From the Library of Congress in Washington DC We've done two so far one on the Mapa Quetzalecatzin and one on the Oztoticpac Lands Map and today we are going todo the Huexotzinco Codex which as Naomi said in the intro is one of thetop treasures here at the Library. Today we're going to take a little bit different tact on this the other two codices that we looked at the Quetzalecatzin and the Oztoticpac Lands Map are all one single sheet whereas the Huexotzinco Codex is eight sheets of amate which is a mulberry fig bark paper a typical indigenous paper from the Nahua and it also has 79 pages of text associated with it which basically narrate a lawsuit and so we're going to be looking both at the text and at the actual codex themselves eight pages of the Codex that are on amate are also written in Nahuatl hieroglyphic writing and we'll take a sort of deep dive into that the Nahuatl hieroglyphs and the sort of symbolism we see on those pages but we have to first start out kind of talking a little bit about about the court case itself and we'll kind of go into some details and it's going to be like I said a little bit different in format because I'm actually going to read a little bit of the translations of the some of the testimony and some of the material from the the actual book that the the eight pages were found in just so we get a kind of flavor of what what these types of Spanish lawsuits and what these sort of Spanish law was as they affected both the indigenous peoples and and the early settlers the Huexotcinzo Codex dates from 1531 1532 so it's a very very early post-colonial codex. First though we're going to look a little bit about what the paper is that the these eight pages are on the other two codices the Oztoticpac Lands Map is on amate, also the Quetzalecatzin is on European paper and we haven't really talked very much about the paper at all and I thought I would just take a couple minutes to talk a little bit about about what the paper is and and and how it's made and kind of what it looks like. There are really a couple of different kinds one made from the ficus genus and there's several different ficus species that are found in Mexico and Central America and this is a basically a fig tree. You'll see here I've got just a botanical specimen from the national herbarium and then a picture of the actually the ficus padifolia on the right and just really what the kind of the paper looks like when it's made on the left that's a sample of a modern sample of the paper made from the inner bark of the the ficus tree and you can see it's very dark very much like the Oztoticpac Lands Map was that we looked at last time. Today's codex, however, is on a much lighter paper and this really probably comes from the Morris genus which is the mulberry and it gives a much lighter paper again it's made from the inner bark of the tree and it's still made in Mexico today. The inner bark is pulled off and then and then soaked it becomes very very soft several things are added to the the bath in order to soften it and then it's basically smeared and beaten and you can see here is an indigenous paper maker making a sheet of paper very much like we are going to be looking at today when we're looking at the Huexotzinco Codex. The Huexotzinco Codex is on a paper that's almost white and it's fairly thin but but a very durable paper and this is a typical paper making operation down in Mexico today and here are some of the pieces of paper and some of the various patterns put in the paper that are out drying in the sun after there they're put down there they're laid out in the Sun and then once they dry you can you can then pick them up and there is roughest paper and so the codices that we're going to be looking at today are really this kind of this kind of paper and so without further ado we'll start talking a little bit about the Codex so this is the first page that the Codex actually what we have here is we have a lawsuit and the lawsuit is actually brought by Hernando Cortes the the conqueror of Mexico one of the first conquistadors to to arrive there and a man named Marquis De Valle and they're bringing up a suit against several people a man named Nuno Guzman a man named Juan Ortiz del Maritzio and a man named Diego Delgadillo and basically what is important about the codex's and and what happens in this codex is you've got 79 pages of Spanish text and in the 79 pages in Spanish text you have an or narration of this court case and basically you have some of the native testimony, the indigenous testimony the Nahua testimony in many cases refers to the actual Nahuatl hieroglyphic texts that we see here almost all of which have to do with tribute and and and price is paid for various species of tribute slaves traded and things like that and we'll get into that in just a bit. The codex itself has an interesting history. It was housed in the [inaudible] town of the Immaculate Conception and Jesus of Nazareth's in Mexico City for a very long time and at some point it passed directly to Cortes's descendants and those are the Italian Dukes of Monteleone and those Italian Dukes held the Codex for a very long time along with a lot of other Cortes materials and it remains in this private archive until 1925 and it was purchased by a man named Harkness in 1927 through a really well-known dealer named ASW Rosenbach. Rosenbach was an extremely important rare book dealer and manuscript dealer during the 1920s. The Rosenwald collection--those of you who are familiar with a large rare book collection here at the Library--a lot of those materials were also purchased through Rosenbach. So the subject of the of the lawsuit is really the sort of misappropriation of funds and the way a law case would work in a in a Spanish court of this period is much different than a law case would work in a law court today really what would happen is charges would be brought by some plaintiff and the plaintiff would would make up a questionnaire and really this is actually a questionnaire which has a series of questions which he would