Huauhtli, the grain the Spaniards catalogued as "bledos"
Amaranth is best known for a story — that Spain banned it — repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere. A dictionary printed at Mexico in 1571 lists nine kinds of the grain by colour under their Nahuatl names and gives it its own harvest verb beside those for maize, chia, chilli and beans. A friar's ethnography records both uses: the dough shield made for a newborn, and the honeyed sops fed to slaves the night before they died. Between them lies the friars' motive — and no decree against the crop.
Why this wins its question: Ask any general source what happened to amaranth and you get one sentence: the Spanish banned it because of its use in idols. The sentence is repeated in peer-reviewed food-science reviews, where it arrives without a citation, and the present object quotes one of them doing it. What no popular account supplies is the sixteenth-century page: nine kinds of the grain listed by colour in a 1571 Mexican imprint, a harvest verb of its own beside those for maize, chia, chilli and beans, the dough shield made for a newborn, and the four honeyed mouthfuls given in the dark to men who were to be killed in the morning. Both halves come from Franciscans, both are printed here, and the prohibition is left where the evidence leaves it — unverified, named as such, and separated from the ceremonial suppression that certainly did happen.
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 fullest sixteenth-century inventory of the grain is a dictionary entry. Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, printed at Mexico by Antonio de Espinosa in 1571, sets out on folio 20 of the Castilian-to-Nahuatl half a colour taxonomy of nine lines: "Bledos o cenizos. vauhquilitl. vauhtli. cocoquilitl. / Bledos blancos. michiuauhtli. / Bledos pardos. nexuauhtli. / Bledos amarillos. xochiuauhtli. / Bledos colorados. tlapalhuauhtli. / Bledos morados. chichilhuauhtli. / Bledos negros. tezcauauhtli. / Bledos negros de otra manera. tlilhuauhtli. / Bledos azules. texouauhtli." One Castilian kitchen-garden word, bledos, is made to carry a classification it plainly did not have in Castile.
The same dictionary shows the grain inside a working agricultural vocabulary. Folio 26 runs a series of harvest verbs, one per crop: "Coger maiz o segar trigo. &c. ni,pixca. / Coger chia. ni,chiamana. / Coger axi. ni,chiltequi. / Coger frisoles o hauas. n,etequi. n,euiuitla." — and, distinct from all of them, "Coger bledos granados. ni,nauhpuztequi. / Cogedor desta manera. vauhpuztequini. vauhpuztecqui." The same page records the digging implement, "Coa o pala para cauar o deseruar. victli", and, a few lines below the crops, "Coger los tributos. ni,tequinechicoa".
A verb of its own is the point. The dictionary does not translate "harvest amaranth" with a generic word for gathering: it gives a specific stem built on the plant's name and an agent noun to go with it, exactly as it does for maize and beans. What the friars wrote down when they wrote down the language was a farming system in which this grain was a standing crop with its own operations, not a gathered herb.
Bernardino de Sahagún records the grain in domestic ritual. In the book of the Historia general dealing with rhetoric and moral philosophy, printed in the second volume of the 1829 Mexico edition, the things prepared for the naming of a newborn boy include "una rodelita de masa de bledos, y encima ponian un arco y saetas, y otras cosas hechas de la misma masa"; there was also mulli with beans and toasted maize, and for the children of the poor "no les hacian mas del arco y las saetas, su rodelilla, algunos tamales y maíz tostado". A shield of amaranth dough was what a family could afford to make for a child.
The same author records the other use, and this object prints it rather than skirting it. In the book on the merchants, on the night before the sacrifice of the slaves a merchant had bought for his feast, the celebrant put out the fire and in the dark "daban á comer á los esclavos unas sopas de una masa que se llama tzoalli mojadas con miel, á cada uno de ellos cuatro bocados", the mouthfuls cut with cords of ixtli; the hair of the crown of the head was then pulled out at the sound of an instrument called the chichtli. Sahagún adds that the men who were to die could not eat when morning came, "y estaban muy pensativos y tristes, pensando en la muerte". Amaranth dough was the substance of that rite as well as of the child's shield.
The prohibition story, stated. A 2026 food-science review of edible amaranths writes that in "pre-Columbian societies of the Aztecs and the Maya, grain amaranths were extensively cultivated and highly valued both for their nutritional richness and symbolic role in religious ceremonies", and that "Consequent to the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, amaranth cultivation declined significantly in order to abolish indigenous religious practices; thus, the cultural continuity was broken, and the crop was abandoned". This is the version in general circulation, and it is quoted here as evidence of what the literature says.
The prohibition story, weighed. The sentence above carries no documentary citation in a review whose competence is nutritional; and neither sixteenth-century source read for this object contains a prohibition. The 1571 dictionary, printed under a Franciscan's name with the viceroy's licence, catalogues the crop in nine varieties and supplies the verb for harvesting it — an odd thing to print about a banned plant — and Sahagún describes the ritual uses as a matter of record. That a colonial administration suppressed the ceremonies in which tzoalli figured is consistent with everything the friars wrote; that it banned the growing of the grain is a further claim, and this object neither asserts nor denies it, having found no decree. Confidence below is on the negative finding, not on the legend.
What the grain is now worth is the reason the question matters. The same review reports amaranth grain protein "ranging between 12% and 18%" and states that "Compared to other grains like wheat and rice, amaranth seeds contain significantly higher amounts of lysine, an essential amino acid often lacking in plant-based diets"; it also records that amaranths "remain underutilised in mainstream industrial food products" while having been "recognised as a modern functional food". The crop whose vocabulary survives in a 1571 Mexican imprint is being rediscovered by food science four and a half centuries later.
What this object does not claim. It attaches no modern botanical species to any of Molina's nine colour terms: the dictionary gives Nahuatl words and a Castilian gloss, not plants, and Amaranthus in Mesoamerica includes more than one cultivated species. It does not claim that "bledos" in a Spanish colonial text always means amaranth — the word covered European goosefoots and pigweeds too, as Molina's own pairing of "bledos o cenizos" shows. And it makes no estimate of how far cultivation actually fell after the conquest, because no source read here measures it.