Who made this?
- 1. Who made it?
- The pages in the photograph show the feather workers of Book 9 at their craft, painted into the book by painters of the same city. The book itself was made in Mexico by a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, working with Nahua scholars, elders, scribes, and painters over some thirty years. And here this series gets to do something it has not been able to do before: name the makers. Seven of the Nahua authors signed their work or were named in it: Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita, Pedro de San Buenaventura, Diego de Grado, Bonifacio Maximiliano, and Mateo Severino. Others remain unnamed.
- 2. When, and where?
- Finished in 1577 at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco, beside what had been Tenochtitlan, where the named authors had studied and taught. Twelve books, about 2,500 pages, with roughly 2,000 painted pictures.
- 3. Why, and for whom?
- Sahagún said his purpose was to teach missionaries the language and ways of the people they meant to convert, the way a doctor must know a disease before treating it; those are his words and his framing. The Nahua authors, working inside that assignment, built something larger: a record of their own world, written in their own language. The pages run in two columns, Nahuatl beside Spanish, and the columns are not equal: in places the Nahuatl runs long and full while the Spanish beside it shrinks to a few lines. The twelfth book tells the war from the side that lost the city, gathered from elders who had lived through it.
- 4. Who has it now, and how did it get there?
- The Laurentian Library in Florence, Italy, which is why it is called the Florentine Codex. It was sent toward Spain around 1577 and was in the Medici family's hands by 1588; how it moved is not fully recorded. In 2023 the Getty, working with the library and with Nahuatl scholars, put every page online, searchable, free.
- 5. Whose voice is missing here, and where can we hear it?
- Nahuatl's own, at book length, which almost nothing else from that century preserves; and the elders' testimony in Book 12. The Spanish column sometimes softens or shortens what the Nahuatl says, so a reader with both columns is reading two accounts at once. The names of the seven authors survived for the plainest of reasons: they were written in the book the authors made.
For your notebook: seven makers' names survived because they wrote them into the thing they made. What has to happen, in any age, for a maker's name to survive?
Sources: Getty, Digital Florentine Codex (2023), florentinecodex.getty.edu; Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; Smarthistory, “Bernardino de Sahagún and Indigenous collaborators, Florentine Codex.”
First, the idea
The test's favorite reasoning question is cause and effect: What was a cause of X? What was an effect of Y? Which development led to Z? The skill has two halves: reading what a passage actually claims, and refusing a claim the passage never makes.
Cause words. Passages mark their cause claims with words like because, since, as a result, led to, so that, therefore. When the test asks for a cause, your first move is to find those words and see what they connect. An answer choice that is true but never connected to the effect in the passage is the standard trap; you met it in Quiz 1, and here it wears its dress clothes.
Say how. A cause is a claim you can finish with a mechanism. In a milpa, the old farm of maize, beans, and squash grown together, the beans do not merely grow after the maize; they grow because of it, and a farmer can say how: the stalk holds the vine up, and the vine feeds the soil the roots share. If you cannot say how A produced B, even in one sentence, you do not have a cause yet. You have two events standing near each other.
After is not because. One thing following another proves nothing by itself. Sales of cold drinks and rescues at the beach both rise in July; neither causes the other; summer causes both. When two things move together, always ask whether a third thing moves them.
More than one cause. Big effects almost never have one cause. The test knows this and asks for an underlying cause (the slow, deep one) versus an immediate cause (the spark). And causes chain: A leads to B, which leads to C. A passage that says the disease killed the ruler, and the loss of the ruler weakened the defense, has given you a chain with two links, and the test may ask about either one.
Worked example — thinking out loud
A small passage, in the same cream box every passage in this series wears, with its sentences numbered the way the test numbers them.
1 In a milpa, maize, beans, and squash grow together in the same mound of soil. 2 The maize comes up first and makes a tall stalk. 3 Because the stalk is there, the bean vine has something to climb, and the beans feed the soil that all three plants share. 4 The squash spreads wide leaves close to the ground, so the soil under them stays damp and few weeds come up.
Written for this example.
The question: According to the passage, why do few weeds come up?
My first pull is toward the biggest true thing I know: the three plants help each other, that is the whole point of a milpa, so I reach for an answer shaped like that. But the question asked about the weeds, and “according to the passage” is a rule from Quiz 1: answer from these four sentences only. So I hunt for the cause word. It is in sentence 4: the squash spreads wide leaves, so the soil stays damp and few weeds come up. There is my chain, with a how in the middle: leaves, then shade, then no room for weeds.
