcujtlapil, in jiatlapal [.] [C]onilvjaia. Ma ximotequjtili, ma xjmotlacotili, totecujoe. [A]uh injn mumuztlae iuh muchivaia in iquac valqujçaia tonatiuh mjtoaia,” Flor. Cod., II, p. 216. For further information on this ritual, see Sahagún, 1997, p. 124; Flor. Cod., II, pp. 216-217, and León-Portilla, 1996, pp. 95-99. 19. León-Portilla, 1996, p. 14. For the pictorial representation of the “zollin tlacotonaliztli” in the Codex Borgia, see Díaz and Rodgers, 1993, p. 7 (plate 71).

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signs disappears and voices are silenced, replaced by the deictic words “they” and “him,” and the adverb “each day,” which speak of a mediated message and locate the Nahua priests in a distant place and time.20 Burkhart similarly indicates that if the contents of the relevant pictorial document that the respondents articulated had been painted by the colonial Nahuas, these would have re-evaluated and re-organized the performance, which increases the level of manipulation and the distancing with the original ritual.21 Added to this, the oral representation is not captured in its communicative circumstances, such as part of a religious and social event, but extracted through an interrogation procedure that impacted upon the genuine functionality of what the respondents expressed.22 The rhythm of their voice and the pitch of possible musical accompaniment, together with the physical, temporal, and cultural context, vanish. Neutralized in their formal aspects and suffering from considerable alterations, any ritual, chant, hymn, and discourse that has been codified in this manner emerges as a depersonalized and decontextualized written recreation of an unrecoverable reality that has ended up captured in a constrained non-verbal and alphabetic space.23 20. León-Portilla, 1996, pp. 14, 70-71. As for the writing of the spoken words, Inga Clendinnen believes that codifying an agglutinative language like Nahuatl incurs “its own difficulties and deficiencies,” because “the scribes wrote as they heard, often failing to separate words, and so leaving ‘blocks’ from which the words were composed unclear,” 1991, pp. 282-283. 21. Burkhart, 2004, p. 468. 22. As Johansson writes: “It is not the same to sing a chant to Tlaloc in the festive circumstances of a religious event, surrounded by thousands of participants who are attired, wearing make-up, and engrossed in the dynamics of an offering dance, as it is to simply pronounce those linguistic components of the chant in the semi-darkness of a Franciscan friary or in another place that is alien to their place of enunciation” (“[n]o es lo mismo elevar un canto a Tláloc en las circunstancias festivas de un acontecimiento religioso, rodeado de miles de participantes ataviados, maquillados, absortos en una dinámica danza ofertoria, que enunciar los mismos simples componentes lingüísticos de este canto en la penumbra de un monasterio franciscano o en cualquier lugar ajeno a la instancia de enunciación,” 1993, p. 26). For a similar argument, see Keber, 1988, p. 62, Ilarregui, 1996, p. 182, Burkhart, 2004, p. 468, and Solodkow, 2010, p. 207. 23. Garibay Kintana defines this scenario as “the luminous prison of the alphabet” (“la luminosa prisión del alfabeto,” 1953-1954, I, p. 15) because, in spite of loss and manipulation, written accounts remain an enlightening glimpse of the splendour of the Nahua culture, otherwise consigned to oblivion.

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Apart from the manipulation and the untranslatability of the Nahuas’ oral and visual tradition, it is the respondents’ attitude that factors as another source of loss and provision of inaccurate data. The experience of gathering information by interviewing indigenous peoples, as evaluated by ethnographers with significant familiarity in conducting fieldwork, carries an inherently problematic process. At times answers are not spontaneous but processed and selected by the informants in order to protect their interests or comply with the ethnographers’ expectations and desired conclusions. Furthermore, when confronted with conflicting matters, such as disparate approaches to knowledge and sacred belief, informants can misunderstand questions, modify, and deliberately obscure and conceal elements of their culture.24 Klor de Alva has highlighted these issues in connection with Sahagún and his assistants’ process of data collection in Tepepulco and Tlatelolco, where the elders were subjected to an asymmetrical situation of power.25 In this sense, Serge Gruzinski suggests that when the tlacuiloque were appointed by Spanish officials to draw maps, tributes, and indigenous stories they may only have reproduced what they felt was needed. Under the obligation of meeting colonial demands, it is possible that they censored “whatever their respect for tradition (or their guilty conscience as Christian novices) prevented them from revealing to the missionaries.”26 In the case of Sahagún’s respondents, an understanding of their attitude calls for an analysis of those passages that detail the manner in which Sahagún approached them, and for a glimpse at the general contents of Historia universal. In his prologue to Book II Sahagún relates that upon requesting of the lord and leaders of Tepepulco the involvement of capable and experienced respondents, they took an unspecified

24. Spindler and Goldschmidt, 1973, pp. 217-218, and Campbell and Levine, 1973, pp. 370-371. 25. Klor de Alva asserts that “[f]ieldwork conditions where the informant is in a subordinate position to the ethnographer or among peoples with substantially different cultures often include less than candid informants who sometimes withhold information altogether,” 1988, p. 46. For Clendinnen’s similar suggestion, see 1991, p. 282. 26. Gruzinski, 1992, p. 24.

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number of days for consideration. “Having assembled them,” Sahagún says: I presented that which I intended to do […]. They replied that they would consult one another regarding the proposition and that they would answer me [another] day. […]. [Another day] the lord came with the leaders […] [,] they assigned me as many as ten or twelve leading elders. They told me I could communicate with them, and they would give me answers to all that I should ask them.27

A possible scenario is that after Sahagún’s superficial explanation of his project—informing himself of ancient customs and beliefs in their own language—, the Nahuas deliberated for several days on the proselytizing nature of his commission, of which they were aware thanks to Sahagún’s precursor; Olmos. They had to decide who was more suitable to attend Sahagún’s meetings and, overcoming pain and resentment, to speak about the ancestral gods, festivities, and offerings against which Sahagún preached as “diabolical” deities and practices. The Nahuas also had to decide which pictorial documents were going to be exposed, if and when they did, and what kind of information would be unveiled. According to Sahagún’s account, the respondents supplied information through “pinturas” (paintings) so, as aforementioned, taking advantage of Sahagún and his assistants’ lack of skills to interpret pictorial documents, they may have furnished incomplete and distorted data. What is more, in circumstances that deviated so much from the original reproduction of their ceremonies and other social activities, it is very likely that the surrounding artificiality affected their performance and they did not utter narratives and chants accordingly. A similar scenario possibly occurred in Tlatelolco, where as Sahagún explains, he again summoned the Nahua leaders and demanded the appointment of several experienced elders with whom he could examine and collate the writings that he had brought from

27. “Aujendolos juntado, propuseles, lo que pretendia hazer, [...] ellos me respondieron, que se hablarian, cerca de lo propuesto, y que otro dia, me responderian [...]. Otro dia vinieron, el señor, con los principales [...], señalaronme hasta diez o doze principales ancianos: y dixeronme, que con aquellos, podia comunicar,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 53-54.

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Tepepulco.28 Sahagún applies the inquisitorial technique of comparing data so as to certify the authenticity of the Tepepulco material and expand it. Since these respondents were gathered in the College of Tlatelolco and enquired on the veracity of the Tepepulco writings, they knew that they were participating in a Christian project to assemble data on their traditions and beliefs for its obliteration, which might have driven them to select their answers. At times they would have remained silent about rituals still in use, softened the ones Sahagún had brought described from Tepepulco, and committed to giving details about those that did not take place any longer, like public human sacrifice.29 Parallel to this non-collaborative attitude, Sahagún’s respondents of Tepepulco and Tlatelolco could have adopted another stance. Availing themselves of Sahagún’s commission they might have spoken up in the defence of their ancestors’ culture and furthered their personal interests within the new colonial order. In fact, Sahagún is a complacent promoter of the recording of a partial account of Nahua reality that leaves aside the day-to-day life of women and the commoners.30 Historia universal is a testament to the description of the male pipiltin and the pochteca’s life, as mirrored, for example, in Books VI on rhetoric, VIII on kings and lords, and IX on merchants and craftsmen, which display their incomparable eloquence, magnificent arrays, residences, and the succulent meals of their banquets.31 Accustomed to regarding the lower 28. For further reference, see ibid., p. 54. 29. These are Federico Navarrete Linares’s suggestions in 2002, p. 105. 30. Regarding the indifference to the lives of Nahua women, partially depicted in relation to “sinful” behaviour and some of their domestic and healing duties, see Ilarregui, 1996, pp. 184-185, and Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez’s 1998 article. Overmyer-Velázquez avers that this underrepresentation responds to Sahagún’s Christian moral system and patriarchal gender hierarchy. As for the life of commoners, only Book X describes them as potential penitents, such as farmers and sellers. To be also noted is that in spite of his wish to cover the totality of the Nahuatl language in its context of utterance, Sahagún does not record their manners of expression. The Primeros memoriales includes some greetings and insults that commoners voiced when quarrelling, but this material is eventually excluded from Historia universal. These colloquial conversations and their translation into English by Sullivan can be read in Sahagún, 1997, pp. 294-298. 31. The Primeros memoriales also contains some greetings and insults uttered by the Nahua aristocracy; see ibidem. Like those of the commoners, they are omitted from the final Nahuatl version. Sahagún might have considered that their

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class with disdain and making no allowances for their world experiences and routines, the Nahua respondents’ self-centred and condescending attitude towards the remaining population resulted in the construction of a limited portrait of society, a written work solely devoted to the depiction of their own lives, perchance embellished or told in a way that presented them before Sahagún in a favourable manner.32 Thus, in Book XII the Tlatelolco respondents benefited from an occasion to look down on their rival citizens of Tenochtitlan by proclaiming their superior bravery in battle, and in chapter XXIX of Book X they seem to have invented a Christianized version of their origins that would certainly have pleased Sahagún.33 According to the passage, in ancient times there was a group of wise elders in possession of books and paintings, who worshipped just one god named Tloque nahuaque or Yohualli ehecatl, and who had abandoned them with the promise of returning.34 Sahagún’s respondents perhaps contrived to author a version of history according to which their ancestors had known about the Bible and were awaiting the arrival of Christians.35 This account exempted them from incorporation was at odds with his proselytizing activities, with the picture of the Nahuas as highly-skilled rhetoricians, and with his intention to supply decorous examples of use for a Calepin. 32. This view subscribes to that of Gruzinski, who asserts that, as upper-class members of Nahua society, the tlacuiloque tended to paint a magnificent universe in which they mingled with priests and princes in the performance of ceremonies and rituals; see 1992, p. 119. 33. Navarrete Linares, 2002, pp. 106-107. 34. For the relevant text, see Flor. Cod., X, p. 190. López Austin has widely annotated a reproduction of the whole chapter in Nahuatl and translated it into Spanish; see Sahagún, 1985, pp. 290-317. Tloque nahuaque and Yohualli ehecatl, translated by Anderson and Dibble as “Lord of the near, of the nigh” and “Lord of the night and the wind,” were two epithets for the god and magician Tezcatlipoca, whom Sahagún considered another “diabolical” divinity of the Nahuas’ pantheon, see Flor. Cod., VI, p. 1. The two epithets are recorded in several huehuetlahtolli of Book VI, and in spite of the Tezcatlipoca-Devil association established by Sahagún, they appear in doctrinal texts in order to refer to the Christian God, such as in the first chapter of Olmos’s Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios and in the ninth chapter of Sahagún’s Colloquios y doctrina christiana. 35. The contention that the Nahuas had been Christianized before the arrival of the Spaniards was much debated in Sahagún’s times. He discusses this possibility in his Spanish translation of chapter XIII of Book XI. His opinion is ambivalent. On the one hand he is certain that “the Gospel was never preached to them” (“nunca les fue predicado el evangelio,” Hist. gen. XI, p. 814), but after reflecting on some analogies,

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the title of innate worshippers of the Devil, in that they had lacked the guidance that churchmen, Sahagún as a representative, were finally delivering.

The Nahua Assistants’ Role Notwithstanding the respondents’ potential fabrication of this story, the possibility that it came from Sahagún’s assistants should not be disregarded.36 Together with the respondents, they composed the indigenous elite who aimed to secure position and privileges within a new colonial order that questioned their true religious disposition and intellectual capacities. Contrary to the respondents, the assistants were the first generation of Nahuas to have been schooled in a Franciscan college. Educated in the Christian culture, they had the power of knowledge and could channel it in their own benefit, which means that the Christianized version of their origins may have been triggered by an attempt on their part to disclaim the Spaniards’ disparaging views.37 What Sahagún tells us about his group of regular assistants, former students who must have been selected on the basis of their expertise and diligence in previous linguistic and doctrinal tasks directed by the friars, is that they constituted the “product” to which the College of Tlatelolco aspired. In his prologue to Book II, Sahagún chooses three labels to qualify them; “gramaticos” (grammarians), “latinos” (Latinists), and “trilingues” (trilingual). With the first two, he means experts in Latin, classical culture, grammar, and lexicography, whereas with trilingual, he corroborates that like the existence of a pre-Hispanic ritual that he equated to confession, he concedes that “it might well be that they were evangelized for some time” (“pudo ser muy bien que fueron predicados por algún tiempo,” ibid., p. 815). 36. Navarrete Linares, 2002, pp. 102-103. 37. Burkhart argues that the students of Tlatelolco, and by extension those Nahuas who had received a Christian education, were “equipped to compare and evaluate both cultures, to challenge Spanish authority in its own grounds, and to subvert its paradigms through subtle manipulations and restatements,” 1996, p. 59. Illustrating this, in her study of the images of Book XII of the Florentine Codex, Magaloni-Kerpel has identified the manner in which the artists transformed Moctezuma into a Christ-like figure; see 2003, pp. 220-221.

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aside from native speakers of Nahuatl they were also fluent in Spanish.38 Sahagún observes that at least four of them worked for him in Tepepulco and four or five in Tlatelolco: “The principal and wisest one was Antonio Valeriano, a native of Azcaputzalco; another, a little less so, was Alonso Vegerano, a native of Quauhtitlan. Another was Martin Jacobita […], another was Pedro de San Buenaventura, a native of Quauhtitlan.”39 As for the Mexico City stage, Sahagún ordered a clean draft of all the works of his 1558 commission from three new assistants: “Diego de Grado, native of the district of La Concepción in Tlatilulco; Bonifacio Maximiliano, native of the district of San Martín in Tlatilulco; Mateo Severino, native of Xochimilco.”40 The emphasis that Sahagún puts on the assistants and their place of origin in the second prologue to Historia universal undoubtedly underscores his indebtedness to them, but it also hints at two additional readings. First, Sahagún acknowledges the utmost relevance of the college as a useful centre of learning and as a boarding school that trained Nahua students from different Nahuatl-speaking areas—especially at a time of decay of the college, since Sahagún probably dictated the prologue sometime during the mid and late 1570s. Second, Sahagún wants to certify the quality of the documents that the assistants wrote after his instruction and under his supervision—every doctrinal text resulting from his 1558 appointment, one of them Historia universal—, probably because his assis38. Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 54. As noted in the previous chapter, Sahagún seems to have communicated with his assistants in Nahuatl, since this is the language in which San Buenaventura writes the letter informing him of every Nahua festivity according to the Julian calendar; see Bustamante García and Díaz Rubio 1983. 39. “El principal y mas sabio fue antonjo valeriano vezino de azcaputzalco: otro poco menos, que este fue alonso vegerano, vezino de quauhtitlan: otro fue martin jacobita [...], otro pedro de san buenaventura vezino de quauhtitlan,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 55. The identity of a fifth assistant in Tlatelolco is unknown. It could have been Juan Badiano, translator of the herbal Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis; Pablo Nazareo, versed in Latin, rhetoric, logic, and philosophy, who occupied the post of rector and preceptor of the college for many years; Andrés Leonardo, as he was involved in the elaboration and translation of Colloquios y doctrina christiana, or Agustín de la Fuente, tutor at Tlatelolco and scribe of the Postilla; see Kobayashi, 1974, p. 371, and Martínez Rodríguez, 1981, p. xvii. 40. “Los escriuanos, que sacaron de buena letra, todas las obras, son: Diego de Grado, vezino del tlatilulco, [...] Bonifacio maximjliano, vezino del tlatilulco [...]. Matheo seuerino, vezino de suchimjlco,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 55.

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tants had eventually become intellectual figures and influential men within the colony. Martín Jacobita, tutor and rector of the college, wrote The Legend of the Sun and the Annals of Cuauhtitlan; this one together with San Buenaventura and Vegerano. The latter also became a tutor in Tlatelolco, and so did Maximiliano. As for Valeriano, “the principal and wisest,” he taught Latin at the college and collaborated in almost every literary enterprise of his time. His mastery of Latin and his high competence of Nahuatl etymology were eulogized by Fray Juan Bautista Viseo, whom Valeriano helped in his sermonary of 1606. What is more, Valeriano became one of the governors of Mexico from 1570 to his death in 1605, and was esteemed by Philip II and his viceroys.41 The assistants’ tasks in the different phases of construction of Historia universal are outlined by Sahagún in a succinct but revealing manner. He insists that they were indispensable collaborators in the three “cedaços,” or “escrutinjos,” of Tepepulco, Tlatelolco, and Mexico City, which entailed the tasks of enquiring, drafting, examination, collation, amendment and expansion of data, and final writing of the documents.42 Being scribes of every surviving text—from the Primeros memoriales of Tepepulco and the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco to the first completed Nahuatl copy of Historia universal of Mexico City—virtually makes them day-to-day owners of the manuscripts, with plenty of opportunities to insert their comments and interpretations under Sahagún’s direction. To begin with, the Primeros memoriales (ca. 1559-1561) demonstrates how Sahagún and his assistants subjected the respondents’ answers to a Christian interpretation.43 In chapter I, on rituals and 41. For further information on the assistants’ works and social status during the colonial period, see Garibay Kintana, 1954-1954, II, pp. 224-227, Kobayashi, 1974, pp. 357-387, Martínez Rodríguez, 1981, pp. xiv-xvii, and Burkhart’s section titled “Nahua scholars,” 1996, pp. 65-73. More recently, Silvermoon has conducted extensive research on these assistants, as well as on other students and tutors at Tlatelolco; see 2007, pp. 145-239. 42. The relevant quote reads: “[I]n all these scrutinies there were grammarians from the College” (“en todos estos escrutinjos, [hubo] gramaticos colegiales,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 55). 43. The manuscript is part of the Códices matritenses held in Madrid and divided between the Códice de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real, fols. 250r-303v, and that of the Real Academia de la Historia, fols. 51r-85v. For a facsimile reproduction, see Paso y Troncoso’s in Sahagún, 1905-107, VI, Ballesteros Gaibrois’s in Sahagún

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gods, every festivity is arranged chronologically for identification and eradication purposes and shows the specific date of the Julian calendar—the Raising of the Pole (Cuahuitl ehua), falling on 1 February; the Flaying of Men (Tlacaxipehualiztli), on 26 February; the Small Vigil (Tozoztontli), on 18 March; the Great Vigil (Huey tozoztli), on 17 April, and so on and so forth, until the Growth or the Eating of the tamales made of amaranth greens (Izcalli), on 31 January.44 López Austin maintains that these dates are the answers to the last query of Sahagún’s predetermined questionnaire: “On what date of the Julian Calendar did this month fall?”45 A more likely option, nevertheless, is that Sahagún asked when the festivities took place according to the Nahua ceremonial calendar, and that upon examination with his assistants these included the Christian dates into the document.46 A second illustrative example of this Christian approach towards the understanding and collection of accounts rests on the classification of the ceremonial offerings as diabolical. The offering of food and clothes (Tlamanaliztli); the burning of a fire as a form of penitence (Teuquauhquetzaliztli); the sweeping (Tlachpanaliztli); and ritual blood cuts, such as the piercing of ears (Nenacazxapotlaliztli) and of lips (Netexapotlaliztli), are all said to be performed in order to worship the “diablo;” the Devil.47 Years later, these and other rituals depicted in the Nahuatl column of the Florentine Codex are likewise qualified as being celebrated in the Devil’s honour, which proves that Sahagún and his assistants’ Christian perspective of the respondents’ answers exerted an influence upon Sahagún’s project from its inception.48 1964, and the edition of the University of Oklahoma Press in Sahagún 1993. For an annotated translation of the manuscript into English, see Sullivan’s in Sahagún 1997. Some chapters have been translated into Spanish by Jiménez Moreno 1974 and León-Portilla 1992 (1958, first edition). 44. Sahagún, 1997, pp. 55-67. 45. López Austin, 1974, p. 125 46. As observed in chapter IV of this study, Sahagún was wary of conflicting opinions about the day on which the Nahua ceremonial year began. It was not until he was in Tlatelolco that he gathered a group of elders and assistants in order to settle the date for good—not on 1 but on 2 February. See Hist. gen., VII, p. 492. For further information on the calendrical tradition in Sahagún’s writings, see Prem 1988. 47. Sahagún, 1997, pp. 70, 75, 80. 48. The offerings appear in the appendix to Book II of Historia universal, on how “the Mexicans made offerings” and “the various modes in which blood was

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Sahagún and his assistants’ manipulation of the respondents’ accounts is also evident because of the inclusion of other ChristianSpanish words and Latin phrases.49 Thus, the god of the merchants, Yacatecuhtli, is portrayed as having “frontal hair, that is, his hair is arranged in the form of a column” (“ytemillo id est. ixquatzon,”) and wearing “bells, [the same] pear-shaped bells, on his legs” (“tzitzilli oyoalli. idẽ. contlaliticac, icxic.”)50 The two phrases—id est, (that is), and idem (the same)—reveal the use of Latin in the clarification of terminology; quite possibly a common strategy to which Sahagún and his assistants resorted as tutors and former students in the college and during the examination of collected material. Another passage that calls attention is the reading of the term juramẽto (oath or promise) in the description of the ritual of eating earth, which parents performed when offering their children for servitude in temples. The Spanish word is repeated no less than three times in a short paragraph; an insistent use that can be explained as a cultural interpretation by Sahagún and his assistants, who were adamant to condemn the Nahuas’ pagan dedication as an unorthodox religious oath in the Christian culture.51 With reference to the Tlatelolco stage, Sahagún characterized it as a period of much intensity, where for over a year he, the respondents, and the assistants worked “cloistered in the College” so that the Tepepulco information “was amended, explained and expanded,” and material “was rewritten [...] in great haste.”52 Of his four or five assistants Sahagún commends Jacobita, at the time rector of the college, as the most industrious one, and remarks that they were “todos trilingues;” all trilingual.53 These details suffice to infer not only Jacobita’s but also the rest of his assistants’ linguistic skills in shed and offered;” see Flor. Cod., II, pp. 194-200. León-Portilla’s contention is that the word diablo was introduced in order to prevent Sahagún from experiencing problems with the Inquisition and the Council of the Indies; see Sahagún, 1992, p. 47. 49. López Austin, 1974, p. 127. 50. Sahagún, 1997, p. 99, translation by Sullivan. Latin words have been italicized for ease of identification. 51. Ibid., pp. 127-128. In Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios Olmos similarly classes the Roman priest Gilberto’s consecration to the Devil as a “juramento.” See relevant passage in Olmos, 1979, pp. 47-48. 52. “[E]ncerrados, en el colegio: se emendo, declaro, y añadio [todo] [...], y todo se torno, a escriujr de nueuo [...] cõ mucha priesa,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 54. 53. Ibidem.

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grammar, lexicography, and translation, which made them indispensable figures for the type of text Sahagún was planning at the time; a three-column page work comprising the source text in the Nahuatl language, the glosses or explanatory notes, and the translation into Spanish. The surviving texts that are to a more or less extent suggestive of this layout are included within the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco (ca. 1561-1565) and known as the “Segundos memoriales,” the “Memoriales en tres columnas,” and the “Memoriales con escolios.”54 Unlike the rich in illustrations Primeros memoriales, the “Segundos memoriales” (ca. 1561-1562), put forward as next in line chronologically, hardly contains images, probably because in Tlatelolco the assistants took notes on folios devoid of “paintings,” and transcribed only oral rather than also pictorial information. The last three sections of the manuscript, relating to “things of the land,” are articulated as if they were the entries of a monolingual dictionary, consisting of the term, the definition, and example of use.55 This lexicographic layout is perhaps indicative of Sahagún’s experimentation with different arrangements of data. It might showcase that at the time he still conceived the creation of a dictionary like that of Calepino, or rather, that he wanted to incorporate this data into the column with glosses of the three-column page work he planned. Nevertheless, it is in the subsequent drafts, the “Memoriales en tres columnas” (ca. 1563-1565) and the “Memoriales con escolios” (ca. 1565), that Sahagún prompts his assistants to devise the three-column arrangement upon which he set his sights for the rest of the work. In the “Memoriales en tres columnas” only the central column is filled in with the source text in Nahuatl. 54. Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer, 1973, pp. 190-191, Dibble, 1982, p. 13. Like the Primeros memoriales, the contents of the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco are divided between the Códice de la Biblioteca del Palacio Real and that of the Real Academia de la Historia. For a breakdown of contents in both manuscripts, see Bustamante García, 1990, pp. 277, 304. For a facsimile reproduction of the Palacio Real manuscripts, see Paso y Troncoso’s in Sahagún, 1905-1907, VII, and for those of the Real Academia, see VIII. Paso y Troncoso also adds a clean copy of the “Memoriales con escolios” in volume VI. Recently, some manuscripts have been digitalized by the Biblioteca digital mexicana and can be accessed online. As for editions and translations, some of these texts appear in studies that cover a specific topic, for example, on omens and superstitions, and on Nahua education, both by López Austin; see Sahagún 1969 and 1985. 55. Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 467-468.

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In the left-hand column Sahagún scribbles the titles of some passages in Spanish, possibly in order to signal for himself and to his assistants where the corresponding translation into Spanish should start. The “Memoriales con escolios” is the sole manuscript that reflects Sahagún’s intended format; a parallel text with the source text occupying the centre of the page and its translation on the left, plus the scholia or glosses of relevant terminology of the Nahuatl text on the right.56 The execution of this layout is reminiscent of a translation process. The analysis of the lexicographic and grammatical characteristics of the Nahuatl source text, mirrored in the column with explanatory notes, emerges as a prior step to an adequate translation into Spanish. The trilingual assistants were essential for the tasks, as Sahagún echoes in this description of those performed by the most outstanding students of the College of Tlatelolco: Because they are experts in the Latin language, they inform us about the properties of the [Nahuatl] words and the properties of their manner of speech; [...] anything that is to be translated into their language, if it has not been examined by them, will not read without defect; nothing can be written accurately neither in Latin, nor in Spanish, nor in their language.57

The attribution of the same working duties of this passage to Sahagún’s assistants means that they clarified the “properties” of the language; the fine points of the phrasing and syntax, and resolved lexicographic and grammatical issues that, as a non-native speaker, escaped Sahagún.58 Added to this explanation of terms, they wrote 56. The insertion of the Spanish text on the left reveals that Sahagún was thinking of his target audience of missionaries, the majority of whom were native speakers of Spanish, to read this in the first place. Some drafts of the “Memoriales con escolios” demonstrate, nevertheless, that the Nahuatl text of the central column was equally important, if not more. With larger and clearer handwriting, it takes up a wider space than the other two columns. 57. “[P]or ser entendidos en la lengua latina nos dan a entender las propriedades de los vocablos y las propriedades de su manera de hablar; […] y cualquiera cosa que se ha de convertir en su lengua, si no va con ellos examinada, no puede ir sin defecto, escrebir[se] congruamente en la lengua latina ni en romance ni en su lengua,” Hist. gen., X, p. 635. 58. Lockhart, 1992, p. 256.

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and examined the final product, ensuring the composition of a coherent text in correct Nahuatl. Some of the linguistic issues that were dealt with ended up registered in the glosses of the right-hand column of the “Memoriales con escolios.”59 For example, one of the first paragraphs of the surviving drafts, on astronomy, describes the way in which the Nahuas portrayed a solar eclipse: “Then it happens that [the sun] gradually turns red, he is not spread out at daytime anymore, he is no longer there at daytime [...], everything turns [very yellow].”60 The corresponding text of the right-hand column lists explanatory entries for almost every word of the Nahuatl text, including verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. Each word is assigned a number that corresponds to the same number within the Nahuatl text of the central column.61 In this specific passage, “chichiliuhtimomana” (literally “[the sun] gradually turns red,”) with the digit two above the word, appears in the explanatory column translated in the form of an infinitive as “to turn red” (“ponerse colorado;”) “aoc tlacamani” (“[the sun] is not spread out at daytime anymore,”) with digit three, as “to be altered, the sun or water” (“turbarse el sol o el agua;”) and “aoc tlacaca” (“[the sun] is no longer there at daytime,”) with digit four, as “to be troubled, the person” (“turbarse la persona.”) In the explanatory notes the past tense form of each of these verbs is also added; “ochichiliuhtimomã,” “aocotlacaman,” and “aocotlacacatca,” respectively.62 Sahagún relied on his assistants to write the appropriate forms of the past tense, which he could have mistaken giv59. This clarification of grammar issues and terminology was vital for the composition of an accurate and precise translation into Spanish. For a brief study on the assistants’ contribution to the creation of the explanatory notes and the Spanish translation of the “Memoriales con escolios,” see Ríos Castaño (in press). 60. Translation by Elke Ruhnau. The original source reads “[i]n iquac muchiua hi, chichiliuhtimomana, aoc tlacamani. aoc tlacaca [...] cenca tlacoçavia,” and is cited from the “Memoriales con escolios” by Anderson and Dibble in Flor. Cod., VII, pp. 2, 37. For the facsimile reproduction by Paso y Troncoso, see Sahagún 19051907, VI, p. 178 (fol. 160v). 61. Sahagún employs a reader-friendly technique similar to that of other European works, such as the Polyglot Bible of Cardinal Cisneros. This bible is composed of several columns with texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. Each text has matching letters on top of some words in order to indicate where the same paragraph starts. 62. Flor. Cod., VII, p. 37.

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en the grammar formation possibilities. His assistants also spelled out the nuances of their language, that is, the different meanings of words and collocations. For example, the glosses for “aoc tlacamani” and “aoc tlacaca,”— “to be altered, the sun or water” (“turbarse el sol o el agua”) and “to be troubled, the person” (“turbarse la persona,”) respectively—are referring to the different meaning the word “tlaca” has depending on the nature of vowels. “Tlaca” means “at daytime” whereas “tlacā ,” with a second long vowel, is the plural of “tlacatl” (human being).63 In the Spanish text, the assistants or Sahagún personified the sun and, instead of rendering the passage literally, interpreted that the sun became restless and troubled. Another example of their indispensable linguistic knowledge is provided in the sixth gloss; the assistants explained that “tlacoçavia” denotes the property of turning yellow, which is said to happen not only to the sun but also to ripe maize about to be harvested.64 Together with these linguistic and translation tasks, the routine in which the assistants mostly engaged must have been the drafting of data, and the comparison and subsequent writing of texts. They probably jotted down separate respondents’ answers and, transferring the textual skills of their years of study and even teaching at Tlatelolco, compared and re-elaborated those answers until accomplishing a final coherent text that excluded unnecessary and repetitive information. The epitome of this is the description of the deities’ arrays in the Primeros memoriales, such as that of Huitzilopochtli’s: On his head is a headdress of yellow parrot feathers with a quetzal feather crest. His blood bird is on his forehead. There are stripes on his face, on his countenance. Ear plugs of lovely cotinga feathers. On his back he bears his fire-serpent disguise, his anecuyotl [a type of back device, of uncertain meaning]. On his arm is an armlet with a spray of quetzal feathers. The knotted turquoise cloth is bound around his loins. His legs are painted with blue stripes. On his legs are small

63. Ruhnau has provided this interpretation. In their translation of the Nahuatl text Anderson and Dibble relied on the glosses and the translation into Spanish and wrote: “When this came to pass, [the sun] turned yellow; he became restless and troubled. He [...] became very yellow,” ibidem. 64. The explanatory note in Spanish reads: “[T]o become yellow, the sun, or the cornfields when they are ready to be harvested” (“amarillecerse el sol, o los mayzales [cuando] estan pa [sic] colarse,” ibidem).

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bells, pear-shaped bells. His lordly sandals. His shield is the tehuehuelli [people destroyer]. Across the shield lie stripped [arrows]. His serpent staff is in his other hand.65

Probably upon the sight of a painted image of the god, perhaps drawn by a commissioned artist, Sahagún asked his respondents to describe with their own words the different parts in which Huitzilopochtli’s attire was divided. In the meantime, at least one of his assistants took notes, maybe at the bottom of the painting itself. Sahagún seems to have asked questions following a top-to-bottom order; starting with decoration in the head and moving on to the middle of the body, legs, and feet. He then finished with a general query on other symbols associated, maybe as observed in the picture, and the shield and the serpent maniple were mentioned. After the session, the assistant or assistants examined their notes and rewrote the phrases into another document, ensuring the cogency and correctness of the text. It is also possible that Sahagún’s order of questions or the reception of answers did not take place in a consistent manner and that the text was directly formatted into a coherent one by the assistants. Interestingly, in Book I of Historia universal the minute verbalization of Huitztilopochtli’s attire is dramatically reduced to: “And he was thus arrayed: he had an ear pendant of lovely cotinga feathers; his disguise was the fire serpent. He had the blue netted sash, he had the maniple. He wore bells, he wore shells.”66 The exuberant image of colourful feathers of the first text is replaced by the mere mention of one decorative pendant of cotinga feathers, and no comment is made about further elements of his array, such as armlet, sandals, and shield. During the final collation and revision of data on Nahua gods Sahagún, or perhaps the assistants with his approval, considered that this amount of information was expendable, and the assistants put into practice their summa65. The original text, translated by Sullivan, reads: “[Y]tozpulol quetzaltzoyo, icpac manj, yezpitzal, ixquac, icac, y ixtlan tlanticac in ipã ixayac, xiuhtototl, in inacuch yxiuhcoanaval, y yanecuyouh, in quimamaticac, yquetzalmapãca, in imac xiuhtlalpilli, inic motzinilpiticac motexovava, in icxic, tzitzilli, oyoalli, in icxic catquj, ytecpilcac, tevevelli in ichimal tlaoaçomalli in ipã temi chimallj ycoatopil, yn imac, icac, çentlapal,” Sahagún, 1997, pp. 93-94. 66. “Auh ynjc muchichioaia: xiuhtotonacoche catca, xiuhcoanaoale, xiuhtlalpile, matacaxe, tzitzile, oiuoalle,” Flor. Cod., I, p. 2.

