Bernal Diaz and The Conquest of New Spain

Bernal Diaz, in The Conquest of New Spain, tells the story of the conquering of Mexico by the Spaniards under Hernan Cortes. The book is more than merely about Cortes, although he is certainly the center of the book. Diaz accompanied Cortes on his exploits and offers a thoroughly positive view of the Spanish conqueror and of the entire Spanish enterprise in the Mexico. As translator J.M. Cohen writes in his Introduction, Diaz's book is a report on

the overthrow of a great empire by a company of adventurers, inspired partly by a sense of mission and partly by a crude greed for gold. Their success, even their survival, could in his belief be accounted for only by the miraculous intervention of God and the Saints, who wished New Spain to be added to the realm of Christ and the Emperor Charles V (Diaz, 1963, 7).

Clearly, operating under such a philosophy, Diaz is not going to give the reader an objective account of Cortes and the Spanish conquerors. To the contrary, he assumes that the Spaniards were on a religious mission, ordained by God and Christ, and that therefore any action they took to succeed in that mission was justified. The Mexicans, on the other hand, are seen by Diaz as savages who can be saved only by being conquered by the Christian Spaniards. The reader, therefore, must keep in mind the author's biases and must assess the book accordingly.

If there is any doubt about the tack Diaz will take in the book, it is dispelled in his "Preliminary Note":

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sense that the Spaniards are superior in every way to the Indians and have a God-given right to completely alter the Indians' way of life in order to have them serve the Spaniards' needs: Here in this island the Captain began to command energetically, and Our Lord so favoured hm that whatever he touched succeeded, especially the pacification of the people and towns thereabouts (Diaz, 1963, 58). The burning of the ships in order to prevent rebellion shows the extreme measures Cortes would go to to succeed in his mission. And, again, in dealing with the Indian enemies of Montezuma, Cortes shows skill in winning their trust in order to have allies and learn information about Montezuma. The reader may judge Cortes for his arrogance, his Eurocentrism, and his ruthlessness in dealing with his own men when necessary, with many Indians and with Montezuma himself, but Cortes certainly shows at every point the courage and constancy of his convictions. He never considers that he may be wrong, that his actions may be evil rather than good, that he and his men have no right to treat the Indians as they did. This certainty of character is a sign of the strength of his character, if not necessarily the rightness. To understand Cortes, the

Category: History - B