The Huexotzinco Codex or Huejotzingo Codex is a colonial-era Nahua pictorial manuscript, one of the group of manuscripts collectively known as Aztec codices. It is an eight-sheet document [1] on amatl, a pre-European paper made in Mesoamerica, and consists of part of the testimony in a legal case against members of the First Audiencia (high court) in Mexico, particularly its president, Nuño de Guzmán, ten years after the 1521 Spanish conquest.
Huexotzinco, (Way-hoat-ZINC-o) is a town southeast of Mexico City, in the state of Puebla. In 1521, the Nahua Indian people of the town were the allies of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés, and together they confronted their enemies to overcome Moctezuma, leader of the Aztec Empire. Cortés's indigenous allies from Tlaxcala were more successful than those Huejotzinco in translating that alliance into privileges in the colonial era, and the Huejotzincans petitioned the crown for such privileges. A 1560 petition to the crown in Nahuatl outlines their participation. [2]
After the conquest, the Huexotzinco peoples became part of Cortés's encomienda holdings. While Cortés was out of Mexico from 1529 to 1530, the First Audiencia intervened in the daily activities of the community and forced the Nahuas to pay excessive taxes in the form of goods and services. When Cortés returned, the Nahuas of Huejotzinco joined him in a legal case against the abuses of the First Audiencia.
The Huexotzinco Codex has testimony enumerating the abuses by Nuño de Guzmán when he took over the encomienda in the name of the crown. Indigenous supporting Cortés's lawsuit claimed that Guzmán extracted large amounts of tributes from the town, but also that they were compelled to serve Guzmán as he went to war. Several indigenous witnesses testified to the fact that the lord of Huextzinco was compelled to participate, but that until a horse was procured for him he refused to serve. At this time horses were very expensive, since they were not native to the New World and at the end of the 1520s likely there were few born locally. The horse, according to the testimony of one Esteban, previously named Tochel (or Tochtli, "rabbit"), cost "twenty-one small gold ingots." Esteban also says that for the 600 men outfitted for war, the cost was 27,000 pieces of cloth. [3]
Although the plaintiffs were initially successful in their suit in Mexico, it was appealed to the Council of the Indies in Spain. Documents attesting to the final outcome of the suit were unavailable for many years. [4] A document later uncovered in the collections of the Library of Congress shows that in 1538, Charles I of Spain agreed with the judgement against the Spanish administrators and ruled that two-thirds of all tributes taken from the people of Huexotzinco be returned. [5]
The codex was part of the private archive belonging to the descendants of Cortés (the Italian dukes of Monteleone) until 1925. [6] Edward Harkness purchased the codex from the rare book dealer, A.S.W. Rosenbach, and presented it to the Library of Congress in 1928–29. [6]
Of particular interest on the Huexotzinco Codex is the image of the Virgin Mary, one of the earliest indigenous depictions. The Indians' testimony was rendered in Nahuatl and translated to Spanish for the lawsuit. Their statements indicate that the Madonna image in the codex shows the banner that Guzmán demanded as a standard for the campaign to conquer what became New Galicia. Made of gold and richly decorated with feathers, the Huexotzincans had to sell twenty slaves to indigenous merchants and received in payment three gold ingots and nine long feathers (likely quetzal feathers, highly prized by the Indians). According to the testimony of one Lucas, formerly known as Tamavaltetle, an indigenous lord of Huexotzinco, the image of the Virgin was "broad and as long as more than half an arm." [7]
Scholars have analyzed the codex and described what each stylized glyph means. On the page with the image of the banner of the Virgin Mary, the decipherments indicate the costs of the banner and the goods rendered for the campaign. On the top left, the pot at the top of a bundle of reeds is 400 pots of liquid amber. Next to it with a bundle of reeds and a divided rectangle is the depiction of "400 small [cotton] mantles to purchase food en route." The four reed bundles and 10 small squares depict 1,600 pairs of sandals for the warriors in Guzmán's campaign. The flag or banner is for the Huexotzincan lord, Don Tomé to carry, which cost "10 loads of small mantles at 20 per load." The three discs are "fine gold plaques used in the standard of the Madonna." The nine flags with the stylized feathers depict nine bundles of quetzal feathers, each containing 20 feathers at a "cost of 9 loads of 20 mantles each." The image of the Virgin Mary was the standard for Guzmán, "(About 16" x 16", gold leaf, One of the earliest native productions related to Catholicism.)" To the left of the Madonna banner are 10 bundles of 400 darts, i.e., 4,000 metal tipped darts for the campaign. The discs to the right of the image of the Madonna depict were the gold or silver to purchase the horse for Don Tomé. On the next line down, the 10 stylized flags depict 200 loads of loincloths for the warriors. The 8 men on that same line are the male slaves sold to Indian merchants for the gold for the Madonna standard. At the bottom of the page, the three stylized flags with large rectangles at their tops are 60 leather covered chests. There are two groups of 6 women, dressed distinctively, which are the female slaves "sold to pay for the gold for the Madonna banner." [8]
Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, referred to retroactively in European sources as Moctezuma II, was the ninth Emperor of the Aztec Empire, reigning from 1502 or 1503 to 1520. Through his marriage with Queen Tlapalizquixochtzin of Ecatepec, one of his two wives, he was also king consort of that altepetl.
