F. Saverio Clavigero - Storia Antica del Messico - 1780

CLAVIGERO, Francesco Saverio (Clavijero, Francisco Javier).
Ancient History of Mexico drawn from the best Spanish historians, and from manuscripts, and from the ancient paintings of the Indians: divided into ten books, and accompanied by geographical maps, and by various figures: and dissertations on the land, on animals, and on the inhabitants of Mexico. Work of Abate D. Francesco Saverio Clavigero. Volume III.
Cesena, for Gregorio Biasini at the Sign of Pallade, (1780).

In-4° (mm 280 × 208 approx.), pp. 260. With a full-page plate depicting Montezuma Xocojotzin seated on a throne, surrounded by portraits of Ferdinand Cortés, Pietro Alvarado, Gonzalo di Sandoval, and Cristoforo d’Olid, within medallions connected by floral garlands and fruits. The folded map originally present is missing. Binding in rustic contemporaneous paper, stitched with blue thread, back missing but rebound; rough cut edges, some staining and foxing typical of period paper, but text complete and legible.

Original edition (first absolute edition) of one of the most important and influential texts on pre-Hispanic history and on the conquest of Mexico.
The third volume contains Books VIII-X, devoted to the arrival of the Spaniards, to relations with Montezuma, to the wars, to the siege of Tenochtitlán and the fall of the Mexican empire. It includes, at the end, the genealogies of Ferdinand Cortés and of King Montezuma, the general index of notable things and the errata.

Francesco Saverio Clavigero (Veracruz 1731 – Bologna 1787), a Mexican Jesuit expelled from Spanish dominions in 1767, wrote the work in Italian during his exile in Cesena and Bologna. He used indigenous sources (manuscripts and ancient paintings) to which he had had access before departure, as well as the best Spanish historians. This is the first complete and systematic history of Mexico ancient available at the time: it reevaluates pre-Hispanic civilizations, distinguishes the different indigenous populations, and openly criticizes the atrocities of the conquistadors, opposing the European Enlightenment biases (Buffon, De Pauw, etc.) that denigrated America and its inhabitants.

The Italian edition of Cesena 1780-1781 (4 volumes) is the princeps: the original Spanish text was lost and rediscovered only in the 20th century. The work achieved immediate European success (English translation by Charles Cullen, 1787; numerous American reissues; Spanish translation only in 1826) and remains a foundational classic for Mesoamerican historiography, ethnography and archaeology.

A specimen of Volume III alone, complete with text and the evocative frontispiece with Montezuma and the conquerors, but lacking the folded geographic map. Desirable for the rarity of the first edition and for the historical and cultural importance of the work, one of the key texts of the “creole patriotism” and of the reassessment of indigenous American cultures.