This remarkable account comes from the Florentine Codex, a massive cultural encyclopedia of the native people of Mexico that was compiled in the mid-sixteenth century under the direction of Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan missionary. Beginning about 1547, Sahagún trained a group of Mexican men to interview prominent elders and to record their words in Nahuatl, their native language. Sahagún’s informants had a vivid memory of the conquest of Mexico, which had occurred only a generation earlier. Sahagún published their account, in both Nahuatl and Spanish, in Book 12 of the Codex — the source of the following selection, which was translated from Nahuatl. This account reveals Mexican perspectives on the events of conquest.