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The possibility that the Codex Mendoza might have come to Thevet not by way of pirates, but as one of many gifts that the queen bestowed upon him during his years of service, takes away from the romantic aura and the status of treasure that the manuscript has achieved over the course of the past four centuries. This hypothesis allows for the possibility that the Codex Mendoza did indeed reach Spain; if this were true, then the codex can be inserted into a wider context. Furthermore, although it is hard to accurately pinpoint the route, precise moment, and context in which the manuscript arrived to Spain, this possibility supports my hypothesis that the manuscript was commissioned by the surviving Mexica elite as well as its role as a document for the apology of the sovereignty of the peoples of the New World in the context of the indigenist movement of the sixteenth century. Both of these topics are explored at a greater depth in the following chapters by Barbara Mundy and me.

Between 1559 and 1592, Thevet remained in the French court and wrote several volumes on exploration, three of which are relevant to the New World in general, and two of which are relevant to the Codex Mendoza: Cosmographie Universelle (1575), Vrais pourtraits et vies des homes illustres (1584), and Grande Insulaire (1588). The contents of these books have been employed by scholars to identify the Codex Mendoza within Thevet’s bibliography. In 1971, Benjamin Keen (cited in Nicholson 1992, 5) quoted the following passage from the Cosmographie Universelle,