Commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, the manuscript consists of 12 books devoted to different topics. Book IX is about merchants, officials responsible for gold and precious stones, and feather working. The pochteca (merchants) were an important group in Aztec society.

Book X is about Aztec society and covers such subjects as the virtues and vices of the people, food and drink, the parts of the human body, and illnesses and remedies. In this book, Sahagún describes the process of making chocolate from cacao beans, which is also depicted on folio 71v.

Book 2 of the Florentine Codex, titled 'The Ceremonies' is predictably weighty, one of the longer volumes in the Codex. It deals 'with the calendar, feasts, ceremonies, sacrifices and solemnities' of the Mexica... 1).

The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (in English: The General History of the Things of New Spain).