Anales de Tlatelolco (Anonymous, 1540-1560)
Metadata: Tena, R. Anales de Tlatelolco. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. 2004. A facsimile edition of the MS 22 and MS 22bis in the Corpus Codicum Americanorum Medii Aevi collection (Mengin, 1945) can be found at the Benson Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection.
The Anales de Tlatelolco is an anonymous compilation of Tlatelolcan history written in Nahuatl by indigenous scribes from Tlatelolco. Found in two sets of manuscripts, Ms 22 and Ms 22bis, it is located at the Fond Mexicain of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. James Lockhart dates the MS 22 manuscript to 1560 and the MS 22bis to the mid-seventeenth century, and considers the possibility of these being copies of an original early version (now lost) possibly recorded in 1528. Rafael Tena (2004) identifies six possible sections in Ms 22. The first is a list of the rulers of Tlatelolco, followed by a brief fictional story in which Cortés plans to take several noblemen to Castile. The third is the list of the rulers of Tenochtitlan, and the fourth is a list of the rulers of the neighboring eastern city of Azcapotzalco also followed by a complementary narrative. The sixth and last section is a piece on Mexica history beginning in the year 1051 with the Chichimec tribes’ departure from Aztlan, and ending shortly after the Spanish invasion in the year 1522.[1]
In the section of the Anales de Tlatelolco dedicated to the history of the Mexica, folios 15r – 20v are devoted to recounting the Spanish conquest. They detail the events from the arrival of the Spaniards to the Gulf Coast, to the end of the war in the year 1522. These excerpts will provide a view of the conquest experience from the Tlatelolca perspective taking into account its position as a former enemy, and later, sister-city of Tenochtitlan.
[1] Previous editions include: a paleography and German translation of “Unos annales históricos de la nación mexicana” in the series Baessler Archiv (Ernst Mengin, 1939); Corpus Codicum Americanorum Medii Aevi collection, a facsimile edition of the Manuscripts 22 and 22 bis of the BNF (Mengin, 1945); Spanish translation from Mengin’s German version, Anales de Tlatelolco (Heinrich Berlin, 1948). A partial translation of the Anales in an edition of the Historia general by Sahagún (Ángel María Garibay, 1956); a translation into English of the “Relato de la conquista por un autor anónimo de Tlatelolco” by James Lockhart (1993); an annotated bilingual edition of “Extract from the Annals of Tlatelolco” (section on the Conquest) in We people here: Nahuatl accounts of the conquest of Mexico (Lockhart, 1993).), and a bilingual edition of the Anales de Tlatelolco in Fuentes Mesoamericanas (Susanne Klaus, 1999).
