The History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo

Davíd Carrasco

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780826342881
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

The History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a new abridgement of Diaz del Castillo's classic Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España, offers a unique contribution to our understanding of the political and religious forces that drove the great cultural encounter between Spain and the Americas known as the "conquest of Mexico." Besides containing important passages, scenes, and events excluded from other abridgements, this edition includes eight useful interpretive essays that address indigenous religions and cultural practices, sexuality during the early colonial period, the roles of women in indigenous cultures, and analysis of the political and economic purposes behind Diaz del Castillo's narrative. A series of maps illuminate the routes of the conquistadors, the organization of indigenous settlements, the struggle for the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, as well as the disastrous Spanish journey to Honduras. The information compiled for this volume offers increased accessibility to the original text, places it in a wider social and narrative context, and encourages further learning, research, and understanding.

ESSAYS

BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO
Soldier, Eyewitness, Polemicist

ROLENA ADORNO

Bernal Díaz del Castillo (c. 1495–1584) is acclaimed today as the author of the most popular and comprehensive eyewitness account of the conquest of Mexico. Despite the extravagance of many of his claims and the seemingly interminable length of his work (hence the value of an abridgment), his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (True History of the Conquest of New Spain) remains the most rich and compelling version available, eclipsing even Hernán Cortés’s Cartas de relación, his famous letters to the emperor Charles V.

Born in Medina del Campo in Old Castile, Bernal Díaz declared that he arrived in the New World in 1514 on Pedrarias Dávila’s voyage to Tierra Firme (Nombre de Dios in Panama) and that he participated in the first three expeditions to Mexico, which were those of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba (1517), Juan de Grijalva (1518), and Hernán Cortés (1519). Although it is doubtful that he took part in the Grijalva expedition, he participated as a foot soldier (some published editions of his work elevated him to the rank of captain) in Cortés’s initial overland march to the Aztec capital of México-Tenochtitlan in 1519. Bernal Díaz also participated in the second major offensive that resulted in the fall of that island city (the site of today’s Mexico City) in August 1521. He accompanied Cortés on the disastrous expedition to Hibueras (Honduras) in 1524–26 and spent the remainder of his life in New Spain, sustained by the labor and goods produced by the native inhabitants of the lands over which he held titles of trusteeship (encomienda) that had been granted to him by the Spanish king, Charles V. After receiving in the 1520s encomienda grants near Coatzacoalcos in Tabasco and Chiapas and losing them in the 1530s, Bernal Díaz settled permanently in Guatemala in the 1540s after the first (1539–41) of his two trips to Spain to secure greater reward for his conquest efforts. The second trip, which either awakened or confirmed his worst forebodings about the future prospects of the encomendero class, occurred in 1550–51. He died an octogenarian in Santiago de Guatemala on February 3, 1584.

Bernal Díaz began to write his Historia after his second trip back to Spain, some thirty years after the fall of the Aztec capital; in 1568 he finished a version of the work that he sent to Spain in 1575 for publication. In the meantime, he continued to work on the manuscript in his possession, augmenting it until nearly the time of his death in 1584. In addition to the recollection of his own experiences, Bernal Díaz used as his sources the published letters of Cortés (1522–26), Francisco López de Gómara’s history of the conquest of Mexico (1552), and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s 1540s arguments favoring war against the Indians, justifying such actions on the basis of the Indians’ perceived violation of natural law through human sacrifice, cannibalism, and sodomy. Bernal Díaz also appreciated the Mexican pictorial record. He observed that native paintings provided warfare intelligence to allies or enemies (chapters 38, 78, 110), gave historical accounts of significant battles (chapters 89, 128), mapped the coast of the Gulf of Mexico (chapter 102), and preserved native history and culture in ancient books and paintings (chapter 92). As Benjamin Keen pointed out in The Aztec Image in Western Thought (1971), Bernal Díaz and Cortés are unsurpassed among members of the conquest generation in their acknowledgment and recording of Mesoamerican cultural achievements. Bernal Díaz’s work provides a still partially untapped resource for insight into Mesoamerican culture at the time of the conquest.

Why did Bernal Díaz write his history of the conquest of Mexico? There is no doubt that he sought to herald the deeds of the common soldier (especially singling out and highlighting his own efforts) to counteract the impression created in the published accounts of Cortés and Gómara that focused exclusively on Hernán Cortés. Bernal Díaz’s creation of a dialogue with the allegorical figure of Fame (chapter 210) provides the most vivid and entertaining account of his concerns. Yet events in Bernal Díaz’s life after the conquest also influenced his decision to write his work. When in Spain in 1550–51, he had made at least two appearances at the royal court, as advocate (procurador) and representative of the encomenderos of the city of Santiago de Guatemala. In the last chapters of his work, he refers indirectly to one of those experiences, and he narrates in detail the events of the second of those occasions (his appearance at court in Valladolid in 1550, in chapter 211). The latter meeting was a junta convened by the Royal Council of the Indies in order to deliberate about the right of Spanish settlers to hold encomiendas in perpetuity.

