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Almost four centuries after Puchas brought the Codex Mendoza into public view, we can esteem the anecdotal constructions and inaccuracies upon which the manuscript’s history has been constructed. Its importance in the Codex Mendoza’s history notwithstanding, what is perhaps most relevant about Purchas’s text is that it allows us to better illustrate his narrative priorities as well as the context in which he operated as a compiler of geographical and exploratory material.

In its present form, the Codex Mendoza has no preface. Additionally, Hakluyt could not have acquired the manuscript after Thevet’s death, since he returned to England in 1588 and the Frenchman died in 1592; such speculations prevent us from giving credence to Purchas’s claims.12 Likewise, in referring to the manuscript as “the choisiest of my Jewels” and by turning it into a present from the viceroy to the emperor—even if no evidence, either within the manuscript, or without it in the form of any previous reference made by Hakluyt or Thevet—Purchas elevates the value of the manuscript as a source of information. Likewise, it is untrue that Mendoza “with some difficultie obtained … the book from the Indians” (Pennington 1997, sec. introduction). By means of a careful analysis of the manufacturing process of the manuscript, I have shown that the Codex Mendoza was the result of a collaborative process between Mexican artists and a (possibly Spanish) interpreter (Gómez Tejada 2012, chap. 1; chap. 5 of this volume). Moreover, the narrative priorities of the manuscript show us that, beyond it being an exotic curiosity or a purely informative document, the artists who collaborated in making the Codex Mendoza conceived of it as a politically charged and ideologically important document. By means of carefully composed pictures and texts, it demonstrated the just and civilized nature of the Mexica world (Gómez Tejada 2018). Notably, both the chronological and geographical separation between Thevet and Purchas and the fact that it was only after Hakluyt’s death that Purchas acquired his documents—among which was the Codex Mendoza—cast further doubt upon Purchas’s narrative.