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rizing skills. It is not known, however, whether the same assistant summarized other passages on gods from Book I or whether it was a shared commission. This kind of rewriting and summarizing sessions must have brought about the insertion of personal comments. One of such instances is once again perceived in the depiction of Huitzilopochtli. The almighty god of war of the Primeros memoriales, respectfully and fearfully venerated as a deity that “nourishes people. He makes people rich. He makes people wealthy. He makes people rulers. He is wrathful with people. He kills people,” is later on demoted to the category of another human being and cruel trickster.67 In Book I of Historia universal, the relevant passage on Huitzilopochtli says that he was “a common man, just a man, a sorcerer, an omen of evil; a madman, a deceiver, a creator of war, a war-lord, an instigator of war,” who only caused hunger and plague.68 Although this biased slant may rest on the second group of respondents’ attempt to please Sahagún by stripping the god of its powers and camouflage the authentic worship they still felt towards him, the distortion of data is more likely to have been caused by the assistants in consultation with Sahagún. They reinterpreted passages according to their Christian mindset and the belief that pagan deities were deceased heroes of the past.69 Book XI of Historia universal supplies further examples on how the assistants reworked material, either by Sahagún’s suggestions or on their own initiative. Palmeri Capesciotti believes that, as acculturated men, the assistants beheld New World reality through Europeanized eyes, which triggered their filtration of the respondents’ answers through the sieve of knowledge that they had internalized at Tlatelolco. A prime case is the matching portrait of birds of prey in chapter II of Book XI and in Pliny’s Book X on ornithology.70 67. “Tenemjtia. Tetlamachtia. Tecuiltonoa. Tetlatocatilja. Tetlauelia. Temjctia,” Sahagún, 1997, p. 121. 68. “[Ç]an maceoalli, çan tlacatl catca: naoalli, tetzaujtl, atlacacemelle, teixcuepanj: qujiocoianj in iaoiutl, iaotecanj, iaotlatoanj,” Flor. Cod., I, p. 1. 69. Klor de Alva, 1988, p. 50. 70. Palmeri Capesciotti, 2001, pp. 209-212. Pranzetti 1998, Olivier 2007, and Reyes Equiguas 2007 have dedicated studies to the manner in which the assistants juxtaposed indigenous and European conceptions of fauna by following models such as Pliny’s Historia naturalis. Olivier and López Austin, nevertheless,

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Regarding the eagle, two European literary topoi, its hunting techniques and its capability of staring at the sun, are detectable in both texts. In chapter III Pliny writes that: The sea-eagle only compels its still unfledged chicks by beating them to gaze full at the rays of the sun and, if it notices one blinking and with the eyes watering, flings it out of the nest as a bastard and not true to stock, whereas one whose gaze stands firm against the light it rears.71

The section shows that what determined the sea-eagle chick’s right to live is the rite of passage of looking straight into the sun, an important ability or trait that comes across in the depiction of the eagle of New Spain: “[I]t can gaze into, it can face the sun.”72 As for its hunting techniques, Pliny notes in chapter V that: The first and second kinds [of eagles] not only carry off the smaller four-footed animals but actually do battle with stags. The eagle collects a quantity of dust by rolling in it, and perching on the stag’s horns shakes it off into its eyes, striking its head with its wings, until it brings it down on to the rocks. Nor is it content with one foe: it has a fiercer battle with a great serpent, and one that is of much more doubtful issue, even though it is in the air.73

In Historia universal chapter II of Book XI similarly explains that the itzquauhtli or golden eagle “preys on, it slays the deer, the wild beasts. To kill them, it beats them in the face with its wings and then pecks out their eyes. It can slay very thick snakes, and can kill whatever kind of bird flies in the air.”74 In both passages emphasis is have also made the Nahua respondents accountable for some of the non-European categorization of plants and animals in Book XI; see 1974, pp. 133-145. 71. The original text translated by Rackham reads: “[H]aliaetus tantum inplumes etiamnum pullos suos percutiens subinde cogit adversos intueri solis radios et, si coniventem humectantemque animadvertit, praecipitat e nido velut adulterinum atque degenerem. illum, cuius acies firma contra stetit, educat,” Pliny, 1967, III, p. 299. 72. “[V]el qujxnamjquj, vel qujtztimoquetza in tonatiuh,” Flor. Cod., XI, p. 40. 73. “Primo et secundo generi non minorum tantum quadripedum rapina, sed etiam cum cervis proelia. multum pulverem volutatu collectum insidens cornibus excutit in oculos, pinnis verberans, donec praecipitet in rupes. nec unus hostis illi satis: est acrior cum dracone pugna multoque magis anceps, etiamsi in aere,” Pliny, 1967, III, p. 303. 74. “[Q’]nvitequj, qujnmjctia in mamaça, in tequanjme. injc qujnmjctia, qujmjxtlatzinja, ica in jaztlacapal: yoan njman qujmjxtelolo chopinja. In cocoa cenca

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placed upon the eagle’s extraordinary strength and ability. It can attack directly in the air, and prey on great or very thick snakes and quadrupeds like deer. Regarding the eagle’s attack on the latter, both texts illustrate how it uses its wings and focuses on damaging the eyes. As suggested by Palmeri Capesciotti, the assistants may have included these items of information because, whilst writing the text, they attributed an Old World understanding to New World species’ characteristics and behaviours, that is, they recalled their readings of Pliny’s work, with which they were familiar as former students and later tutors, as in the case of Jacobita. Another explanation for the striking similarities in both passages is that the respondents replied to questions Sahagún had designed by following Pliny’s text. Sahagún may have enquired about animals on which eagles preyed and how they did so. This option does not invalidate the possibility that the assistants tampered with the text. Pliny mentions that eagles prey on “smaller four-footed animals,” for instance, mice and rabbits, whereas the Nahuatl text dispenses with this fact. Disregarding the eagle’s common-like prey, the passage highlights its stunning image; how it fights wild beasts and thick snakes and any bird in the air. In the case that the respondents also referred to small animals, perhaps the first answer that crossed their minds, the assistants may have decided to delete this reference and concentrate on building up the image of the powerful eagle of New Spain.

Sahagún’s Role Despite the irrefutable role played by the assistants in the composition of Historia universal, Sahagún claims full authorship in the prologue to Book II. On this he says that as any other writer who endeavours to “authenticate [his] writings” by falling back on the works of auctoritates, he lacked these for “that which I have [...] in these twelve Books [written],” which prompted him to leave notice of everything, “I,” he repeats, “have written in these Books.”75 tomaoaque, vel q’nmjctia: yoan vel qujnmjctia, in çaço tleique patlãtinemj, ehecaticpac,” Flor. Cod., XI, p. 41. 75. The relevant quotes read: “All writers endeavor to authenticate their writings […]. I have lacked all these proofs to authenticate that which I have written in

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Clarifying what Sahagún meant by “writing the texts,” Lockhart imagines that he is addressing “an audience of uninformed outsiders who had no notion of philological complexities and would not have comprehended the full truth;” what Sahagún really wants to say is that “he was in charge of the process that led to the writing of the texts.”76 As the controlling mind of the project, he created the outline, designed the questions, organized the different stages of drafting and redrafting of what he calls “my writings,” and he marshalled the final version of the Nahuatl text as an encyclopaedic work in Mexico City.77 Behind this careful configuration of Sahagún’s writings into the medieval hierarchical and doctrinal work at which he aimed, Browne elucidates an intellectual and personal crisis.78 Educated in a transitional period during which Scholasticism and Humanism coexisted, for the acquisition and comprehension of knowledge Sahagún banked on the teachings of Scholasticism through three modes; authority, reason, and experience. When he reached the New World he encountered an indigenous reality unknown to him, never read in auctoritates. Given his reliance on reason and experience, he “could not admit to himself that Nahua customs made sense in a manner that had nothing to do with the Christian West or God’s divine plan.”79 Faced with the dilemma of “two worlds in collision,” the new world of the Nahuas and the Old World that did not recognize them, Sahagún found himself in the middle of a transition towards modernity. He could have become a producer of knowledge, as modern hermeneutics was about to dictate; these twelve Books […]. [I] place here the account of efforts I made to know the truth of all that I have […] in these Books written” (“[t]odos los escriptores trabaxan de autorizar, sus escripturas [...]: a mj me an faltado, todos estos fundamentos, para autorizar, lo que en estos doze libros tengo escripto […] [,] [pongo] aqui, la relation, de la diligentia que hize: para saber la verdad, de todo lo que en estos libros, he escripto,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 53). 76. Lockhart, 2004, p. 28. Garibay Kintana believes that the intellectual discrimination that the Nahua students and collegians of Tlatelolco suffered at the hands of the Spanish colonists, who felt threatened by their superior knowledge, made missionaries like Sahagún present themselves as authors; see 1953-1954, II, p. 232. 77. Sahagún refers to “mjs escripturas” in Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 55. 78. This is one of Browne’s main arguments in his 2000 study. 79. Browne, 2000, p. 109.

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however, unable to trespass across the frontier of Scholasticism, he continued to live on the sphere of the medieval interpreter, turning to those authorities who had before him inscribed the world into what he understood as a “divine cosmic hierarchy.” In other words, he overcame the crisis of two colliding worldviews by subsuming the Nahua’s into the European’s.80 During his three years in Mexico City, overwhelmed by the paradoxical novelties of the New World and, on many occasions, by the impossibility of coming to terms with it, Sahagún found refuge in the rewriting and rearranging of the material that was most similar to his divinely ordained and pre-existing knowledge. He longed to return to a tranquil state of mind and behaved as “an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in the right place’.”81 It is in this “clerkly” state of the medieval person who had no greater delight than in contemplating how each and every fact or story fits into the greater, unified scheme of things, that Sahagún entered the world of the Nahuas into the Christian Universal History. The relocation of material from the Códices matritenses to the Florentine Codex, which tells of Sahagún’s struggle to reach the twelve-book format and adhere to the intellectual taxonomies that he knew, has been the object of study of several scholars.82 Collating previous reconstructions and undertaking an exhaustive and meticulous examination of the marginal notes and comments that Sahagún scribbled throughout the early documents of the Primeros memoriales and, above all, the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco, Bustamante García distinguishes eight approximate progressive arrangements of data.83 Seven of them took place during a period of ten 80. Ibid., pp. 133-134. 81. Browne follows the description of the medieval thinker in C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image (1964); see ibid., p. 130. 82. The list includes Jiménez Moreno 1938, I, Ballesteros Gaibrois in Sahagún, 1964, Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer 1973, Glass 1978, Martínez Rodríguez 1981, Dibble 1982; 1999, Bustamante García 1989; 1990, Anderson 1994, and LeónPortilla 1999a. 83. In his 1999a article León-Portilla reviews the reconstruction process previously put forward by scholars, and expresses his doubts about Bustamante García’s, suggesting that Sahagún might not have organized material alone; see 1999a, pp. 110-111. This is also Ruz Barrio’s opinion in 2010, p. 207.

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years—from the initial compilation of data in Tepepulco around 1559 up to the completion of the first Nahuatl text in 1569—, and a final eighth rearrangement was finalized immediately before his manuscripts were impounded by Escalona, sometime around 1570 and 1571.84 The first organization, in Tepepulco around 1560, saw collected material distributed into four chapters: “Rituals and Gods” (“in teteu,”) “Rulership” (“in tlatocayutl,”) “The Heavens and the Underworld” (“in ilhuicacaiutl [yoan in] mictlancaiutl,”) and “Things relative to man” (“yn tlacayutl.”)85 In the second one, of the same year, Sahagún moved the third chapter (“The Heavens and the Underworld”) so that it followed the first (“Rituals and Gods.”) This reorganization accords with the traditional hierarchy of medieval encyclopaedias like Anglicus’s, proceeding from the divine to the human.86 The mundane section is then covered in the third rearrangement, in Tlatelolco around 1564, when Sahagún added a fifth chapter on flora and fauna (“yn ixquich tlacticpacayotl”) at the end of the manuscript.87 Once in the Friary of San Francisco in Mexico City, where he arrived around 1565, Sahagún worked alone on a new restructuring of documents for three years. He claims in this respect: “I examined and re-examined all my writings, and I again amended them and divided them into Books, into twelve Books, and each Book by chapters, and some Books by chapters and paragraphs.”88 During this scrutiny, wrangling with the amalgam of variegated material that he had brought from Tlatelolco, and which he wished to synthesize into a harmonious and allencompassing whole, Bustamante García argues that Sahagún conducted another five rearrangements. 84. Appendix III of this study offers a chart with the eight arrangements proposed by Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 448-498, and 1990, pp. 413-441, 452-453. In his opinion, Sahagún finished his rearrangement of the books around 1570-1571, and this organization is probably the same one as that of the Florentine Codex; see 1990, p. 453. 85. Spellings of the Nahuatl titles and translation by Sullivan are found in Sahagún 1997. 86. Robertson, 1966, pp. 621-622. 87. León-Portilla considers the possibility that this fifth chapter was produced during the Tepepulco stage; see 1999a, pp. 75-78. 88. “[P]ase, y repase, a mjs solas todas mis escripturas, y las torne a emendar: y diujdilas por libros, en doze libros, y cada libro, por capitulos: y algunos libros, por capitulos, y parraphos,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 55.

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In the first reorganization of Mexico City, or fourth since starting off in Tepepulco, Sahagún transformed his earlier five chapters into five books, bearing the Spanish titles of [I] “On gods [and rituals]” (“De los dioses,”) [II] “On the sun, the moon, the stars, and omens of each day of the year” (“Del sol y de la luna y estrellas y de los agueros de cada dia del año,”) [III] “On lords, and merchants, and artisans of gold, stones, and feathers (“De los señores y de los mercaderes y officiales de oro y piedras y pluma,”) [IV] “On human things” (“De las cosas humanas,”) and [V] “On earthly things” (“De todas las cosas crjadas sobre la tierra.”)89 To this classification he adds two more books and divides them all into chapters, sections, and paragraphs, as Sahagún states in his aforementioned quote. He expands material by relying not only on the Tlatelolco writings, and perhaps on new information from respondents of Mexico City, but also on two works completed prior to his 1558 commission. Thus, the fifth reorganization, or the second of Mexico City, sees the incorporation of the book on the conquest, written around 1555, as Book IV “On war” (“De la Guerra,”) and the sixth reorganization that of the Libro de la rethorica (1547) as Book VII “On rhetoric and moral philosophy and theology” (“De la rethorica y philosophia moral y theologia.”) This sixth rearrangement marks a turning point in that, possibly in pursuit of a twelve-book encyclopaedia, Sahagún extends contents from the six books of the fifth organization to eleven books. He achieves this thanks to two main decisions; expansion of information and division of former Books I and II into new books. The resulting first six books continue to mirror a medieval hierarchical organization and deal with divine matters and the sky. The previous Book I, on gods and rituals, splits into Book I on gods (“De los dioses,”) and Book II on the ritual calendar, festivities, and ceremonies (“Del calendario, fiestas y ceremonias.”) Regarding the structure of the latter, a glance at the Códices matritenses allows a reading of the annotations that Sahagún makes during his sixth rearrangement. He decides that the offerings of chapter I of the Primeros memoriales should be appended to this second book and writes the title and the number of the chapters as they should be newly ordered: “Third chapter on the offerings that were made to the demons inside and 89. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 470; 1990, p. 430.

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outside the temple,” and “fourth chapter on the blood that was spilt and other rites to honour the Devil.”90 As for the division of Book II of the fifth rearrangement, which concerned astronomy, astrology, and omens, new deriving books in the sixth rearrangement are Book IV, including information on the sun, the moon, the stars, and the binding of the years (“Del sol y de la luna y estrellas y del año del Jubileo,”) Book V on judicial astrology (“De la astrologia judiciaria,”) and Book VI on omens (“De los agueros.”) Bustamante García observes that Sahagún leaves note of this organization in the “Memoriales en tres columnas.” For example, on the top right-hand column of the draft on judicial astrology, he writes “fifth book on astrology; here it deals with judicial astrology as these natives believed them.”91 Similarly, at the beginning of the paragraphs concerning omens Sahagún jots down “sixth book that tells of the omens that these Mexican people believed.”92 Noticeably, Sahagún’s handwriting shows that he reconsidered the location of this book because he crosses out “fifth” to write “sixth” instead. The following book, Book VII, acts as a hinge between the divine and the human. Sahagún incorporates the Libro de la rethorica, and the books that follow remain in the same order as in the fifth arrangement. Book VIII deals with lords, merchants, and artisans of gold, stones, and feathers; Book IX with war; Book X with human things; and Book XI with earthly things.93 Sahagún again makes reference to this arrangement in the “Memoriales con escolios.” For example, at the very beginning of the paragraphs dealing with the virtuous versus sinful characterization of people, which eventually occupy the first chapters of Book X, he crosses out “the fifth chap.” and replaces it with “the 10th book deals with human things.”94 Regarding the book on earthly things, at the beginning 90. “Capitulo tercero de las ofrendas q[ue] se ofrecian a los demonios en el templo y fuera,” Sahagún, 1905-1907, VI, p. 10 (fol. 254v), and “capitulo cuarto de la sangre que se derramaba y otros ritos del demonio,” ibid., p. 11 (fol. 255r). 91. “[L]ibro qujnto dela astrologia. Aqui se comjença a tratar dela astrologia judiciaria q[ue] usab[an] estos naturales,” ibid., VII, p. 280 (fol. 189v). 92. “Libro sexto que habla de los agueros que esta gente mexicana usaba,” ibid., p. 388 (fol. 243v). 93. Bustamante García, 1989, p. 475; 1990, pp. 433-343. 94. “[E]l quinto cap.,” “el 10. libro, habla de las cosas humanas,” Sahagún, 1905-1907, VI, p. 199 (fol. 88r).

