An Unknown Early Seventeenth-Century Codex of the Crónica Mexicana of Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc

A T THE BEGINNING of 1951 the writer had occasion to study a considerable number of manuscripts which a short time before had belonged to the family of the Conde de Revillagigedo in Spain. Among those manuscripts, at present in possession of the bookseller H. P. Kraus in New York City, there appeared an unidentified volume in Spanish of the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth century. It soon became evident that this codex was a version of the Crodnica mexicana of Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, older by two centuries than any known to modern scholars and editors. A good deal has been written recently about this chronicler who was a descendant of Aztec emperors on both sides,' and details of his life hitherto unknown have been clarified.2 It should be mentioned first that the Cronica mexicana of Tezozomoc as it survives today deals with the history of the Aztecs and their kings from Acamapichtli I, at the end of the fourteenth century, to Moctezuma II and the arrival of the Spaniards with Hern'an Cortes in 1519. Present-day writers in excellently documented studies have shown that the Indian chronicler, Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, about whom practically nothing concrete was previously known, was

Ancient history · Art · Geography · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture