ABSTRACT
Hernán Cortés at the gates of Tenochtitlan as the revered feather-serpent god Quetzalcoatl comes down to us in the selection below taken from The Florentine Codex, Book Twelve. Nahau speakers had their own system of pictographic writing, so we have no firsthand Nahua texts of the Spanish conquest. The Florentine Codex, Book Twelve, is a post-conquest text, completed in the years 1578-1579 by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, who used Nahau translators to finish his work. Of all the post-conquest texts written in Nahuatl (the langauge of the Aztecs) and translated into Spanish, Book Twelve is one of the most controversial because it contains the story of Cortés appearing to the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. In fact, an earlier text, the Annals of Tlatelcolo, recorded in the 1540s, made no reference to Cortés as a god. We have no evidence that the Nahua translators who helped Sahagún knew firsthand that Moctezuma bel ieved that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl . “Cortés as Quetzalcoatl” was perhaps a story fabricated by Sahagún and his Nahaua translators as a way to help explain how the largest empire in Mesoamerica could have possibly fallen to the Spanish. Indeed, the “Cortes as Quetzalcoatl” story is open to interpretation.