then they would devise and then they would give to their witnesses and their witnesses would answer the questionnaire for a scribe and the scribe would write down the the the answers and so what we have in this codex is actually Cortes's side of this story. We have the information and the questions that Cortes and his side is putting to the Guzman side and so after those questionnaires were done they would be sent to the defendants the answers be sent to the defendants the defendants would be given a particular span of time and they would produce their own questionnaire which they would then send to their witnesses. There'd be another exchange of these back and forth between the defendants and the plaintiffs and those would go to a judge. If the judge thought that the testimony was complete enough he would render a decision and if the the court case was big enough, if there was enough money at stake, it may have to go back to Spain as opposed to being decided in Mexico City but most of these local cases in the new world were were decided in Mexico City. But in this case we only have the one side, we only have Cortes's documents in the Codex here. Now what the codex begins with it begins with a group of charges and I'm just going to read a little bit because I think it's important to kind of get an idea of what the language is and how the language sounds and obviously this is a translation but but I think it's an interesting way to kind of take a look at about the way these things were put forward and it begins basically saying that this is a court case against Nuno Guzman and several other people who are in charge of the area around Huexotzinco and it begins saying, "I say that while my said party held and possessed by just and write titles and grant of your majesty which justify and have justified the possession use and utilization of the Indians of the town of Huexotzinco which is in the province," and then there's a lacuna in the manuscript, "taking the fruits in the profits of said town the said Nuno de Guzman did in fact and against alright and without any cause or reason take from my said party the said town and the utilization thereof." So basically this has been appropriated this town and the fruits of the labors and the the the important cash crops have been appropriated by Nuno Guzman and it says continues, "and they took in appropriated the said town for themselves taking the fruits and incomes of it as they have taken them from the year 29 past to the present making use of the said town in all the enterprises they could as well as services and other necessary things and what is worse is that at the time when they took the said town from my said party they published and said that they were placing it under tribute to your majesty." And basically the manuscript here literally says "placing it in the head of your majesty" in order to that they might make use of the incomes and profits of the said town and in truth your Majesty has enjoyed the name and they have taken for themselves and enjoyed the profit and I think that's an interesting little little thing there so basically we have a group of people who are now been accused of taking account over which was basically given to the indigenous people for tribute. They have said that they were taking it, placing the tribute under the crown and giving it to the crown but in fact they were keeping it to themselves and only using the name of the crown to name name only some things never change obviously. And then it says "and since the laws of your realm that is prohibited that judges should make such users and carry on such dealings and enterprises because they must keep their hands clean in everything the said Nuno de Guzman in doing what they did committed violence crime spoilation and notorious fraud which in law is considered as a capital case." And so that is really the execution of the charges that begin the codex and begin the Huexotzinco Codex and so as I said according to Spanish law the next part of the the case here would be for the plaintiffs to draw up some sort of questionnaire which they did and in the case of the way of single codex it's a multi-point question here it actually has fourteen independent questions and we're not going to go into all of the questions but there's one that's kind of important for what we're going to see as we actually go through the pages of the codex themselves and it's actually number four and what the number four says it basically begins, "also whether they know and have seen," and this is put in the form of a question so this is being asked to the witnesses, "whether they know and have seen that as soon as and then it names for defendants arrived in the city they summon the Lords from the leading men of the town and ask that they give and bring a certain quality more than six thousand pesos of gold ingots and jewels and also stones and feathers and clothing and slaves in an amount worth more than another thousand gold pesos and let the witnesses say what gold, stones, feathers, clothing slaves and other things they gave to the said president immediately upon their arrival and on the road before they arrived in the city." And so this is basically a question asking witnesses that what kind of tributes what sort of things were given to Nuno de Guzman and the other people by the leading men of the city and whether these were these demands made of gold and and other kinds of tribute and what we're going to see actually is when we begin looking at the Codex pages here we're just going to be seeing lists of tributes and lists of of these kinds of items and we're going to see that basically a lot of what we have in the Codex itself is native testimony is indigenous testimony and we're going to look at one in particular because right after that we'll get actually into the Codex pages and one of the things that the Huexotzinco Codex is famous for is a small portrait of the Virgin Mary considered to be the first portrait of the Virgin Mary in the new world that was actually rendered by an indigenous