Codex Tovar

Hence, Tovar met with Aztec historians and manuscript painters (tlacuiloque) to transform these pictoglyphic sources into an account more acceptable to the Western historical tradition.

Having failed in his task and having left New Spain, he reached out to his colleague Tovar, who was already advanced in the preparation of the Ramírez Codex.

He encouraged Tovar to send a copy of his work to King Philip II of Spain, who at the time requested historical works on his American domains to be prepared: hence, the Ramírez Codex remained in Mexico, where it was later re-found, and the Tovar Codex was sent to Spain, where Acosta used the valuable information from the manuscript to write the section on Aztec history in his more general work Historia natural y moral de las Indias.

[4] The contents and illustrations of the first and the historical part are noticeably close not only to the Ramírez Codex, but also to the work of Diego Durán, and Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc.

[5] Some scholars consider that Tovar derived both of his works from Durán, given the similarities among them,[6] while others hypothesize that both come from the same group of pictographic Aztec documents, now lost.