Cuauhtli (MH484v)

This is a personal name, preceded in the gloss by a Christian first name (Toribio). He may have been named after Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolinia ("One Who is Poor or Afflicted"). This was the first word he learned in Nahuatl, and he went on to learn the language well. He lived in the monastery in Huejotzingo. Doing a quick search for the name "Toribio" will produce an impressive result.

Many Nahua men in this manuscript also had the distinguished name Eagle. When cuauhtli was a name, it probably had a calendrical origin, i.e. drawing from the day in the tonalpohualli 260-day divinatory calendar that the person was born. "They said the good days were Reed, Monkey, Crocodile, Eagle, House" (central Mexico, sixteenth century). See: Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 129. Calendrics were important in the Nahuas' religious views of the cosmos.