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Table 1: Circulation, reproduction, and studies of the Codex Mendoza: 1625-1992

Despite the continuous reproduction and sustained circulation of the manuscript throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, two cardinal moments in the development of the modern history of the Codex Mendoza took place at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. In 1781, Francisco Clavijero, an exiled Mexican Jesuit living in Italy, identified the manuscript as “la colección de Mendoza” in his Historia Antigua de México. This led to the commencement of a new era of studies focused on the connection between the manuscript and the first viceroy of New Spain; these studies treated the Codex Mendoza as a document belonging to a foundational narrative that, even then, signals a fledgling Mexican nationalist movement. As we shall see, in the introduction to his Historia Antigua, Clavijero (1964) writes that his work will serve as a “first true history of Mexico, for the service of homeland and country”. In the same work, Clavijero goes on to announce that he had chosen forty-seven sources as the basis for this history, each of which had been painted by Mexican artists, written by notable colonial personages, or penned by authors whose texts fitted within a narrative with nationalist inclinations. Amongst those prominently featured, the one Clavijero identified as la colección de Mendoza is known today as the Codex Mendoza.5