Whereas Spaniards wrote many volumes about their conquest of Mexico, very few native writers had the opportunity to write down their own accounts of the wars that Spaniards waged against Mesoamericans in the early sixteenth century. Only a handful of native-language writings have survived. By far the best and most extensive of these posterior accounts focuses on the Spanish-led siege of Tenochtitlan, as it was recorded in Book XII of the Florentine Codex. This “codex” consists of twelve books written entirely in the Nahuatl language (accompanied by a Spanish translation), with several hundred illustrations, that was produced by a small group of Nahua noblemen from Tlatelolco, an altepetl that was located at the center of the Mexica empire (on the same island as Mexico-Tenochtitlan, in fact). The texts were written from the 1540s to the early 1570s, and were compiled under the supervision of the Franciscan scholar fray Bernardino de Sahagún. The original title of the work is General History of the Things of New Spain (Historia universal de las cosas de la Nueva España).

Here we provide ten of the forty-one chapters from Book XII of the Florentine Codex (document 3.1). We also include selections from a separate work, called the Annals of Tlatelolco (document 3.2), which present another Tlatelolcan view of the conquest. (Document 4.2, in the next chapter, a letter from Xochimilco to the King of Spain, provides yet another perspective on these events and their implications for the altepetl of Xochimilco.