person. What's interesting about that is people believe that from how it was rendered for a reason of being pious or something like that or making the codex somehow seem religious but in fact it's a little bit different than that and we'll see that in just a minute. So I'm going to just read a couple more little things and then we'll get into the Codex themselves and I'm going to read the testimony an answer to that number four by an indigenous person and that particular testimony begins it says, "after the aforesaid in the said City of Mexico on Monday the third day of the month of April in the year 1531 through an interpreter Juan de [inaudible] this citizen of the city a statement and disposition was received from Esteban an indigenous who was previously named Toshell which in the Christian language means rabbit. From the said witness through the said interpreter an oath was received in do legal form under the obligation which he promised to tell the truth and what he said and deposed is the following," and so that's the way his testimony begins and I'm going to read his answer to the fourth question and then we're going to begin looking at the Codex itself and so he says to the fourth question he said that when Nino Nuno de Guzman arrived in the city the Indians of the said town Huexotzinco and its province did not come to it nor did they go out to receive them except that the Lord and leading men of the head Indians and this witness with them came to the city to see and know them and they did not bring them any gold or cloth or anything else except they brought food, hens, quail--possibly as many as forty hens and twenty quail--and a little basket of eggs. And about a year after Nuno de Guzman had come to the city the overseer of the said town who is named de Bahia who has reportedly gone to Guatemala told them that they should give something to Nuno de Guzman when he wanted to go to the war. And they asked what they should give and he told them whatever they wished and they determined to make cloth with a sheet of gold and the whole sheet of gold would be an image of Saint Mary this they gave to the said Nuno de Guzman, they and said overseer, and they brought it to him in this city and for the workmanship and expense of what the said image cost they sold twenty slaves--eight men and twelve women. And they also but for three ingots of gold which went into the said image on the top of a cloth on which the image was placed there were nine plumages, each plumage consisting of twenty feathers and these cost nine loads of little awnings with twenty awnings in each load and this witness saw that Union to Guzman said to the Lord of Huexotzinco that she he should give him men to go to war with. Six hundred men outfitted for war after the manner in which they were accustomed to and they gave them and with them also certain clothing in gear which they have painted on certain papers." Now we're beginning to talk about the manuscript itself. "And he asked that the said papers be shown to him and he was shown one paper of certain paintings which is signed with the sign of me the undersigned notary and secretary. And when he had looked at the pictures the said interpreter said that in gear for the said warriors they had spent thirty two thousand and four hundred pieces of cloth and small awnings and then he corrected himself to say that there were twenty seven thousand and six hundred little awnings." And this goes on basically talking about a whole list of things that were given and cost that were cost that were brought all to go to war and all to make this image it actually ends, "all this has been state all this has been stated is painted on the said paper on which the depicted the said image of Our Lady and which is signed with my sign." And so really what we have here is we have this court case where we have a whole slew of pages which are going to talk about what we're actually given to Guzman or appropriated by him in order to go to war or spent by the indigenous rulers of Huexotzinco in order to make this gold image of the Virgin Mary. And so really that's what this codex is. So let's let's get to the codex itself here and we'll the codex the eight pages are actually numbered and they're actually numbered by the scribe who is actually writing a little bit in in this book name is Alonzo Valverde and he talks about the testimony and he actually signs the the images themselves and so what we have here is we have the beginnings of this testimony and we're just going to go over some of the symbolism here just because I think it's kind of fascinating the way that these things are put and you will begin to get a sense of the huge number, the vast array of tribute that was spent and collected by this group of people in order to make this image and and for this going to war and so we'll look at the manuscript here and we'll begin and hopefully this won't drive people too crazy I'm going to use the little pointer to actually point out some of the things on the manuscript when we when we look at this one here we see these two rings and these are actually loads of lime and so we have here two loads of lime that have been put on on this sheet. B here is two piles of adobe bricks for construction this is people have called the chocolate chip the chocolate chip tribute but this is actually what we have here is we have six and those little flags are twenty so six times 20 loads or beams. Some things we don't know exactly what they are over the side this is kind of an unknown group of things. This here is another way of of doing 400 you've got seven these things in this is actually four hundred and so we have seven times four hundred loads of cloths, so two thousand eight hundred loads of cloth. And then of course we know this is again lime we have some stones here this part here is again we've got the same number so four hundred is this bundle and this maize up here, so we've got two thousand eight hundred loads of maize. Down here with the little heads what kind of bird does it remind you of well