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266 BENEDICT VADAKKEKARA of the community Tepepulco, Tlatelolco and Mexico and used to receive the .requested information "in pictures, which was the writing they had used of old". This explains why the Florentine Codex carries as many as 1850 drawings. "In the Codex Florentino, Sahagun and his indigenous collaborators appear to have employed a strategy of trying to engage the king's support for the pro– Indianist faction, to vindicate the work of the mendicants, to advocate for the missionizing work that yet needed to done, and to convince the king that the indoctrination efforts of the early Franciscans should continue. The Florentino illustrations (and the text) form an argument in support of the Mexican people and of the Franciscan vision of a millennial kingdom in New Spain" (136). The paper The multilingua~ bi-visual world of Sahagtin's Mexico by Elizabeth Hill Boone distinguishes the oral and visual communications of "the invading, conquering, and evangelizing Spaniards" from those of the Mesoamericans. While the Spaniards had Spanish and Latin as their principal languages, in Mesoamerica around 40 languages were spoken, with the imperial language Nahuatl occupying the predominant place. If the Spaniards had two graphic systems, based on alphabets to record the spoken language and iconographic images, the Mesoamericans had the single system of writing/painting or pictog– raphy. Until the arrival of the mendicant friars on the scene in the third decade of the sixteenth century there used to be an informal process of mutual accul– turation between the native techniques and the Spanish systems. As the friars learned Nahuatl and used it in their preaching, select young noble Nahuas took to learning and communicating in Spanish and Latin. Accordingly if colonial Nahuas began to employ the European script for writing Nahuatl, Spanish and Latin, they also continued to employ pictography alongside. Many a time peti– tions to the king or complaints against the Spanish officials took the painted form. The Franciscan friars regarded painting as an effective means for getting the Gospel message across to the American natives. In fact the Council of Trent in 1564 formally recognised the efficacy of the use of images for the work of evangelisation. "It was a multilingual, bivisual world, in which Sahagun and his colleagues moved easily" (166). Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo aptly describes the Mesoamerican painters of Sahagun's MSS as mediators between two worlds. He tries to set the record straight by showing that the widely-held view that "the Indian cultures had been devastated, and that Indians had played a predominantly passive role in the colonial process" does not correspond with historical facts. Though the na– tive Americans were often spectators to the displacement of their model of civilisation, they were to some extent successful in accommodating their culture