Working With Aztec Accounts of the Conquest
If you have ever sat down to actually read through Aztec perspective sources on the conquest, you quickly realize the material is messy. You are not getting a single coherent narrative. What you are getting is a collage of translations, fragments, and later copies made by people who had their own agendas. The main sources you will run into are the Florentine Codex, the works of Diego Durán, the chronicle of Chimalpahin, and various Nahuatl-language responses compiled by early colonial scribes. Each one comes with its own baggage. The Florentine Codex took decades to compile and was read back to indigenous elders long after the events. Durán was a Dominican friar writing from Spain with a clear theological purpose. Chimalpahin wrote a century later and drew on family oral tradition and earlier documents that may no longer exist.
How to Navigate the Aztec Account Of The Conquest Of Mexico Sources
Start by picking a translation you trust. Dibble and Sanderson's version of the Florentine Codex is the standard for scholarly work, though it is expensive and voluminous. For something more accessible, the selections compiled by James Lockhart in "We People Here" pull from a wide range of Nahuatl documents and include useful commentary. If you are working with primary source material in an academic setting, you will want to cross-reference at least two translations before citing anything. Here is where people tend to slip up. They treat the Florentine Codex as a pure indigenous voice. It is not. Sahagún designed the questionnaire structure. He chose which answers to record. He shaped the narrative through his own Franciscan lens. The Nahuatl texts were translated by interpreters who were often trained in Spanish conventions of rhetoric and history. The resulting text is filtered at multiple layers. That does not make it worthless. It makes it complicated. When I was working through the Tlaxcala accounts for a project a few years back, I kept running into passages that felt strangely defensive in tone. Tlaxcala had allied with Cortés, and the accounts from that region reflect a political calculation that was still relevant in the late colonial period. The same event gets described differently depending on where the narrator's community stood. I learned to flag the provenance of each passage before drawing conclusions. If the source came from a formerly rebellious city-state versus a former ally, the framing would shift significantly.
Another thing that trips people up is the date problem. Many of these accounts were written down decades after 1521. Memory degrades. Political circumstances change. A text copied in the 1570s may not reflect what someone actually remembered from the 1520s. It reflects what their community believed about the past in the 1570s, which is still valuable data, just not the data some readers are looking for. When you need a straightforward chronological baseline alongside the indigenous accounts, Anthony Pagden's translations of Cortés's letters and the selection by J.M. Cohen titled "The Conquest of New Spain" provide the Spanish side. Read them in parallel. The discrepancies between the two sides are often where the useful history lives. One more practical note: if you are working from digitized versions online, check whether the scan matches the published translation. Some open-access archives have images but no reliable transcription. I once spent hours trying to parse a blurry Nahua manuscript image only to realize a clean transcription existed in the Stanford Latinate collection. Always look for the transcription first, then verify against the original when the passage matters to your argument.
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