Matrícula de Tributos

Folio 9r of the Matrícula de tributos.

The Matrícula de Tributos (English: Tribute roll) is a 16th-century central Mexican manuscript on amatl paper, listing the tributes paid by the various tributaries of the Aztec Empire. The manuscript is composed of 16 pages (32 leaves) with likely more being lost to time, measuring 42 centimeters high and 29 centimeters wide. The dating of the Matrícula has been a subject of debate as to whether it dates to pre-Columbian or early colonial times, if truly being pre-Columbian then it'd be the only surviving preconquest Aztec manuscript.

Dating

Folio 2r of the Matrícula de tributos depicting the relationship between Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, this folio has evidence of European influence from the features of the humans painted (squared jaws, expressive eyebrows, and long noses).

There has been debate among scholars as to when the Matrícula was made with many differing opinions on the origins of the document being offered over the decades. Robert Barlow in 1949 argued that it was a colonial document newly painted for Cortes due to the European format of the manuscript. In 1963 Woodrow Borah and Sherburn Cook had postulated that both the Matrícula and Codex Mendoza were copied from another preconquest document during colonial times.

Frances Berdan in 1980 was the first to hypothesize a preconquest dating of the Matrícula noticing that there was no Spanish influence other than the glosses, Barlow had been convinced of the preconquest dating by 1990 even suggesting that it was made after 1511. Berdan also claimed that the Matrícula could've been made throughout the last decade of Moctezuma II's reign. Berdan's hypothesis isn't widely agreed upon as Luz María Mohar challenged it in 1997 saying the document was made 10-20 years after conquest under Cortes as a copy of older documents. More recently in 2007 Juan José Batalla Rosado supported Berdan's hypothesis who's analysis found that the document had multiple styles suggesting it was made over multiple years by different scribes before conquest. In 2021 Jorge Gómez Tejada put forth the newest hypothesis, that the folios date to multiple periods, several from just at the end of preconquest and others as late as 1560, his analysis found several folios who's art styles seemed to have European influence, drawing humans and zoomorphic glyphs with Europeanized features not depicted in Codex Mendoza which follows more pre-Columbian tradition.

History

Some time after conquest, the leaves of the manuscript were glued together front to back to emulate a European book. Several decades after its painting the Matrícula was used as a reference for Codex Mendoza's tribute section, several pages disappeared after this time.

The first historical mention of the Matrícula appears in Lorenzo Boturini's collection of Mexican documents in the 1740s. 2 pages of the Matrícula was donated to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia by Joel Roberts Poinsett in 1830. In 1937 Daniel Rubín de la Borbolla wrote to the society that their pages were part of a larger document in Mexico and requested they sent pictures of the pages to him, several days later the society subsequently unanimously voted to repatriate the pages instead which after some delays were returned to Mexico in 1942 where Harry M. Lyndenberg handed the pages to Alfonso Caso as a part of the dedication ceremony for the Biblioteca Benjamín Franklin. With its hundreds of tribute glyphs, the Matrícula is considered an important document in the study of Nahuatl and Aztec culture, mathematics, governance, economy and geography. It is held in the collection of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

The first reproduction of the Matrícula was done in 1770 and the document has been reproduced multiple times since then.

Content

Folio 10v of the Matrícula de tributos, this unique page depicts 3 provinces instead of 1: Tlalcoçauhtitlan, Quiauhteopan, and Yoaltepec.

The first 3 leaves (folios 1r, 1v, and 2r) are heavily damaged and are also unique in having red lines dividing the page. Folios 1r and 1v depict the frontier regions of the empire while 2r depict the relationship between Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. These folios (in addition to folio 13r and 14v) were the ones found by Gómez Tejada to have had the human facial features painted with European influence. The rest of the manuscript follows a standard formula, each leaf depicts 1 province (8r and 10v being exceptions depicting 2 and 3 provinces respectively), starting at the bottom left of the folio starts with the glyph for the major city of the province followed by other towns in the province running up the right edge of the page if needed. The rest of the page is dedicated to items that are expected to be sent to Tenochtitlan as tribute, with many provinces expected to send regional items not readily available elsewhere (i.e. feathers, dye, cacao, cotton, seashells). Each item is marked with a numerical glyph for how many loads were expected, a white flag for 20, a black and white feather for 400, and a white pouch for 8000. Comparing the Matrícula with the Codices Mendoza and Azoyú II and another colonial document showed that all had similar numbers for expected tribute of the Tlapa province, proving the Matrícula's accuracy in depicting expected tribute across the empire.

Analyzing the warrior costumes required by Tenochtitlan from the Matrícula, 5 major regions could be found, the Eastern and Southern regions were not required to send as much warrior costumes despite having access to the feathers required to make them while the dry provinces surrounding Tenochtitlan were required to send the most to the capital forcing them to trade with the other regions for the required feathers to make the warrior costumes highlighting a symbolic division of the empire rather than a practical one.

Scribes

Folio 4r of the Matrícula de tributos, one of the pages painted by the Mixtec scribe.

The scribes of the Matrícula aren't known but Batalla Rosado's 2007 analysis was able to identify 6 different painting styles attributing each to a different painter. A Mixtec painter was identified by Batalla Rosado from 1 of the styles by recognizing the sign for hill used by this scribe is from the Mixtec script rather than the Aztec script. Batalla Rosado argues that 1 of the scribes from the Matrícula is the same painter charged with creating the Codex Mendoza possibly named Francisco Gualpuyogualcal. This idea has been pushed back against by Gómez Tejada who argued that the Matrícula actually belonged to a group of documents that the Mendoza referenced rather than being the work of a scribe from the Matrícula. During the colonial period the Matrícula was maintained and repaired by Mexica elite.