{"id":73771,"date":"2026-08-21T14:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T14:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/73771\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T14:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T14:22:09","slug":"a-true-account-of-the-conquest-of-new-spain-chicanery-adventures-and-plunder-recounted-by-a-soldier-writer-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/73771\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A True Account of the Conquest of New Spain\u2019: Chicanery, adventures and plunder recounted by a soldier-writer | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alejo Carpentier, a deep connoisseur of the origins, essences and behaviors of New World identity, and the author of the identity concept he called \u201cAmerican Magical Realism\u201d \u2014 which he also stylized in his novels \u2014 stated that the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of America, which took place in 1492<\/a>, was the most momentous event in history, because from that encounter mankind finally had a full understanding of the world it inhabited. What happened from that moment on changed everything. For everyone.<\/p>\n

Many disruptive events and phenomena followed thereafter. As is well documented, after Columbus\u2019s discovery the conquerors\u2019 drive drastically and brutally transformed the lives of the continent\u2019s original inhabitants: not only was another worldview imposed, but violence was used to do so and, as collateral damage, diseases were introduced<\/a> \u2014 processes that reached genocidal levels among Cuba\u2019s Indigenous populations, among others. Of course, the American adventure also altered the makeup of European societies, from those directly involved in conquest to populations that began to ease their famines with the various benefits arriving from the other side of the Atlantic, such as the potato.<\/p>\n

Undoubtedly, two of the most dramatic conquest processes, judged by the huge number of sociohistorical changes they produced, were those that took place in Mesoamerica<\/a>, home to the peoples grouped under the names Maya and Aztec, and the campaign in the southern part of the continent against the vast Inca empire, the Tahuantinsuyo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The arrival of a civilization that was materially and technologically more advanced, and theologically at a monotheistic stage, unleashed a historical tsunami that altered the fate of the native cultures<\/p>\n

In every case, the arrival of a civilization that was materially and technologically more advanced, and theologically at a monotheistic stage, unleashed a historical tsunami that altered the fate of the native cultures, transformed by blood and fire; for with the evangelizing cross came the invading hordes\u2019 material violence in search of the riches abundantly found across what would soon be called the Americas.<\/p>\n

Those campaigns of conquest and the convulsive upheavals they produced \u2014 their historical significance tinged with the astonishment of the scarcely conceivable, but often justified ideologically by the evangelization that, it was repeatedly claimed, would bring salvation to so many unbelievers \u2014 gave rise to a varied and abundant literature. In that corpus, known as the chronicles of the conquest, there was everything: from more or less official letters and documents \u2014opened by Columbus\u2019s letters to the Catholic Monarchs and capped by Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s\u2019s letters on the conquest of what would become the Viceroyalty of New Spain<\/a> \u2014 to indispensable works for understanding the dimensions of what occurred, such as the two volumes of the Comentarios reales by the highly gifted Inca writer Garcilaso de la Vega on the Andean empire and the events related to its fall; followed, as almost always happened, by disputes among the newcomers, and the work of the ever-mnemonic soldier Bernal D\u00edaz del Castillo, emphatically titled Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espa\u00f1a (A True Account of the Conquest of New Spain), which was published in 1632, nearly 50 years after the author\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

When, in recent times, several of those events and processes from half a millennium ago \u2014 in another world, another system of epochal ideas and concepts \u2014 have once again become political controversies with score-settling included<\/a>, the publisher Libros del Asteroide has issued a substantial edition of Bernal D\u00edaz del Castillo\u2019s work. Prefaced by a well-documented introduction by Jordi Gracia and capped with an illuminating epilogue by Andrea Mart\u00ednez Baracs, this 2026 edition of the Historia verdadera\u2026 presents a bold adaptation. Under the guidance of specialist in medieval and Renaissance Hispanic literature, Lorenzo Mart\u00edn de Burgo, the edition modernizes the 16th-century lexicon (a \u201crendering into contemporary Spanish\u201d) and removes or condenses chapters considered repetitive or tedious. The editors\u2019 explicit aim has been to make a classic work more accessible to contemporary readers.<\/p>\n

From its very title the work declares its intentions: to narrate what the author considers the truth of a history already beginning to be manipulated by certain interests<\/p>\n

Of course, the work of editors and specialists may be open to debate. And although the end often does not justify the means, I, for one (having read the original text, which remains in my emotional memory), applaud such a daring endeavor, which will surely draw in readers who would otherwise be unlikely to be attracted by the magnetic yet challenging immersion in this indispensable document within the historical landscape of Hispanic literature and the history of the nascent relationship between Europeans and the wider world, culminating in Columbus\u2019s expedition.<\/p>\n

