How do we know Tenochtitlan had a zoo?

There’s considerable evidence in the writings both of the Spanish chroniclers and of the Nahua scribes and wise old men whose knowledge was documented by the great Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, in the 16th century. Sahagún’s monumental, almost encyclopedic, work, has come down to us as the Florentine Codex. In Book VIII we find the illustration above and references to what we would call zookeepers - ‘caretakers of wild animals, majordomos there guarded all the wild animals: ocelots, bears, mountain lions, and mountain cats... eagles... and various birds’ - all things designed ‘to bring [ruling] men pleasure’.

Bernal Díaz de Castillo, a chronicler and soldier who witnessed the conquest - and wrote of it in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, described zoos and aviaries attached to palaces in both Texcoco and Tenochtitlan. He claims, without direct evidence, that the wild animals of Moctezuma’s zoo (‘every kind of beast of prey... most of which were bred there) ‘were fed on deer, fowls, little dogs, and other creatures which they hunt, and also, I am told, on the bodies of the Indians they sacrificed...’

‘The ruler’s animals’, Florentine Codex, Book VIII