The Codex Telleriano-Remensis documents many of the epidemic outbreaks that afflicted Central Mexico in the sixteenth century. The left image illustrates the outbreak of 1538. The text reads, “this year of Seven Rabbit and 1538 many people died of smallpox.” The glyph year is connected by a line to two men covered in pustules, one painted in orange, the other in yellow, suggesting different symptoms. The 1538 outbreak is rarely documented, suggesting that this was one of countless local outbreaks.
The most disastrous of all epidemic outbreaks to affect Central Mexico was the huey cocoliztli (great pestilence) of 1545, depicted in the middle image with a pile of bodies connected by lines to the years 13 Flint (1544) and 1 House (1545). The text reads, “Year of 1544 and one thousand five hundred and forty-five there was great mortality among the Natives.” Killing between five and fifteen million people, the outbreak diminished the Indigenous population by approximately 80 percent in less than three years. The highly lethal illness quickly spread across the region. It devastated Michoacán in six months, while in Jalisco it remained for three years. In Guatemala, a settler reported that “God sent down such sickness upon the Natives that three out of every four of them perished . . . because of this, all is now lost in Mexico, and here also” (Cook 1998:103–4).
The calamitous 1545–1548 cocoliztli outbreak was followed by an outbreak of mumps in 1550. High fevers, neck swelling, and high mortality led to further ruin. One-third of male survivors suffered sterility, exacerbating the already staggering demographic collapse. The Codex Telleriano-Remensis’s authors registered the outbreak with a brief note in Spanish that reads, “this year of Six Rabbit and of 1550 many Natives died in this New Spain of mumps” (right image). The page lacks the rich glyphic illustrations of previous folios, and the years 7 Reed (1551) and 8 Flint (1552) are left empty, without records of any event. The decline in artistic production signals the increasing difficulty that the artists faced amid epidemic outbreaks and social collapse.
Image Source
- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Mexicain 385 (Codex Telleriano-Remensis), ca. 1563, fols. 45v, 46v, and 47v. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.
Further Reading
- Acuna-Soto, Rodolfo, et al. “Megasequía y mega-muerte en México en el siglo XVI.” Revista Biomédica 13, no. 4 (2002): 289–92.
- Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Quiñones Keber, Eloise. Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
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