From its very title the work declares its intentions: to narrate what the author considers the truth of a history already beginning to be manipulated by certain interests, whether through lack of information or, at times, for even murkier reasons, such as specific relations of power and material gain. It is therefore no accident that Bernal D\u00edaz\u2019s chronicle launched a barrage of criticism at Francisco L\u00f3pez de G\u00f3mara\u2019s Historia general de las Indias, published in 1552, a few years before D\u00edaz began drafting his account.<\/p>\n

Such an intention is fitting for attempting a concise assessment of the qualities of any historical writing. Although the discipline is considered a \u201csocial science,\u201d its scientific character is often in doubt. For, to begin with, it carries a very real stigma: history is written by the victors, a condition that must be coupled with its class-based nature, shaped by economic, epochal and, above all, ideological judgments and prejudices from which the historian can never fully disentangle himself, even when he claims to reveal the truth and documents it.<\/p>\n

In this case it is important to note that Bernal D\u00edaz had the advantage of physical proximity to the events he narrates: he was the only European who participated in the three expeditions that culminated in the discovery and subsequent conquest of the territory, later led by Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s, which ended in the fall of Aztec power in Tenochtitl\u00e1n<\/a>. However, it is also necessary to warn of the drawback of his partiality, since he was, precisely, an actor in the events; and although he writes with the purpose of establishing a truth, it will always be contaminated by the original sin of his historical and cultural condition (his ideology), which imbues him with a worldview decorated by visceral intellectual traits such as religion.<\/p>\n

The Mexica capital, the lacustrine city of Mexico-Tenochtitl\u00e1n, housed about 300,000 inhabitants when Paris reached 200,000.<\/p>\n

One of the most notable literary merits of Bernal D\u00edaz\u2019s work lies in his narrative ability to generate dramatic tension despite recounting a well-known story. Conceptually, his mediated yet perceptible grasp of what that conquering campaign meant is also noteworthy. Recall that the Aztec capital, the lacustrine city of Tenochtitl\u00e1n, housed about 300,000 inhabitants at a time when Paris had 200,000. It was a highly stratified society with strict controls over its population and despotic toward subjugated neighbors, yet economically prosperous and advanced in a wide range of human activities. Hence the chronicler\u2019s admiration for such beauty, opulence and social organization that runs throughout the work, allowing him to state that they could \u201csee things never heard of, nor seen, nor even dreamed of, as we saw them,\u201d for \u201cthey seemed like enchantments told in the book of Amadis,\u201d while repeatedly justifying the civilizing character of a process he accepts as a great historical and spiritual necessity.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the soldier-writer does not hide the plunder that drove the much-vaunted civilizing action. It would be worth counting how often words such as gold, silver, and riches appear in his chronicle and noting the complaints about the unfair divisions of those spoils. He does not conceal many European misdeeds \u2014 horrors such as, among many, the enslavement of Indigenous people, branded with hot irons like beasts \u2014 nor the internal disputes among the invaders\u2026 and, of course, the fate of expeditionaries like him, bearing the countless scars from the battles they fought and who, in the end, barely received the scraps of the great spoils obtained.<\/p>\n

It is no coincidence that in the closing section of the chronicle, after the Aztec capital is taken, with Moctezuma<\/a> long dead and his successor Cuauht\u00e9moc even murdered, while Bernal D\u00edaz continues to record the many \u201cbenefits\u201d the Spaniards\u2019 arrival brought to lands of idolaters, he also recounts how among the Europeans the shameful feast of tricks and underhanded deals that the conquering campaign devolved into begins. And so Bernal D\u00edaz records when he reflects: \u201cHere you will see how much distance there is between the old conquerors and those recently arrived from Castile, who do not know the nature of Indian warfare and their cunning. In this the conquest ended.\u201d<\/p>\n

It seems that, as always in history, some gain more than others, and some grow rich. But the big losers were not those who failed to acquire more wealth or more enslaved Indigenous people under the encomienda system. They were civilizations that, due to the ambitions and fanaticism characteristic of that era, suffered a historic catastrophe. And I repeat: as always, for there is no shortage of such ambition and fanaticism in our 21st century either, while a history presented as true is being reissued, in a modernized form, for today\u2019s readers.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alejo Carpentier, a deep connoisseur of the origins, essences and behaviors of New World identity, and the author…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[28439,4108,4529,17,28440],"class_list":["post-73771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-alejo-carpentier","tag-cuba","tag-hernan-cortes","tag-spain","tag-tenochtitlan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}