{ "id": "codice-ramirez", "type": "entity", "name": "The Codice Ramirez - an anonymous Nahua history recovered in 1856, printed in 1878", "summary": "A sixteenth-century manuscript written in two columns with the right-hand column left blank, which its finder read as a Spanish translation of a Nahuatl original by an indigenous layman. It was pulled out of a Mexico City convent being demolished on a September night in 1856, and when it was printed in 1878 the editor showed that it is the core of Diego Duran's famous history, copied almost word for word, and behind the passages of Acosta that made his reputation.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "historiography", "indigenous-peoples", "new-spain", "ethnography", "books", "printing", "mexico", "sixteenth-century" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "duran-historia-de-las-indias-de-nueva-espana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "acosta-historia-natural-y-moral-1590" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "alvarado-tezozomoc-cronica-mexicana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "munoz-camargo-historia-de-tlaxcala" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "fernando-de-alva-ixtlilxochitl" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "hernan-cortes" } ], "questions": [ "What is the Codice Ramirez?", "Who wrote the Relacion del origen de los indios that Duran used?", "Did Diego Duran copy an indigenous manuscript?", "Where did Jose de Acosta get his account of the Mexica?", "What do indigenous sources say about the massacre at Cholula?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The manuscript was saved by an inventory ordered in the middle of a demolition. In an Advertencia printed at the head of the 1878 text its finder writes that he discovered the manuscript in the convento grande de San Francisco of Mexico City \"al tiempo de la barbara destruccion, efectuada por orden del gobierno, so pretexto de una conspiracion, en la noche del 16 de Setiembre de 1856\"; that the Minister of Fomento Manuel Siliceo commissioned him, with Manuel Orozco, to inventory the books and papers so as to preserve them from the demolishers, by which the library and the archive were saved; and that he obtained the manuscript as a gift from the provincial, Fr. Buenaventura Homedes.", "sources": [ "cronica-mexicana-1878-aparato-editorial" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The physical description carries the argument about the language. The original is a volume in quarto of 269 leaves in a very small sixteenth-century hand with compact lines, laid out in two columns of which only the left is written, the right having been left blank - which suggested to the finder that the blank column was meant to receive a text in another language, probably Nahuatl, and that what stands written is therefore a translation. He also reports that the volume was bound in parchment and in such confusion that it looked at first like a collection of fragments; taking it apart yielded one fairly complete work and three fragments.", "sources": [ "cronica-mexicana-1878-aparato-editorial" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The case that the author was an indigenous layman is made from the text's own asymmetries, and every item of it cuts against the colonial authorities. The etymologies and translations of Mexican names; the praise and particular esteem with which the Mexicans are spoken of beside other peoples; the laconism with which the text mentions, without excusing it, the killing the Spaniards did at Cholula; the horrible description it gives of the one Alvarado carried out among the Mexica nobility, without justifying it and admitting the greed of the conquerors among the motives; the coldness and even contempt with which it speaks of Motecuhzoma in describing his death, which it attributes to the Spaniards themselves; and the severity with which it treats the clergy, stating that Motecuhzoma was not baptised because the priest who came with the Spaniards \"se ocupo mas en buscar riquezas con los soldados, que no en cathequizar al pobre Rey\".", "sources": [ "cronica-mexicana-1878-aparato-editorial" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The Cholula passage in the text itself reads as flatly as that summary promises. The Tlaxcalans and the people of Cempohuallan march with the Spaniards; on reaching the city a proclamation is made in the name of \"el capitan Don Hernando Cortes\" that all the principales of Cholula assemble in the patio of the great temple; when the patio is full the Spaniards take its three entrances, the horsemen come in through all three and begin to lance those inside, \"haziendo alli gran matanza de aquellos pobres\", after which the whole town fled and abandoned the city. The same page records the impostor dressed in Motecuhzoma's clothes whom the Tlaxcalans identified for Cortes as Tzihuacpopoca.", "sources": [ "codice-ramirez-relacion-1878" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The manuscript is undated and its author