The FBI has returned a stolen document, dated at 500 years old and signed by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, to Mexico. This manuscript page, written in 1527, is part of a set of 15 pages believed to have been taken from Mexico’s national archives between 1985 and 1993. The document details financial records related to supplies for Cortés’s expeditions and was found in the United States before being repatriated to Mexico.
Cortés played a significant role in the fall of the Aztec Empire and the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The recovered page was authored after he was appointed governor of New Spain by the Spanish crown. Mexico’s national archives had identified the missing documents while transitioning to microfilm in 1993, noting the absence of the 15 pages.
The returned document had a distinguishing number marked in wax, applied by archivists in 1985-1986, indicating it was likely stolen between cataloging efforts. In 2024, the Mexican government sought assistance from the FBI’s art crime team to locate the missing papers, providing information on which pages had been taken and how certain pages had been damaged. The FBI utilized open-source research to pinpoint the document’s location in the US.
The agency did not disclose the exact site where the manuscript was retrieved or its ownership at the time of seizure. No prosecutions will occur relating to the theft, as the page changed hands multiple times since its disappearance. The FBI underscored the necessity of addressing antiquities trafficking due to the U.S.’s prominent role as a consumer of such artifacts. The agency expressed a commitment to identify and return the remaining missing pages from this collection. In a related event, another Cortés-signed document was returned to Mexico in 2023.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62we83d1lno?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss