The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it: (in English: The Universal History of the Things of New Spain). After a translation mistake, it was given the name . The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.
In partnership with Nahua men who were formerly his students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, Sahagún conducted research, organized evidence, wrote and edited his findings. He worked on this project from 1545 up until his death in 1590. The work consists of 2,400 pages organized into twelve books; more than 2,000 illustrations drawn by native artists provide vivid images of this era. It documents the culture, religious cosmology (worldview) and ritual practices, society, economics, and natural history of the Aztec people. It has been described as "one of the most remarkable accounts of a non-Western culture ever composed."
Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson were the first to translate the Codex from Nahuatl to English, in a project that took 30 years to complete. In 2012, high-resolution scans of all volumes of the Florentine Codex, in Nahuatl and Spanish, with illustrations, were added to the World Digital Library. In 2015, Sahagún's work was declared a World Heritage by the UNESCO. In 2023, the Getty Research Institute released the Digital Florentine Codex which gives access to the complete manuscript.
History of the manuscript
In 1575 the Council of the Indies suggested to the Spanish Crown to educate the native Americans in Spanish instead of using the indigenous languages; for this reason, the Spanish authorities required to Fray Sahagún to hand over all of his documents about the Aztec culture and the results of his research in order to get further details about this matter. In the meantime, the Bishop of Sigüenza, Diego de Espinosa, who was also the Inquisitor General and President of the Royal Council of Castile instructed the cleric Luis Sánchez a report about the situation of the native Americans. The concerning findings of this report triggered a visit of Juan de Ovando to the Council of the Indies because it demonstrated a total ignorance of the Spanish authorities about the native cultures and, in Ovando's opinion, was not possible to make correct decisions without reliable information. As a consequence, the Council of the Indies ordered to the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1568 that they needed to include ethnographic and geographic information regarding any new discovery within their limits. A similar disposition was given to the Vice-Royalty of New Spain in 1569, specifying that 37 chapters were to be reported; in 1570, the extent of the report was modified to required information for 200 chapters. That same year, Phillip II of Spain created a new position as "Cosmógrafo y Cronista Mayor de Indias" to collect and organize this information, being appointed Don Juan López de Velasco, so that he could write "La Historia General de las Indias", namely, a compilation about the history of the Indies.
King Phillip II of Spain concluded that was not beneficial for the Spanish colonies in America and, hence, it never took place. That is the reason why the missionaries, including Fray Bernardino de Sahagún continued their missionary work and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun was able to make two more copies of his Historia general. The three bound volumes of the Florentine Codex are found in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Palat. 218-220 in Florence, Italy, with the title Florentine Codex chosen by its English translators, Americans Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, following in the tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican scholars Francisco del Paso y Troncoso and Joaquín García Icazbalceta.
The manuscript became part of the collection of the library in Florence at some point after its creation in the late sixteenth century. It was not until the late eighteenth century that scholars become aware of it, when the bibliographer Angelo Maria Bandini published a description of it in Latin in 1793. The work became more generally known in the nineteenth century, with a description published by P. Fr. Marcellino da Civezza in 1879.