In 1529, a Franciscan priest named Rev. Bernardino de Sahagun arrived in Mexico, where eight years earlier Hernando Cortes, leading a ragtag army of 500 conquistadors, had killed Aztec god-king Montezuma and crushed his empire of millions.
Sahagun mastered the Aztec language, Nahuatl and spent the remainder of his long life interviewing and studying the Indians, whom he came to admire deeply, as he tried to convert them to Christianity. The works he wrote and that were written under his direction became the core of much of what is known about Aztec history and early Mexican colonial history.
For one day only on Friday in the Newberry Library, Chicagoans will have the opportunity to see a selection of the priceless, rarely displayed documents telling of the conquest of the Aztecs--some in the words of the Aztecs themselves.
This weekend, anthropologists, who regard Sahagun as the "father of American anthropology," are honoring his 500th birthday, as are their colleagues and historians from Europe, Mexico, South America and the U.S. who are descending on the library for a series of lectures and seminars Friday and Saturday.
"It is being held in Chicago because the Newberry holds the largest private collection of his manuscripts in the world," said Tom Cummins, a University of Chicago art historian who helped put together the two-day event.
"Sahagun was one of the most brilliant minds of the 16th Century. He was a man who was interested in all facets of language, pictorial arts and natural history."
At one point, using young, high-born Aztec students he had trained himself, Sahagun organized a project to interview elderly Aztecs to compile a picture of their lives before the European conquest. Devising a set of questionnaires, his methodology had an uncanny resemblance to those that anthropologists use in modern ethnographic studies.
Using his knowledge of Aztec culture, he wrote sermons in Nahuatl tailored to appeal to them spiritually. Some of those sermons, written in Sahagun's own hand on barklike native paper, are among the most prized documents in the Newberry collection.
He also co-opted traditional Aztec dance ceremonies and wrote new texts for them with Christian messages and compiled a Nahuatl dictionary. He directed his most artistic students to record traditional Aztec rituals and ceremonial dress in paintings and drawings.
By the time he died in 1590, at the age of 91, Sahagun had assembled an astonishing library in Spanish and Nahuatl on the lives of the Aztecs, much of it written by him or his Aztec proteges. The biggest portions of those documents reside in government archives in Mexico and Spain, but Chicagoan Edward Ayers in the late 19th and early 20th Century bought more than a hundred Sahagun documents for his private collection.
Ayers as a young man served as a corporal in the Union Army, guarding a mine in Arizona. The mine owner lent him a copy of 19th Century historian William Prescott's book, "Conquest of Mexico." Though he had very little formal education, Ayers was so mesmerized by the history of the conquest that studying the first contact of native peoples with European explorers became his passion in life.
It was a passion he could indulge in lavishly after becoming a multimillionaire in the lumber business, making and supplying railroad ties for the burgeoning rail industry throughout the U.S., Mexico and South America.
Up until his death in 1927, Ayers worked to compile the largest library of its kind in the world--books and manuscripts that follow the spread of European settlement across North and South America all the way to the Philippines from the time of the Renaissance to this century.
Ayers left the entire collection to the Newberry, including the Sahagun documents, along with an endowment to keep it growing. It now numbers more than 100,000 volumes.
The collection includes rare atlases, a letter written in 1493 by Christopher Columbus, accounts of Jesuit missionaries and American colonial documents, including the earliest known published writings by George Washington, printed in 1754.
The Sahagun material remains among the rarest and most valuable items in the collection. Many of the pieces are fragile and light sensitive, so that library curators are reluctant to put them on display, making the one-day event Friday, open to the public, an extremely rare opportunity.
Sahagun was one of a group of Franciscan missionaries who came to Mexico to convert the Indians. They were notable, Cummins said, because of the compassion they displayed for the conquered natives.
"Sahagun's work was contradictory in many respects. He says he is writing . . . to allow his fellow Franciscans and evangelists to better understand Aztec idolatry and idolatrous customs. At the same time, he lavishes tremendous respect for these practices."
The Newberry has facsimiles of Sahagun's most famous work, the so-called Florentine Codex, an encyclopedic, lavishly illustrated account of meticulously gathered Aztec history and culture. The original now resides in Florence, Italy.
"These are wonderful resources for the history of Mexico, and for their linguistic value," said Cummins. "They are useful for a number of disciplines and intellectual interests, and reveal how Christianity adapted itself so that it would (appeal) to the Aztecs.
"A lot of people who will attend the conference have worked or are working directly on these manuscripts. They really do highlight the importance of the Newberry as a major intellectual repository."