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The trajectory of the Codex Mendoza revisited

As the story goes, this manuscript was created by commission of don Antonio de Mendoza, first Viceroy of New Spain (r. 1535-1550), to be presented to Charles I of Spain. Instead, the manuscript ended up in France, where it was purchased by the cleric and geographer André Thevet (1516?-1592), who would work as geographer for four kings of the Valois-Angouleme dynasty, beginning in 1559. In the 1580s, the manuscript was passed on to Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616), a cleric and geographer who was also a secretary to the English ambassador to France, Sir Edward Stafford, between 1583 and 1588. After Hakluyt’s death in 1616, the manuscript passed on to another Englishman, Samuel Purchas (1577-1654), the first man to ever publish the texts and images in the Codex Mendoza, as part of his 1625 compendium of voyage chronicles Haklyutus Posthumus: Or Purchas His Pilgrimes. Finally, the manuscript reached its last private owner, John Selden (1584-1654), a jurist and scholar with an interest in ancient English and Hebrew laws, egyptology, and the pre-Columbian cultures of the New World (Toomer 2009). In fact, his library, which was bequeathed to the Bodleian Library after his death in 1655, included three Mexican manuscripts, the Codex Mendoza, which is the protagonist of this history, and two others: the Codex Selden, also known as Codex Añute, and the Selden Roll, also known as The Roll of the New Fire.4 Although his interest in pre-Columbian Mexico seems to have been tangential, Selden’s profile is worthy of consideration, since it is similar to those of scholars who will include the Codex Mendoza in their works for the two following centuries: thinkers interested in Mediterranean antiquity and how it was reflected conceptually—and sometimes practically—in the New World, Judaism and its impression on the development of Western thought, and natural history.