Bernardino de Sahagún

Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499–1590) was a Franciscan friar and pioneering ethnographer born at Sahagún in León. He reached New Spain in 1529, mastered Nahuatl, and spent more than fifty years documenting Aztec religion, society and history with native assistants, developing methods to collect and check the information he gathered.

He compiled the General History of the Things of New Spain, preserved as the bilingual and richly illustrated Florentine Codex, whose twelfth book recounts the fall of Tenochtitlan from the Aztec point of view. His methods later earned him the title of first anthropologist of America.