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Florentine Codex: Book 9: Book 9: The Merchants (Volume 9)
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 Nine begins with how commerce grew in Mexico from the trade of only feathers to jewelry, precious stones, animal skins, embroidered clothing, and chocolate. It discusses how the merchants prepare for a journey and the celebrations that take place when they arrive home safely. This book also lists different types of merchants, such as lapidaries, who worked with precious stones, and ornamenters, who made feather articles.
108 pages, Hardcover
First published April 27, 1959
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September 13, 2025
Business is war, and war is business. An entire industry of books, articles, and thinkpieces thrives on one or both of these pithy maxims. I can’t say how helpful it is to conceive of either war or business as the other thing, but I can say that that for the Aztecs there was virtually no distinction at all. When Moctezuma’s merchants arrived in your territory, they came with two things: weapons and an offer you couldn’t refuse.
The ninth book of Bernardo de Sahagún’s “General History of the Things of New Spain” covers the merchants of pre-Conquest Mexico, and falls into roughly three parts. The third and final part will most interest artisans or historians of artisanal crafts. The Franciscan father extracted concise but detailed data on the three luxury crafts that drove Tenochtitlan’s urban economy: goldworking, precious stoneworking, and feather working. I’ve never personally smelted gold, incised jewels, or glued down tropical feathers; so I can’t say that I found these chapters riveting.
What I do find interesting is the way value varies across culture. Rarity and beauty always matters. Sahagúns collaborators could pinpoint when the feathers of tropical birds entered the economy: “But when the precious feathers came to appear, so it is told, it was later, in the time of the ruler Auitzotl. Those who discovered them, who came upon them, were his noble travelers, his vanguard merchants, who had become trading merchants when first they penetrated the land of Anauac.” The same marks of rarity and beauty attend worked gold and jewels, both of which required the sort of difficult, skilled labor that created multi-generational networks of artisans organized in guild-like networks.
Rarity and beauty, though, are not enough on their own to create value. For that, you need power. One illustration of this is the way Mexican featherworking died out after the Spanish conquest. Charles V had plenty of uses for Aztec gold since its preexisting value in a European context gave him increased access to warmaking capacity. By contrast, no European arquebusier was going to die in an Italian cannonade or besiege a Protestant German princeling for a handful of troupial feathers. Rarity and beauty are good starts toward investing something with value, but we most highly value those things that increase our ability to enforce our will against all comers.
The Mexican hegemony was no less human than this. Business and war are often on friendly terms, and the merchants of Mexico served the dual purpose of funneling value inward and projecting power outward. Everyone around the Aztecs knew that “when Moctezuma commanded the merchants, vanguard merchants, the reconnoiterers, to enter, no matter where, if they were besieged [or] slain there, where [the foe] no longer respected the message of Moctezuma, then swiftly he declared war, so that then war would break out.” If Moctezuma wanted your business, then you could pay now or you could pay later; but one way or another, you were going to pay. This zero-sum attitude to trade made expeditions such a dangerous game that merchants often disguised themselves like the locals, allowing their hair grow long and unkempt, for if “the Mexicans, the disguised merchants, were discovered, then they were slain, [for] they were considered ominous.”
The militant cast of the state-run Aztec economy comes out clearly in the first and second parts of the book, which cover the ritualized setting out and returning, respectively, of Tenochtitlan’s traders. The pep talk on departure was intense: “Thou mayest perish in the midst of the forest [or] the crags; thy poor maguey fiber cape [or] breech clout dragged forth; thy poor bones scattered in various places, and thy poor hair streaming out at the place of glory, of renown. As thou goest, go dedicated, indebted, to misery — suffering.” But glory awaited those who died in this crucial service to the sacred state: “And they said that indeed he had not died, for he had gone to heaven; he followed the sun. And just so was it said of those who had died in war; they said that they followed the sun; they went to heaven.” On your return, flush with valuable goods, you could expect a stoner party for the ages, complete with human sacrifices in gratitude to the god and psychedelic mushrooms that revealed your fate, whether good or evil.
When Moctezuma started receiving intelligence reports of bearded, white-skinned strangers armed to the teeth and asking to trade, game must have recognized game. Drawing lessons from history is as perilous as a trade expedition to Anauac because it’s too easy to construct a narrative that just so happens to prove you right. But since glory awaits the foolhardy, I’ll suggest that you could interpret the fall of the Aztecs as a cautionary tale about aggression and a zero-sum mentality. I can’t conceive of a world where the Aztecs didn’t fall to European tech and, more importantly, disease; but they might not have fallen to Cortés. Indeed, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote that when his band of merchant-adventurer-soldiers fought a multi-day engagement with the Tlaxcallans, one more fight would’ve finished the Spaniards. What saved them was the Tlaxcallan realization that these foreigners might just be ferocious enough to disrupt Tenochtitlan’s hegemony. As Moctezuma found, punching down is easy when you’ve got the market cornered, but the enemies you create never forget. When their turn comes, the takeover will be less hostile than it is exterminatory.