The Aztecs were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Aztec culture was organized into city-states (altepetl), some of which joined to form alliances, political confederations, or empires. The Aztec Empire was a confederation of three city-states established in 1427: Tenochtitlan, city-state of the Mexica or Tenochca, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, previously part of the Tepanec empire, whose dominant power was Azcapotzalco. Although the term Aztecs is often narrowly restricted to the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, it is also broadly used to refer to Nahua polities or peoples of central Mexico in the prehispanic era, as well as the Spanish colonial era (1521–1821). The definitions of Aztec and Aztecs have long been the topic of scholarly discussion ever since German scientist Alexander von Humboldt established its common usage in the early 19th century.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, also known as the Virgin of Guadalupe, is a Catholic title of Mary, mother of Jesus associated with a series of five Marian apparitions to a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego and his uncle, Juan Bernardino, which are believed to have occurred in December 1531, when the Mexican territories were under the Spanish Empire.
The Nahuas are a group of the indigenous people of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. They comprise the largest indigenous group in Mexico and second largest in El Salvador. They are a Mesoamerican ethnicity. The Mexica (Aztecs) were of Nahua ethnicity, and the Toltecs are often thought to have been as well, though in the pre-Columbian period Nahuas were subdivided into many groups that did not necessarily share a common identity.
Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán was a Spanish conquistador and colonial administrator in New Spain. He was the governor of the province of Pánuco from 1525 to 1533 and of Nueva Galicia from 1529 to 1534, and president of the first Royal Audiencia of Mexico – the high court that governed New Spain – from 1528 to 1530. He founded several cities in Northwestern Mexico, including Guadalajara.
Huei Tlamahuiçoltica is a tract in Nahuatl comprising 36 pages and was published in Mexico City, Mexico in 1649 by Luis Laso de la Vega, the vicar of the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac outside the same city. In the preface Luis Laso de la Vega claimed authorship of the whole work, but this claim is the subject of an ongoing difference of scholarly opinion.
Aztec codices are Mesoamerican manuscripts made by the pre-Columbian Aztec, and their Nahuatl-speaking descendants during the colonial period in Mexico.
The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it: La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España. After a translation mistake, it was given the name Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva España. The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.
Codex Osuna is an Aztec codex on European paper, with indigenous pictorials and alphabetic Nahuatl text from 1565. It has seven parts, with most being economic in content, particularly tribute, with one part having historical content. It was named after the Spanish nobleman, Mariano Francisco de Borja José Justo Téllez-Girón y Beaufort-Spontin, twelfth Duke of Osuna, in whose library the codex was held until his death in 1882. It then became part of the collection of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. It is part of a lawsuit by the indigenous of a Nahua community against Spaniards, and a fragment of a much larger Mexican text; the first numbered folio in the facsimile is 464.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Conquest of Mexico, the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–1521), or the Conquest of Tenochtitlan was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. There are multiple 16th-century narratives of the events by Spanish conquistadors, their indigenous allies, and the defeated Aztecs. It was not solely a small contingent of Spaniards defeating the Aztec Empire but a coalition of Spanish invaders with tributaries to the Aztecs, and most especially the Aztecs' indigenous enemies and rivals. They combined forces to defeat the Mexica of Tenochtitlan over a two-year period. For the Spanish, Mexico was part of a project of Spanish colonization of the New World after 25 years of permanent Spanish settlement and further exploration in the Caribbean.
Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal was bishop of Santo Domingo and president of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo from 1528 to 1531. He was also president of the second Real Audiencia of Mexico from January 10, 1531, to April 16, 1535. Later he was a member of the Council of the Indies.
The traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican literature extend back to the oldest-attested forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, which date from around the mid-1st millennium BCE. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, who produced a number of Mesoamerican writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and completeness. Mesoamerican writing systems arose independently from other writing systems in the world, and their development represents one of the very few such origins in the history of writing.
Diego Delgadillo was a judge of the first Real Audiencia of Mexico, which took control of the governance of New Spain from the conquistadors from December 9, 1528 to January 9, 1531.
Juan Ortiz de Matienzo was a Spanish colonial judge and an original member of the first Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, in 1512. From December 9, 1528 until January 9, 1531, he was a member of the first Real Audiencia of Mexico, which took over the governance of New Spain from the conquistadors.
Antonio Valeriano was a colonial Mexican, Nahua scholar and politician. He was a collaborator with fray Bernardino de Sahagún in the creation of the twelve-volume General History of the Things of New Spain, the Florentine Codex, He served as judge-governor of both his home, Azcapotzalco, and of Tenochtitlan, in Spanish colonial New Spain.
Antonio del Rincón was a Jesuit priest and grammarian, who wrote one of the earliest grammars of the Nahuatl language.
Quetzalcoatl is a deity in Aztec culture and literature. Among the Aztecs, he was related to wind, Venus, Sun, merchants, arts, crafts, knowledge, and learning. He was also the patron god of the Aztec priesthood. He was one of several important gods in the Aztec pantheon, along with the gods Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli. The two other gods represented by the planet Venus are Tlaloc and Xolotl.
Huejotzingo ( is a small city and municipality located just northwest of the city of Puebla, in central Mexico. The settlement's history dates back to the pre-Hispanic period, when it was a dominion, with its capital a short distance from where the modern settlement is today. Modern Huejotzingo is located where a Franciscan monastery was founded in 1525, and in 1529, the monks moved the indigenous population of Huejotzingo to live around the monastery. Today, Huejotzingo is known for the production of alcoholic apple cider and fruit preserves, as well as its annual carnival. This carnival is distinct as it centers on the re-enactment of several historical and legendary events related to the area. The largest of these is related to the Battle of Puebla, with about 2, 000 residents representing French and Mexican forces that engage in mock battles over four days.
Mexican featherwork, also called "plumería", was an important artistic and decorative technique in the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods in what is now Mexico. Although feathers have been prized and feather works created in other parts of the world, those done by the amanteca or feather work specialists impressed Spanish conquerors, leading to a creative exchange with Europe. Featherwork pieces took on European motifs in Mexico. Feathers and feather works became prized in Europe. The "golden age" for this technique as an art form was from just before the Spanish conquest to about a century afterwards. At the beginning of the 17th century, it began a decline due to the death of the old masters, the disappearance of the birds that provide fine feathers and the depreciation of indigenous handiwork. Feather work, especially the creation of "mosaics" or "paintings" principally of religious images remained noted by Europeans until the 19th century, but by the 20th century, the little that remained had become a handcraft, despite efforts to revive it. Today, the most common feather objects are those made for traditional dance costumes, although mosaics are made in the state of Michoacán, and feather trimmed huipils are made in the state of Chiapas.
The history of the Nahuatl, Aztec or Mexicano language can be traced back to the time when Teotihuacan flourished. From the 4th century AD to the present, the journey and development of the language and its dialect varieties have gone through a large number of periods and processes, the language being used by various peoples, civilizations and states throughout the history of the cultural area of Mesoamerica.
In 1538 Charles V supported an earlier ruling that 2/3 of the tributes paid by Huexotzinco be returned to the community.
