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Florentine Codex: Book 10: Book 10: The People (Volume 10) (Florentine Codex; A General History of the Things of New Spain)
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Ten gives a broad overview of the different occupations, classes, and characteristics of Aztecs during this time period. Arguably the most fascinating part of this book is the detailed documentation of human anatomy and commonly used cures for physical ailments.
212 pages, Hardcover
First published July 7, 1961
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October 8, 2025
The trio of computer strategy games that dominated my teenage gaming hours were SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, and Civilization. The first two franchises petered out after numerous versions, but the latter is still going strong: 2K released Civilization VII just eight months ago. I don’t know if these games fed my love of history or vice versa, but I do know this: hooking up your people with luxury goods is the only way to govern unless you like angry faces, stagnation, rebellion, and losing.
The challenge of maintaining a dense urban culture isn’t just for nerdy teenagers, nor is it unique to what Civilization VI developers called the Information Era. In 16th-century Mexico, the Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún compiled the tenth book of his “General History of the Things of New Spain” under the title “Of the vices and virtues of this people.” What he documents in broad, morality-laden couplets are the load-bearing roles supporting the complex urban society that teemed on and around Lake Texcoco.
Take the first role in the first chapter: the Aztec father. A good father is “diligent, solicitous, compassionate, sympathetic; a careful administrator.” He raises his kids and teaches them, advising and admonishing. He’s a guy who “is exemplary; he leads a model life….He regulates, distributes with care, establishes order.” In contrast, a bad father is “lazy, incompassionate, negligent, unreliable. He is unfeeling, neglectful of duty, untrustworthy; a shirker, a loafer, a sullen worker.” Each member of the family operates under similar expectations. There is a way to be a good mother, child, step-child, step-parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, parent-in-law, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, and so forth. There is also a way to fill each role badly, to disappoint your kin and let down your entire society.
Role-based expectations are not limited to urban environments, of course. Marsha Ogilvie drew intriguing conclusions from gendered bone density of North American hunter-gatherers as the gradual adoption of agriculture altered subsistence patterns to favor roving men and sedentary women. Any coherent community, whether a small band of Paleo-Indians hunting mammoths or a multi-city dynastic hegemony building pyramids to the sun, requires a shared language of expectation. If you have no way at all to predict what your neighbor will do next, and no way to define (much less challenge) destructive deviance, your society will fracture or disintegrate under the solvent of mutual distrust.
Where this dynamic gets hard, though, is in complex urban ecosystems. The sheer mass of people, and the sheer number of divergent background cultures, generates two things: a need for a central power capable of enforcing expectations, and the prospect of explosive disintegration if that power presses too hard on such a volatile mix. This is why, in previous volumes, Father Sahagún found that a key responsibility of Tenochtitlan’s nobles was regulation of the marketplace. Nowhere is the risk of a destabilizing reaction greater than in the act of buying and selling, where expectations of justice intersect with family structures as heads of households strive to provide for and protect the ones they love.
The bulk of this volume is devoted to these marketplace roles. Again taking the first such example, this one from the seventh chapter, the good craftsman is “able, discreet, prudent, resourceful, attentive. The good craftsman [is] a willing worker, patient, calm.” By contrast, you wouldn’t want to hire the “stupid craftsman” who is “careless — a mocker, a petty thief, a pilferer. He acts without consideration; he deceives, he steals.” The same sort of analysis proliferates to all economic roles, from goldworkers to retailers of exotic luxury goods to sellers of flowered sandals, savory meats, luscious fruits, and fine tobacco. When you entered the marketplace of Tlatelolco with fresh cacao beans burning a hole in your pocket, you expected artisans and vendors to offer quality merchandise at a reasonable price, and you expected magistrates and judges to make sure they did. Just as in any modern society, the smooth functioning of the Mexican state depended on a critical mass of people trusting each other and believing that they’re getting a fair shake.
Overshadowing all of this, of course, is the Spanish question. More so than previous volumes, this book is less a painting of a purebred past and more a photograph of a hybrid present. Father Sahagún speaks of grain vendors who deal not only in regional strains of maize but also in Castilian wheat. Hand-drawn illustrations of paper vendors depict Spaniards buying from Spaniards, and the “bad meat seller” is one who “claims dog meat to be edible” — a claim that only a weird foreigner would dispute since other sources confirm that Mexicans found dog delectable enough to serve at weddings. The extent to which Mexican roles were already conforming to Spanish expectations must remain open to debate unless some treasure trove of pre-Hispanic moral treatises emerges from the jungle.
The question of what the Aztecs might have been or become without Spain can never be answered. Perhaps they would have collapsed anyway, whether under ecological stresses, through infiltration by other tribes, or by the blades of their neighbors in a rebound effect from the Aztec state policy of punching down on everyone. Perhaps, though, they might have become something more. Father Sahagún filled the twenty-seventh chapter with a detailed list of Nahuatl words for “the intestines, and of all the internal organs, and of all the external organs, [and] of the joints pertaining to men and pertaining to women.” In this Dibble and Anderson translation, this lexicon of the body is extensive enough to fill 43 pages.
A smoothly-functioning urban society like that of Tenochtitlan does something that no small band of hunter-gatherers can do: it pools enough humans that efficiencies kick in, time expands, and knowledge scales. When a people is sophisticated enough to break down the human body into 43 pages of linguistic detail, it’s on a trajectory toward something bigger than the sum of its parts. Who knows: maybe in some alternate history, the Aztecs would have been designing civilization-building computer games with starting technologies such as featherworking, chinampa farming, and human sacrifice. Thanks to Spain, we’ll never know; but thanks to Father Sahagún, at least we know that Aztec society was just as dependent as our own on shared expectations of justice, doing the right thing, and taking care of the people you love.