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of one of the paragraphs of the “Memoriales en tres columnas” that covers information on fauna, flora, and mineralogy, Sahagún crosses out “fifth” and “sixth” and writes: “[I]n this 11th book are dealt all the things observed in nature and all the terms concerning them.”95 This demonstrates that, as put forward by Bustamante García in his rearrangements, Sahagún had previously considered the book on the natural world as the fifth and even the sixth. In the seventh and eighth rearrangements, the fourth and fifth of Mexico City, Sahagún keeps the general order that he had already imposed, except for three main modifications. In the seventh organization he splits Book VIII on lords, merchants, and artisans into two different books; Book VIII “On lords and their elections” (“De los señores y sus electiones,”) and Book IX “On merchants, and artisans of gold, precious stones, and rich feathers” (“De los mercaderes officiales de oro y piedras preciosas y pluma rica.”) He also moves Book IX on the conquest to the end of the encyclopaedia as Book XII. Sahagún justifies his decision to locate this book here, eventually bound in the same volume with Book XI, on the natural world, because “those [things] of lesser order,” like animals, birds, plants, and trees are not human, just as war is extrinsic to humanity, “a thing horrible and contrary to the human nature.” 96 Finally, in the eighth organization, which is reflected in the twelve books of the Florentine Codex, he places Book IV on the sun, the moon, the stars, and the binding of the years after the Libro de la rethorica. Therefore, he ensures that the first five books—on gods, ceremonies, mythology, astrology, and omens—only deal with beliefs the divine, or as he claims in his prologue to Book III, with “idolatrous” information that churchmen can use as “weapons on hand to meet [the Devil] with.”97 The former exposition of the different rearrangements attests to Sahagún’s main editorial stance so that his documents conformed to his desired order, from the four chapters of the Primeros memoriales to the twelve books of the Florentine Codex. Likewise, 95. “[E]n este 11 libro, se tracta de todas las cosas ouservadas sobre la naturaleza y de todos los vocablos cõcernjẽtes dellas,” ibid., VIII, (fol. 200r). 96. “[C]osa orrible, y enemiga de la naturaleza humana,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, pp. 71-72. 97. “[A]rmas [...] para salirle [al diablo] al encuentro,” ibid., p. 59.

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the contents of the Nahuatl texts allow a glimpse at the manner in which Sahagún and his assistants tampered with the wording of the material initially provided by the Nahua elders. This manipulation is perceivable, as observed already in the Primeros memoriales, because of the insertion of references to Spanish and Christian realia—terms denoting everyday realities or socio-historical and cultural specifics related to Sahagún’s worldview, which he and his assistants at times share. The following pages display a non-exhaustive but representative selection of these references within the final Nahuatl version of the right-hand column of the Florentine Codex. They are realia new to the Nahua world, that is to say, a series of Spanish words and phrases alluding to textual divisions, food, objects, professions, fauna, flora, and the Christian faith. Sahagún must have dictated or approved them whilst reading the Nahuatl drafts, structuring contents, and thinking of a possible translation for the left-hand column—of his planned three-column page format or of the two-column page of the Florentine Codex. Overall, the presence of these references casts light on Sahagún and his assistants’ attempt to come to terms with the Nahua world by mostly using two techniques; the introduction of Spanish loanwords when a given realia does not exist in the Nahua culture, and the comparison of Nahua with Spanish realia.98 When Sahagún sorted his amalgam of writings by embedding them into a European text-based classification, the inexistence of Nahuatl terminology to refer to the compartmentalization of written discourse predisposed him to use capitulo, parrapho and apendiz (chapter, paragraph, and appendix).99 Examples of these loan98. Karttunen and Lockhart have surveyed language contact phenomena in Nahuatl texts of the colonial period, including Books X and XII of Historia universal, and drawn up a list of Spanish terminology that entered the Nahuatl language, see 1976. Lockhart, in particular, distinguishes three stages; from 1519 to 1540 and 1550, characterized by no change in Nahuatl; from around 1545 and 1550 to the mid-seventeenth century, which experienced massive borrowing of Spanish nouns, and from about 1640 until today, which involves a deeper and broader Spanish influence; see Lockhart, 1992, pp. 261-325. 99. These are textual divisions that, as quoted above, Sahagún says to have applied to his rearrangements in Mexico City. The terms are also traceable in Sahagún and his assistants’ handwriting throughout the Códices matritenses. Interestingly, in the body of the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex the word amoxtli, with its spelling variants amuxtli and amostli, is preferred to the Spanish word libro, which

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words in the Florentine Codex are: “First chapter, which telleth of the highest of the gods” (“[j]nic ce capitulo, yntechpa tlatoa, yn oc cenca tlapanauja teteuh;”) “second paragraph, in which it is told how they did honor to Uitzilopochtli,” (“[i]njc vme parrapho vncan moteneoa in quenjn qujmaviztiliaia Vitzilobuchtli;”) and “here beginneth the addition to the third book called the appendix” (“[n]i-can vmpeoa in janca, injc ey amoxtli in icotõca apendiz.”)100 For the relocation of indigenous information into European categories of knowledge, Spanish terminology is also inserted in titles and subheadings, although this time together with the Nahuatl equivalent or explanation. For instance, the beginning of Book VI reads: [Here] are told the various words of prayer with which they prayed to those who were their gods; and how they made formal conversation, through which they displayed their rhetoric and moral philosophy, as is evident in the discourses ([n]ican [...] moteneoa in tlatlatlauhtiliztlatolli: injc qujntlatlauhtiaia intevan catca: yoan in juh tecpillatovaia, injc qujmatia rethorica, ioan in philosophia moral: in juh neztica in jpan tlatolli).101

Sahagún interprets words of prayer (tlatlatlauhtiliztlatolli) and discourses (tlatolli or tlahtolli) as equivalent to the European art of eloquence and knowledge of moral values that he had learnt and in which he instructed his students. In fact, in this passage Sahagún and his assistants pronounce the Spanish loanwords that they must have used on a regular basis to speak of the subjects taught at Tlatelolco.102 Another example of how Sahagún and his assistants opted for entering a Spanish term that they tended to use in their eduis found in the Spanish titles to each of the twelve books. Amoxtli was commonly accepted by Sahagún and his contemporaries as the equivalent for book. It is defined by Molina as “libro de escriptura” (“book of writing,”) 1970, p. 5, and appears in other texts by Sahagún, such as in Psalmodia christiana; see for example, 1993b, p. 81. 100. Flor. Cod., I, p. 1; III, pp. 5, 39. Spanish words and phrases in the Nahuatl text and their translation into English by Anderson and Dibble are italicized hereafter for ease of identification. 101. Ibid., VI, p. 1. 102. Likewise, the third psalm of March of Psalmodia christiana, honouring Aquinas, cites in Spanish the disciplines in which he was trained as: “[G]rammar, rhetoric, logics, philosophy, and astrology” (“in Gramatica, in Rethorica, in Logica, in Philosophia, yoan Astrologia;”) see Sahagún, 1993b, p. 81.

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cational and proselytizing environment appears in the sixth chapter of Book VI. Prayers to Tezcatlipoca are eulogized because of the exuberance of their “qualli in tlahtolli” or good words, immediately rephrased as metaphoras: “[T]he words were very good, and the metaphors were very good” (“cenca qualli in tlahtolli, ioan cenca quaqualli in metaphoras.”)103 Spanish words referring to food, professions, and objects, which had been introduced in the first decades of the colony or were still finding their place, similarly stand out throughout the Nahuatl text. For example, chapter XIX of Book X, on sellers of tortillas and tamales, tells of the sellers of trigo (wheat), a cereal brought by the Spaniards. The trigonamacac, literally a namacac or seller of wheat, is said to trade in these different types: “[W]hite wheat […] [,] yellow wheat, dark wheat, ordinary wheat” (“iztac trigo […] [,] coztic trigo, iauitl trigo, ça ça ie trigo.”)104 Along these lines the tlaxcalnamacac, or traditional tortilla seller who used to make his product only of maize corn, is now named a caxtillan tlaxcalnamacac, or seller of “Castilian tortillas” made of wheaten bread; and the texnamacac, or traditional seller of corn flour, becomes a castillan texnamacac or seller of wheaten flour. This combination of a Nahuatl term with the place name caxtillan or castillan, in allusion to a novelty brought along by the Spaniards, is also present in chapter XXI, on sellers of decorative products and utensils like dyes, rabbit hair, and gourd bowls, and in chapter XXV, on sellers of candles, sashes, and shoes.105 The amanamacac or seller of the pre-Hispanic amate paper, made of fig tree bark, is said to sell “castillã amatl,” that is, the “Castilian paper” manufactured in the Spanish style. The seller of shoes is said to trade in “castillan 103. Flor. Cod., VI, p. 25. The subject matters taught and learnt at Tlatelolco also suggest themselves in chapter XXIX of Book X, which describes the first settlers of the valley of Mexico as “like the inhabitants of Babylon, wise, learned, experienced” (“babylonja tlaca, in mjmatinj in tlamatinjme, in jxtlamatque,” ibid., X, p. 165). In a drafting session, possibly upon remembering the civilizations of the Old Testament, either Sahagún or his assistants added this comparison to the Nahuatl text. 104. Ibid., X, pp. 70- 71. Karttunen and Lockhart confirm that trigo was already common in colonial documents around 1548; see 1976, p. 56. 105. For a list of some early uses of caxtillan or castillan to refer to Spanish products imported to the colony, see Lockhart, 1992, p. 276.

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cacçoc,” literally meaning shoes or sandals that are made in the Spanish style, which is also rephrased in the same sentence with the Spanish loanword çapatos (shoes).106 To be noted is that Spanish goods are not always named in connection with parallel Nahua realia, and thus the peddler or retailer, the tlacôcoalnamacac, is said to deal in “scissors, knifes, cloths, and fine cloths” (“tixeras, cuchillos […] [,] paños [y] lienços.”)107 Who pronounced these words, whether the Nahua respondents or Sahagún and his assistants, remains uncertain. All of them witnessed the first arrival of European imports, their production in New Spain, and the adoption of loanwords or the coinage of terms for their naming. The respondents could have voiced widely-circulated loanwords like trigo and repeated, as heard from sellers, the terms “castillã amatl” and “castillan cacçoc,” which still retained the manner of referring to their Nahua world realia. As for the presence of the loanwords “tixeras, cuchillos, paños, lienços,” there are two options. If well-known terms like trigo, they could have been pronounced by the respondents. This time they did not paraphrase the items by resorting to the linguistic pattern observed in “castillã amatl,” which combined the name of a similar Nahuatl object and qualified it with the adjective Castilian.108 If the loanwords had not been disseminated, they are more likely to have been either dictated by Sahagún or entered by his assistants, who spoke Spanish and described the image they had of the peddler’s goods. Throughout the Nahuatl text of Historia universal the combination with the place name “Castillan” or a Spanish reference for comparison’s sake with Nahua realia seems to be, nevertheless, the rule rather than the exception. Out of the twelve books, it is Book XI that abounds the most in comparisons between Nahua and Spanish realia, more specifically between Nahua and Spanish 106. Flor. Cod., X, pp. 78, 91. 107. Ibid., p. 91. Karttunen and Lockhart maintain that these words were introduced around 1570; see 1976, p. 62. The word “lienço” is defined by Covarrubias as “cloth made and knitted from linen” (“tela hecha y texida de lino,” 1987, p. 1087), although it could be also understood as “paintings on canvas” (“quadros pintados en lienço,” ibidem). 108. For example, instead of “tixeras” they could have made up “castillan tlatequilōni;” tlatequilōni standing for saw, scissors, or cutting instrument. See definition in Karttunen, 1992, p. 296.

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fauna and flora. The accurateness of the resemblances varies from one case to another. The first chapter, dealing with four-footed animals, reduces the fierce ocelot to “a Castilian cat,” (“in castillan mjzton.”) This domestication of animals is also reflected in the depiction of the tapir, the tlacaxolutl, whose size is compared to that of the cow; “very large, bigger than a cow,” (“cenca vei qujpanavia in vaca,”) and in that of the peccary or forest peccary, the coiametl or quauhcoiametl, whose meat, and perhaps size, is said to be “unlike, dissimilar to the pig […], it does not equal the pig which comes from Castile” (“hacan contlaz, hacan qujtlanevi in puerco […], amo qujnevivilia in puerco, in castillan vitz.”)109 Some birds of the second chapter receive a similar treatment. The American bittern, the tolcomoctli, is “rather large, the same size as the Castilian chicken, the capon” (“veitontli, ixqujch in castillan totolin: capon,”) whereas the common chachalaca, the chachalacametl, is said to “sing three times during the night, like a Castilian rooster” (“in ioaltica, expã tlatoa: in juhquj caxtillã vexolotl.”)110 The previous associations of more or less ordinary animals perhaps occurred during conversations held between Sahagún and his assistants. The respondents, more knowledgeable with their surrounding fauna and flora than younger generations, might have been more suited to discuss rare species. On other occasions, however, there is less doubt that it was Sahagún who, with the help of his assistants, established similarities whilst working on recorded data. In chapter XIII of Book XI, on kinds of sustenance, the description of a number of food items is shaped echoing the lexicographic layout found in the “Segundos memoriales” and the “Memoriales con escolios.” The Nahuatl term is the headword, which is followed by a definition in Spanish and finally by a short paragraph in Nahuatl. Illustrative of this format are the paragraphs on the aiecotli, explained as “black kidney beans, big as dry broad beans” (“frisoles negros grandes como auas;”) the chien or chian as “a seed that is like linseed and from which an oil like linseed oil comes” (“vna semilla que es 109. Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 3, 10. Vaca was already used in colonial documents around 1548; see Karttunen and Lockhart, 1976, p. 56. Lockhart has listed the Spanish names of the main European animals, which were introduced in the first decades of the colonization; see 1992, p. 280. 110. Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 33, 53.

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como linaça y sale della olio como de la linaça;”) the cocotl as “amaranth that is like goosefoot from Spain” (“vnus bledos que son como cenizos o cenilcos de España;”) and the petzicatl as “a herb whose seed the hens eat” (“vna ierua cuya semilla comen las gallinas.”)111 The familiarity with Spanish beans, seeds, and herbs, the reformulation of the term goosefoot as either “cenizos” or “cenilcos,” and the phrase “de españa,” instead of the most commonly used place name “Castilian,” alert to the likely possibility that this time it is Sahagún who dictates the explanation to his assistants. The language order used in the distribution of information—Nahuatl headword, Spanish definition, and Nahuatl explanation—also tells us that, possibly after a first transcription of the Nahuatl text, Sahagún discussed the Spanish definition with his assistants. These rewrote the text, this time by inserting the Spanish sentence first and the Nahuatl paragraph afterwards. What is more, Sahagún’s attempt to establish comparisons (e.g., chian as linseed), find equivalents (e.g., cocotl as amaranth), and provide explanations that would help in the understanding and visualization of the item (e.g., petzicatl as seed eaten by hens) confirms his determination to satisfy both the linguistic need and culinary curiosity of the missionary audience with whom he shared a mindset. Aside from these Spanish sentences, it is the existence of Christian terminology within the Nahuatl text that constitutes the most convincing evidence that Sahagún is considering his target audience, and offers an insight into how his Christian worldview impinged upon the comprehension of acquired data. As in previous examples relating to objects, fauna, and flora, the inclusion of a Spanish word is indicative of a comparison between Christian and Nahua realia. For example, chapter VIII of Book VI, on prayers to Tlaloc, explains that the Nahuas: “[S]aid that he governed tlalocan, which they considered as [the] earthly paradise” (“qujtoaia ca iehoatl vmpa tlatocatia in tlallocan in juhq’ma parayso terrenal ipan qujmatia.”)112 Sahagún and his assistants address the respondents as those who, conceiving Tlalocan—the fertile land that Tlaloc watered—an alluring place, linked it to the Garden of Eden, also 111. Ibid., pp. 284-286. 112. Ibid., VI, p. 35.

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lush and exuberant.113 It needs to be highlighted, nevertheless, that when it comes to the conveyance of religious concepts, this recurrence to a parallel wording of Spanish and Nahua realia is an exception.114 In this respect, Dibble argues that in doctrinal works like Psalmodia christiana Sahagún favours the presence of Christian loanwords, such as diablo (Devil), Dios (God), Espíritu Santo (Holy Spirit), ángel (angel), and alma (soul), to speak of new or similar religious concepts for the Nahuas. The reference to an equivalent in the Nahuatl language contributed to the spread of syncretism, and led to a superficial and unassimilated comprehension of the evangelical message in the native mentality.115 In the Nahuatl text of the Florentine Codex it seems as if the use of Christian loanwords to refer to Nahua beliefs mostly operates as a mechanism to condemn the latter. Although the Nahua respondents might have pronounced them in order to acquiesce to Sahagún’s expectations and please him, it is much more likely that Sahagún and his assis113. For further reference on this association between Tlalocan and Parayso terrenal, see Contel 2000. 114. In other doctrinal works Parayso and Parayso terrenal appear in the Nahuatl text without the reference to Tlalocan. This happens, for instance, in the second and sixth psalms of the “Song of Lamentation” of Psalmodia christiana, and in some sermons for Advent and Christmas attributed to Sahagún. See Sahagún, 1993b, pp. 62, 6, and Klaus, 1999, p. 244, respectively. The context and the target audience have to be taken into account. In the Florentine Codex the term Tlalocan is being explained; Sahagún and his assistants want to clarify to the churchmen that the Nahuas established the comparison. 115. Dibble, 1974, p. 227. Burkhart and Klaus concur with Dibble’s argument that Nahuatl equivalents triggered syncretism, which, Sahagún worried, was perpetuating idolatry; see 1989, pp. 39-45, and 1999, pp. 244, 251, respectively. In his Spanish version of chapter XII of Book XI, Sahagún expresses his concern that the Christian Mother of God had been wrongly identified with the Nahua goddess of motherhood, and so named like her; Tonantzin; see Hist. gen., XI, p. 808. In order to prevent this confusion he refrains from using, for example, the word tlacatecolotl—literally, owl-man; a sorcerer or shaman—to refer to the Devil. The association was easy; a tlacatecolotl was said to have the power to murder, inflict sickness, and transform himself into animals; Burkhart, 1989, pp. 39-40. However, since the sorcerers who pretended to be like a tlacatecolotl were still very much respected and feared amongst the Nahuas, Sahagún wished to circumvent the belief that the Devil did have authority and supernatural powers by keeping away from the tlacatecolotl-Devil comparison; see Lopes Don, 2010, pp. 17, 52-58. Nevertheless, neither he nor his fellow missionaries managed to avoid it completely, as the term is still found in works like Psalmodia christiana and in Olmos’s Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios; see Burkhart, 1989, p. 41.

