Tag: Aztecs

Review: History of the Conquest of Mexico

Review: History of the Conquest of Mexico

History of the Conquest of Mexico by William Hickling Prescott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I began this book with great expectations—cracking open its pages in the airport, on my way to Mexico City for my first ever trip to Latin America. The book seemed extremely promising: the classic work on a subject that fascinates me, written by a man who is considered to be both an excellent prose stylist and one of the founders of scientific history. Rarely does a book seem more perfectly suited to my tastes.

By the end, however, I found myself drained and unmotivated—dragging myself through the final pages. And now, I am in the strange situation of being unable to recommend this book to nearly anyone, despite seeing why it was considered a classic for so long.

I should begin by giving Prescott his due. Severely visually impaired, he could not travel to any of the places he was famous for writing about—never once stepping foot in Mexico, Peru, or Spain. Instead, he had to rely on secretaries, on copies of manuscripts sent to him, and most of all on his prodigious memory, which allowed him to gain fuller access to the primary sources than any scholar before him. And judged by the academic standards of his time, he was an extremely thorough and careful researcher. This book is extensively footnoted, and includes bibliographic essays at the end of many chapters. He did his homework.

He was also an accomplished writer. Believing that history was a genre of literature as much as a record of facts, he labored to make his narrative colorful and attractive. True, his style can seem overly verbose for modern tastes. But the book is still very readable. Indeed, the experience is often more comparable to reading a good swashbuckling novel than a serious work of history. More impressive still—considering his trouble seeing and his never having traveled there—his descriptions of the landscapes are quite lovely examples of nature writing. As both a historian and a writer, then, there is much to commend.

As James Lockhart points out in the introduction, however, there is a tension between these two sides of Prescott. While he is meticulous and skeptical in his footnotes, he is willing to take poetic license with his narrative. Facts, after all, are not always conducive to drama; and the records of history often leave unsatisfying lacunae. But Prescott was intent on writing a story that would stand on its own merits, and shows a willingness to fill in gaps or twist facts to suit his purposes. His urge to tell a good story, in other words, often overpowered his judgement.

Yet for the modern reader, this is not the most serious issue with this book. The glaring and obvious problem is Prescott’s candid sympathy for the conquering Spaniards, combined with his open disdain for those they conquered. Referring to the Aztecs as “barbarians” and “savages,” he dismisses their entire civilization as “half-civilized,” comparing their culture to “Asiatic despotism.” Now, to be fair to Prescott, these sorts of prejudices were nearly universal in his cultural milieu. But I have been alarmed to see other users on Goodreads swallow these prejudices uncritically—which I think requires some correction.

In Prescott’s hands, you see, the conquering Spaniards are romanticized to the point of unrecognizability—becoming an intrepid band of knights errant, motivated by genuine religious conviction, on a civilizing mission to free the oppressed and ignorant denizens of the New World from their tyrannical oppressors. The Aztecs are reduced to bloodthirsty savages, superstitious to the point of insanity, whose barbaric religion must be eradicated for the good of the world. This is no exaggeration. I am using his language and his phraseology here.

Now, I am certainly not going to sit here and write a defense of human sacrifice. But it is worth noting that the Spanish conquest led to a calamitous demographic collapse—one of the great mortality events of recorded history. So any notion that they somehow saved lives is absurd. It is also worth pointing out that the Spanish subjugated everyone they could, peaceful or otherwise. Further, any historian of the period will tell you that the Spanish conquistadores were motivated by one thing above all else: riches. This was obvious and openly admitted. Indeed, their actions don’t make sense in any other light.

If this book is worth reading, then, it is because it is itself a piece of history—a stirring work of literature, a contribution to the academic discipline of history, and an example of the dominant prejudices of the time. But in both its understanding of the period, and in the attitudes it reflects, this book is more than dated. It is obsolete.



