Among the manuscripts which seem to have belonged to Ixtlilxochitl was the one known in our day under the designation given to it by Brasseur de Bourbourg, Codex Chimalpopoca,[883] in honor of Faustino Chimalpopoca, a learned professor of Aztec, who assisted Brasseur in translating it. The anonymous author had set to himself the task of converting into the written native tongue a rendering of the ancient hieroglyphics, constituting, as Brasseur says, a complete and regular history of Mexico and Colhuacan. He describes it in his Lettres à M. le duc de Valmy (lettre seconde)—the first part (in Mexican) being a history of the Chichimecas; the second (in Spanish), by another hand, elucidating the antiquities—as the most rare and most precious of all the manuscripts which escaped destruction, elucidating what was obscure in Gomara and Torquemada.
Brasseur based upon this MS. his account of the Toltec period in his Nations Civilisées du Mexique (i. p. lxxviii), treating as an historical document what in later years, amid his vagaries, he assumed to be but the record of geological changes.[884] A similar use was made by him of another MS., sometimes called a Memorial de Colhuacan, and which he named the Codex Gondra after the director of the Museo Nacional in Mexico.[885]
Brasseur says, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, that the Chimalpopoca MS. is dated in 1558, but in his Hist. Nat. Civ., i. p. lxxix, he says that it was written in 1563 and 1579, by a writer of Quauhtitlan, and not by Ixtlilxochitl, as was thought by Pichardo, who with Gama possessed copies later owned by Aubin. The copy used by Brasseur was, as he says, made from the MS. in the Boturini collection,[886] where it was called Historia de los Reynos de Colhuacan y México,[887] and it is supposed to be the original, now preserved in the Museo Nacional de México. It is not all legible, and that institution has published only the better preserved and earlier parts of it, though Aubin’s copies are said to contain the full text. This edition, which is called Anales de Cuauhtitlan, is accompanied by two Spanish versions, the early one made for Brasseur, and a new one executed by Mendoza and Solis, and it is begun in the Anales del Museo Nacional for 1879 (vol. i.).[888]
The next after Ixtlilxochitl to become conspicuous as a collector, was Sigüenza y Gongora (b. 1645), and it was while he was the chief keeper of such records[889] that the Italian traveller Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Carreri examined them, and made some record of them.[890] A more important student inspected the collection, which was later gathered in the College of San Pedro and San Pablo, and this was Clavigero,[891] who manifested a particular interest in the picture-writing of the Mexicans,[892] and has given us a useful account of the antecedent historians.[893]
CLAVIGERO.
After a lithograph in Cumplido’s Mexican edition of Prescott’s Mexico, vol. iii.
The best known efforts at collecting material for the ante-Spanish history of Mexico were made by Boturini,[894] who had come over to New Spain in 1736, on some agency for a descendant of Montezuma, the Countess de Santibañez. Here he became interested in the antiquities of the country, and spent eight years roving about the country picking up manuscripts and pictures, and seeking in vain for some one to explain their hieroglyphics. Some action on his part incurring the displeasure of the public authorities, he was arrested, his collection[895] taken from him, and he was sent to Spain. On the voyage an English cruiser captured the vessel in which he was, and he thus lost whatever he chanced to have with him.[896] What he left behind remained in the possession of the government, and became the spoil of damp, revolutionists, and curiosity-seekers. Once again in Spain, Boturini sought redress of the Council of the Indies, and was sustained by it in his petition; but neither he nor his heirs succeeded in recovering his collection. He also prepared a book setting forth how he proposed, by the aid of these old manuscripts and pictures, to resuscitate the forgotten history of the Mexicans. The book[897] is a jumble of notions; but appended to it was what gives it its chief value, a “Catálogo del Museo histórico Indiano,” which tells us what the collection was. While it was thus denied to its collector, Mariano Veytia,[898] who had sympathized with Boturini in Madrid, had possession, for a while at least, of a part of it, and made use of it in his Historia Antigua de Méjico, but it is denied, as usually stated, that the authorities upon his death (1778) prevented the publication of his book. The student was deprived of Veytia’s results till his MS. was ably edited, with notes and an appendix, by C. F. Ortega (Mexico, 1836).[899] Another, who was connected at a later day with the Boturini collection, and who was a more accurate writer than Veytia, was Antonio de Leon y Gama, born in Mexico in 1735. His Descripcion histórica y Cronológica de las Dos Piedras (Mexico, 1832)[900] was occasioned by the finding, in 1790, of the great Mexican Calendar Stone and other sculptures in the Square of Mexico. This work brought to bear Gama’s great learning to the interpretation of these relics, and to an exposition of the astronomy and mythology of the ancient Mexicans, in a way that secured the commendation of Humboldt.[901]