The Codex Mendoza Was an Aztec Tax Record Commissioned by Spain

Around 1541, Antonio de Mendoza, the first Spanish viceroy of New Spain, commissioned a comprehensive record of the Aztec Empire he was administering. He wanted to understand what it was — its history, its tribute system, the daily rhythms of its people — partly for practical governance and partly to send back to Charles V in Spain. He hired Aztec scribes to draw it.

The result was the Codex Mendoza: 71 folios of pictorial Nahuatl writing accompanied by Spanish glosses added by a friar who interviewed the scribes as they worked. The first section recounts the reigns of Aztec rulers and the cities they conquered, illustrated with dates in the Aztec calendar. The second is a tribute registry — town by town, showing exactly what each vassal community owed the Triple Alliance every eighty days: so many warrior costumes, so many jaguar skins, so many bushels of cacao. The third section depicts the Aztec life cycle from birth to death: the education of children, the punishments for drunkenness, the training of warriors.

Mendoza shipped the finished codex to Spain in 1549. A French privateer intercepted the vessel and took the manuscript to France, where it passed through several hands before ending up in the library of the geographer André Thevet. An Englishman bought it in 1587, and eventually the Bodleian Library at Oxford acquired it, where it has been held since 1659.

What makes the Codex Mendoza unusual is that it was written by the conquered to explain themselves to the conquerors — a record of a living administrative system, not a post-conquest reconstruction. The tribute lists are specific enough that historians have used them to map the exact geographical reach of Aztec power in the years before contact.