The Conquest of New Spain

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The Conquest of New Spain (Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España) is the first person conquistador narrative of Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492 or 1493 - 1581), a 16th century soldier, settler and conqueror who served with Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, Juan de Grijalva and Hernán Cortés in Mexico and Yucatan, and saw and participated in the fall of Moctezuma II and with him the end of the great Aztec empire.

Written at eighty-four years of age on his poor encomienda estates in Guatemala, having lost "both sight and hearing", Díaz saw his work as defending the common conquistador history of the conquest against Bartolomé de Las Casas, a fierce critic of the conquest of the New World, and the hagiographic biographers of Hernán Cortés, among them Francisco López de Gómara, who were accused of downplaying the role of some 700 common soldiers and sailors, Díaz among them, who were instrumental in bringing down the Aztec empire. Accusing these chroniclers of speaking the truth "neither in the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end", Díaz vociferously defended the actions of the conquistadors, while at the same time bringing the elements of humanism and honesty to his eyewitness narrative, famously summarised in his famous throwaway line; "we went there to serve God, and also to get rich".

Díaz is not always charitable to Cortés. As with many of the other soldiers involved in the conquest, Díaz found himself among the ruins of Tenochtitlan little richer than when he had arrived, a state for which many of his comrades blamed Cortés, accused by some of taking far more than his previously-agreed 'fifth' of the Aztec treasury as loot. Certainly, the compensation many conquistadors received, both in land and gold, was a poor return for the months of marching and hard fighting across Mexico and Anahuac. Other readings of The Conquest of New Spain have noted that Díaz was one of a number of relatives serving with Cortés of Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, governor of Cuba and mortal enemy of Cortés, many of whom ended up plotting against the conquistador. Díaz may have deliberately played down this relationship because it played a more prominent role than he pretends in the text; his involved relationship with Cortés and his captains suggests that he may have been the representative of the Velázquez faction, and was one of the few who remained loyal to Cortés to the end. There has even been speculation among historical sources that Díaz's account was entirely fictional. But disregarding some of his possible omissions, Díaz's narrative is widely acknowledged to be a true one, and that his attitude to Cortés expresses no more ambivalence towards the conquistador's legacy than it has since inspired among many others.

The Conquest of New Spain is a vivid account of one of the most startling episodes in colonial history, and Díaz stands "among chroniclers what Daniel Defoe is among novelists". It is certainly an absorbing, fascinating, and above all comprehensive first-hand account of the Spanish conquest of the New World, and hence valuable both to historians and casual readers.