Revising the Narrative of the Conquest of Mexico: Bernardino de Sahagún’s 1585 Relación de la conquista de esta Nueva España

Amber Brian

doi:10.14434/textual.v13i2.31592

Abstract

2021 represents the five-hundred-year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. This essay addresses the rendering of the events that culminated in the Spanish domination of that region in two texts associated with the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590). The first is Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex, a bilingual manuscript written collaboratively with Indigenous intellectuals in Nahuatl with a Spanish translation and accompanied by nearly two thousand illustrations that represent a third text. Completed in 1579, under increasing scrutiny by religious authorities, the manuscript was confiscated and sent to Europe, eventually coming to reside in the Medici Library in Florence. In 1585, Sahagún, authored Relación de la conquista de esta Nueva España, which sought to revise the narrative of the conquest found in Book Twelve. Sahagún’s revision reveals how the narrative of the conquest changed in the hands of the Franciscan friar as the sixteenth century drew to a close.

Highlights

2021 represents the five-hundred-year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire
Cline’s 1989 volume contains an introduction by her, a transcription of the nineteenth-century manuscript copy of that text housed in the Boston Public Library, a reproduction of that nineteenth-century manuscript, an English translation based on that text, and a reproduction of an 1840 Mexican edition of the 1585 manuscript
Outside of Barcelona, an hour by train followed by another five-minute cable car ride up steep mountain cliffs, we find the Montserrat Monastery, where, in the library, an eighteenth-century manuscript copy of Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún’s 1585 history of the conquest of Mexico is housed