Article suitable for Top Juniors and above

‘Codex Corner’: playing with fire

21st Jun 2024

Facsimile of the screenfold Codex Borgia, showing burnt pages

Some of the stories behind - and fates of - the few surviving ancient Mesoamerican books are truly extraordinary. Take the Codex Borgia (currently held in the Vatican Library in Rome) for instance: here we quote from María Sten’s excellent little introduction Codices of Mexico, originally written in Spanish in 1972...

The story of the Codex Borgia, the book of prophecies (considered the most perfect model of the Ceremonial Calendar), is so incredible that it sounds like fiction. Many competent people have written descriptions of it, among them Baron Alexander von Humboldt. Through the nobleman Camilo Borgia, a nephew of the cardinal of the same name, von Humboldt was able to study the manuscript directly. He writes: “I believe the codex belonged to the family of the Giustiniani princes.” We do not know by what unfortunate coincidence it reached the hands of the servants who, not understanding the value of the unusual figures, turned it over to the children of the house as a plaything.

But fate, that great friend of science, had the cultured Cardinal Stefano Borgia walk through the halls of the palace at that precise moment... The Cardinal was a connoisseur of ancient art, a famous collector of both pagan and Christian antiques, who did not hesitate to sell even the buckles of his shoes in order to buy a coin or other object that interested him, his biographers write. He was a passionate archaeologist and linguist who knew many languages, among them Ethiopian, Armenian, Hebrew, Malabar, and a number of Hindu dialects. How was such a man not to stop short upon seeing a rare manuscript in the hands of children! The cardinal acted swiftly, but the children had already burned the first and last pages...