The first two pages of the Matrícula—folios 1r and 1v, in addition to being damaged, difficult to interpret. They do not follow the visual layout found in the rest of the document. They are subdivided by red lines, and they contain a number of glyphs showing human faces. What survives of folio 1r depicts two pairs of places—Oztoma and Poctepec below, Çoçolan and Huaxacac above—as well as glyphs for human heads representing the governors of these locations. The bottom of folio 1v depicts an additional pair of places (Atlan and Teçapotitlan), and at the top of the page are painted two more, single places (Atzacan and Soconusco with their governors). Significantly, most of these locations (Oztoma and Poctepec, Zozolan and Huaxacac, Atlan and Teçapotitlan, Xoconochco) were located on the outer fringes of the Aztec empire. Atzacan was sandwiched between two kingdoms (Tlaxcala and Teotitlan) that had maintained their independence from the Aztec. In other words, the places depicted on the initial folios of the Matrícula probably represented different kinds of frontier outposts. All these locales were in relatively distant reaches of the empire, they represent the cities where the Triple Alliance are stationed in the conquered area. Similar content is available in Codex Mendoza. Its record is more complete, with a total of 11 garrison altepetls.

The first place shown (so, the town depicted in the lower left-hand corner) is the main town of each tribute province, and gives each tribute province its name. The majority of the space on each page is then filled with images of the tribute items that the listed towns were expected to send to Tenochtitlan, probably every 80 days. Many of the visually-depicted objects (bowls of gold dust, jars of honey, jaguar skins) are marked with numeric signs. These indicate how many such objects were demanded. A white paper flag stood for 20, a black and white feather for 400, and a white pouch for 8000. The reading order of these tribute items across each folio is not clear. For our presentation here we have decided to read them along a snaking back-and-forth route: left to right, then right to left, then left to right again. This was a reading order well known to prehispanic Mesoamericans—and also to the ancient Greeks, who called it boustrophedon, “as the ox plows.”

Ancient Mesoamericans used the 20-based mathematical system. In the Nahuatl writing system, scribes use glyphs to represent numbers. They appear on the tribute page in the manuscript to indicate the amount of tribute required. The glyphs for numbers appearing in the manuscripts are listed below.