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Review: The Conquest of New Spain

Review: The Conquest of New Spain

The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In the introduction to this book, its translator J.M. Cohen makes a point to emphasize how badly it is written. This is hardly normal for a book that is widely considered to be a classic—though perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise for a document composed by a poorly-educated soldier of fortune. For this edition, Cohen trimmed much of what he considered to be repetitive, and straightened out some of the knottier prose. Even after this treatment, however, a great deal of this book is a confused and monotonous narration of battles.

And yet, it is an absolutely fascinating document. Díaz wrote his account as an old man, to correct some of the earlier stories about the conquest of “New Spain,” which glorified Cortés at the expense of his followers. This would seem to indicate that Díaz—who was one of these followers—had a proverbial axe to grind. But Díaz’s lack of intellectual subtlety, his clumsiness as a writer, and his obvious frankness combine to make this document strangely absent of perceivable bias. Writing down what he witnessed was such a chore in itself, the reader feels, that Díaz did not have it in him to twist the story to his ends.

The result is an eyewitness account of one of the most monumental events in human history—the collapse of a great empire, and with it the only power in Central America capable of resisting the Spanish colonists. It is a story rich in drama and intrigue, as Cortés navigates the politics of his Spanish backers (who turn on him) as well as the local peoples he encounters, seeming to stay one step ahead of trouble through his cunning and a generous amount of luck.

It is also a gruesome and tragic story. Hardly a page goes by in this book without armed conflict and human butchery. It is impossible to root for the Spaniards as they slash and burn their way through the landscape, provoking unimaginable losses to our cultural heritage in the process. And yet, ironically, Díaz—an agent of this civilization’s destruction—was one of the last people to see it at its full splendor, and is now one of our best sources of information on what he helped to destroy.

The passages about the Aztec cities, and especially meeting Montezuma in Tenochtitlan, are easily my favorite part of the book. Despite their selfish and bloody purpose, Díaz and his fellows were absolutely dazzled at the splendor of the empire. He was amazed at the broad and straight causeway, the network of canals and bridges, the high stone pyramids. The vast markets, teeming with alien plants and animals, he compares favorably to those of Constantinople or Rome; and he goes into raptures at the beauty of their gardens. The sheer number of people is shocking for the modern reader, who may be accustomed to thinking of the New World as only lightly populated at the time of European contact. On the contrary, Tenochtitlan would have dwarfed the London or Seville of the time.

A tone of regret or remorse creeps into the writing at this point, as if he is sorry that such a wonderful place was destroyed. It is an especially striking tonal shift, given that so much of the book is one battle after another, often told quite matter-of-factly. In another passage, Díaz seems to be amazed that all of this really happened, and seems unable to explain how it could occur, deciding that it must have been divine intervention. This is somewhat self-serving, to be sure, but it does give a taste of his complete lack of guile. As an author, he writes what he remembers, and shrugs his shoulders at the explanation.

What continually strikes Díaz—and undoubtedly his readers—is the prevalence of human sacrifice in the Aztec world. He describes finding people in cages being fattened for sacrifice, temples covered in blood, and the horrifying way in which victims would be dragged up the temple steps and have their chests cut open. As far as I know, there is no reason to doubt that this really happened. Yet it also serves rhetorically as a constant justification for the Spaniards’ actions. It is difficult to feel bad for the Aztecs, after all, if they are murdering on such a scale.

But I think it is important for the modern reader to keep in mind that Díaz and his fellows were hardly there on a humanitarian mission. These conquistadors—who would go on to commit violence on a much larger scale—were there for personal enrichment above all else. The lives of the peoples they conquered had little interest or value for them, beyond their possessions or their enslavement. To pick just one example, after expounding on the horrors of human sacrifice, Díaz calmly relates: “we dressed our wounds with the fat from a stout Indian whom we had killed and cut open, for we had no oil.” I do not say this to re-litigate the past, only because I think this book is more profitable and compelling if not read as a story of heroes and villains.

So while I cannot call this document a literary masterpiece, or even well-written, I found it to be a window—and a surprisingly clear window—into one of history’s great moments. And the sad truth is, to learn about this moment, we must turn to books like these, for “today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.”




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