tomin (FCbk10f70r)
This iconographic scene shows a man extending a hand and offering a tomin coin. Tomin was a Spanish word that entered Nahuatl as a loanword. Its value was ⅛ peso, also called a real in Spanish. The team preparing the Digital Florentine Codex used tomin as a keyword for the contextualizing scene, where we learn the man is offering money to a prostitute who works along the roads (where the otli, or road, is marked by footprints). A speech scroll also emits from the man’s mouth in the direction of the woman he sought to procure.
Stephanie Wood
One eighth of a peso was a standard payment for many things in the early Spanish colonial period. It was the principal coin of daily life for a majority of Nahuas. It was so common, the term came to mean simply “money,” too. In some other examples of tomines below, we can see how glyphs of tomines could have circles telling the number of coins involved (such as one or three). When it was four (half a peso), the tomin would bear the numerical digit 4. In one example, the glyph for Tomin is a man’s name! In this particular iconographic example, the coin is just blank. The text surrounding the contextualizing image does not offer a gloss or one-word description of this coin. So, there is an assumption here that it is a tomin. Incidentally, the association of prostitutes with street walking may reveal European influence.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
dinero, moneda, monedas, tomines, sexuality
tomin, money, a coin, ⅛ peso (a loanword from Spanish), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tomin
el tomín
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 10: The People", fol. 70r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/10/folio/70r?spTexts=&nhTexts= Accessed 23 June 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
