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Chimalpahin's Conquest
A Nahua Historian's Rewriting of Francisco López de Gómara's La conquista de México
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6948-8
Chapter One
The History of Chimalpahin's "Conquista" Manuscript
Susan Schroeder
In 1552 the historian Francisco López de Gómara (1511-c. 1559) published his monumental Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México. The book was an instant success, and five additional Spanish-language editions were published over the course of the next five years, as well as numerous translations. López de Gómara knew Hernando Cortés (1482-1547) well, reportedly served as his priest for a time, and can be considered his biographer. La conquista is a recounting of the circumstances of Cortés's birth, the travails he experienced as a young man in Medellín and later in Seville as he waited to set sail for Santo Domingo, and his activities, including his marriage, while living in Cuba. By far the greatest detail, however, is devoted to the conqueror's exploits as he explored the land that he eventually named New Spain, his negotiations with local peoples, and his inexorable march toward and defeat of Mexico Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. López de Gómara aimed to furnish the best of all insight into the thought and will of the great captain and included, purportedly verbatim, the eloquent speeches that Cortés made to rally his men and exalt the glory of imperial Spain and their Christian mission. Cortés was inevitably Gómara's hero.
However, in the interest of maintaining stability in the colonies, Prince Philip of Spain came to be concerned about the tone of the portrayal of Cortés and the other conquerors of New Spain, and in 1553 the Council of the Indies ordered the suppression of the printing and sale of the book. In 1566, as King Philip II, he prohibited its reading in Castile and in the Americas and imposed large fines for infringement of this order. Nevertheless, the censorship did little to prevent the work from being shipped to the colonies and read by the inhabitants of New Spain and even indigenous peoples in Mexico City. It warrants noting that, by 1573, the use of the term conquista was prohibited, although the term continued to be used by some Spanish authors. To date, there is no evidence of its use as a loanword in any native-authored, native-language text in the Americas.
At some point, La conquista fell into the hands of the seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin (b. 1579), who lived and worked at the church of San Antonio Abad in the district of Xoloco, site of the famous first encounter of the conqueror Hernando Cortés and Emperor Moteuczoma Xocoyotl, "the younger." Chimalpahin is best known for his epic histories of Indian Mexico in the Nahuatl language, but he occasionally worked with Latin- and Spanish-language documents as well. His histories represent the most comprehensive extant corpus of the history of Indian Mexico written by a known indigenous author in his own language. Chimalpahin had access to an extraordinary collection of ancient pictorial manuscripts; writings in alphabetic Nahuatl, his native language; and published books in Spanish and Latin. Moreover, because he was located in Mexico City, he was able to furnish copious firsthand reports on the contemporary goings-on in the capital. Chimalpahin's histories are therefore invaluable, as they provide a unique, indigenous perspective on life in the colony.
Chimalpahin took it upon himself to make a copy of López de Gómara's great tome. It is said that he also translated the work into Nahuatl, but the whereabouts of that manuscript are unknown. He did transcribe the Spanish book, and as he copied it he deleted and corrected portions and interpolated abundant information about the Nahuas, as if he felt there was much more to the story of the conquest than had been told. As such, then, his work constitutes a major contribution to the New Conquest History genre.
Chimalpahin was writing his histories exactly one hundred years after the Spanish invasion, thus he had not only a temporal advantage but also a material bounty of Spanish- and Nahuatl-language colonial accounts to draw upon. In and around Mexico City, Spaniards-particularly fray Bernardino de Sahagún-collected Tlatelolca histories of the conquest, and mestizo and Nahua authors wrote massive tomes about key actors and events that either preceded the fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan or related their home regions' participation in it. All wrote with an agenda-to exalt the contributions of their own people and towns. Best known are Chimalpahin's contemporaries, don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl of Tetzcoco and don Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc of Mexico Tenochtitlan. Both men were highly esteemed in their respective communities, and both wrote major historical works in Spanish. It is believed that Alvarado Tezozomoc also wrote in Nahuatl, but what is extant in that language is known only from writings by Chimalpahin. Of unique and particular importance to this study is the entrance of a seventeenth-century Nahua intellectual into a sixteenth-century Hispanic conquest literary tradition, and his successful manipulation of that genre.
