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‘Codex Corner’: Night Flight from Tenochtitlan

17th May 2021

‘Codex Corner’: Night Flight from Tenochtitlan

The Spanish under Cortés flee Tenochtitlan on the Sad Night, Lienzo de Tlaxcala fol. 18

How did the Mexica (Aztec) scribes depict in hieroglyphic writing the flight of the Spanish under Hernando Cortés (June 30th. 1520)? In the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (written/drawn in the second half of the 16th century), Indigenous writers included a simple but easy-to-miss glyph to indicate the event... Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

Perhaps symbolically, almost poking Cortés in the face is the hoof of a deer - an age-old symbol for fleeing at speed. The Nahuatl word for ‘flee’ is choloa. The glyph is attached to the bottom of the famous ‘Tree of the Sad Night’, in the top right corner of the scene, in which the routed Spanish are harried on both sides by Mexica warriors.

Info from Johansson, Patrick K. ‘Cuitláhuac: la visión de un vencedor’, Arqueología Mexicana no. 167, Mar-Apr 2021, pp. 78-85
Image sources:-
• Colour image from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala downloaded from http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/tlaxcala/Tlaxcala-lienzo.pdf
• B/W image scanned from our own copy of ‘Lienzo de Tlaxcala’ (Alfredo Chavero edition, 1892), Artes de México no. 51/52, Vol XI, 1964.

See another example of the use of the deer’s hoof as symbol of speed...

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‘Codex Corner’: Night Flight from Tenochtitlan

The Spanish under Cortés flee Tenochtitlan on the Sad Night, Lienzo de Tlaxcala fol. 18

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