The Aubin Codex is an 81-leaf Aztec codex written in alphabetic Nahuatl on paper from Europe. Its textual and pictorial contents represent the history of the Aztec peoples who fled Aztlán, lived during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and into the early Spanish colonial period, ending in 1608. History The first date written in the manuscript is 1576, on the frontispiece. The latest date written is 1607. It appears that various Nahuatl-speaking authors worked on it over that time. It is not known where the codex was during most of the 17th century, or indeed until Italian historian and ethnographer of the New World, Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, added it to his collection in the mid-18th century. His collection was impounded by Spanish authorities after he was arrested in 1744 for entering New Spain without license. In the early 19th century, the codex was acquired from whereabouts unknown by , a French Americanist and collector, whose name the codex now bears. Somehow the codex ended up in the collection of a French bookseller living in London, Jules Des Portes. Des Portes sold the codex to the British Museum in 1880, in amongst another 300 or so objects over the course of their commercial relationship. Aubin published a lithographic reproduction in 1893. The manuscript was hand-copied and partially translated numerous times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; many of these copies are in collections in Europe and Mexico. Contents The Aubin Codex is two manuscripts, bound together as one. The first is an annals account of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, beginning with their migration out of Aztlan in the year 1 Flint, correlated to 1168 in the manuscript. It includes the foundation of Tenochtitlan, and the cataclysmic events of the conquest-era, including the smallpox epidemic after the arrival of the conquistadors, and the massacre at the temple in Tenochtitlan in 1520. James Lockhart has published an English translation of the Codex Aubin's Nahuatl account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire. According to Lockhart, internal evidence suggests that the main author was a man from the Mexico-Tenochtitlan sector of San Juan Moyotlan, who drew on existing material, including oral sources, for his account of the earlier era, and then began an eyewitness account of the events of the late sixteenth century. Unlike the account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire in the Florentine Codex, which is primarily from the