Tenochtitlán figurada

Five hundred years after the publication of the map of Tenochtitlan and the map of the Gulf of Mexico in the imperial city of Nuremberg, this article offers a comprehensive review of its history and historiography. Based on an exhaustive analysis of sources and historiography in several languages, it reconstructs the document’s journey from its possible creation in Mexico to its printing in Nuremberg, a true “migration of the image” through different media, visual regimes and political goals. The research reveals unpublished data on its manufacture, its possible indigenous sources, the identity of the German engravers involved in its production, and the trail of the map-plan in the political-geographical imagination of the 16th century. The article analyzes the impact of the map on European cartography, reconstructing its wake in a series of sumptuous world maps derived from the Padrón Real that played a dominant role in Charles V’s diplomatic strategy toward the papacy. The formal analysis reveals that the centrifugal projection of the city plan, together with the prominent representation of the ceremonial precinct, point to a visual strategy that emphasizes the centrality of sacrifice and Mexica political order within the Habsburg imperial narrative. At the same time, the image of Tenochtitlan forged in the print served to underpin the political fiction of the “New Spain of the Ocean Sea” that Hernán Cortés presented in his Second Letter to the Emperor.