Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer
1499 CE
to 1590 CE
Bernardino de Sahagún (1499 – October 23, 1590) is a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participates in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain (now Mexico).
Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeys to New Spain in 1529.
He learns Nahuatl and spends more than fifty years in the study of Aztec beliefs, culture and history.
Though he is primarily devoted to his missionary task, his extraordinary work documenting indigenous worldview and culture has earned him the title as “the first anthropologist."
He also contributes to the description of the Aztec language Nahuatl.
He translates the Psalms, the Gospels, and a catechism into Nahuatl.
Sahagún is perhaps best known as the compiler of the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (in English): General History of the Things of New Spain (hereinafter referred to as Historia General).
The most famous extant manuscript of the Historia General is the Florentine Codex.
It is a codex consisting of twenty-four hundred pages organized into twelve books, with approximately twenty-five hundred illustrations drawn by native artists using both native and European techniques.
The alphabetic text is bilingual in Spanish and Nahuatl on opposing folios, and the pictorials should be considered a third kind of text.
It documents the culture, religious cosmology (worldview), ritual practices, society, economics, and history of the Aztec people, and in Book Twelve gives an account of the conquest of Mexico from the Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco point of view.
In the process of putting together the Historia General, Sahagún pioneers new methods for gathering ethnographic information and validating its accuracy.