Now the check. “The plants help each other” is true and too big; it names the garden, not the mechanism, and the test will offer it to me dressed as the right answer. “Because farmers pull the weeds” is true on every real farm and appears nowhere in the passage: the true-fact trap in its work clothes. The answer is the shade, because that is the how this passage states. In Part B the same skill runs at full size, on a passage where an empire, a disease, and a blockade all claim the word because.
Part A · The skill by itself
1. A farmer explains the milpa: “We plant the beans beside the maize because the stalk holds the vine up, and the vine feeds the soil.” Which part of the sentence turns it from a description into a cause claim?
2. In New York, ice cream sales and rescues at Rockaway Beach both rise sharply every July. What is the most careful reading of these two facts?
3. Read the sentence: “Because the aqueduct was cut, the city lost its fresh water.” Which is the cause, and which is the effect?
Part B · The skill in the wild
Now the skill at full size: a passage with many causes in it, set under the twelfth book’s own picture of the sickness. Read it the way Quiz 1 taught: sentences first, then the claims they make. The numbers are for the questions.
The sickness of 1520 as the twelfth book’s painters showed it: a healer tending a patient, and the sick on their mats. Florentine Codex, Book 12 (1577); public-domain reproduction. Sentence 6 of the passage comes from the account this picture was painted for.
Why the City Fell
1 In 1519, when the Spaniards first marched inland, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities on earth, set in a lake and fed by causeways, canals, and an aqueduct that carried fresh water from the springs at Chapultepec. 2 The Mexica state that ruled from the city collected tribute from many peoples, and some of those peoples hated it. 3 Tlaxcala, never conquered by the Mexica, had fought them for generations, and after first fighting the newcomers, its leaders joined them. 4 In 1520, during the months the Spaniards were expelled from the city, smallpox reached the lake country; the disease had come from across the sea, and the peoples of the Americas had never met it before, so their bodies carried no defenses against it. 5 The sickness burned through Tenochtitlan for about sixty days; among the many who died was Cuitláhuac, the new ruler, who had led the fight that drove the Spaniards out. 6 The Nahua account of these years, written down later by elders who had lived through them, records that so many fell ill at once that in some houses no one was left well enough to fetch water or grind maize, and people died of hunger beside full storerooms. 7 In 1521 the Spaniards returned with a fleet of small warships built for the lake and with fighters from Tlaxcala and other nations, tens of thousands of them, more than the Spaniards themselves by far. 8 Because the ships controlled the water, canoes could not bring food into the city, and because the besiegers cut the aqueduct, the city lost its fresh water. 9 After months of siege, hunger, and street fighting, the city fell on August 13, 1521. 10 A war between two sides had in truth been a war among many, and the city was defeated by an alliance, a blockade, and a disease, working together.
Written for this quiz. The facts follow the Nahua account in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex (1577), via the Getty's Digital Florentine Codex; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Maudslay translation, 1908); and the World History Encyclopedia, “The Fall of Tenochtitlan.”
4. According to the passage, which of these was a cause of Tlaxcala joining the Spaniards?
5. The passage presents the epidemic of 1520 chiefly as
6. Sentence 8 gives two causes for two effects. Which pairing matches the sentence?
7. Which statement is true but is NOT given as a cause anywhere in the passage?
8. Complete the sentence so that it matches the passage and the lesson.
In this passage, the deep, slow cause of the city's isolation was [the weather on the lake / the tribute system that gave many peoples reasons to join the other side / the size of the city], and the epidemic counts as a cause of the defeat because the passage [says how: it killed defenders and the ruler who led them / mentions it after the defeat / calls it bad luck].
The key — and why the tempting answers tempt
Improve this quiz
This page was built to be improved, and the person best placed to improve it is the one who just finished it. That’s you. Four questions — answering even one, in class or however your teacher gathers notes, is enough:
- Where did you stop, or get lost? Point to the sentence or the item number.
- Which wrong answer almost got you — and why?
- What does this page assume you already know?
- What change(s) should we make to this quiz?
If your note changes this page, the change is recorded below and on the Map, credited the way you choose — first name, class, or not at all.
Changed by its readers: August 2026 — asked which passage, and where it was, we rebuilt this quiz’s worked example to carry its own passage inside it. The fix now governs every quiz in the series.