Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and the Cronica mexicana of about 1598
A Mexica noble wrote the history of Tenochtitlan in Spanish about 1598, in a hundred and ten chapters built almost entirely out of speeches - the elders in council, the embassies, the demands of tribute. Two nineteenth-century authorities declared the book lost while copies of it sat in Mexican libraries; its first printing was made in London in 1848 inside a folio so costly that the work stayed effectively unpublished until a Mexico City press set it in 1878.
Why this wins its question: General accounts of the Aztec past cite Tezozomoc as a name in a source list and then quote him as if the text were stable. This object supplies the chain that decides how far the citation can be trusted: the 1598 dating taken from the work's own folio, the Boturini original and the Veytia and Archivo copies between it and every modern reading, the 1792 certification of the copy, the two missing chapters that the catalogues insist on and the printed copy does not have, the offered second part nobody has found, and the fact that the book was first printed in London in a folio almost nobody could use. It also keeps the two indigenous historiographies apart rather than merging them, printing the nineteenth-century judgement that Tezozomoc treats Texcoco as a vassal of Mexico while Alva Ixtlilxochitl puts Texcoco first - and it prints the same volume's demolition of a biographical claim about the author that had been repeated for decades.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The volume read here is the Mexico printing of 1878 in the series whose half-title reads BIBLIOTECA MEXICANA and whose sheets are signed CRONICA at the foot; it prints the Cronica mexicana together with the manuscript the same volume names the Codice Ramirez and a long editorial introduction. The imprint line - Imprenta y litografia de I. Paz, Mexico, 1878 - is taken from the volume's catalogue record and not from the title leaf, which is one of the few pages of this digitisation that would not open.
The date and the manuscript line are stated in an Advertencia by Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta which the 1878 introduction reprints. The chronicle was written about 1598, as deduced from its own text at folio 358 verso; the original manuscript belonged to Lorenzo Boturini and stands in his catalogue at number 11 of section VIII; from Boturini's original the historian Mariano Veytia had a copy made, and from that copy came the one in the Archivo General de la Nacion. A certification printed in the same introduction, signed by Fr. Francisco Garcia Figueroa at Mexico on 21 November 1792, states that the chronicle was copied exactly from a copy that had belonged to Veytia.
The book was twice pronounced lost by men who should have known. Beristain gave it up for lost in his Biblioteca Hispano Americana Septentrional; Lucas Alaman, following him, wrote in the Disertaciones that the work "al presente no existe, y todos estos tesoros historicos desaparecieron con los jesuitas". The 1878 editor observes that this last assertion was made precisely when a larger number of copies of the work existed than at any earlier time.
What the chronicle contains was summarised in 1792 by the friar who assembled the collection it passed through, and the summary is printed in the 1878 volume - "En ciento y diez capitulos detalla el Autor el origen de sus Nacionales; su establecimiento en Tenoxtitlan; sus adversidades, progresos, monarquia, guerras, conquistas y vicisitudes; presenta agradables noticias de sus Reyes, estatuas, valor, costumbres, politica, utensilios, vestuarios", then its religion, idols, priests, sacrifices of slaves, honours to the war dead, the arrival of Cortes, and "tristeza, abatimiento y ardides de Moctezuma".
Two gaps in the text are on the record and neither is resolved. Boturini's printed catalogue and the inventory made by the fiscal both say the chronicle has 112 chapters, while the copy printed here has 110 with no lacuna visible at the beginning or the end; and a citation by Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora of chapter 82 of the work answers to chapter 80 of this copy, which places the discrepancy inside the first eighty chapters. The author also ends by offering to continue in "otro cuaderno", which has been taken to mean a second part on the Spanish conquest; the editor of the copy states that he has found no notice that convinces him it ever existed.
The chronicle's form is political oratory, and it is what makes the work unlike a Spanish narrative of the same events. In the passage read here the Mexica elders tell the newly seated king Huitzilihuitl that they are subject to servitude in the land of the Tecpanecs and vassals of Tezozomoctli of Azcapotzalco because they sit on other people's ground; the senate then holds a cabildo in which the oldest speaker asks whether the new king brings any rest from serving so many lords at once - the Tecpanecs of Azcapotzalco, the lords of Aculhuacan, the lords of Culhuacan - and resolves to send an embassy asking Tezozomoctli for his only daughter as wife for their king. The old men go as ambassadors carrying white fish and frogs, the food of a lake people, and address the Azcapotzalco king as "los miserables mexicanos".
Its partisanship is precise and was named by its own nineteenth-century readers. The introduction to the French translation of 1853, reprinted in the 1878 volume, sets the work beside Alva Ixtlilxochitl's - the Texcocan prince of the royal blood always puts his own nation first, "mientras que Tezozomoc la considera siempre como vasalla de los mexicanos" - and judges that Tezozomoc "parece un historiador fiel y exacto, aunque levante fuera de medida a los aztecas". The two indigenous historians of central Mexico are therefore read against each other, not merged.
The biography attached to the author is thinner than the work's fame suggests and the 1878 editor demolishes part of it in his own text. Veytia says he descended from the kings of Azcapotzalco and wrote about 1598, which would put his youth within reach of old men who had seen the empire of Motecuhzoma standing. Carlos Maria Bustamante had written that Chimalpahin translated the chronicle into Castilian in 1598; the editor answers that Bustamante turns Alvarado into Alva, that the author demonstrably wrote in Spanish and not in Nahuatl, that nothing supports the Chimalpahin story, and that "en este capitulo no merece el menor credito". Ternaux Compans is corrected in the same paragraphs for giving the author the baptismal name Alvaro.
The publication history is a fact about access rather than about scholarship. The work first saw the light in 1848, in Lord Kingsborough's Antiquities of Mexico, tomo IX, pages 1 to 196, under the title Cronica mexicana por Fernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc - a beautiful and costly printing which the 1878 editor calls almost useless to ordinary readers, since its price puts it beyond reach and its maximum-folio volumes are impossible to handle, so that the work remained as if unpublished. He notes what that means: the first edition of a Mexica author's history of Mexico was made in London while in Mexico the chronicle was known only to a few curious men.