ONCE THE SCANS OF THE WALLACE CODEX were completed by the Fine Arts Expert Institute in Geneva, they were put on a secure online site, which enabled Anna to commence her work by downloading and printing the 220 pages, each of which contained texts, images, or both, describing many different plants.
She started her work by comparing it to the Florentine Codex, which had been executed under the orders of Bernardino de Sahagun by 20 Aztec tlacuilos or painters.
Sahagun’s codex was a vast work consisting of twelve books, in which the texts were written in two columns, one in Nahuatl and the other in Spanish, illustrated with 2,686 colored images.
The Aztecs who composed the codex spoke and wrote Nahuatl, Latin and Spanish, they had also benefited from the knowledge of their own Aztec libraries—since destroyed by the Spanish Conquistadors, as well as that brought from Spain by the learned friars.
Cortes and his men, on entering the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, after its fall in 1521, had been horrified by the scale of human sacrifice they discovered in the temples. They immediately ordered their destruction and all that they contained, including the vast library of books they housed.
Anna continued by comparing the folios of the Wallace Codex with the Libellus, the Latin translation of another surviving Aztec text, a herbarium that described the medicinal properties of native plants in pre-Columbian Mexico, covering nearly 230 plant species, used as remedies in combination with other mineral and animal components.
It was written as a textbook in the College of Santa Cruz in Tlaltelolco, near Mexico City, then headed by Friar Jacobo de Grado. The college had been established to evangelise and educate the children of the Aztec nobility, teaching them to read and write their own language and in addition were taught Spanish, Latin and Greek.
Nahuatl was traditionally written with pictographs supplemented by ideograms, which was, however, insufficient for expressing the full vocabulary and syntax of the spoken language.
The Franciscans transcribed the words written and spoken by Aztec physicians and herbalists into an easily readable phonetic form developed by learned friars using the Latin alphabet.
The Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, also known as the Badianus Manuscript, or Codex Barberini, Latin 241, was the work of two baptised Aztecs, noblemen, the first Martinus de la Cruz, a physician, herbalist and teacher who composed the work in Nahuatl, and the second Juannes Badianus, a teacher at the college who translated it into Latin.
On completion the Libellus was brought to Spain by Francisco de Mendoza, the son of the viceroy, who sought to obtain concessions to sell Mexican medicinal herbs. The original Nahuatl herbarium was lost, but its translation found its way to the Barberini Library in the Vatican and was forgotten. It remained there until it was rediscovered in the library in 1929 by a certain Professor Charles Clark.
The Libellus contains 185 plant illustrations with 227 plant names many of which were in Nahuatl. The text was arranged by illness and disease in 13 chapters, in which the specific properties of each plant, and in most cases their ecological habitats, were described.
The Aztecs had a long tradition in the cultivation and harvesting medicinal plants and had established botanical gardens in Texcoco, Chapultepec and the royal gardens of Moctezuma.
Certain plants such as the cacao tree grew in the hot, humid, tropical forests of the south, in the Maya Lowlands. The fruit of the tree, the cacao pod, was symbolic and it represented the sacrificed human heart and chocolate blood. Its beans were not only used to make chocolate drinks, but were traded and served as a currency, or exacted as a tribute from the provinces of the Aztec empire.
