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‘Codex Corner’: conquest

17th Dec 2023

‘Codex Corner’: conquest

Burning temple pyramid of Tlatelolco, Codex Mendoza fol. 10

We all know that the Mexica (Aztecs) were on a mission to dominate their known world. They didn’t do badly: by the time the Spanish invaders appeared they had already subjugated close to 400 towns or small city-states, comprising several million inhabitants. The Codex Mendoza records most of these. Shown here (main pic) is a detail from fol. 10r, depicting the famous defeat of Tlatelolco at the hands of Triple Alliance forces under Aztec ruler Axayacatl, in 1473. The Tlatelolcan leader, Moquihuix, falls dead from the main temple, in full regalia. It is the burning of their temple that ‘officially’ symbolised the defeat of an enemy for the Aztecs... (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

In the following page from the Codex, which we’ve animated, we see 25 towns out of a total of 37 that successively fell to the Aztecs under Axayacatl, each town individually named with its toponym and Spanish gloss. The burning of the enemy’s major temple ‘symbolised the supremacy of the Mexica god Huitzilopochtli over the local patron deity’ (Frances Berdan).

Info from The Essential Codex Mendoza by Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt (University of California Press, 1997).
Quote from The Aztecs of Central Mexico: An Imperial Society by Frances F. Berdan, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1982, p. 109.
Images scanned from our own copy of the 1938 James Cooper Clark facsimile edition (London) of the Codex Mendoza (original in the Bodleian Library, Oxford).

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‘Codex Corner’: conquest

Burning temple pyramid of Tlatelolco, Codex Mendoza fol. 10

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