1520: Year of Disease

The year 1520 was so traumatic that it passed into history as the year of disease. According to the chronicler Francisco López de Gómara, “the Natives called this sickness huitzahuatl [hueyzahuatl], meaning the great leprosy, and later counted the years from it, as from some famous event” (López de Gómara 1964:205). The missionary Toribio de Benavente “Motolinia” recounted that people “died in heaps, like bedbugs. . . . In many places it happened that everyone in a house died, and as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them . . . so that their homes became their tombs” (Motolinia 1950:38). Motolinia went on to estimate that over half the population had perished in the first two months of the outbreak. Chroniclers of the time tended to exaggerate and round numbers, which makes it impossible to precisely estimate the loss of life, but it was without a doubt abhorrently high. 

The left image is a detail from the Codex Mexicanus, a calendar painted in the tradition of Nahua ideographic writing, illustrating the calamities that afflicted Tenochtitlan in 1519 and 1520. The Spanish entrance into Tenochtitlan is represented over the year 1 Reed (1519, left) by a soldier in full body armor, who looks toward a burning temple over 2 Flint (1520, right), signifying the battles that took place that year. Below the temple, a man lying down covered in pustules signifies the harrowing illness that the Spanish had brought to the city.

The illness quickly spread throughout Tenochtitlan’s sphere of influence. The right image, from the Tira de Tepechan, illustrates how the tragedy affected Tepechpan, a town subject to the Aztec capital. Above and below year 2 Flint (1520, right) appear, from top to bottom, a figure of the funerary bundle of Ometocihuatzin, a noble woman from Texcoco who died of smallpox in 1520; an image of a male seated figure covered in pustules, possibly her unborn child; a burning temple, a reference to the attacks that Tenochtitlan endured that year; the funerary bundle of Emperor Montezuma, who died during the attacks; and, finally, the funerary bundle of Cuitlahuac, Montezuma’s successor, who died of smallpox less than three months after being enthroned. Below 1 Reed (1519, left), Hernán Cortés, who arrived that year, is depicted pointing to the burning temple.

Image Sources

• Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Mexicain 23–24 (Codex Mexicanus), ca. 1590, fols. 76–77. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.
• Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Mexicain 13–14 (Tira de Tepechpan), ca. 1596, fol. 15r. Courtesy of gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

Further Reading

• Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. New Approaches to the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• Diel, Lori Boornazian. The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018.
• Dufendach, Rebecca. “Nahua and Spanish Concepts of Health and Disease in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1615.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2017.
• López de Gómara, Francisco. Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary. Edited and translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964 (1552).
• Malvido, Elsa. “La primera gran pandemia de viruelas (1520).” Arqueología Mexicana 101 (2010): 22–27.
• Motolinia, Toribio de Benavente. Motolinía’s History of the Indians of New Spain. Edited and translated by Elizabet Andros Foster. Berkeley: Cortés Society, 1950.