The Ansorena house auctions a codex that Mexico denounces as "apocryphal" for 190,000 euros

A mysterious illustrated manuscript that narrates "the end of the Aztec empire" has been auctioned this Wednesday in Spain for 190,000 euros (more than four million Mexican pesos).

The so-called Cardona codex, written on hundreds of pages of amate paper, with 300 illustrations and fold-out maps, recounts daily life in ancient Tenochtitlan and the arrival of the conquerors.

According to Arnold J. Bauer, one of the researchers who has studied the piece the most, the book was made around 1550 by Mexica scribes.

Other academics, however, question the authenticity of the object and believe that its elaboration was later.

The Ansorena auction house, based in Madrid, offered it this Wednesday with a starting price of 180,000 euros, despite the fact that the Mexican government had denounced that it is "apocryphal".

The so-called Cardona codex appeared in the 1980s after disappearing for years and arrived, some time later, in a private collection in Spain.

Historian Arnold J. Bauer, now deceased, wrote in his book

(The search for the Cardona codex) that the manuscript was made in Mexico by Aztec scribes and artists under the supervision of the Catholic clergy.

The object was to be a gift to King Carlos I, according to the academic's research.

Bauer had toured Mexico, the United States, and Europe to document the provenance of the artifact.

But the same historian recognized in the book published in 2009 that he lacked certainties about some of the mysteries of the codex.

It is unknown, for example, what happened between the date of the supposed creation of the object and its public appearance in 1982.

That is one of the "alarms" that raised suspicions among researchers like Stephanie Woods, who in 2010 wrote an essay that reviews Bauer's book.

Another was the use of amate paper, which, according to the researcher, was not typical of the genre at that time.

Woods also came to question that it is a codex: "I conclude that it fits better within the genre of relationships, which transmit geographic, social, political and economic information about colonial jurisdictions to the Crown in response to specific questions."

“[Bauer] may be right, and I hope he is, but it is not possible to verify that the manuscript is a product of the 16th century,” she argued in the essay.

In the 1980s, the codex had been offered to Stanford University for six million dollars, but laboratory tests to determine the age of the pigments and the paper were inconclusive and the educational institution refused to buy it.

While writing his book, Bauer discovered that the object had also been offered to Christie's auction house in New York, Sotheby's in London and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, according to a publication from the University of California.

At some point in those years, the trace of the codex was lost again until it appeared in a private Spanish collection on a date that the auction house does not specify.

“In any case”, the firm that organized the auction defended on its website, “it is a monumental work, of great interest, which still has many secrets to reveal”.

In the description of the lot, the Spanish house assured that it is an "important document" that describes in detail "the difficult years of the end of the Aztec empire and the Spanish settlement in Mexico."

A spokeswoman for the Ansorena firm has clarified to EL PAÍS by email that the firm "at no time indicates the age of this codex, but rather presents it for sale due to its historical importance."

In 2020, the auction house had already tried to market the object without success.

That same year the Spanish Ministry of Culture declared the property “inexportable”.

After the publication of the catalog that includes the so-called Cardona codex, the Mexican government had denounced the auction.

“According to the investigations and analyzes of various national and foreign scholars, the INAH specialists conclude that it is an apocryphal document, without the antiquity and much less the authenticity with which it is offered for sale,” Gutiérrez Müller said on Twitter.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History has not given this newspaper more information about the piece and the analyzes carried out, but it had communicated, also on social networks, that the document "misrepresents historiography."

The Secretary of Culture, Alejandra Frausto, had joined the criticism: "The offer of goods, historical documents, false archaeological and paleontological pieces,

The Mexican Government has promoted for years, and especially during this six-year term, the recovery of heritage abroad.

Claims to recover pieces such as Moctezuma's plume from Austria;

the Cospi, Fiorentino or Magliabecchiano codices from Italy, or the Dresden codex from Germany are at the center of the dispute between Mexico and other countries.

In addition, the struggles with the auction houses are constant.

This Tuesday, for example, an auction of 20 pieces in the French house Millon was reported.

Awareness has been the strategy most used by the authorities to recover patrimonial objects, sources from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained to this newspaper in February.

In some cases it has worked.

For example, in the first three years of the Government, more than 5 were recovered.

000 pre-Hispanic pieces that were scattered around the world.

But in others, like this Wednesday, it has not been enough.

subscribe here

to the

of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of this country