The FBI returned a 16th-century manuscript page signed by Hernán Cortés to Mexico decades after it was stolen from the national archives, according to The New York Times. Mexico had requested help from the FBI’s Art Crime Team last year to recover a page from a lost group of documents bearing Cortés’s signature, the outlet reported.
This is an original manuscript page that was actually signed by Hernán Cortés on February 20, 1527, said Special Agent Jessica Dittmer, according to The Guardian. The document recorded payments in gold pesos to outfit an exploratory expedition to the Americas and included purchase instructions in Old Spanish, offering a detailed accounting of logistics tied to Cortés’s travel to what later became New Spain.
Pieces like this are considered protected cultural property and represent valuable moments in the history of Mexico, said Dittmer.
The FBI said in a press release that the document moved through many hands over the years, and no one would be prosecuted. Authorities did not disclose where it was recovered or who possessed it.
The investigation involved the New York City Police Department, the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI’s Atlanta office, and the government of Mexico. Using open-source information, agents determined the page was in the United States, narrowed the search with support from Atlanta and New York authorities, and seized it from an undisclosed location. The FBI said it added the case to the National Stolen Art File and continued looking for other missing pages from Mexico’s national archives.
Archivists at the General Archive of the Nation in Mexico discovered during a 1993 microfilming project that 15 pages from the Cortés collection were missing, believed stolen between 1985 and 1993. A distinctive wax numbering system used in 1985–1986, along with recorded rip patterns from the torn folios, helped investigators authenticate the recovered page and could aid the search for the rest.
This was the second Cortés document the FBI returned to Mexico. In 2023, the bureau returned a 16th-century letter from Cortés that authorized the purchase of sugar in New Spain, describing a payment order in gold for 12 gold pesos of pink sugar.
The United States — for better or for worse — is one of the largest, if not the largest, consumer of art and antiquities, said Veh Bezdikian, a supervisory special agent with the FBI in New York. The FBI said it hoped recoveries like this would deter trafficking in cultural goods and credited cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities.
Cortés, who seized the Mexican capital in 1521 and was named governor of New Spain by Charles V in 1522, played a central role in Spain’s expansion across the Americas. The viceroyalty later extended from the area of today’s Washington state to Louisiana and across much of present-day Mexico, Central America, and the United States. The 1527 manuscript reflected a period when Pacific routes were opening and New Spain sought links between the Americas and Asia, including an account of his journey from Europe to the Americas.
Produced with the assistance of a news-analysis system.