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tants entered them into the text for the expression of their views on pagan religion. Thus, like in the Primeros memoriales, it is the diablo that continues to be insistently cited as the instigator of rituals. In the appendix of Book II, the diablo is behind the twisting off or cutting of the heads of birds (known as Tlaquechcotonaliztli); the placing of the sacrificial victim’s blood by figures representing gods (Tlatlatlaqualiliztli); the piling up of wood for the gods (Teuquauhquetzaliztli); and the men’s imitation of the female voice when singing (Cihoapãcuiquiztli).116 Although for the reprobation of the Nahua religion the term diablo prevails throughout the Nahuatl text, at least once the term Dios (Cristian God) showcases in allusion to a Nahua divinity. The title of chapter II of Book III reads “how they considered a god named Titlacaun or Tezcatlipoca; even as an only god they believed in him” (“in quenjn Dios vel ipã qujmatia in iehoatl in mjtoa Titlacaoan, anoço Tezcatlipuca in juhqujma ipan qujmatia ce dios.”)117 The Tezcatlipoca-Dios equation contradicts Sahagún’s wish to rule out syncretism. It may be connected to the Christianized version of the origins of the Mexicas that is recorded in Book X, where either the assistants or the respondents hinted that their ancestors awaited the arrival of Christianity after a group of wise elders who worshipped Tezcatlipoca had left them with the promise of returning. Sahagún would have heard or read this version and accepted it as valuable for indoctrination purposes. Another possibility is that he did not approve of it, which means that his supervisory role allowed room for this kind of “slips,” or that at least one of his assistants was willing to challenge his authority. After all, the students of Tlatelolco had been equipped with sufficient knowledge to compare both cultures and contest and subvert the Spaniards’ authority on their own grounds.118 There is another cluster of Christian references, this time in the form of dates according to the Julian calendar and locations named 116. Flor. Cod., II, pp. 201-202. Other sacrifices and offerings appear in pp. 197-199. 117. Ibid., III, p. 11. 118. Burkhart, 1996, p. 59. This association of Tezcatlipoca with the Christian God can also be found in Olmos’s Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios and in Sahagún’s Colloquios y doctrina christiana.

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after a saint. They speak of the proselytizing process that was taking place in New Spain and are again reminiscent of the fact that the Nahuatl text was initially targeted at a religious readership. For example, in chapter II of Book XI, the bird acoiotl or water-turkey is mentioned as a migratory species, one of the first to reach the Valley of Mexico around “the Feast Day of Santiago” (“in jpã ilhujtzin Sanctiago.”)119 Similarly, in chapter V of Book VIII, on the history of the city of Tula, the year in which the first ruler occupied power is dated as 1246, that is, “in the year of [the birth of] our lord Jesus Christ. 1246” (“in jxiuhtzin totecujo iesu [Christo]. 1246,”) and so is the first ruler of Azcapotzalco, in 1348, and the first ruler of Mexico City, in 1384.120 This juxtaposition of New World events with Christian dates conveys the sense of simultaneous or parallel historical existence in both the Old and the New World, which accorded with Sahagún’s endeavour to insert the Nahuas into Universal History. The allusion to the arrival of Cortés and the Franciscans, also in Book VIII, reinforces this argument. Subsequent to the list of rulers of Mexico City, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Uexotla, and Tula, chapter VII starts with information on how “capitan don hernando cortes” set foot in 1519, and finishes off in 1524 “when the twelve Franciscan Fathers arrived to convert the natives of New Spain” (“icoac açico in matlactin vmomen sãct francisco padreme, in qujntlaneltoqujtique in njcan nueua españa tlaca.”)121 Churchmen who were to read this document, and in particular the Franciscans, were provided not only with the year in which the Twelve disembarked, but also with a chronological timeline that renders Cortés and the Franciscans as markers of a critical momentum in the Nahuas’ history, an interpretation Sahagún would have conjured up.122 As regards the inclusion of Christian names for locations, several examples in Book XI can be cited. In chapter XII Sahagún, like Pliny, Isidore, and Anglicus, dedicates a section to geographical 119. Flor. Cod., XI, p. 30. 120. Ibid., VIII, p. 15. 121. Ibid., pp. 21-22. 122. In his 1970 study, Phelan examines this providential interpretation of the Franciscans’ arrival in New Spain thanks to Cortés. For a consultation of primary sources, see Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana, particularly the first and third chapters of Book III, 1973, I, pp. 106-109, 112-114.

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features.123 Apart from supplying the usual stream of Nahua collocations that relating to rivers, fountains, valleys, mountains, and caves fulfils Sahagún’s linguistic purpose, the section outlines an itinerary of mountains. The Quetzaltepetl is described directly in Spanish as “another mountain which is near Santa Clara Coatitlan” (“otro monte que es cabe [sic] sancta clara coatitlã,”) and the Petlacaltepetl as “another mountain which is toward San Pedro, which is called Xaloztoc, near Santa Clara” (“otro monte que esta hazia Sanct P[edro] que se llama Saloztoc iunto a sancta clara.”)124 Likewise, the mountains Teucalhujacan and Chapultepetl are said to be close to the locations of San Lorenzo and San Miguel, respectively. Sahagún was perhaps leaving note of the areas in which these mountains were situated so that churchmen would know where to remove hidden idols and prevent the secret celebration of rituals that still occurred.125 Another reading suggests that Sahagún considered the juxtaposition of a geographical setting and a Christian name as the epitome of conversion achievements. San Lorenzo was a former “idolatrous” town in which some Spaniards surviving the Sad Night had been attacked. Similarly, Sahagún notices that another area in which the Spaniards had once lost a battle and been made captives was renamed as San Martin.126 In Sahagún’s day and age these were both Christian sites, where missionaries endeavoured to continue the Spiritual Conquest of the Nahuas.

123. See Books III to VI of Historia naturalis, Books XIII, XIV, and XV of Etymologiae, and Books XIII and XIV of De proprietatibus rerum. 124. Flor. Cod., XI, pp. 259-260. 125. Sahagún makes this intention clear in the Spanish version of the tweltfh chapter of Book XI. “Having dealt with the fountains, waters, and mountains,” he says, “it seemed to me pertinent to deal with the principal, ancient idolatries that were and still are performed in the waters and in the mountains” (“habiendo tratado de las fuentes, aguas y montes, parecióme oportuno para tratar de las idolatrías principales antiguas que se hacían y aún hacen en las aguas y en los montes,” Hist. gen., XI, p. 807). Sahagún narrates in particular how he had discovered an idol in a fountain around Xochimilco and replaced it with a cross. 126. In chapter XXXV of Book XII, relating a victorious battle for the Tlatelolcans, the banner of the Spaniards is said to have been “[seized] here where now it is called San Martin” (“vncan in macic, in ie axcan sanct Martin moteneoa,” Flor. Cod., XII, p. 103).

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Conclusion The Spiritual Conquest of New Spain rested on a number of measures that harked back to the conversion of the infidels of the conquered territories in Spain. The schooling of children as part of a process of acculturation, the persecution of unorthodox practices, the preaching of the new faith, and the administering of the sacraments constituted the main tasks undertaken by friars. The Franciscans, in particular, pursued this large-scale mission to evangelize the Nahuas with distinct approaches and attitudes. While Motolinía remained unsuspicious about superficial conversion and Escalona condemned their peers’ cultural investigations as counterproductive, Olmos and Sahagún advocated the conjunction of indoctrination and the thorough study of the Nahuas’ language and culture, which Bishop Zumárraga had fully endorsed, in the hope of implanting Christianity on steady ground. Olmos and Sahagún also participated in the education of the sons of the Nahua elite, some of whom became their assistants in the production of evangelizing works like sermons, chants, and adaptations of doctrinal texts in the Nahuatl language. In addition to these works, their assistants were of central importance for the creation of other texts intended to contribute to the spread of Christianity, such as grammars, vocabularies, and—in Sahagún’s case—of an ambitious lexicographic and encyclopaedic manual; a work that embedded in a single unit what he deemed was necessary for the preacher and the confessor. At a time during which the Spanish Empire’s knowledge-power equation—the accumulation and classification of material on New World territories so as to manage and exploit them, and on their in-

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habitants so as to render and keep them as vassals—coexisted with the missionaries’ investigations of indigenous cultures in order to convert people into Christianity, those investigations by Olmos and Sahagún were also propelled by royal demand. The official request addressed to Sahagún, nevertheless, only reached him in 1575, and was annulled soon afterwards by another mandate to confiscate works of an indigenous nature. The perception of the twelve books of Historia universal as useful accounts for a wide-ranging Libro de las descripciones de Indias or as detrimental to conversion, in that they perpetuated idolatry, ultimately went along with the opinions and decisions of the Council of the Indies and the Council of Trent. This perception that Historia universal could bring other results or fit into other purposes beyond the conversion of the Nahuas continues to be latent. There is no wrong in it—different interpretations of the purpose and suitability of Historia universal existed in the 1570s—as long as neither Sahagún nor Historia universal are disconnected from or understood outside of their sixteenth-century missionary context. Thus, in Sahagún’s own time, what would have been wrong, and did not happen, would have been for his contemporaries to interpret him not first and foremost as a committed missionary, but also as a scholar fascinated by a language he devoted himself to codifying with no further intention, as an official working for the Council of the Indies, or as a disseminator of Nahua culture. This misinterpretation of roles somehow happens in studies that dissociate Sahagún from his primordial role of missionary, placing it at the same level as other roles that were inexistent at the time or that he performed only as part of his evangelical mission. For example, in Bernardino de Sahagún: First Anthropologist, León-Portilla argues that “the three primary motivations for [his] research efforts are revealed in religious, linguistic, and, as we would say today, historical-anthropological veins.”1 What is more, León-Portilla ventures the view that, although initially tied in with evangelization purposes, “[the linguistic objective] would seem to 1. León-Portilla, 2002, p. 137. This is Mauricio J. Mixco’s translation of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pionero de la antropología. The original text reads: “[L]as tres motivaciones clave en la empresa de investigación que realizó fray Bernardino [fueron] de índole religiosa, lingüística y, como diríamos hoy, histórico-antropológica o cultural,” León-Portilla, 1999, p. 115.

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be appealing on its own right,” and that “as he penetrated more deeply into his research, the appeal of learning about the ancient culture in and of itself also grew stronger.”2 Along the same lines, Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer assert that “Sahagún’s initial motive was to absorb the language and beliefs of the native Mexicans in order to evangelize them effectively. Slowly he became interested in Indian things for their own sake.”3 León-Portilla’s twice-repeated expression “por sí mismo” (“on its own right,” “in and of itself”) and Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer’s “for their own sake,” applied to Sahagún’s study of Nahuatl and Nahua culture, transform him into a kind of present-day researcher who shows curiosity in the disciplines currently known as lexicography and, as León-Portilla recognizes, history and anthropology—the last one representing the crowning of his development.4 This study has attempted to show that Sahagún’s religious motivation both triggered and shaped the linguistic and the anthropological nature of the contents of Historia universal. True as it is that Sahagún aspired for a Calepin of the Nahuatl language, and that the subject matters of Historia universal resemble those of the current disciplines of history and anthropology, the three motivations that León-Portilla mentions—religious, linguistic, and historicalanthropological—can neither be equalled nor considered as separate, for the last two were inextricably enmeshed within the religious purpose, which constituted Sahagún’s rationale for being in the New World in the first place. In this respect, Anderson puts it bluntly: “Spectacular though that work is from the perspective of the twentieth-century anthropologist or historian, Sahagún did not 2. León Portilla, 2002, pp. 135-136. The original texts reads: [E]l interés lingüístico [tenía] visos de tenerse como atrayente por sí mismo [...], [y] a medida que se adentraba en su investigación, fue creciendo en él la atracción por conocer, por sí misma, la antigua cultura,” León-Portilla, 1999, pp. 112-114. 3. Cline and Nicolau d’Olwer, 1973, p. 188. 4. In a 2011 article Hernández de León-Portilla reiterates this belief: “First, Sahagún was a missionary, author of sermonaries and religious texts, and author of a Calepin […]. Over time […] [he became] a historian of a culture; later, […] ethnographer, philologist, linguist, and finally, anthropologist” (“[p]rimero fue el Sahagún evangelizador, autor de sermonarios y libros religiosos, y autor de un Calepino […]. Al paso del tiempo […], historiador de una cultura; más tarde, […] etnógrafo, filólogo, lingüista y, finalmente, antropólogo,” 2011, p. 86).

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go to Mexico to study Aztec culture but as a missionary to teach the Aztecs a religion new to them.”5 The “anthropological interests” do not arise in Sahagún and his work “for their own sake.” When in 1558 he sets out to compose a body of works for the conversion of the Nahuas, Historia universal is one of several belonging to, rather than disjointed from, the collection of texts that, including amongst others the sermons of the Postilla, are referred to by some Sahaguntine scholars as his “doctrinal encyclopaedia.”6 For Sahagún, his “twelve books” embodied the first encyclopaedic auxiliary work for preachers and confessors, reminiscent of other auxiliary texts like Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, treatises of vices and virtues, and confession manuals. Historia universal stands out for the manner in which the language of evangelization is codified, because of the wide-ranging material that, echoing Augustine, Sahagún judges useful for the preparation of the Christian orator, and because at times Sahagún eulogizes the Nahuas in order to defend their “quilate;” their level of perfection and capacity to become Christians. This was Sahagún’s answer to the general debate on the indigenous peoples’ level of rational capacity—conducted by Las Casas and civil jurists and imperial ideologues like Sepúlveda—, and also to the particular debate on the intellectual abilities of his students and assistants of Tlatelolco. At every point, Sahagún sought to make the European and the Nahua worlds compatible in the same cosmological plan. The Nahuas were “brothers, stemming from the stock of Adam,” and their world could and ought to be inserted into the European encyclopaedic tradition and the Universal History of redemption.7 That Sahagún eventually felt attracted to the Nahua culture “on its own,” to the extent of laying aside his concern for the eternal salvation of their souls in favour of disinterested academic research, is 5. Anderson, 1982, p. 31. Although Anderson is adamant about this point, he also detaches Historia universal from its conversion purposes when asserting in the same page that “Sahagún’s obligations as a Franciscan, as a priest, and as a missionary were more important to him than his work of genius as a pioneer ethnographer and as a compiler of Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España,” ibidem. 6. The phrase “doctrinal encyclopaedia,” created to separate Historia universal from the other works attributed to Sahagún, is used, for instance, by Anderson in his 1982a article and by Schwaller, 2003, p. 265. 7. “[H]ermanos: procedientes, del tronco de Adam,” Flor. Cod., Prologues, p. 49.

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a speculation prompted only by twentieth-century squeamishness about admitting that Sahagún was an imperialist missionary dedicated to the extermination of the Nahua cultural identity. To label Sahagún as a father of anthropology or a pioneering ethnographer is thus to misunderstand him and Historia universal, if what is meant is that in its production he did not aim for the destruction of the pre-Hispanic Nahua identity and conducted research and reported data as modern ethnographers are supposed to do. In a more profound sense, however, Sahagún did behave as ethnographers do—or more accurately, ethnographers behave as he did, for in truth, as Asad and Crapanzano argue, all ethnographers are cultural translators like Sahagún. As they try to make one culture understandable to another, they incur the same risk of falling into the ethnocentric and authorial position of the person who when writing about another culture “renders the foreign familiar.”8 Scholars like Todorov and Browne are correct to dismiss the claim that Sahagún was a pioneering anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. Browne makes a significant contribution when he argues that the way in which Sahagún conceived and structured Historia universal is indicative of his attempt to overcome the trauma of the new. The missionary’s work of cultural translation emerges as a response to an existential crisis—by inscribing the Nahuas in the matrix of familiar categories he sought to set himself and his contemporary churchmen at ease. This study has similarly tried to demonstrate how Sahagún’s selection of subject matters in Historia universal and his method of data collection were underpinned by narratives and methodologies taken from the European intellectual tradition and worldview. If in many cases the content of his work coincides with that of modern anthropology, for instance, in his concern with religion, institutions, family, and professions, it nevertheless drew upon the themes proposed by Augustine for an all-encompassing education of the Christian orator, and upon the models of Pliny, Isidore, and Anglicus—none of whom is considered a pioneer of anthropology. Pliny’s Historia naturalis stemmed from the classical ambition to incorporate the whole sum of human knowledge into a single dis8. Crapanzano, 1986, p. 51.

