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At this moment, we return to the beginning of this discussion. The precise circumstances for the Codex Mendoza’s arrival in Europe are still a mystery and, rather than pursue certainty, it behooves us to embrace the possibility that the manuscript’s initial trajectory might have included a stay at the Spanish court. As I have suggested elsewhere and reiterate throughout this volume, the contents of the manuscript might have been aligned with the indigenist movement spearheaded by Bartolomé de las Casas (Gómez Tejada 2012, 269–306; 2018). Beyond being a viceroyal commission or a report, its raison d’être might be as an apology of the pre-Columbian world and as a demonstration of its just and legitimate government and social structure. This would have thus set the stage for the role that both Clavijero and Kingsborough bestowed upon it in subsequent periods marked by emancipatory politics.

The birth of the Codex Mendoza: Francisco Clavijero’s Storia Antica del Messico (1781)

Despite the continuous reproduction, circulation, and study of the Codex Mendoza between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, the construction of the manuscript’s history was defined in two instances. The first of these was its publication as part of Samuel Purchas’s 1625 compendium of exploration Hakluytus Posthumus: Or Purchas His Pylgrimes, which we covered in the previous section. The second came about in 1781, when Jesuit historian Francisco Clavijero included it as one of his bibliographic sources for his Storia Antica del Messico, identifying it as la colección de Mendoza. This gesture itself is a powerful one.