of course it's a turkey and so we have lots of lots of turkeys and so one hundred and forty turkeys, seven times twenty. This number down here in these little boxes is a huge number and this is actually eight thousand so we have two times eight thousand or sixteen thousand chili peppers that are also listed on here. And really the codex continues this way, again more amounts of turkeys and maize. We've got the chili peppers and so this continues very much in this way and this is talked about in the Spanish text exactly where this is coming from and what it's being used for. One of the most striking pages in the entire codex is this and what we have here is of course you can see that the numbers in the middle, those flags which you now know are 20 and these are 20 cloths with designs and there's basically several different patterns there's a flower design there's a rabbit design and there's the design that looks like a reed so we've got three different different kinds of designs here and the entire cost is we've got 37 times 20 which equals these cloths down here and all total we've got about four hundred and sixty flower patterns, 160 rabbit patterns, and 120 reeds if one adds this all up and so these are cloths that are given in tribute that are talked about the third page...the fourth page I should say is this and this is the most abstract of the pieces and really what these are is five cloths of rove woven red rabbit fur and the total is 400 mantles. Four times 20 equals 80 and then when you add them all up you actually have 400 mantles of woven red rabbit fur. Now we get to the Virgin Mary page, the page which the codex is probably most famous for and that Esteban talks about in his testimony and this is basically listing what it cost in order to put the the actual solid gold image of the Virgin which is portrayed here together. And up here we have this symbol here this is four hundred pots of liquid amber and so that's quite a thing, then we've got this here is mantles of food, four hundred mantles of food that one purchases in route. See here, you can see the feet this group right here there's four and we now know of course this is 400 so for sixteen hundred pairs of sandals are here and we can go on and talking about this and then for instance for this which is a banner for Don Tomei to carry, it costs ten loads ten loads with mantles there then we have three gold plaques right here that are listed used in the in the standard of the Madonna in other words used to make the Madonna itself. Here we've got plumages, so twenty large green feathers and we talked about the cost of that. This here of course is the famous Madonna in the middle for Nino Guzman and it is 16 by 16 inches of gold leaf and it's supposed to be one of the earliest productions related to Catholicism in the New World by the indigenous peoples and then here we've got 21 gold plaques the thickness of three fingernails to purchase a horse for Don Tomei the principal and brother of Lord of Huexotzinco. Here we have metal tip darts and the group of metal tip darts here and then loincloth along the bottom here and then we have slaves, groups of slaves in order to...who are sold to buy the Madonna and this is an interesting little thing here, we've got this group of slaves along the bottom here and these slaves at least according to the testimony were actually sold to indigenous merchants to buy the gold in order to make the Madonna and so it's quite an interesting quite an interesting page this figure which people talk about so much. The next page here these are two Aztec war leaders with different shield designs. There's 11 houses basically who contributed to the work so basically 11 different family lineages who contributed warriors to this supposed war effort that we were talking about in the in the testimony itself and then we we have the numbers of warriors along here this basically gives us four numbers of warriors and then we have woven bags and then we have blankets so again more about the same same stuff, same source type of issues. Again here we have another page this time talking more about grain this is a granary up here that we see so it's a an indigenous granary holding maize which was paid in 1529 and 1530 so just before the the actual codex is made so the events the codex is actually narrating are between 1529 which is the date that's given in the what I read the initial charges that begins in 1529 and we are in 1531 so this exploitation and this taking out of money and tribute in order to go to war by this group of people against Cortes or or stealing from Cortes basically happens over a two-year period. And so it gets more and more complicated as the text goes on there are about twenty to twenty-five different testimonies from the indigenous peoples within the thing itself within the actual Codex itself and that really does give us a real sense of how these cases are narrated and and really how important this was when we start looking at some of the numbers and adding up some of the numbers, for instance when we look at this number right here when we look at this right here we basically have a total of about eight thousand turkeys here so it's a substantial, substantial amount when we go down to this row down here and we see the corn here we're talking 32,000 ears of corn and here we're talking about 48,000 chili peppers so a lot of a lot of money that has been exploited or misappropriated in Huexotzinco by Nuno Guzman and the others who are named in the case. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how the case turned out and as I said we only know really the one side of it. There are some documents which give us hints to the to the other side but they don't give us much in the way of conclusive evidence. It seems as if that this particular codex survived mostly because it went into the hands of Cortes's descendants, the Dukes of Monteleone, and that really is how it survived and so I would be more than happy to take any questions. This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.