The Codex Florentine

The Codex Florentine was a collection of twelve books written by Friar Bernardino de Sahagun and associates in the mid-1500s. It was commissioned as a collective history of the Nahua peoples before the Spanish conquered them. It was originally a collection of Nahua history told in the Nahuatl language. Bernardino translated this into Spanish, but loosely. In order to generate the greatest understanding from the Spanish readers, he sometimes summarized the text and left out sections he thought were unimportant to the concepts. To compensate, numerous illustrations (most in color) filled the first two pages of the fourth book. Bernardino went and lived with the Nahua peoples in order to generate the material for this codex. When he first arrived, he thought they were backwards and was set on 'fixing' them. The more time he spent with the Nahua, the more he grew to respect them and he constantly praised them in many of his other works on the Nahua. Bernardino is sometimes called the Father of Anthropology in the New World for his extensive research done with the Nahua during his lifetime.
codiceflorentino.tripod.com/english.htm