unnamed, which the same Advertencia states plainly - \"El MS. no presenta indicacion alguna por la cual pueda venirse en conocimiento de su fecha\". The dating to about the middle of the sixteenth century is an inference from two internal marks: the author says of one episode that he heard it from eyewitnesses, and he speaks of the ruins of the great temple as still standing. Every attribution that follows rests on that inference and should be carried at its strength, not above it.", "sources": [ "cronica-mexicana-1878-aparato-editorial" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The find settled a question of borrowing that had been argued for two centuries. The Advertencia states that the whole core of the Dominican Diego Duran's Historia de los Indios - its ritual part finished in 1579 and its historical part in 1581 - is this manuscript, copied in general so nearly word for word that the finder could use Duran's text to repair the omissions and errors of his own copyist; Duran did no more than amplify the narration with numerous details and other traditions he collected from contemporaries, until it stood five or six times the size of the original. The discovery also resolves the disputed charge against Jose de Acosta, whose Historia natural y moral de las Indias made his fame: Davila Padilla had written of Duran's works that \"parte de ellos estan ya impresos\" in Acosta's natural and moral philosophy, \"a quien los dio el P. Juan de Tobar\".", "sources": [ "cronica-mexicana-1878-aparato-editorial" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The name and the copy are both nineteenth-century acts, and the editor's note says so. The text sees the light publicly for the first time in the 1878 printing; the copy used is the one the finder had made, a smaller quarto of 446 pages in a clean hand with marginal notes in his own hand and his signature at the end preceded by the word \"Cotejada\"; at his death the manuscript passed to Alfredo Chavero, who gave it to Manuel Orozco y Berra with a dedication dated Mexico, 27 May 1875 - \"Al mejor de nuestros historiadores, la mejor de nuestras Cronicas\" - and the two of them gave the manuscript the name Codice Ramirez to honour the memory of the scholar who found and preserved it. What is printed is therefore a copy of a copy of a translation, and the object of study is anonymous.", "sources": [ "cronica-mexicana-1878-aparato-editorial" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Duran and Acosta are cited constantly as European authorities on the Mexica, and the manuscript that sits underneath both of them is usually mentioned, if at all, as a bibliographic curiosity called the Codice Ramirez. This object puts the underlying text in the foreground with its own evidence attached: the night in 1856 on which it was pulled out of a convent being demolished, the blank second column that is the whole argument for a lost Nahuatl original, the six textual features by which its finder judged the author an indigenous layman, the Cholula massacre as the text itself narrates it, and the demonstration that Duran's celebrated history is this manuscript amplified five or six times. It also refuses the flattering version of its own case: the work is anonymous, undated, and reaches print as a copy of a copy of a translation, and the claim of priority over Duran is a nineteenth-century editor's argument rather than a document.", "confidence": 0.75, "last_verified": "2026-08-13", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/codice-ramirez", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/codice-ramirez.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The Codice Ramirez - an anonymous Nahua history recovered in 1856, printed in 1878", "description": "A sixteenth-century manuscript written in two columns with the right-hand column left blank, which its finder read as a Spanish translation of a Nahuatl original by an indigenous layman. It was pulled out of a Mexico City convent being demolished on a September night in 1856, and when it was printed in 1878 the editor showed that it is the core of Diego Duran's famous history, copied almost word for word, and behind the passages of Acosta that made his reputation.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/codice-ramirez", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-13", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Editorial front matter of the Cronica mexicana of 1878 - the Advertencia of Jose Fernando Ramirez on the Codice Ramirez, the editor's note on it, and the introduction to the chronicle", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=aciARt20b0QC&pg=PA155" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Relacion del origen de los indios que habitan esta Nueva España - the anonymous sixteenth-century text known as the Codice Ramirez, as first printed", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=aciARt20b0QC&pg=PA85" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Codice Ramirez - an anonymous Nahua history recovered in 1856, printed in 1878" } }