Illness Arrives

These pages from the Florentine Codex recount the first encounter between the Spanish and the people of Tenochtitlan in the summer of 1519. Messengers sent by Emperor Montezuma shower the Spanish visitors with sacrosanct gifts (top left), are subsequently bound in chains (bottom left), and collapse upon hearing the weaponry blasted by the Spaniards (right). 

Why the Europeans tied the messengers and forced them to hear the detonations at close range is not clear. Regardless of their reasons, the troubled salutations signaled to the people of Tenochtitlan that the visitors were a threat to their health. The Spanish text accompanying the drawings explains that the messengers, upon hearing the explosions, “fainted away and collapsed . . . they lost their senses” (Dufendach 2017:177). The Nahuatl text uses the word iolmicque, “heart-death,” to describe the traumatic experience and the physical nature of the messengers’ pain. The blasts had robbed the messengers of their ihiyotl, a vital force associated with breath, and a central component of life and well-being. 

When the messengers returned to the capital, they submitted to a cleansing ceremony before meeting Emperor Montezuma. The precaution was ineffectual, as by then the emperor already “felt tired and weak. He no longer found anything tasteful, enjoyable, or amusing” (Dufendach 2017:184). He was diagnosed with having a crushed heart—a severe ailment, as the heart is the seat of the life force teyolia, the source of a person’s vitality and essence. The Spanish had transmitted illness to Tenochtitlan even before their entrance into the city.

Image Source

• Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Mediceo Palatino 220 (Florentine Codex), book 12, fols. 8v–9r (3:415v–416r). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

Further Reading

• Dufendach, Rebecca. “‘As if His Heart Died’: A Reinterpretation of Moteuczoma’s Cowardice in the Conquest History of the Florentine Codex.” Ethnohistory 66 no. 4 (2019): 623–45.
• Dufendach, Rebecca. “Nahua and Spanish Concepts of Health and Disease in Colonial Mexico, 1519–1615.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2017.
• Martínez González, Roberto. “El ihiyotl, la sombra y las almas-aliento en Mesoamérica.” Cuicuilco 13, no. 38 (2006): 177–99.