The ninth book of Bernardo de Sahagún’s “General History of the Things of New Spain” covers the merchants of pre-Conquest Mexico, and falls into roughly three parts. The third and final part will most interest artisans or historians of artisanal crafts. The Franciscan father extracted concise but detailed data on the three luxury crafts that drove Tenochtitlan’s urban economy: goldworking, precious stoneworking, and feather working. I’ve never personally smelted gold, incised jewels, or glued down tropical feathers; so I can’t say that I found these chapters riveting.
What I do find interesting is the way value varies across culture. Rarity and beauty always matters. Sahagúns collaborators could pinpoint when the feathers of tropical birds entered the economy: “But when the precious feathers came to appear, so it is told, it was later, in the time of the ruler Auitzotl. Those who discovered them, who came upon them, were his noble travelers, his vanguard merchants, who had become trading merchants when first they penetrated the land of Anauac.” The same marks of rarity and beauty attend worked gold and jewels, both of which required the sort of difficult, skilled labor that created multi-generational networks of artisans organized in guild-like networks.
Rarity and beauty, though, are not enough on their own to create value. For that, you need power. One illustration of this is the way Mexican featherworking died out after the Spanish conquest. Charles V had plenty of uses for Aztec gold since its preexisting value in a European context gave him increased access to warmaking capacity. By contrast, no European arquebusier was going to die in an Italian cannonade or besiege a Protestant German princeling for a handful of troupial feathers. Rarity and beauty are good starts toward investing something with value, but we most highly value those things that increase our ability to enforce our will against all comers.
The Mexican hegemony was no less human than this. Business and war are often on friendly terms, and the merchants of Mexico served the dual purpose of funneling value inward and projecting power outward. Everyone around the Aztecs knew that “when Moctezuma commanded the merchants, vanguard merchants, the reconnoiterers, to enter, no matter where, if they were besieged [or] slain there, where [the foe] no longer respected the message of Moctezuma, then swiftly he declared war, so that then war would break out.” If Moctezuma wanted your business, then you could pay now or you could pay later; but one way or another, you were going to pay. This zero-sum attitude to trade made expeditions such a dangerous game that merchants often disguised themselves like the locals, allowing their hair grow long and unkempt, for if “the Mexicans, the disguised merchants, were discovered, then they were slain, [for] they were considered ominous.”
The militant cast of the state-run Aztec economy comes out clearly in the first and second parts of the book, which cover the ritualized setting out and returning, respectively, of Tenochtitlan’s traders. The pep talk on departure was intense: “Thou mayest perish in the midst of the forest [or] the crags; thy poor maguey fiber cape [or] breech clout dragged forth; thy poor bones scattered in various places, and thy poor hair streaming out at the place of glory, of renown. As thou goest, go dedicated, indebted, to misery — suffering.” But glory awaited those who died in this crucial service to the sacred state: “And they said that indeed he had not died, for he had gone to heaven; he followed the sun. And just so was it said of those who had died in war; they said that they followed the sun; they went to heaven.” On your return, flush with valuable goods, you could expect a stoner party for the ages, complete with human sacrifices in gratitude to the god and psychedelic mushrooms that revealed your fate, whether good or evil.
When Moctezuma started receiving intelligence reports of bearded, white-skinned strangers armed to the teeth and asking to trade, game must have recognized game. Drawing lessons from history is as perilous as a trade expedition to Anauac because it’s too easy to construct a narrative that just so happens to prove you right. But since glory awaits the foolhardy, I’ll suggest that you could interpret the fall of the Aztecs as a cautionary tale about aggression and a zero-sum mentality. I can’t conceive of a world where the Aztecs didn’t fall to European tech and, more importantly, disease; but they might not have fallen to Cortés. Indeed, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote that when his band of merchant-adventurer-soldiers fought a multi-day engagement with the Tlaxcallans, one more fight would’ve finished the Spaniards. What saved them was the Tlaxcallan realization that these foreigners might just be ferocious enough to disrupt Tenochtitlan’s hegemony. As Moctezuma found, punching down is easy when you’ve got the market cornered, but the enemies you create never forget. When their turn comes, the takeover will be less hostile than it is exterminatory.
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