Mexican Chronicle. Manuscript 117

The best known works of Fernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc are the present

• Mexican chronicle, written in Spanish around 1598, which recounts the departure of Aztlan from the Aztec-Mexicas and ends with the beginning of the conquest,
• and the Crónica mexicáyotl, composed in Nahuatl in 1609, on the genealogies of the highest Mexica pipiltin (nobles), and exhibits their merits and rights.

The Mexican Chronicle tells how the Mexica reached their splendor and conquered the world known to them. Manuel Orozco y Berra, its first editor, said of the Chronicle that this:

narrates the causes that motivated the wars and the result of these, revealing how rude, arbitrary, unjust there was in the conduct of the monarchs of the Triple Alliance; The dialogues are natural, the style hard, careless, typical of the peoples to whom they belong: in short, it is the tradition, the true tradition that the Mexica preserved in their seminaries and made the young students learn from choir.

Manuscript number 117 of the Hans Peter Kraus Collection of Spanish American Manuscripts is in the Library of Congress of the United States of America. It contains the now earliest version of Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc’s Mexican Chronicle (1598).
This version differs greatly from that of the Mexican Chronicle published by Orozco and Berra in 1878 and then repeatedly reissued to this day.
The differences are its 160 numbered folios, instead of the 158 known. In addition, it is divided into 112 chapters, instead of 110. There are also abundant original notes, all absent in the version known to date. There are also significant differences in spelling, syntax and even phraseology between one text and another.