The challenge of maintaining a dense urban culture isn’t just for nerdy teenagers, nor is it unique to what Civilization VI developers called the Information Era. In 16th-century Mexico, the Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún compiled the tenth book of his “General History of the Things of New Spain” under the title “Of the vices and virtues of this people.” What he documents in broad, morality-laden couplets are the load-bearing roles supporting the complex urban society that teemed on and around Lake Texcoco.
Take the first role in the first chapter: the Aztec father. A good father is “diligent, solicitous, compassionate, sympathetic; a careful administrator.” He raises his kids and teaches them, advising and admonishing. He’s a guy who “is exemplary; he leads a model life….He regulates, distributes with care, establishes order.” In contrast, a bad father is “lazy, incompassionate, negligent, unreliable. He is unfeeling, neglectful of duty, untrustworthy; a shirker, a loafer, a sullen worker.” Each member of the family operates under similar expectations. There is a way to be a good mother, child, step-child, step-parent, grandparent, great-grandparent, parent-in-law, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, and so forth. There is also a way to fill each role badly, to disappoint your kin and let down your entire society.
Role-based expectations are not limited to urban environments, of course. Marsha Ogilvie drew intriguing conclusions from gendered bone density of North American hunter-gatherers as the gradual adoption of agriculture altered subsistence patterns to favor roving men and sedentary women. Any coherent community, whether a small band of Paleo-Indians hunting mammoths or a multi-city dynastic hegemony building pyramids to the sun, requires a shared language of expectation. If you have no way at all to predict what your neighbor will do next, and no way to define (much less challenge) destructive deviance, your society will fracture or disintegrate under the solvent of mutual distrust.
Where this dynamic gets hard, though, is in complex urban ecosystems. The sheer mass of people, and the sheer number of divergent background cultures, generates two things: a need for a central power capable of enforcing expectations, and the prospect of explosive disintegration if that power presses too hard on such a volatile mix. This is why, in previous volumes, Father Sahagún found that a key responsibility of Tenochtitlan’s nobles was regulation of the marketplace. Nowhere is the risk of a destabilizing reaction greater than in the act of buying and selling, where expectations of justice intersect with family structures as heads of households strive to provide for and protect the ones they love.
The bulk of this volume is devoted to these marketplace roles. Again taking the first such example, this one from the seventh chapter, the good craftsman is “able, discreet, prudent, resourceful, attentive. The good craftsman [is] a willing worker, patient, calm.” By contrast, you wouldn’t want to hire the “stupid craftsman” who is “careless — a mocker, a petty thief, a pilferer. He acts without consideration; he deceives, he steals.” The same sort of analysis proliferates to all economic roles, from goldworkers to retailers of exotic luxury goods to sellers of flowered sandals, savory meats, luscious fruits, and fine tobacco. When you entered the marketplace of Tlatelolco with fresh cacao beans burning a hole in your pocket, you expected artisans and vendors to offer quality merchandise at a reasonable price, and you expected magistrates and judges to make sure they did. Just as in any modern society, the smooth functioning of the Mexican state depended on a critical mass of people trusting each other and believing that they’re getting a fair shake.
Overshadowing all of this, of course, is the Spanish question. More so than previous volumes, this book is less a painting of a purebred past and more a photograph of a hybrid present. Father Sahagún speaks of grain vendors who deal not only in regional strains of maize but also in Castilian wheat. Hand-drawn illustrations of paper vendors depict Spaniards buying from Spaniards, and the “bad meat seller” is one who “claims dog meat to be edible” — a claim that only a weird foreigner would dispute since other sources confirm that Mexicans found dog delectable enough to serve at weddings. The extent to which Mexican roles were already conforming to Spanish expectations must remain open to debate unless some treasure trove of pre-Hispanic moral treatises emerges from the jungle.
The question of what the Aztecs might have been or become without Spain can never be answered. Perhaps they would have collapsed anyway, whether under ecological stresses, through infiltration by other tribes, or by the blades of their neighbors in a rebound effect from the Aztec state policy of punching down on everyone. Perhaps, though, they might have become something more. Father Sahagún filled the twenty-seventh chapter with a detailed list of Nahuatl words for “the intestines, and of all the internal organs, and of all the external organs, [and] of the joints pertaining to men and pertaining to women.” In this Dibble and Anderson translation, this lexicon of the body is extensive enough to fill 43 pages.
A smoothly-functioning urban society like that of Tenochtitlan does something that no small band of hunter-gatherers can do: it pools enough humans that efficiencies kick in, time expands, and knowledge scales. When a people is sophisticated enough to break down the human body into 43 pages of linguistic detail, it’s on a trajectory toward something bigger than the sum of its parts. Who knows: maybe in some alternate history, the Aztecs would have been designing civilization-building computer games with starting technologies such as featherworking, chinampa farming, and human sacrifice. Thanks to Spain, we’ll never know; but thanks to Father Sahagún, at least we know that Aztec society was just as dependent as our own on shared expectations of justice, doing the right thing, and taking care of the people you love.
December 31, 2023
I'm so glad and thankful for Sahagun's dedication on this project.
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