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cursive discipline, just as Isidore’s Etymologiae and Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum reflected a medieval aspiration to embrace the totality of creation within a divine hierarchy. Sahagún’s dependence on these doctrinal and classical sources for the structure of his enterprise displays the futility and irrelevance of all claims of modernity on his behalf. So does the interpretation of Sahagún’s method of data collection as pioneering ethnography because, as this study has also attempted to prove, it was inspired by inquisitorial and confessional procedures, not by the presuppositions of modern fieldwork. Linking Sahagún’s method with ethnography associates the foundations of the discipline with manipulation, biased data, misunderstanding and loss, a set of features which anthropology and ethnography struggle to overcome. During the interrogations that Sahagún conducted he adhered to his preconceived ideas and missionary endeavours, which led to questions hinging on patterns of thought and enquiry contained in European texts, such as Pliny’s and confession manuals, and to answers that likewise had to accommodate his prejudgements. Unlike ethnographers who, when investigating human societies, conduct interviews, juxtapose data, and try to provide unprejudiced narratives about peoples’ lives so as to develop general knowledge of humankind for scholarship’s sake, Sahagún’s use of confessional and inquisitorial techniques was dictated by the sixteenth-century Spiritual Conquest of New Spain. When compiling material, rather than opening himself to his Nahua respondents and listening impartially to everything they had to say, he had already prescribed a conceptual model to which everything had to be reduced, and from which he would only deviate if unexpected accounts met his linguistic and proselytizing interests.9 To label Sahagún as a cultural translator frees us from the fruitless bind of the querelle des anciens et modernes, and invites us instead to explore how he understood and interpreted the Nahuas at the service of empire. The claim that Sahagún was the father of modern anthropology or ethnography is incorrect and also irrele9. As discussed in chapter IV of this study, Sahagún may also have conducted brain-storming sessions and encouraged scenarios similar to vocabulary contests. Those strategies do not make him an ethnographer; they do speak of his ability to adapt techniques for certain purposes, such as for the amassing of an extensive list of terminology.

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vant—unless, as stated by Bustamante García and Browne, there is a nationalist interest in appropriating the title for Mexican anthropology. Contrarily, cultural translation resolves the epistemological problem in a way just as relevant to a modern anthropologist as it was to a sixteenth-century missionary. In both cases the notion that purer impartiality can be achieved—that there can be such a thing as a value-free investigation of human societies, an objective or “scientific” description of difference—is highly questionable. In Sahagún’s case, this study has exposed the manner in which he relocated the world of the Nahuas into his Christian framework of Universal History; into a reference manual for preachers and confessors that merged in one encyclopaedic work collections of speeches and sayings, examples of vices and virtues, and information on potential Nahua penitents. Crucial for sustaining this argument have been the directions in translation theory that highlight translation as process and as product, both of which are constrained by extra-textual elements such as ideology, patrons, purpose, and target audience. These parameters have shaped an examination of Historia universal, and in particular of the early documents and the Nahuatl version included within the Florentine Codex. The latest studies on Sahagún and Historia universal have focused on the material elements, the illustrations, and the structure of its surviving manuscripts.10 Future studies could continue restoring Sahagún to his historical and cultural milieu, by, for example, understanding the textual characteristics of Historia universal as regards the clerical duties for which it was first created, and by comparing it with other works with which it shares socio-cultural structures. This analysis of Historia universal against other doctrinal works, not only those deriving from Sahagún’s 1558 commission but also sixteenth and seventeenth-century texts of Spain and New Spain, can lead to a deeper understanding of the manner in which Historia universal was used for conversion purposes. Given its encyclopaedic nature, a deeper exploration of Historia universal can similarly elucidate its connections with other “libros de antigüedades” written by, or under the di10. See Wolf and Connors 2012 (first edition 2011), and Hidalgo Brinquis and Benito Lope 2013.

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rection of, other churchmen and laypeople.11 In addition to this, an in-depth textual examination and collation of Sahagún’s different manuscripts, from the Primeros memoriales to the Florentine Codex, can help to clarify the evolution of the writing process, the writing techniques, and the existence of other textual models that might have been used during the different composition stages. For example, further exploration of the Primeros memoriales could unveil linguistic theories linked to Nominalism and resemblances with manuscripts of other investigations on indigenous cultures, like those attributed to Olmos and to the Dominican Fray Pedro de los Ríos. Likewise, the textual comparison of equivalent paragraphs of the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco and the Florentine Codex could aid in tracing the editing techniques, in understanding the expansion and deletion of information, and even in establishing translation strategies. For instance, a study of the Spanish translation of the “Memoriales con escolios,” the “Memoriales en español,” and the Spanish text of the Florentine Codex could demonstrate whether different translation decisions were made depending on the two target readers; first that of churchmen and later of Spanish officials. This juxtaposition and evaluation of the different manuscripts of Historia universal and other coeval texts opens room for new contributions that could also determine with more precision the role played by the Nahua respondents, and, above all, by the assistants. Regarding the respondents, speaking of authorship on their part means recognizing that they did give the “raw” accounts and answers; unquestionably, they told Sahagún about the unlucky fate of 11. For example, Dibble has pointed out the incorporation of some excerpts from the huehuetlahtolli of Book VI in the sixteenth-century anonymous Tratado y manual de doctrina christiana, and Sell has suggested the influence of some huehuetlahtolli in the Augustinian friar Juan de Mijangos’s Espejo divino (1607); see Dibble, 1974, p. 232, and Sell, 2010, p. 191. Amongst others, Martínez Rodríguez and Bustamante García have similarly proposed that the royal physician Francisco Hernández could have drawn on data from Books I, II, and VI for his De antiquitatibus novae Hispaniae, and from Book XI for his Rerum medicarum novae Hispaniae thesaurus; see Martínez Rodríguez, 1981, pp. lxxviii-lxxix, and Bustamante García, 1989, pp. 364-365; 1990, pp. 355-365. Bustamante García even establishes further connections with the works of Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl and Antonio de León y Gama; see 1990, pp. 365-372.

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those born under the One Ocelot sign or how pre-Hispanic rulers used to organize a celebration. Nevertheless, it also needs to be acknowledged that this material was very likely self-censored depending on the topic—the extent to which remains difficult to ascertain because of its intrinsically implied speculation—and tampered with by Sahagún and his assistants, who categorized data according to a Eurocentric written medium and worldview.12 As for the assistants, Sahagún acknowledges that they were active collaborators during the whole project, linguistic aids who jotted down answers, compared, discussed, amended, and edited material. It is not difficult to imagine two of the assistants whom Sahagún in particular commended—Jacobita, rector of the College of Tlatelolco, and Valeriano, also tutor at Tlatelolco and eventually governor of Mexico City—collating information and rewriting drafts into a definite text in which they included Christian references and Spanish terminology. Bearing them in mind when carrying out a deeper analysis of some of the texts of Historia universal, as done by Lockhart in his study of Book XII, might reveal them as “informants-consultants” who furnished vocabulary and accounts for other books and sections.13 Understanding their participation in the totality of Sahagún’s 1558 commission can pave the way to new studies that would focus on the impact that the composition of Historia universal and the other doctrinal texts, like Psalmodia christiana, had upon the works they wrote and helped to write in subsequent years. As young scholars they benefited from an unparalleled opportunity to expand their linguistic competence in Nahuatl and Spanish, as well as to broaden their knowledge of the European culture and that of their ancestors. In other words, thanks to the College 12. The degree of manipulation and loss to which collected material was exposed always needs to be recognized, even when referring to texts that appear to have codified the Nahua voice in, so to speak, a more authentic manner, such as the Primeros memoriales and the huehuetlahtolli of Book VI of Historia universal. 13. See Lockhart’s study in We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (1993). In this sense, Robertson has noted that the descriptions of the “sinful” or unprofessional artist and stone mason of Book X are conceived according to early colonial rather than pre-Hispanic features; see 1966, p. 625. Likewise, a thorough study of the annotations of the Códices matritenses might reveal whether the organization of material, as suggested by León-Portilla, 1999a, and Ruz Barrio, 2010, rested not only on Sahagún but also on his assistants.

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of Tlatelolco and their appointment as assistants by Sahagún, they became cultural translators themselves and producers of early colonial literature.14 A study of their works—such as the stories of the Codex Chimalpopoca—, and of works that could be attributed to them—such as plays, translations like that of Aesop’s fables, the Cantares mexicanos, and the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España—, might gauge to what extent they are to be classified as nepantla, clarify whether some of these texts were obtained for Sahagún’s project, and reveal connections with the collection of data and writing techniques of Historia universal.15

14. Martin Lienhard defends this thesis when questioning León-Portilla’s presentation of Crónicas indígenas: Visión de los vencidos (1959, 1985) as indigenous accounts of the Spanish conquest. Lienhard argues that in these stories the indigenous cultural past is subdued by the colonial context in which they are produced, resulting in the creation of the earliest Latin American works; see 1990, pp. 11-13. 15. Rabasa defines the Nahuatl term nepantla as “neither here nor there, neither in the ancient order nor in the Christian [...] [,] also understood in terms of a-not-being-really-convinced-of-the-necessity-of-dwelling-in-only-one-world,” 2011, p. 90.

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APPENDIX I: Contents of Historia universal

This chart offers a summary of contents of Historia universal, following the edition and translation of Anderson and Dibble in Sahagún 1950-1982.

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Book I: The gods who were worshipped by the natives. Chapter I, Huitzilopochtli. Chapter II, Paynal. Chapter III, Tezcatlipoca. Chapter IV, Tlaloc. Chapter V, Quetzalcoatl. Chapter VI, Ciuacoatl. Chapter VII, Chicome coatl. Chapter VIII, Teteo innan. Chapter IX, Tzapotlan. Chapter X, Ciuapipiltin. Chapter XI, Chalchiuhtli ycue. Chapter XII, Tlaçolteotl. Chapter XIII, Xiuhtecutli. Chapter XIV, Macuilxochitl and Xochipilli. Chapter XV, Omacatl. Chapter XVI, Ixtlilton. Chapter XVII, Opochtli. Chapter XVIII, Xipe Totec. Chapter XIX, Yacatecutli. Chapter XX, Napa tecutli. Chapter XXI, Tepictoton. Chapter XXII, Tezcatzoncatl. Appendix Confutation: The truth of God’s word (paralleling the Book of Wisdom, Chapters XII, XIII, XIV, XV and XVI). Addenda: Gods Amimitl and Atlaua, adages to the sun.

Book II: The feasts and sacrifices by which these natives honoured their gods in their state of infidelity. Chapter I, Atl caualo. Chapter II, Tlacaxipeualiztli. Chapter III, Toçoztontli. Chapter IV, Uei Toçoztli. Chapter V, Toxcatl. Chapter VI, Etzalqualiztli. Chapter VII, Tecuilhuitontli. Chapter VIII, Uei tecuilhuitl. Chapter IX, Tlaxochimaco. Chapter X, Xocotl uetzi. Chapter XI, Ochpaniztli. Chapter XII, Teotl eco. Chapter XIII, Tepeilhuitl. Chapter XIV, Quecholli. Chapter XV, Panquetzaliztli. Chapter XVI, Atemoztli. Chapter XVII, Tititl. Chapter XVIII, Izcalli. Chapter XIX, Nemontemi and the movable feasts. Chapters XX-XXXVIII, feasts, honours paid, and blood offerings in each of the eighteenth months of the calendar. Appendix Description of the temple of Huitzilopochtli. Feast celebrated every eight years. Mexican temples. Offerings in temples. Training of the labours done in the temples. Declaration of how the devils were prayed. Oaths and songs. Women serving in the temples.

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Book III: The origin of the gods. Chapter I, birth of Huitzilopochtli and ceremonies in his honour. Chapter II, Tezcatlipoca. Chapter III, Quetzalcoatl. Chapters IV-XI, acts and works of magic of Tezcatlipoca. Chapters XIIXIV, stories of Quetzalcoatl. Appendix Chapters I-III, burials, souls who went to the land of the dead and to the home of the sun. Chapters IV-VI, education of the male commoners in the Telpochcalli. Chapters VII and VIII, education of the upper class in the Calmecac. Chapter IX, election of the high priests.

Book IV: The book of days which the Mexicans handed down. Chapters I-XVI, signs (One Crocodile, One Ocelot, One Deer, Two Rabbit, Three Water, One Flower, One Reed, One Death, One Rain, One Grass, One Serpent) and characteristics of those who were born under them. Chapters XVII-XIX, merchants and their admonitions. Chapters XX-XL, further signs (One Flint Knife, One Monkey, One Lizard, One Motion, One Dog, One House, One water, One Wind, One Eagle, One Rabbit) and characteristics. Appendix Justification in defence of the truth contained in this book. Calendar of the Indians of Anauac. Refutations.

Book V: The omens in which the Mexicans believed. Chapter I, “when someone heard some wild animal cried out.” Chapter II, “when they heard the white hooded hawk.” Chapter III, “when they heard as if someone shot iron arrows.” Chapter IV, “when the horned owl hooted.” Chapter V, “the omen of the

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screech owl.” Chapter VI, “when someone saw a weasel which crossed in front of him.” Chapter VII, “when they saw that now the rabbit entered one’s house.” Chapter VIII, “when they saw the chafer.” Chapter IX, “when the skunk entered one’ home.” Chapter X, “omens of ants, frogs, and mice.” Chapter XI, “when, at night, they saw the towering men, the giants.” Chapter XII, “the omen ‘bundle of ashes’.” Chapter XIII, “rest of the omens which showed themselves at night.” Appendix Chapters I-XXXVII, further superstitions (e.g., Chapter I, “which telleth of the white amaryllis.”)

Book VI: Various words or prayers with which they prayed to those who were their gods; and how they made formal conversation, through which they displayed rhetoric and moral philosophy. Chapters I to XL, huehuetlahtolli (e.g., Chapter I, “Here they told the words which truly issued from their hearts when they spoke, at the time that they supplicated him who was their principal god, the one [who was] Tezcatlipoca, or Titlacauan, or Yaotl, at the time that a plague prevailed, that he might destroy.”) Chapter XLI, tlatlahtolli (adages). Chapter XLII, zazanilli (conundrums). Chapter XLIII, metaphors.

Book VII: The sun, moon and stars, and the binding of the years. Chapter I, sun. Chapter II, moon. Chapter III, stars. Chapter IV, comets. Chapter V, clouds. Chapter VI, snow, clouds, hail. Chapter VII, the year counter and the year sign. Chapter VIII, how they held in dread hunger and famine. Chapter IX, the binding of the years. Chapters X-XII, the belief in the “new fire” and ceremonies that took place.

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Book VIII: The great rulers and noblemen and the way in which they observed the elections in their government. Chapter I, list of rulers and governors of Mexico. Chapter II, list of rulers and governors of Tlatelolco. Chapter III, list of rulers and governors of Texcoco. Chapter IV, list of rulers and governors of Huexutla. Chapter V, the city of Tula up to 1565. Chapter VI, signs and omens about the coming of the Spaniards. Chapter VII, things that came to pass before and after the arrival of the Spaniards. Chapters VIII-XIII, adornments, attire, hairstyle, hobbies, games, food, and drink of the lords. Chapter XIV, royal houses, courts, palaces, houses of the servants and the prisoners. Chapter XV, attire and hairstyle of noble women. Chapter XVI, knitting and cooking. Chapters XVII-XXI, lords’ preparation for war, judicial procedures, election of lords, penances, the market, education for noblemen and commoners.

Book IX: The merchants and the artisans; those who worked gold, and precious stones, and precious feathers. Chapter I, on those who founded commerce in Mexico and Tlatelolco. Chapter II, how the merchants began their office. Chapters III-IV, offerings of the merchants. Chapter V, how the merchants were given the name of distinguished merchants. Chapter VI, more offerings of the merchants. Chapters VII-VIII, banquets of the merchants. Chapter IX, what the merchants did at dawn. Chapters X-XIV, celebrations and sacrifices of slaves. Chapters XV-XVIII, on makers of fine ornaments (gold-workers, lapidaries, and feather-workers). Chapters XIX-XXI, inhabitants of Amantlan (ornamenters who made feather articles).

Book X: The different virtues and vices which were of the body and of the soul, whomsoever practised them. Chapters I-XV, description of virtuous and sinful people according to age (e.g., good and bad old woman), family members

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(e.g., good and bad father), and social class (e.g., good and bad lord). Chapters XVI-XXVI, description of virtuous and sinful sellers (e.g., good and bad seller of tamales) and their goods (capes, cacao, maize, dried beans, wheaten bread, sandals, gourd bowls, baskets, medicines, candles, chocolate, etc.). Chapter XXVII, parts of the body. Fourteen paragraphs including the description of the head to the cervix, the shoulder, the torso, the legs, the organs within, and the rottenness and filth of the body. Chapter XXVIII, illnesses and medicines. Six paragraphs on how to cure the head, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the teeth, the neck and throat, the chest and the back, the stomach, the bladder, wounds, and broken bones. Chapter XXIX, origin and description of peoples in the region of Anahuac.

