The FBI returns a stolen document signed by Conquistador in Mexico

The FBI rendered a stolen document of 500 years signed by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico.

The manuscript page was written in 1527 and is one of the 15 pages that would have been slipped from the National Archives of Mexico between 1985 and 1993, the US investigation agency announced.

The page – which describes the payments made for shipping supplies – was discovered in the United States and repatriated Wednesday.

Cortés was an explorer who caused the end of the Aztec Empire and helped to open the way to Spanish colonization of the Americas. The manuscript details plans for his journey through what was going to become New Spain.

At its peak, the colony extended over a large part of the west and the center of North America and Latin America.

The previously missing document was written after Cortés was appointed governor of New Spain by the Spanish Crown.

The National Archives of Mexico had counted the document among a collection of documents signed by Cortés – but found that 15 pages were missed when it was put in microfilm in 1993.

The recovered page brought a written number in wax that the archivists had applied in 1985-1986, suggesting that it had been stolen between the two cataloging periods.

The Mexican government asked for help from the FBI artistic crime team to find the missing documents in 2024, providing notes on the pages taken and how certain pages had been torn.

The FBI said open source research has revealed that the document was located in the United States.

The agency did not reveal exactly where the manuscript page was found or who had owned it during its seizure.

No one will face the flight prosecutions because the page had “changed several times” since it was stolen, according to special agent Jessica Dittmer of the FBI artistic crime team.

The document “really gives a lot of flavor regarding the planning and the preparation of an unexplored territory at the time,” she said, describing “the payment of common gold pesos for expenses in preparation for the discovery of spice lands”.

The so-called “spice lands” were areas of East and South Asia. Europeans sought to find a faster commercial route with these areas by sailing west, but in doing so, it landed on the Americas instead.

Cortés would explore northwestern Mexico and the Baja California peninsula.

The repatriation of the document comes at a moment of political tension between Mexico and the United States on the prices imposed by the Trump administration and illegal migration through the American-Mexican border.

But the FBI says that, as one of the largest consumers of antiques, the United States was responsible for countering artifacts.

Ms. Dittmer said: “Pieces like this are considered to be protected cultural properties and represent precious moments in the history of Mexico, it is therefore something that Mexicans have in their archives in order to better understand history.”

The FBI said that it was determined to locate and repatriate the other even missed pages to the collection.

Another document signed by Cortés was returned to Mexico by the FBI in 2023.