The Codex Quetzalecatzin is a manuscript, consisting an ancient map of an area including Mexico City and Puebla between 1570 and 1595.
Known as the Mesoamerican map of Spanish colonization (the Mapa de Ecatepec-Huitziltepec), it has been traded hands among private owners. And here, the Codex has been donated to the U.S. Library of Congress by an unnamed French collector.
After scanning the illustrated document to digitize it, the research library then uploaded the Codex to the internet so everyone can see it for the first time in more than a century.
The information and illustrations are critical primary source documents, considered priceless for scholars looking into history and ethnography during the earliest periods of contact between Europe and the peoples of the Americas.
The Codex is in good condition. And its rarity makes it even more special.
According to John Hessler of the Library’s Worlds Revealed blog:
The de Leon family presided over a large region of territory that extends from north of Mexico City, to just south of Puebla.
The manuscript is an extremely rare example of a pre-1600 indigenous American codex, created at a time when many cartographic histories were being produced both as a part of a Spanish royal investigation into the human and community resources in the Spanish colonies, and when indigenous families were trying to reassert their ancient land claims.
Maps like these were largely drawn by indigenous painters and scribes. Particular features that point to indigenous authorship include pre-Hispanic illustrative conventions.
The clues in the map which represented the roads and rivers, were made from extracted colors from “Maya Blue”, and from insects in the suborder Sternorrhyncha called the cochineal.
The glosses for the Latin alphabets on the manuscript, are clues to its colonial-era composition, as also with the names of some of the indigenous leaders such as “don Alonso” and “don Matheo.”
Naming conventions such as these provide good evidence that some indigenous elites in the era were granted the "don" Spanish title of nobility, and had been baptized with Christian names.