BACKGROUND OF THIS VOLUME
In December 1986 the late Michael Meyer, then director of the Latin American Area Center at the University of Arizona, telephoned me to say that in front of him, on his desk, was a manuscript entitled "La conquista de México" by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón [Chimalpahin] Quauhtlehuanitzin. I was astonished because it had been close to one hundred years since the work was last seen. It seems that a family physician in Yuma, Arizona, Ellis Browning, had for many years been in possession of the manuscript and was presently in Meyer's office to determine its value or, at the least, to have it translated into English. I eventually met Dr. Browning, examined the manuscript, and determined that it was Chimalpahin's version of Francisco López de Gómara's grand opus of the same title that was published in Spain in 1552. I confess my disappointment on seeing that it was not written in Nahuatl or even in Chimalpahin's hand but was instead an eighteenth-century copy. Subsequent research determined unequivocally that it was the copy made by Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, who listed it in his 1746 catalog. The manuscript was loaned to me, and I transcribed the entire work in typescript. Dr. Browning donated the manuscript to the Newberry Library in 1991.
Some fifteen years elapsed before I was able to return to Chimalpahin's "Conquista" manuscript. The occasion was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Newberry Library in 2000, to research the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the manuscript itself. In the course of that fellowship year I fortuitously met Anne Cruz, whose interest is the Golden Age literature of Spain. She, in turn, introduced me to Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera, whose specialty is the life and writings of Francisco López de Gómara. Suddenly, I had the makings of a translation team. I was already acquainted with David Tavárez, who is known for his work on Nahua and Zapotec peoples in colonial Mesoamerica, and I invited him to join the project. Cruz, Roa-de-la-Carrera, and Tavárez are native Spanish speakers, and all three possess the scholarly expertise that was needed to realize the translation of the manuscript into English. In 2005, we were awarded an NEH Collaborative Translation Grant, and we began working on the translation at the Newberry Library that July. We subsequently met in Chicago for one month during each of the next two years. The opportunity to bring to light Chimalpahin's abundant emendations to López de Gómara's text has been an arduous, but highly rewarding, undertaking. Although this work by Chimalpahin is known to some scholars, it has been dismissed for it was believed that he had done little more than add a list of Indians and sign his name. Doubtless, we will never know how it was that Chimalpahin came to make a copy of La conquista. There is good evidence that he worked at least part time as a copyist of Nahuatl pictorial and alphabetical texts while living in Mexico City (1593-c. 1624). Presumably, his interest was in providing a comprehensive history of Indian Mexico so that future generations of Nahuas would know of their glorious past. As noted above, López de Gómara's book was forbidden reading in New Spain, yet we are certain that at least one copy was shipped there in 1600. Cristián Roa-de-laCarrera discusses the life and works of López de Gómara in his introduction below. We know that the mestizo historian Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a contemporary of Chimalpahin, possessed a copy of La conquista and declared it to be the best account of the conquest that he had seen. But how did the book come into Chimalpahin's possession? He does not say; indeed, there is no record that he ever mentioned having read it, much less going to the trouble of making a copy. Did he translate it into Nahuatl, as the nineteenth-century historian and politician don Carlos María de Bustamante so assiduously asserts? Was it his purpose to write the history of the fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan from the indigenous perspective?
CONVENTIONS
By all the evidence, Chimalpahin intended to make an exact copy of La conquista. Otherwise, he would have corrected the egregious Spanish phonetic spellings of Nahuatl personal and place names, among other things. We are quite certain which of the six editions published in Spain (1552-1557) he had access to, after Roa-de-la-Carrera's careful comparison of them. In truth, there are relatively few differences in the various editions,14 and we are confident that he used either the original 1552 or the 1553 edition. We have thus opted for the 1552 work as our copy text for comparison with Chimalpahin's manuscript. We adhere to Chimalpahin's intention to furnish a full account of López de Gómara's book. In the course of copying the book, Chimalpahin inadvertently omitted two folios (1552, ff. xix, xx). We have translated the missing folios and include them in our text, enclosed in brackets, to maintain continuity of the history. In addition, while López de Gómara used chapter titles, Chimalpahin numbered the chapters, but not all of them, and he omitted an occasional title altogether and added a couple of his own. Another marked difference is Chimalpahin's use of parentheses, which are familiar in his Nahuatl annals. Most often, his parenthetical comments are direct quotes from López de Gómara, although the latter rarely, if ever, used parentheses. Chimalpahin also commonly posed questions in his histories and punctuated them with question marks. Yet these, like parentheses, are stylistic features that appear sparingly in López de Gómara's published book. As he famously did in all his other writings, Chimalpahin signed his name in the text as he made his emendations. All such additions are characteristic of the Chimalpahin canon.
