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Florentine Codex: Book 11: Book 11: Earthly Things
Two of the world’s leading scholars of the Aztec language and culture have translated Sahagún’s monumental and encyclopedic study of native life in Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. This immense undertaking is the first complete translation into any language of Sahagún’s Nahuatl text, and represents one of the most distinguished contributions in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics.
Written between 1540 and 1585, the Florentine Codex (so named because the manuscript has been part of the Laurentian Library’s collections since at least 1791) is the most authoritative statement we have of the Aztecs’ lifeways and traditions—a rich and intimate yet panoramic view of a doomed people.
The Florentine Codex is divided by subject area into twelve books and includes over 2,000 illustrations drawn by Nahua artists in the sixteenth century.
Book Eleven is a beautifully written and careful documentation of all of the animals and plants known to the Aztecs in the sixteenth century. As the volume with the most illustrations, Earthly Things allows the reader to look at the natural world through the eyes of the Aztec.
314 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1963
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November 29, 2025
One of the understated clever twists in Brandon Sanderson’s YA fantasy novel “The Rithmatist” is that Italian food consists of fusion dishes such as “spaghetti mixed with fried peppers, mushrooms, water chestnuts, and a tangy tomato soy sauce.” In this alternate Earth, the Mongols under Korean command conquered Europe, resulting in a smaller Columbian Exchange with the Americas — tomatoes are still part of Italian food, but not as dominant as Asian flavors.
For 16-century Spaniards and Mexicans alike, they might as well have been living in a fantasy novel. In a flash, each found itself confronted by an outlandish and domineering warrior culture determined to rule or perish. In the aftermath of Cortés’s cataclysmic war, the Columbian Exchange began in earnest as triumphant Spaniards set to work molding the Valley of Mexico into their own image, importing European plants and animals and exporting the wonders and wealth of the New World back to the Old.
As part of this effort, the Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún spent decades consulting with indigenous men, transcribing their memories and descriptions of Aztec lifeways in his bilingual “General History of the Things of New Spain,” preserved today in the Florentine Codex. In this eleventh and penultimate book, the largest volume of the codex, Sahagún devotes reams of paper to the earthly things of New Spain: the animals, birds, fish, trees, herbs, precious stones, metals, soils, and agricultural products of this new field in the Lord’s harvest.
I won’t pretend this volume is anything less than a slog. Unless you’re a masochistic botanist, nothing is interesting about pages of descriptions of trees. Certainly there are tidbits to interest the casual reader; for instance, the detailed account of the Ahuízotl (water dog), a cryptid that would lure you to the water’s edge with the sound of a baby crying, grab you with its monkey’s hands, and drag you into the depths to drown and devour you. Also, Aztecs referred to gold as Mother Earth’s urine or the sun god’s dung, and to silver as the moon goddess’s excrement. Think about that next time you’re giving or receiving jewelry.
For the most part, though, my interest was less in the book’s contents and more in its metacontext. The Columbian Exchange is obvious enough as the reader finds exotics such as turkey, avocado, tomato, chia, and jicama. This transfer transcended the physical as illustrated by embedded fragments of Aristotelian science (“Since [the tetzmitl plant] is cold, it drive out fire”) and Roman Catholic evangelism (“Today it is said: ‘The sun goes in; it enters the house’; for it used to be said: ‘The god enters’”).
However, what most struck me was the human capacity to creatively use and reuse the things we find. The Aztecs found a land bursting with plants obeying no greater imperative than reproduction of their own kinds, and turned them into medicine. The Spaniards found a hegemony brimming with decorative gold, and alchemized that gold into religious wars across Europe. Father Sahagún wrote a sprawling handbook of Aztec culture, not excluding ad hoc vocabulary lessons, so that his brothers in faith could better evangelize the Indians; instead, the Inquisitorial paranoia that engulfed Spain in the Counter-Reformation sent his book to the dead stacks. Today, Sahagún’s great life work serves not as a missionary’s manual but as a resource for cultural anthropologists, linguists, and historians. I wonder what uses — unimaginable to us now — our successors will find for the things we do today.
For 16-century Spaniards and Mexicans alike, they might as well have been living in a fantasy novel. In a flash, each found itself confronted by an outlandish and domineering warrior culture determined to rule or perish. In the aftermath of Cortés’s cataclysmic war, the Columbian Exchange began in earnest as triumphant Spaniards set to work molding the Valley of Mexico into their own image, importing European plants and animals and exporting the wonders and wealth of the New World back to the Old.
As part of this effort, the Franciscan Father Bernardino de Sahagún spent decades consulting with indigenous men, transcribing their memories and descriptions of Aztec lifeways in his bilingual “General History of the Things of New Spain,” preserved today in the Florentine Codex. In this eleventh and penultimate book, the largest volume of the codex, Sahagún devotes reams of paper to the earthly things of New Spain: the animals, birds, fish, trees, herbs, precious stones, metals, soils, and agricultural products of this new field in the Lord’s harvest.
I won’t pretend this volume is anything less than a slog. Unless you’re a masochistic botanist, nothing is interesting about pages of descriptions of trees. Certainly there are tidbits to interest the casual reader; for instance, the detailed account of the Ahuízotl (water dog), a cryptid that would lure you to the water’s edge with the sound of a baby crying, grab you with its monkey’s hands, and drag you into the depths to drown and devour you. Also, Aztecs referred to gold as Mother Earth’s urine or the sun god’s dung, and to silver as the moon goddess’s excrement. Think about that next time you’re giving or receiving jewelry.
For the most part, though, my interest was less in the book’s contents and more in its metacontext. The Columbian Exchange is obvious enough as the reader finds exotics such as turkey, avocado, tomato, chia, and jicama. This transfer transcended the physical as illustrated by embedded fragments of Aristotelian science (“Since [the tetzmitl plant] is cold, it drive out fire”) and Roman Catholic evangelism (“Today it is said: ‘The sun goes in; it enters the house’; for it used to be said: ‘The god enters’”).
However, what most struck me was the human capacity to creatively use and reuse the things we find. The Aztecs found a land bursting with plants obeying no greater imperative than reproduction of their own kinds, and turned them into medicine. The Spaniards found a hegemony brimming with decorative gold, and alchemized that gold into religious wars across Europe. Father Sahagún wrote a sprawling handbook of Aztec culture, not excluding ad hoc vocabulary lessons, so that his brothers in faith could better evangelize the Indians; instead, the Inquisitorial paranoia that engulfed Spain in the Counter-Reformation sent his book to the dead stacks. Today, Sahagún’s great life work serves not as a missionary’s manual but as a resource for cultural anthropologists, linguists, and historians. I wonder what uses — unimaginable to us now — our successors will find for the things we do today.
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