{
  "id": "duran-historia-de-las-indias-de-nueva-espana",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Diego Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España (written 1579-1581, printed 1867)",
  "summary": "A Dominican's history of the Mexica, built from their own painted books and from old men who remembered, finished in 1581 and left unprinted for nearly three centuries. When it was finally set in type in Mexico City in 1867 the authorship line of the manuscript had been scratched out by someone trying to pass the work off as his own, and the editor who recovered the name was himself being driven out of the country as the sheets went through the press.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "new-spain",
    "ethnography",
    "books",
    "printing",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "nineteenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "leon-y-gama-dos-piedras-1792"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "valades-rhetorica-christiana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "barrios-verdadera-medicina-1607"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "lagunas-arte-y-dictionario-1574"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "codice-ramirez"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alvarado-tezozomoc-cronica-mexicana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "chimalpahin-relaciones-de-chalco-amaquemecan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relacion-de-michoacan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "serna-manual-de-ministros-de-indios"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who was Diego Duran and what did he write?",
    "How did Spanish friars record Mexica history?",
    "Why was Duran's history of the Indies not printed until 1867?",
    "What sources did sixteenth-century chroniclers of the Mexica actually use?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page of the volume read here reads \"HISTORIA DE LAS INDIAS DE NUEVA-ESPAÑA Y ISLAS DE TIERRA FIRME, POR EL PADRE FRAY DIEGO DURAN, RELIGIOSO DE LA ORDEN DE PREDICADORES (ESCRITOR DEL SIGLO XVI). LA PUBLICA CON UN ATLAS DE ESTAMPAS, NOTAS E ILUSTRACIONES, JOSE F. RAMIREZ\", and the imprint is \"MEXICO, IMPRENTA DE J. M. ANDRADE Y F. ESCALANTE, BAJOS DE SAN AGUSTIN NUM. 1, 1867\", tomo I.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The dates of composition are given in the introduction and in the manuscript itself. The editor states that in 1579 the author wrote the treatises forming the second and third parts of the work, and in 1581 the first; and that at the head of the calendar treatise, after three erased lines, stands the note \"acabose el año de 1579\". The book therefore reached print in 1867, some two hundred and eighty-six years after the date its first part carries.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Those three erased lines are the reason the author nearly lost his book. The editor reports that Gonzalez de Vera, examining the erasure against the sunlight, read \"clara y distintamente\" the words \"por el padre frai diego duran religioso de la orden de los predicadores\", and concludes that whoever made the deletion \"tuvo la intencion de apropiarse el trabajo del autor, haciendolo pasar por suyo\". He adds that he has seen the same thing done to a manuscript of Mariano Veytia.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The author's own account of his method opens the first chapter, and it is an account of working from Mexican sources rather than from Spanish ones. He has proceeded, he writes, \"como de su relacion y pinturas se colige, y como de algunos viejos ancianos, de muchos dias, he procurado saber para sacar esta opinion en limpio\" - from the painted books and from old men questioned over many days. He also states what those sources do not settle: the peoples themselves \"ignoran su origen y principio\", though they always confess to having come from strange lands.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "He reads the paintings as corroboration of a biblical thesis, and the thesis is his own conjecture rather than a finding. Having found painted \"grandes trabajos de hambre, sed y desnudez\" endured on the way to this land, he writes that this confirms \"mi opinion y sospecha de que estos naturales sean de aquellas diez tribus de Israel, que Salmanasar, Rey de los Asirios, cautivo y trasmigro de Asiria\". The framework he brings to the Mexican past is scriptural, and this object records that as plainly as it records his use of native evidence.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The same opening chapter registers the demographic catastrophe as a thing within living memory. He writes of the number of people found in the land as it was seen \"antes de aquella gran mortandad quel año tres uvo, donde murio tanto numero de gente\". The 1867 editor's footnote does not smooth the passage over: it calls the date defective in every sense, notes that it cannot be reconciled with any of the great pestilences - 1520, 1545, 1576 - and reports that in the original codex the words first written were \"que agora treinta y tres años\" before the figure was struck out and emended.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Who the author was is contested in the volume itself, and the contest is worth keeping open. The editor records that Davila Padilla, who is thought to have known him, and Beristain after him, made him a native of Tezcoco; the editor rejects that, judges from unpublished documents that the author was \"originario de Mexico, y uno de los primeros frutos de los enlaces legitimos de los españoles con las hijas del pais\", and holds that his birth cannot be placed later than 1538. This is a nineteenth-century editor's conclusion from papers he does not print in these pages, set against two earlier attributions, and it is reported here as such.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.5
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The recovery of the text was itself precarious, and the editor says so. Explaining why he split the printing into two volumes, he writes that \"los graves acontecimientos que se precipitan a mi derredor y me lanzan a tierras extrañas\" force him to cut where the break is least violent, and that the division at least secures \"completo el primer periodo de nuestra historia\" against the loss of the work and of the money spent on it. The first volume ends at chapter LXVIII, with the rumours reaching Motecuhzoma of the coming of strangers.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "What this volume is, and is not, should be stated. It is a nineteenth-century transcription of a manuscript, not the manuscript, and the editor's footnotes show him emending and disputing his own text; the sixteenth-century author's words reach a reader here at one remove. The author was a religious of the Order of Preachers writing about a religion his order existed to replace, and the old men and painters on whose testimony the history rests appear in it as a category and not as named informants. None of that is a reason to leave the book out of the account of how the Mexican past was preserved; it is part of the account.",
      "sources": [
        "duran-historia-indias-nueva-espana-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Duran is cited constantly in English as a source for Mexica history and almost never described as an object with a history of its own. This object opens the 1867 editio princeps and takes four things straight from the sheets that general accounts leave out: the erased authorship line and its recovery against the sunlight, which shows a colonial manuscript nearly stolen outright from its author; the author's own statement that he worked from painted books and from old men questioned over many days; his scriptural conjecture about the ten tribes, quoted rather than tidied away; and the editor's admission, printed in 1867, that he was cutting the work in two because events were driving him out of the country. It also states what the volume cannot do - the text arrives through a transcription, and the informants are unnamed.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-10",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/duran-historia-de-las-indias-de-nueva-espana",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/duran-historia-de-las-indias-de-nueva-espana.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Diego Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España (written 1579-1581, printed 1867)",
    "description": "A Dominican's history of the Mexica, built from their own painted books and from old men who remembered, finished in 1581 and left unprinted for nearly three centuries. When it was finally set in type in Mexico City in 1867 the authorship line of the manuscript had been scratched out by someone trying to pass the work off as his own, and the editor who recovered the name was himself being driven out of the country as the sheets went through the press.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/duran-historia-de-las-indias-de-nueva-espana",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-10",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España y islas de Tierra Firme, por el padre fray Diego Duran, religioso de la Orden de Predicadores (escritor del siglo XVI), tomo I",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=b9wCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR1"
      }
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Diego Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España (written 1579-1581, printed 1867)"
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}