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""The Search for the Codex Cardona" is a terrific read. I could hardly put it down. If the Codex is real, and I came to believe that it probably "is" authentic, then it is the most important document of the early colonial world to have come to light since the Florentine Codex surfaced in Italy in the late nineteenth century."--Mary Miller, Dean of Yale College and author of "The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec"

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THE SEARCH FOR THE Codex Cardona

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

preface..............................................................ixacknowledgments......................................................xichapter one The Crocker Lab.........................................1chapter two A World of Painted Books................................10chapter three Early Doubts..........................................24chapter four Sotheby's of London....................................30chapter five The Getty..............................................41chapter six Sloan Ranger............................................52chapter seven Nights in the Gardens of Coyoacn.....................63chapter eight A Mysterious Affidavit................................72chapter nine Seville................................................78chapter ten Christie's of New York..................................88chapter eleven El Palacio del Marqus...............................97chapter twelve Librera Zcalo......................................104chapter thirteen An Internet Posting................................117chapter fourteen The Architect's Studio.............................125chapter fifteen Pasaje de las Flores................................139chapter sixteen The High End........................................146chapter seventeen Ibiza.............................................153chapter eighteen A Madrid Anticuario................................162chapter nineteen Resolution.........................................167notes................................................................171bibliography.........................................................173index................................................................177

Chapter One

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken

JOHN KEATS, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

From the outside that afternoon, the Crocker Laboratory looked like a huge, windowless concrete oven, but inside it was cool. Three men bent over a steel bench on which the item we had come to see was opened out. They were anthropologists and linguists from Stanford University, specialists in pre-Columbian and colonial Mexico. Close by in the air-conditioned lab stood a gentleman wearing dark, baggy pants, a rumpled shirt, and a loosened, gaudy tie. An empty fiber box was propped up against the wall.

Richard Schwab introduced me to Mr. Schwarz-Thomas F. Schwarz-a rare book and manuscript dealer: "Mr. Schwarz, this is my colleague; I hope it's all right with you if he has a peek as well."

Schwarz offered a soft handshake and a glancing, furtive look. As he hovered and darted among the three professors, they carefully turned the oversized pages with the help of a broad wooden paddle, pausing to examine details through a hand-held magnifying glass. What they had before them was an ancient Mexican "painted book," described by Schwarz as the "Codex Cardona." I stepped back from the table. Surprise was an inadequate term; I was astonished. Schwarz pointed out that there were "four hundred and twenty-seven pages, over three hundred painted illustrations, and two extraordinary maps." These he unfolded from a package inside the hard pasteboard cover of the codex and set them aside.

No one in the room, not even the specialists, had ever heard of a book called the Codex Cardona. There was no mention of this cultural treasure in any of the voluminous literature on early Mexico. The Stanford professors had searched catalogs, archives, and library holdings in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Incredibly, this remarkable sixteenth-century manuscript seemed to have entered the modern world, brought to the Crocker Laboratory by Thomas Schwarz, in a fiber box tied with canvas straps. But, as we shall see, and what I didn't know then, the Codex Cardona came with lots of baggage that no one knew about on that summer day.

There are several pre-Hispanic and early colonial documents and codices, including jewels such as the Telleriano-Remensis and the Codex Mendoza now held in Paris and Oxford, and fragments of other rare pre-Columbian and postconquest documents in libraries and museums in Rome, Florence, Mexico City, and the Vatican, to name a few. But the Codex Cardona, with many more pages than any of these and hundreds of illustrations, not to mention the oversized, foldout maps, was truly dazzling. As Schwarz carefully leafed through the pages, which crackled a bit to the touch, the Stanford professors spoke to each other quietly, pointing out this and that detail.

In part similar to the Tira de la peregrinacin, of which I'd seen a reproduction in Mexico's grand Museum of Anthropology and History several years ago, the Codex Cardona began by tracking the chronology of the Mexica-or Nahuas-from their hazy twelfth-century beginnings to the founding of Tenochtitln a hundred years later. According to a typewritten inventory that Schwarz handed around, the codex then dealt with the catastrophic conquest by the Spaniards from 1519 to 1521, continuing with sketches, text, and paintings of early Mexico, down to the time the codex was actually produced-or said to have been produced-between 1550 and 1556. The scribes and painters worked under the direction of one Captain Alonzo Cardona y Villaviciosa, a crown official, whose own orders had come directly from the first viceroy of Mexico, don Antonio de Mendoza.

The Mexica or Nahuas-commonly known since the eighteenth century as the Aztecs-settled in the high intermontane Valley of Mexico in the early fourteenth century and still occupied a large swathe of it in the years after the Spanish conquest. Their descendants, of course, still live there today, a good part of one of the planet's largest cities. The painted illustrations in the Codex Cardona were accompanied by explanatory text, written, perhaps by Catholic clergy-Franciscans and Dominicans most likely-in the nearly indecipherable sixteenth-century script that to the layperson looks as much like Arabic as Spanish.

As Schwarz patiently lifted the pages, one could see that on nearly every one, native artists had traced with quill and brush, in still-vivid blue, vermillion, and green paint, and rust-colored and black inks, the details of daily life and descriptions of flora and fauna. The pictures showed tools and plants, birds and feathers, gods and sacrifice, the ways of farming and irrigation, family life, and women's dress. Several drawings of corpses in cotton shrouds offered confirmation of the widespread death caused by the European invaders' deadly pathogens. There was one page, touching in its simplicity, showing the conqueror, Hernn Corts himself, carrying one corner of his deceased wife's coffin. Three or four folios showed two different native women seated in European chairs. One was described as having written a native account of the conquest, another as having gathered weapons for an uprising, frustrated by the Spanish occupiers and severely repressed.

I felt like an outsider to Schwarz's presentation, but he didn't seem to mind my uninvited presence. The Stanford professors, absorbed in the show, didn't seem to notice my presence, or perhaps thought it bad manners to object. Schwab stayed discreetly back...