Bernal Díaz: The True History of the Conquest of New Spain

Hernán Cortés was a Spanish naval commander and explorer, sent to the Americas as a conquistador, a conqueror in service to the Spanish Empire. In 1519 Cortés and his soldiers landed on the Yucatán peninsula, in what is now the southern part of Mexico. His mission was to colonize the region in the name of the Spanish crown. This task required them to subdue the most powerful empire in the region, that of the Aztecs, a mighty warrior people inundated with gold and silver. The Aztecs regularly sacrificed prisoners from local tribes to their war god, Huitzilopochtli. In the local religion, Huitzilopochtli had argued over the morality of human sacrifice with Quetzalcoatl, a white-skinned god usually represented as a feathered serpent. Quetzalcoatl had been driven off by Huitzilopochtli, but it was said that Quetzalcoatl would return in a “year of 1-Reed”—occurring once every fifty-two years—to reclaim his dominance of the region. The year 1519 happened to coincide with the Aztecs’ “year of 1-Reed”; although historians have begun to dispute the idea, it has long been believed that the Aztecs took the lighter-skinned Spanish warriors to be representatives of Quetzalcoatl.

One of Cortés’s soldiers was Bernal Díaz del Castillo. He won glory for the Spanish crown on this campaign but afterward spent the rest of his life as a poorly compensated governor of one of the provinces of the colony of New Spain. When he was an old man, he penned an account of the Spaniards’ encounter with the Aztecs—The True History of the Conquest of New Spain—largely to assert that he deserved better pay for the sacrifices he had made to build the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Díaz reveals the Spanish to be impressed with the Aztecs and their riches but disgusted with their religion and impatient to get their hands on the wealth surrounding them.