inTRoducTion • 5Mendoza folio 2r serves as both an introductory statement
and an opening scene, a painted preamble to the history on
the pages that follow. It shows in simplified graphic form
the city of Tenochtitlan, not as the full-grown city of ca.
1542 that its makers knew firsthand, but as the city at the
moment of its foundation in 1325. It is a simple settlement,
a small island surrounded by a rectangular band of blue
water, with canals dividing the space of the nascent city
into four triangular plots. Rudimentary architecture is
included: a little green thatched-roof hut is at top, while a
skull-rack (tzompantli), where a skull is pinioned at center
right, shows the residue of ritual sacrifice. The early city is
unlikely to have had such an ordered appearance; instead,
the artists employed the quadripartite scheme because it
was conceptually and aesthetically important within the
larger world of Nahuatl speakers, whom modern scholars
call the Nahua. They held that quadripartite arrangements
in politics and architectural design, as well as urban spaces,
were conducive to harmony in those entire arenas. At the
center of the page, we find a concise icon of the city’s foun-
dation. Here the eagle of Huitzilopochtli is seen alighting
on the nopal cactus to tell his people to found their city
on that spot. Thus, as told by the Codex Mendoza, the
history of the Mexica people began only with their estab-
lishment as an urban people in a carefully manipulated
space, this city brought into being through being named:
Tenochtitlan, whose distinctive glyph, combining the sym-
bols for “rock” and “prickly-pear cactus,” is set at the center
of the page.
This city’s political elites figure prominently in the
image. In the quadrants, the ten tribal leaders of the Mexica
cluster, each marked with a pictographic or hieroglyphic
name written in the iconic script developed in the pre-
Hispanic period. The black-faced figure at the center left
is named with a hieroglyph whose central component is
the nopal cactus. The nopal rises from the glyph for “stone,”
an oval shape with foliate ends painted yellow and gray.
Together, these hieroglyphs (for te and noch) yield the
name of Tenoch, the tribal leader and priest who was the
leader of the ethnic chiefs shown here as city founders.
As such, Tenoch would lend his name to the city itself.
This connection is made clear by the central icon of the
page that anchors the page’s whole design at the crossing
canals. Here, in the same horizontal register as Tenoch’s
name, we find another, similar name comprising a nopal
and stone written in iconic script, and that is the name of
the city, Tenochtitlan. To emphasize that this is indeed a
place-name, one of the scribes who worked on the manu-
script has written the name in the Latin alphabet below.
The name of Tenoch, the tribal leader, is one with the
emergent city. His reign is also set into a near-ideal cycle of
time. Around the edge of the page is a band made of fifty-
one small squares, all colored a brilliant turquoise, each
one representing a year in the native calendar; Tenoch’s
rule falls one short of the auspicious Nahua century of
fifty-two years.
On the most basic level, the page, with its encircling
turquoise band, points to the Mexicas’ own historical tra-
dition, wherein they kept written records in a time-line
presentation, or annals format. 10 The brilliant band of
turquoise years introduces another point: that the writer
of this history has chosen to divide the continuous and
seamless flow of time into even units of solar years and
then to group those years irregularly, according to the life-
span of a seated ruler. Such division enables the imposition
of a particular narrative shape and limit to the potentially
infinite number of events a history could include. Here, its
arc is determined by a ruler’s life. As the subsequent pages
of the Codex Mendoza show, the focus of Tenochtitlan’s
history falls almost exclusively on the figure of the ruler
and his conquests.
Folio 15v is the first of three pages to document the
reign of Moteuczoma II (r. 1502–1520), whom the Codex
Mendoza presents as the last ruler, the end of the series of
nine who followed Tenoch (figure 1.4). This page is like the
other pages that chronicle these rulers in format and infor-
mation: the figure of the ruler, contained within the gen-
eral grid-like schema of the page, is seen at the middle left.
He is distinguished by seat and crown, and a glyph for his
name is attached to his head. In this case, the leftmost band
of the page gives us the count of the first sixteen years of
his reign, the bright blue year symbols corresponding in the
Gregorian calendar to 1502–1518 ce. In front of Moteuc-
zoma is a round shield decorated with seven tufts of eagle
down, with four spears visible behind it, a symbol of his
prowess as a warrior. His abilities are further attested to
by the sixteen icons of temples on this page—their yellow-
gold thatched roofs set ajar and flames emerging from the
right—that show Moteuczoma’s conquests (they continue
on the pages that follow). Each one of them is attached on
the left to a place-name that identifies it as a distinct city
or town, once independent but now being brought under
the sway of Tenochtitlan and its ruling lords.
On this page as on others previous, the death of a ruler