Everywhere they told them:
—“Who are you?
—Where do you come from?”
(Matritense Codex Royal History Academy, fol. 180r.)[1]
After pilgrimaging for some time and with many adventures, because nobody wanted them and feared them, they settled in an island of the great lagoon and established their capital towards the year 1325, barely 194 years before the arrival of the Europeans and the destruction of their empire. Professor Séjourné states that the mexicas began their expansion from a primitive cultural background.
"Considering their will as the only possible magic force, the men of this episode seem to want to proudly differentiate themselves from the animal and plant world with which thus far were so closely related, and replaced the sorceress by the warrior chief. This seems to indicate that the aztecs did not know more than the archaic witchcraft laws until they made contact with religious beliefs [basically philosophical A.N.] of the highlands, beliefs they immediately adopted in their rudimentary mentality.”
“My main coming and my work is war... I have to keep and gather all sorts of Nations, and this is not graceful.” (Mexican Chronicler, Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc.)[2]
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- ↑ Códice Matritense or The Florentine Codex is the common name given to a 16th century ethnographic research project in Mesoamerica by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Bernardino originally titled it: La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana (in English: the General History of the Things of New Spain). It is commonly referred to as "The Florentine Codex" after the Italian archive library where the best-preserved manuscript is preserved. In partnership with Aztec men who were formerly his students, Bernardino conducted research, organized evidence, wrote and edited his findings starting in 1545 up until his death in 1590. It consists of 2400 pages organized into twelve books with over 2000 illustrations drawn by native artists providing vivid images of this era. It documents the culture, religious cosmology (worldview) and ritual practices, society, economics, and natural history of the Aztec people. One scholar described The Florentine Codex as “one of the most remarkable accounts of a non-Western culture ever composed.”
- ↑ Fernando or Hernando (de) Alvarado Tezozómoc was a colonial Nahua noble. A son of Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin (governor of Tenochtitlan) and Francisca de Moctezuma (a daughter of Moctezuma II), Tezozómoc worked as an interpreter for the Real Audiencia. Today he is known for the Crónica Mexicayotl, a Nahuatl-language history. Fernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc was also a chronicler of some note, pertaining to a group of mestizo chroniclers with Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, Diego Muñoz Camargo and Domingo San Anton y Muñon Chimalpaín.
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