However, conspicuously absent in the eighteenth-century copy we worked from are the scholia that would typically fill the blank spaces between the lines and in the margins of an original, handwritten version. We can nevertheless imagine Chimalpahin's densely scripted holograph. His additions are numerous and usually pertinent, and they ultimately enhance our understanding of his particular perspective of the Spanish invasion. And, despite the "editing" nature of most of his interpolations, we are reminded of his eloquence as a Nahua historian when he laments the loss of five hundred Mexica during the final siege, describing the men as "the flower of Tlatelolco" (f. 116). Yet he is seemingly capricious in his description of the natives of Tabasco, remarking that "they were such simpletons" when they gave flowers and turkeys to the Spaniards' horses to eat (f. 17).
Mention should also be made of Boturini's copyist, who presumably made an exact transcription of Chimalpahin's manuscript. Occasional copyist errors are apparent, such as inconsistencies in the spelling of certain terms. When an error was obvious and easy to correct, we have done so in the text without comment. When it was not so easily resolved, we have consulted other sources and explained the action or answered the question in a note. We cannot be absolutely certain who it was that omitted the two folios from the original book, Chimalpahin or the copyist, but all subsequent copies of Chimalpahin's manuscript are missing the same two folios. In keeping with Chimalpahin's style-and to avoid López de Gómara's repeated use of yndios in his many references to native peoples of a given polity, such as the Mexicanos of Mexico Tenochtitlan-we have substituted the Nahuatl plural endings (without the glottal stops) -ca, -teca, and -que. Hence, Mexica for Mexicano, Chololteca for Cholulanos, and Colhuaque for Culhuas. We have attempted to identify and explain or to correct ambiguities on the parts of López de Gómara and Chimalpahin, when possible, in relevant notes. An example is López de Gómara's, or perhaps Hernando Cortés's, habit of confusing the native altepetl, "kingdom or ethnic state," of Colhuacan with Acolhuacan (generally known as Tetzcoco), or sometimes using Colhuacan interchangeably with Coyoacan (yet another altepetl), and even mistaking Colhuacan for Culiacan (a different polity altogether). Chimalpahin usually caught the errors and corrected them, but not always. In most instances, we have standardized the spellings of Nahuatl place and personal names, following the Nahuatl lexicon, except when a spelling has changed significantly and the modern form is readily familiar-for example, Cuernavaca for Quauhnahuac, and Oaxaca for Huaxacac. Many Spanish-language terms are specific to their institutions, places, and dates, and we have retained these in the translation after defining them when they first appear. We also have compiled a glossary with English translations of all the foreign terms that appear repeatedly in this work. López de Gómara frequently used more than one spelling for particular places and personal names. On the first appearance of each variation, we have retained his spelling in the translation, corrected it in a note, when possible, and used the standard spelling thereafter.
The Aztec capital at the time of the Spanish invasion was Mexico Tenochtitlan, but early on, López de Gómara referred to it as México (for greater Mexico City), and Chimalpahin let it stand. Another error that Chimalpahin glossed over is López de Gómara's use of Nahuatl place names as individually titled personal names, stating that a certain lord was called Tabasco (f. 18), and referring to a Lord Iztacmixtitlan (f. 34v), even when they are obviously the names of locales, judging by the locative endings. In one instance Chimalpahin adds "Lord" (before "Chinantla"; f. 106v) to indicate that a person was being referred to rather than a place. In his Nahuatl histories, Chimalpahin was fastidious about such details, and he was nearly obsessive about rank, office, title, reverentials, and correct spellings, as discussed below by David Tavárez. Additionally, several of Chimalpahin's manuscripts are unfinished, often breaking off in midsentence. All totaled, López de Gómara's book contains 252 chapters. In Chimalpahin's version, Chapter 229, "On Judges and Laws," had barely begun when the narrative abruptly ends.
As noted, Chimalpahin's "Conquista" manuscript is an amalgam of authorial voices and editorial practices. Moreover, because we were working from an eighteenth-century copy rather than from Chimalpahin's original holograph, we had to contend with an additional layer of mediation provided by a copyist who may have contributed his own misreadings or inaccuracies. The following are some of the theoretical and linguistic assumptions that we made as translators in order to convey the complexity of the manuscript into English.
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