Book XI: The different animals, the birds, the fishes; and the trees and the herbs; the metals resting in the earth; and the different stones. Chapter I, four-footed animals. Seven paragraphs including wild beasts, forest-dwellers, and other four-footed animals like the deer, the dog, the mouse, and their habits. Chapter II, birds. Ten paragraphs including birds like the yellow-headed parrot, the scarlet macaw, the waterfowl, the birds of prey, other kinds of birds, good singers, native turkeys, and the parts of different birds. Chapters III-IV, aquatic animals. Nine paragraphs including edible and inedible fish, small animals living in water, and water-dwelling serpents. Chapter V, snakes and insects. Fourteen paragraphs including various serpents and small insects such as ants, bees, locusts, and fireflies. Chapter VI, trees. Nine paragraphs including different types of trees, their parts, how they are planted, and their fruits. Chapter VII, herbs. Twelve paragraphs dealing with many different herbs, mushrooms, edible-cooked herbs, petals and stalks, and flowers. Chapters VIII-X, precious stones and metals (e.g., emerald-green jade, the turquoise, the stone of which mirrors are made, metals in the earth, and further fine stones). Chapter XI, colours. Three paragraphs concerning all the different colours and how they are made. Chapter XII, kinds of water and earth. Ten paragraphs including information on the nature of the sea, rivers, soils, useless

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lands, kind of earth to make jars, rocks that are worked, roads, houses and their classification, and caves. Chapter XIII, kinds of sustenance. Six paragraphs on maize, various kinds of seeds, beans, edible amaranth, and gourds.

Book XII: How war was waged here in the city of Mexico. Chapter I, signs and omens before the Spaniards had come. Chapter II, the first boat. Chapters III-VII, on Moctezuma and Cortés. Chapter VIII, Moctezuma and the magicians, wizards, and soothsayers. Chapter IX, how Moctezuma and the Mexicans wept. Chapters X-XV, the Spaniards’ journey to Tenochtitlan. Chapter XVI, Moctezuma meets the Spaniards. Chapters XVII-XVIII, Moctezuma arrested by the Spaniards. Chapters XIX-XX, manslaughter of the Mexicans. Chapter XXI, the Mexicans fight the Spaniards. Chapter XXII, Cortés’s return. Chapter XXIII, Moctezuma’s death. Chapters XXIV-XXVI, the Spaniards’ peace agreements. Chapter XXVII, on how the Mexicans reached the Spaniards. Chapter XXVIII, the Nahuas’ ceremonies celebrating the Spaniards’ departure from Tenochtitlan. Chapter XXIX, the smallpox. Chapters XXX-XXXIV, battles to conquer Tenochtitlan. Chapter XXXV, the offering of the Spanish captives. Chapters XXXVI-XL, the conquest of Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan. Chapter XLI, Cortés’s speech to the rulers of the conquered cities.

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APPENDIX II Comparison of Contents

This chart offers a comparison of contents between Historia universal, following the edition of Sahagún 1950-1982, and the three encyclopaedias that scholars have suggested as possible influences; Pliny 1967, Isidore 2004, and Anglicus 1975-1988.

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Chapters I – XVIII, calendar and feasts on fixed dates. Chapter XIX, movable feasts. Chapters XX – XXXVIII, ceremonies held on each month.

BOOK II: “Which treateth of the feasts and sacrifices by which these natives honoured their gods in their state of infidelity.”

Chapters I – V, five gods. Chapters VI – XII, seven goddesses. Chapters XIII – XXII, minor gods.

BOOK I: “Here are named the gods whom the natives worshipped.”

Historia universal BOOK VII: “God, angels and saints.”

BOOK II: “Astrology, astronomy and weather.” Chapter V, of god.

Chapter XV, canon-tables of the Gospels. Chapter XVI, the canons of Councils. Chapter XVII, the Easter cycle. Chapter XVIII, other liturgical feasts.

BOOK VI: “Books and ecclesiastical offices.”

BOOK VIII: “The Church and sects.” Chapter XI, gods of the heathens.

Etymologiae

Historia naturalis

Chapters IX-XX, months of the calendar. Chapter XXXI, Easter. Chapter XXXII, Pentecost.

BOOK IX: “Time and festivities.”

BOOK II: “Properties of good and bad angels.”

BOOK I: “God and names of God.”

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Historia universal

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BOOK III: “The origin of the gods.”

Appendix: Description of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, feast celebrated every eight years, Mexican temples, offers in temples, training of temple workers, prayers, oaths and songs, women serving in the temples.

Historia naturalis

Etymologiae

Chapter IX, magicians.

BOOK VIII: “The Church and sects.”

Chapter XII, clerics. Chapter XIII, monks.

BOOK VII: “God, angels and saints.”

Chapter XIX, offices.

BOOK VI: “Books and ecclesiastical offices.”

Chapter IV, sacred buildings.

BOOK XV: “Buildings and fields.”

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Chapter XX, combination of words.

Chapters I – XL, huehuetlahtolli (ancient speeches).

Chapter 3, the portents.

BOOK XI: “The human being and portents.”

Chapter VI, people who received their name from a certain presaging.

BOOK VII: “God, angels and saints.”

Chapter XLV, the circle of the zodiac.

BOOK III: “Mathematics.”

Etymologiae

BOOK II: “Rhetoric and dialectic.”

Historia naturalis

BOOK VI: “Rhetoric, moral philosophy and theology.”

Appendix: Thirty-seven chapters with further superstitions.

Chapters I – XIII, omens.

BOOK V: “In which are told the omens in which the Mexicans believed.”

Chapters I - XVI and XX – XL, on the twenty signs.

BOOK IV: “Which telleth of the book of days which the Mexicans handed down.”

Historia universal

Chapters IX-XXI, Zodiac signs.

BOOK VIII: “The world and the celestial bodies.”

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Historia universal

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Chapters I – IV, sun, moon, stars, and comets. Chapter V, clouds. Chapter VI, snow, clouds, hail.

BOOK VII: “The sun, moon and stars, and the binding of the years.”

Chapter XLI, tlatlahtolli (adages). Chapter XLII, zazanilli (conundrums). Chapter XLIII, metaphors.

Chapter XVII, the sun’s motion. Chapter XI, the moon’s motion. Chapter VII, eclipses, solar and lunar. Chapters VIII-X, XIX, the stars. Chapters XXII-XXIII, the comets. Chapter LXI: hail, snow, frost, cloud.

BOOK II: “Astrology, astronomy and weather.”

Historia naturalis

Etymologiae

BOOK XI: “The air and its properties.” Chapter IV, clouds. Chapter X, hail. Chapter XI, snow.

Chapter VII – VIII, clouds. Chapter X, phenomena of the clouds.

Chapter XVI, the sun. Chapters XVII – XVIII, the moon. Chapters XX – XXI, the comets and the stars.

BOOK VIII: “The world and the celestial bodies.”

De proprietatibus rerum

BOOK XIII: “The cosmos and its parts.”

Chapters XLIX – LII, the sun. Chapters LII – LVI, the moon. Chapters LX – LXII, the stars.

BOOK III: “Mathematics.”

Chapter XXI, figures of speech, words, and expressions.

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Chapter V, the city of Tula. Chapters VIII – XIII, adornments, attire, hairstyle, hobbies, games, food and drink of the lords.

BOOK VIII: “Which telleth of the great rulers and noblemen and of the way in which they observed the elections in their government.”

Historia universal

Historia naturalis

BOOK XVIII: “War and games.” Chapters LX – LIX, games.

Chapter II, foodstuff. Chapter III, beverages.

BOOK XX: “Provisions and various implements.”

Chapter XXII, clothing. Chapter XXIV, men’s garments.

BOOK XIX: “Ships, buildings and clothing.”

Chapter I, cities. Famous towns.

BOOK XV: “Buildings and fields.”

Etymologiae

De proprietatibus rerum

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Historia universal

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Chapters XV – XVI, attire and hairstyle of noble women; knitting and cooking.

Chapter XIV, royal houses, courts, palaces, houses of the servants and the prisoners.

Historia naturalis

Etymologiae

BOOK XX: “Provisions and various implements.”

Chapter XXV, women’s outer garments. Chapter XXX, ornaments. Chapter XXXI, women’s head ornaments.

BOOK XIX: “Ships, buildings, and clothing.”

Chapter III, dwelling-places. Chapters II-VIII, public and sacred buildings, parts of buildings.

BOOK XV: “Buildings and fields.”

De proprietatibus rerum

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Chapters XV – XXI, the craftsmen (gold workers, lapidaries, feather-workers, and ornamenters from Amantlan).

BOOK IX: “Which telleth of the merchants and the artisans; those who worked gold, and precious stones, and precious feathers.”

Chapters XVII – XXI, lords’ preparation for war, judicial procedures, election of lords, penances, the market, and education for noblemen and commoners.

Historia universal

Historia naturalis

Chapters VI – VII, metalworkers. Chapter XIX, woodworkers.

BOOK XIX: “Ships, buildings, and clothing.”

Chapters I - XXVII: law.

BOOK V: “Laws and times.”

Chapter III, reigns and terms for military matters.

BOOK IX: “Languages, nations, reigns, the military, citizens, family relationships.”

Etymologiae

De proprietatibus rerum

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Historia universal

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Chapters XVI – XXVI, sellers and products (capes, cacao, maize, dried beans, wheaten bread, sandals, gourd bowls, baskets, medicines, candles, chocolate, etc.).

Chapters I – III, qualities of people related through lineage, degrees of affinity, and age differences. Chapters IV to XV, people according to status, members of a family, and professions.

BOOK X: “Which treateth of the general history, in which are told the different virtues and vices which were of the body and of the soul, whomsoever practised them.”

Historia naturalis

Etymologiae

Chapters III – X, food, beverages, drinking vessels, lamps and other domestic tools.

BOOK XX: “Provisions and various implements.”

Chapter II, the ages of human beings.

BOOK XI: “The human being and portents.”

Chapter V, family relationships and their degrees. Chapter VI, paternal and maternal relatives.

BOOK IX: “Languages, nations, reigns, the military, citizens, family relationships.”

De proprietatibus rerum

Chapters IV – XIV, the child, the boy, the girl, the mother, the daughter, the father. Chapter XVI, the bad servant’s properties. Chapter XVII, the good servant’s properties. Chapter XVIII, the good lord. Chapter XIX, the bad lord.

BOOK VI: “The ages of man and properties.”

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Chapter XXVII, the human body. Fourteen paragraphs including the description of the head to the cervix, the shoulder, the torso, the legs, the organs within, and the rottenness and filth of the body. Chapter XXVIII, account of illnesses and of medicines. Six paragraphs on how to cure the head, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the teeth, the neck and throat, the chest and the back, the stomach, the bladder, wounds and broken bones.

Historia universal

BOOKS XXXI-XXXII: “Remedies from aquatic animals.”

BOOKS XXVIII-XXX: “Drugs obtained from animals.”

BOOKS XX – XXVII: Trees, plants, flowers as remedies and other drugs.

BOOK XX: “Medicines obtained from garden plants.”

Historia naturalis

Chapters VI – VIII, illnesses. Chapter IX, remedies and medications. Chapter XII, scents and ointments.

BOOK IV: “Medicine.”

BOOK VII: “Illnesses and medicines” (headache, flu, spasm, sickness, leprosy, medicines, etc.).

BOOK V: “The human body and its members” (from head to feet, and bones, veins, flesh, skin, and hair).

BOOK XI: “The human being and portents.” Chapter I, human beings and their parts.

De proprietatibus rerum

Etymologiae

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BOOK X: “The nature of birds,” (ostrich, phoenix, eagle, hawk, night-owl, goose, crane, stork, nightingale, kingfisher, pigeon, goldfinch, parrot, pheasant, cormorant, etc.).

Chapter II, birds (yellowheaded parrot, scarlet macaw, waterfowl, birds of prey, other kinds of birds, good singers, native turkeys, their habits and their parts).

Chapter I, four-footed animals (wild beasts, forest-dwellers, deer, dogs, mouse, and their habits, etc.).

Historia naturalis BOOK VIII: “Properties of animals,” (elephant, snake, lion, panther, tiger, giraffe, lynx, rhinoceros, crocodile, beaver, gecko, bear, mouse, horse, goat, ape, hare, etc.).

Historia universal

BOOK XI: “Which telleth of the different animals, the birds, the fish; and the trees and the herbs; the metals resting in the earth–tin, lead, and still others; and the different stones.”

Etymologiae

Chapter VII, birds (dove, falcon, sparrow, crane, swan, peacock, etc.).

Chapter I, livestock and beast of burden (ox, sheep, bull, lamb, etc.). Chapter II, beasts (lion, panther, tiger, fox, dog, etc.).

BOOK XII: “Animals.”

De proprietatibus rerum

BOOK XII: “Birds and their ornaments” (alphabetic order: Aquila (eagle), gallus (rooster), pelicanus (pelican), etc.).

BOOK XVIII: “Animals and their differences” (arranged in alphabetic order: Aranea (spider), ariete (bock), basiliscus (basilisk), canibus (dog), cervus (deer), etc.).

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Sections VIII – XIV, small insects (ants, bees, locusts, and fireflies).

BOOK XI: “The kinds of insects,” (bee, wasp, hornet, chrysalis, moth, beetle, ant, locust, etc.).

Chapters XIII-XIV, XXX-XL, snakes. Chapter III, small animals (weasel, spider, hedgehog, cricket, ant, etc.). Chapter VIII, tiny flying animals (bee, wasp, moth, fly, etc.).

Chapter IV, snakes.

BOOK VIII: “Properties of animals.”

Chapter V, snakes and insects. Sections I – VII, serpents, with and without rattles, twoheaded, thick and large.

Etymologiae Chapter VI, fish (dolphin, tuna, crocodile, eel, etc.).

Historia naturalis BOOK IX: “The nature of aquatic animals,” (triton, whale, tortoise, largest fish, mackerel, tuna, sword-fish, remora, lobster, scallop, etc.).

Historia universal

Chapters III – IV, aquatic animals. Fish, small aquatic animals, edible, inedible ones, and water-dwelling serpents.

De proprietatibus rerum

Chapter XXVI, fish (crocodile, oyster, shell, dolphin, frog, hippopotamus, etc.).

BOOK XIII: “Water and properties and differences.”

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Chapters VIII – X, precious stones and metals (emeraldgreen jade, turquoise, the stone of which mirrors are made, metals in the earth, and further fine stones).

Chapter VII, herbs (mushrooms, edible-cooked herbs, petals and stalks, and flowers).

Chapter VI, trees (parts and fruits).

BOOK XVI: “Stones and metals.”

Chapters IX – XI, aromatic or common plants and garden vegetables (marjoram, poppy, rosemary, lavender, carrot, turnip, lettuce, parsley, etc.).

Chapters VI – XV, gems (green, white, red, purple, BOOK XXXVII: “Gems.” black, varicoloured). Chapters XVII – XXIV, metals.

BOOK XXXVI: “The nature of stones,” (onyx, alabaster, marble, coral, etc.).

BOOK XXII: “Herbs.”

BOOK XXI: “Flowers.”

BOOK XX: “Medicines obtained from garden plants.”

BOOK XVII: “The nature of cultivated trees.”

BOOK XVI: “Stones and metals” (alphabetical order: Adamans (diamond), argentum (silver), topazium (topaz), etc.).

BOOK XVII: “Herbs and plants” (alphabetical order: Aloe (aloe vera), coriandrum (coriander), farina (flour), etc.).

Chapter I, trees. Chapter II, aromatic trees.

Chapters VI – VIII, trees (palm, laurel, apple-tree, pomegranate, peach, etc.).

De proprietatibus rerum BOOK XVII: “Herbs and plants.”

Etymologiae BOOK XVII: “Rural matters.”

Historia naturalis BOOKS XII – XVI: “Trees, foreign trees, fruit trees, fruit-bearing trees, forest trees.”

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BOOK XXXV: “Method of painting. Non-mineral pigments, artificial colours.” BOOKS III – VI: “Sites, seas, harbours, mountains, rivers.”

Chapter XII, different kinds of water and of earth (seas and rivers, soils, useless lands, kind of earth to make jars, rocks that are worked, roads, houses and their classification, and caves).

BOOK XXXIV: “Copper.”

BOOK XXXIII: “The properties of metals.”

Historia naturalis

Chapter XI, colours.

Historia universal

BOOK XIII: “Water and properties and differences” (lake, river, meander, sea, etc.).

BOOK XIII: “The cosmos and its parts.”

Chapters VII – IX, lands, mountains, and plains.

BOOK XIV: “The earth and its parts.”

BOOK XIV: “The Earth and its parts” (land, mountains, valleys, meadows, deserts, caves, etc.).

Chapters II-XXIII, colours.

Chapter XVII, colourings.

Chapters XII – XXI, water, sea and rivers.

BOOK XIX: “Colours, flavours, and smells.”

De proprietatibus rerum

BOOK XIX: “Ships, buildings, and clothing.”

Etymologiae

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Chapter XIII, kinds of sustenance (maize, various kinds of seeds, beans, edible amaranth, and gourds).

Historia universal

BOOK XX: “Medicines obtained from garden plants,” (cucumber, pumpkin, turnip, leek, lettuce, cabbage, sprout, etc.).

BOOK XVIII: “Crops, their natures,” (corn, wheat, barley, etc.).

BOOK XV: “Fruitbearing trees,” (olive oil, peach, plum, apple, etc.).

Historia naturalis

Etymologiae

Chapter LXVII, flour. Chapters CLXXXIVCLXXXVIII, wine.

Chapters II – V, cultivation of fields, cereals, vegetables, legumes, and vines.

Chapter LIV, honey. Chapter LXIII, milk. Chapter LXXIII, butter. Chapter LXXIV, cheese. Chapter LXXX, eggs.

BOOK XIX: “Colours, flavours, and smells.”

BOOK XVII: “Herbs and plants.”

De proprietatibus rerum

BOOK XVII: “Rural matters.”

Chapter XVI, roads.

BOOK XV: “Buildings and fields.”

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BOOK XII: “Which telleth how war was waged here in the city of Mexico.”

Historia universal

Historia naturalis

Chapters I-XIV, war, weapons, and protective devices.

BOOK XVIII: “War and games.”

Chapter III, names related to governance and to the military.

BOOK IX: “Languages, nations, reigns, the military, citizens, family relationships.”

Etymologiae

De proprietatibus rerum

274 APPENDIX

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APPENDIX III Sahagún’s Rearrangement of Contents

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Chapter 1, “on rituals and gods ”

Second (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

Chapter 2, Chapter 2, “on rulership” “on the heavens and the underworld”

Chapter 1, “on rituals and gods”

First (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

Book 1, “on gods,” and appendix, “refutation of the gods” Book 2, “on the calendar, festivities, and ceremonies,” and appendix, “temples, religious hierarchy, offerings”

Book 1, “on gods”

Book 2, “on the calendar, festivities, and ceremonies”

Book 1, “on gods”

Book 2, “on the calendar, festivities, and ceremonies”

Book 1, “on rituals and gods”

Book 2, “on the sun, the moon, the stars, and omens of each day of the year”

Book 1, “on rituals and gods”

Book 2, “on the sun, the moon, the stars, and omens of each day of the year”

Chapter 2, “on the sun, the moon, the stars, and omens of each day of the year”

Eighth Seventh Sixth Fifth Fourth (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, ca. 1570ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 15651571) 1569) 1569) 1569) 1569)

Chapter 1, “on rituals and gods”

Third (Tlatelolco, ca. 15641565)

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Book 4, “on judicial astrology” Book 4, “on the sun, the moon, the stars, and the binding of the years”

Chapter 4, “on human things”

Chapter 4, “on human things” Chapter 4, “on human things”

Book 3, “on the beginning of the gods,” and appendix, “on the sky and the underground to which the dead go and offerings made,” and “education of commoners and the elite”

Book 4, “on human things”

Book 4, “on war”

Book 4, “on the sun, the moon, the stars, and the binding of the years”

Book 3, “on places where the spirit of the dead go and the offerings that were made, and stories about some of the gods”

Book 3, “on places where the spirit of the dead go and the offerings that were made, and stories about some of the gods”

Book 3, “on lords, merchants, and artisans of gold, stones, and feathers”

Chapter 3, Chapter 3, “on rulership” “on rulership in Mexico”

Chapter 3, “on the heavens and the underworld”

Book 3, “on lords, merchants, and artisans of gold, stones, and feathers”

Eighth Seventh Sixth Fifth Fourth (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, ca. 1570ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 15651571) 1569) 1569) 1569) 1569)

Second (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

Third (Tlatelolco, ca. 15641565)

First (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

APPENDIX 277

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First (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

Second (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

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Book 6, “on rhetoric and moral philosophy” Book 7, “on the sun, the moon, the stars, and the binding of the years” Book 8, “on lords and their elections”

Book 6, “on omens”

Book 7, “on rhetoric and moral philosophy”

Book 8, “on lords and their elections”

Book 6, “on omens”

Book 7, “on rhetoric and moral philosophy”

Book 8, “on lords, merchants, and artisans of gold, stones, and feathers”

Book 5, “on omens”

Book 6 , “on earthly things”

Book 5, “on judicial astrology”

Book 5, “on judicial astrology”

Book 5 , “on earthly things”

Chapter 5, “on earthly things”

Book 5, “on human things”

Eighth Seventh Sixth Fifth Fourth (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, ca. 1570ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 15651571) 1569) 1569) 1569) 1569)

Third (Tlatelolco, ca. 15641565)

278 APPENDIX

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First (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

Second (Tepepulco, ca. 1560)

Third (Tlatelolco, ca. 15641565)

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Book 11, “on earthly things” Book 12, “on war”

Book 10, “on human things” Book 11, “on earthly things” Book 12, “on war”

Book 10, “on human things” Book 11, “on earthly things”

Book 10, “on human things”

Book 9, “on merchants and artisans of gold, precious stones, and rich feathers”

Book 9, “on war”

Book 9, “on merchants and artisans of gold, precious stones, and rich feathers”

Eighth Seventh Sixth Fifth Fourth (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, (Mexico City, ca. 1570ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 1565ca. 15651571) 1569) 1569) 1569) 1569)

APPENDIX 279

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Sullivan, Thelma D. 1963. “Nahuatl Proverbs, Conundrums and Metaphors Collected by Sahagún,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, vol. 4, 92-177 — 1974. “The Rhetorical Orations, or Huehuetlatolli, Collected by Sahagún,” in Edmonson, 79-109 — 1988. Compendium of Nahuatl Grammar (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press) Sullivan, Thérèse. 2008. “Latin Text, Translation, and Commentary of Book IV of De Doctrina Christiana,” in Enos and Thompson, 33-186 Téllez Nieto, Heréndira. 2010. Vocabulario trilingüe en españollatín-náhuatl atribuido a fray Bernardino de Sahagún (México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) Tentler, Thomas N. 1977. Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (New York: Princeton University Press) Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Conquest of the Other, tr. by Howard, Richard (New York: Harper & Row) (from La conquête de l’Amérique: La question de l’autre, 1982) — 1991. “Voyagers and Natives,” in Renaissance Characters, ed. by Garin, Eugenio and tr. by Cochrane, Lydia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) (translation of L’uomo del Rinascimento, 1988), 250-273 Toreno, Conde de (ed.). 1877. Cartas de Indias, I (Madrid: Ministerio de Fomento) Toro, Alfonso. 1923. “Importancia etnográfica y lingüística de las obras del Padre Fray Bernardino de Sahagún,” Anales del Museo Nacional de México, vol. 2, 1-17 Torquemada, Juan de. 1975. Monarquía indiana de los veinte y un libros rituales y monarquía indiana, con el origen y guerras de los indios occidentales de sus poblazones, descubrimiento, conquista, conversión y otras cosas maravillosas de la mesma tierra, ed. by León-Portilla, Miguel et al. (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Valdés, Fernando de. 1561. Nos don Fernando de Valdes [...] Arçobispo de Sevilla, Inquisidor Apostolico general [...] [.] Hazemos saber a vos los reuerendos inquisidores apostolicos, [...] se acordo que en todas las Inquisiciones se deve guardar la orden siguiente

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[Instrucciones sobre la manera de proceder en las causas de la Inquisicion] (Madrid: s.n.) Valdés, Juan de. 1982. Diálogo de la lengua, ed. by Barbolani, Cristina (Madrid: Cátedra) Valero García, Pilar. 1988. La Universidad de Salamanca en la época de Carlos V (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca) Vicente Castro, Florencio and José Luis Rodríguez Molinero. 1986. Bernardino de Sahagún: Primer antropólogo en Nueva España (siglo XVI) (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca) Viesca Treviño, Carlos. 1995. “Y Martín de la Cruz, autor del códice de la Cruz-Badiano, era un médico tlatelolca de carne y hueso,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, vol. 25, 480-498 — 2002. “Las enfermedades en la obra de fray Bernardino de Sahagún,” in León-Portilla, 167-184 Villoro, Luis. 1999. “Sahagún o los límites del descubrimiento del otro,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, vol. 29, 15-26 (from “Sahagún or the Limits of the Discovery of the Other,” 1989) Watson, Gerard. 2008. “Saint Augustine’s Theory of Language,” in Enos and Thompson, 247-266 Wilkerson, S. Jeffrey K. 1974. “The Ethnographic Works of Andrés de Olmos, Precursor and Contemporary of Sahagún,” in Edmonson, 27-77 Williams, Jerry M. and Robert E. Lewis (eds.). 1993. Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention (Tucson and London: University of Arizona Press) Wolf, Gerhard and Joseph Connors (with Louis A. Waldman) (eds.). 2012. Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún (1st ed. 2011) (Milan: Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Press) Zaballa Beascoechea, Ana de. 1990. Transculturación y misión en Nueva España: Estudio histórico-doctrinal del libro de los “Coloquios” de Bernardino de Sahagún (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra) Zimmermann, Klaus. 2005. “Traducción, préstamos y teoría del lenguaje: la práctica transcultural de los lingüistas misioneros en el México del siglo xvi,” in Zwartjes and Altman, 155-182 Zorita, Alonso de. 1999. Relación de la Nueva España: Relación de algunas de las muchas cosas notables que hay en la Nueva

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Index A Abrojo, Friary of 65, 157 Acosta, Fray José de 116 Adrian VI 57, 58 Aesop 70, 250 Alcalá, Father Pedro de 55 Alcalá, University of 46, 49, 51, 118, 157 Alonso de Herrera, Hernando 46 Altamirano, Fray Diego 58 Amberg, Friedrich von 53 Ángeles, Fray Francisco de los 57 Anglicus, Bartholomaeus 26, 53, 118, 120-121, 127-129, 131, 133, 226, 238, 244-246, 259 Aora, Fray Juan de 58 Aquinas, St. Thomas 43, 45, 50, 70, 130 Aristotle 41, 43, 45, 59, 112, 118, 129 Assisi, St. Francis of 48 Audiencia, Second 100 Augustine, St. of Hippo 14, 26, 41, 50-52, 70, 90, 94, 132-136, 141, 157, 196, 244-245 Auto de fe 156, 164 Azpilcueta, Martín de 15, 139-144, 146, 186-191 B Bacon, Fray Roger 53-54, 87 Badiano, Juan 118

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314

INDEX

Bandini, Angelo Maria 110 Barbosa, Arias 92-93 Bassacio, Fray Arnaldo de 70 Bautista Viseo, Fray Juan 148, 213 Beauvais, Vincent of 54 Bembo, Cardinal Pietro 91-92 Betanzos, Fray Domingo de 71 Boccaccio, Giovanni 92 Bonaventure, St. 52 Bustamante, Fray Francisco de 66 C Caesar, Julius 70 Calepino, Ambrosio 26, 84, 96, 125, 216 Casale, Fray Ubertino of 53, 87 Casas, Fray Bartolomé de las 73-77, 79, 82, 116, 244 Catholic Monarchs 48, 55, 59, 67 Cato 44, 70 Cazalla, Bishop Juan de 157 Charles V 40, 56-58, 60, 65, 72-73 Cicero 41, 43, 45-46, 70, 90, 94, 136 Ciruelo, Pedro 163 Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de 49, 50-52, 55-56 Ciudad Rodrigo, Fray Antonio de 165-166, 168 Cologne, Albert of 112 Columbus, Christopher 54, 58 Conventuals 48 Converso 155 Córdoba, Fray Andrés de 47 Córdoba, Fray Pedro de 70 Cortés, Hernán 57-58, 67, 164, 238 Coruña, Fray Martín de la 103 Council of the Indies 31, 34, 57, 68, 74, 102, 106-107, 110-111, 116, 196, 242 Covarrubias, Sebastián de 96, 115-116 D Díaz del Castillo, Bernal 115

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INDEX

315

d’Orléans, Laurens 130 Durán, Fray Diego 16, 19, 33 Durandus 70 E Edicto de fe 156, 158 Enríquez, Viceroy Martín 108-109 Erasmus, Desiderius 112, 157 Escalona, Fray Alonso de 105, 226, 241 Extremadura, Friary of 49 Eymerich, Nicholas 152, 170 F Faba, Guido 130 Ferrer, St. Vincent 136 Flaminio, Lucio 42 Focher, Fray Juan 66, 70 G Gante, Fray Pedro de 47, 58, 61, 63, 68 Gaona, Fray Juan de 66, 70 Gerson, Jean 15 Glapión, Fray Juan 57 González, Juan 165-166, 168 Gregory the Great 14 Gregory XIII 110 Guadalupe, Fray Juan de 49 H Hanappes, Nicolas de 131 Henry III of Castile 54 Hojacastro, Fray Martín de 47, 66 Horace 43, 46 Humanism 38, 41-42, 45-46, 48, 50, 69, 224 I Inquisition, Holy Office of the 152-153, 155-156, 158-160 Isabella, Queen of Castile 49

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316

INDEX

Isidore, St. of Seville 53, 118-121, 123-127, 238, 245-246, 259 J Jacobita, Martín 213, 215, 223, 249 Jakobson, Roman 200-201 Jerome, St. 50 Jiménez, Fray Francisco 83 Josephus, Flavius 112 Juvenal 46, 70 K Kramer, Henry 170 L La Rábida, Friary of 54 Laurentius 46 Leo X 56-58 Lienhardt, Godfrey 27-28 Lille, Alain de 14 Livy, Titus 44, 60, 70 López de Mendoza, Don Íñigo, Marquis of Santillana 92 López de Velasco, Juan 107-108, 111, 116 López de Villalobos, Francisco 118 M Mair, John 50, 59, 70, 74 Mal Lara, Juan de 93 Manrique, Inquisitor General Alfonso 157-158 Margallo, Pedro 51 Marineo Sículo, Lucio 42 Marrano judaizante 155 Martial 46 Martínez Silíceo, Juan 51 Martyr d’Anghiera, Peter 59 Matlatlan, Don Juan of 159, 172 Maximiliano, Bonifacio 213 Maximus, Valerius 44 Medici, Ferdinando de’, Grand Duke of Tuscany 110

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INDEX

317

Melgarejo, Fray Pedro 58 Mendieta, Fray Gerónimo de 37, 42, 63, 71, 83-84, 100, 104105, 114, 157, 171-172 Modus parisiensis 50-51 Molina, Fray Alonso de 146-148, 165 Mondéjar, Marquis of 102 Montúfar, Bishop Alonso de 158 More, Thomas 70 Motolinía, Fray Toribio de Benavente 16, 19, 33, 101-104, 116, 138, 170, 172, 241 N Navarro, Fray Miguel 105 Navas, Fray Francisco de las 103 Nebrija, Elio Antonio de 39, 41, 43, 46, 70, 84-85, 87-88, 92, 118 Nominalism 38, 50-51, 248 Núñez de Guzmán, Hernán 46-47, 93 O Observants 48-49 Ockham, William of 50, 52 Olmos, Fray Andrés de 14-16, 35, 44, 66, 71, 75-77, 100-104, 148, 153-154, 157-164, 166, 169-176, 179-180, 182, 208, 241-242, 248 Oria, Juan de 51 Ovando, Juan de 68, 106-109, 111, 116 Ovando, Nicolás de 67 Ovid 43, 46 P Padua, Fray Anthony of 53 Paidea 94, 118 Palos, Fray Juan de 47, 114 Pérez de Oliva, Hernán 60 Perrault, Guillaume 130 Peter of Spain 45 Philip II 40, 99, 102-103, 107-108, 110, 213

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318

INDEX

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 70 Plano Carpini, Fray John of 54 Plautus 44, 125 Pliny, the Elder 41, 46-47, 53, 70, 112, 115-122, 127, 186, 191195, 201, 221-223, 238, 245-246, 259 Plutarch 70 Q Quintilian 70, 89, 192 R Ramírez de Fuenleal, Sebastián 100, 169 Renaissance 40 Ríos, Fray Pedro de los 248 Rochelle, Fray Jean de la 53 Rubruck, Fray William of 54 S Salamanca, University of 17, 33, 38-42, 44-45, 48-51, 59-60, 89, 93, 118, 139 Sallust 44, 70 San Buenaventura, Pedro de 212-213 San Francisco, Fray Juan de 47 San Francisco, Friary of 26, 33, 39, 43-44, 47-49, 52, 54, 56, 70, 87, 120 San Francisco, Friary of (Mexico City) 22, 68, 87, 104, 226 San José, School of 68, 73 San Juan de Pie del Puerto, Domigo de 51 Sánchez de Arévalo 42 Santa Cruz, Alonso de 102, 107 Santa María de los Ángeles, Friary of 63 Santángel, Luis de 58 Scholasticism 40, 42, 45-46, 48, 69, 129, 224-225 Scotus, Duns 50, 52, 70 Seneca 45-46, 70 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 74, 80, 244 Sequera, Fray Rodrigo de 106, 109-110 Siena, Fray Bernardino de 53

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INDEX

319

Sixtus 110 Sorbonne, University of la 58 Spiritual Conquest 33, 63, 65, 99, 132, 239, 241, 246 Spirituals 48 Sprenger, Jacob 170 Strictissima Observantia 33, 49 Studia humanitatis 42, 94 T Tacitus 44 Talavera, Fray Hernando de 55-56 Tastera, Fray Jacobo de 66, 72-73, 77, 82, 88 Tecto, Fray Juan de 58 Tello de Sandoval, Bishop Francisco 158 Terence 44 Texcoco, Don Carlos Ometochtzin, Lord of 84, 154, 164-168, 170, 175 Tlatelolco, Imperial College of Santa Cruz in Santiago de 19, 22, 26, 33, 44, 52, 66, 68-71, 73, 77, 83-87, 89, 90, 110, 117119, 136, 139, 146, 173-174, 192-193, 200, 209, 211, 213, 217, 219, 221, 231, 249 Toral, Fray Francisco de 77, 104, 112, 147 Torquemada, Fray Tomás de, Inquisitor General 160-161 Trebizond, George of 46 Twelve, the 58, 63-64, 100, 114, 165, 238 V Valdés, Juan de 92-93, 97, 112 Valencia, Fray Martín de 63, 100, 169 Valencia, University of 49 Valeriano, Antonio 213, 249 Valla, Lorenzo 41 Valladolid debates 74 Valladolid, University of 71 Varro, Marcus Terentius 133-134 Vegerano, Alonso 213 Velasco, Luis de 110 Velasco, Viceroy Luis de 71, 110

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320

INDEX

Vergara, Juan de 157 Via moderna 50 Villa Dei, Alexander 41, 43 Virgil 41, 43, 46, 70 W Wales, Fray John of 53 Z Zorita, Alonso de 170 Zumárraga, Bishop Juan de 33, 65-66, 69-71, 75, 84, 100, 104, 154, 157-160, 164-167, 169, 241

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