Bernal Díaz had made his case favoring grants in perpetuity in formal petitions of 1549 and 1550, but the interests of himself and his encomendero peers were bested and defeated by the arguments made by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) and like-minded colonial officials and members of the royal court. After these experiences, Bernal Díaz undertook the writing of his book. His appearances at court had shown him that his heirs would not likely receive rights in perpetuity to his encomienda grants, or he learned, at least, that such long-term rewards for his long-ago efforts in the conquest of Mexico were far from being assured.

Although Bernal Díaz’s Historia concentrates on the events of the Mexican conquest from 1519 to 1521 (chapters 19–156), his narration covers events in Mexico from 1517 through 1568 (chapters 1–18, 157–212) and includes accounts of affairs pertinent to the viceroyalty of New Spain that occurred at court in Spain as well as in the seats of governance on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. Broader in scope than the 1519–21 conquest of Mexico that is the heart and soul of his narrative account, Bernal Díaz’s objective was to place New Spain in the context of Spain’s imperial possessions at the time and to assure that the importance of Mexico was not eclipsed in the eyes of his countrymen by the newly discovered Inca Peru and its spectacular mineral wealth in the South American Andes.

Equally if not more pressing was his desire to claim for the common conquistador (himself and his remaining peers and their heirs) the privileges and prestige that he understood to be their due and to ensure that those rewards would endure through future generations. His two trips back to Spain taught him that the interests of the ex-conquistador encomenderos were being eroded by a series of royal decrees that included legislation that sought to abolish the encomienda system and Indian slavery (the New Laws of 1542). He also became aware of competing claims for royal recognition by other constituencies, not the least of which was the developing royal bureaucracy dedicated to managing the Crown’s resources at home and abroad. Politically, the conquests in America had come under increasingly severe pressure from Las Casas and his colleagues who persuaded Charles V, in the name of Christian evangelization and justice, to curtail the prerogatives of private citizens and their virtually unfettered access to the labor and resources of the native populations of the Indies.

Even the writing of history had dealt the conquistadores a severe blow. Cortés’s published letters effectively attributed the Spanish victory over the Aztecs to his own brilliance as a military strategist and his faith in Divine Providence, and Gómara and other historians likewise emphasized Cortés’s role to the detriment of that of his Castilian soldiers. These authors also inadvertently but effectively undermined the conquistadores’ interests by complacently assuming (rather than forcefully arguing) that the conquests had been legitimate and just. Bernal Díaz wrote his book at the very time those military campaigns were coming under political and legislative attack, being characterized as brutal and unjustified in their execution and devastating to native peoples and natural resources in their consequences. This attack was most vividly carried out in Las Casas’s well-known Brevíssima relación de la destruyción de las Indias (Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies), which appeared in print in Seville in 1552 and which would be rebutted by Bernal Díaz in his Historia (chapters 83, 125) with the same or greater vehemence and scorn than he heaped on López de Gómara’s history of the conquest.

Bernal Díaz thus understood that, regarding the conquest of Mexico, there was a second war to be fought and won: it would take place at court, and it had to be engaged on the battlefield of the documentary record and especially in historical accounts of those events. The challenge was to bring alive those forever absent deeds and to do so not only in relation to conquest events themselves, but more importantly in hand-to-hand combat with those works that constituted the “library” of published works on the subject. Thus he remarked,

I wish to return to my story, pen in hand as a good pilot carries his lead in hand at sea, looking out for shoals ahead, when he knows that they will be met with, so will I do in speaking of the errors of the historians, but I shall not mention them all, for if one had to follow them item by item, the trouble of discarding the rubbish would be greater than that of gathering in the harvest. (True History 1:68 [chapter 18])

During Bernal Díaz’s lifetime, other historians of Mexico, such as Alonso de Zorita (1560s) and Diego Muñoz Camargo (1576), mentioned Bernal Díaz’s writings in their own; at least one local resident in Santiago de Guatemala, the municipal official Juan Rodríguez del Cabrillo, stated in 1579 that he had read Bernal Díaz’s manuscript chronicle. His work thus had at least a limited circulation in manuscript during his lifetime, but the version sent to Spain was not published until 1632. It was brought out by the royal printing house under the supervision of the learned chronicler of the Order of Mercy, Fray Alonso Remón, who sought to highlight the role of Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo, as well other members of the Mercedarian Order and the Christian mission in general, in the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The manuscript that remained in Guatemala was transcribed and published in Mexico by Genaro García in 1904–5 and is regarded, by the present author, as the authoritative version of the work. (Its translation by Maudslay is the text used in this abridged edition.)

Bernal Díaz’s Historia is of great interest today not only for its suspenseful and dramatic account of the conquest of Mexico, written several decades after the fact, but also for the way Bernal’s work disguises polemical argumentation as neutral historical narration and exemplifies the capacity of prose exposition both to contain and conceal the argumentation that drives it. His claims to write using “plain speech” and to convey the “unvarnished truth” belie a highly mediated and nuanced account that blurs the boundaries between history, jurisprudence, and eyewitness testimony.

Bernal Díaz’s ruminations on the writing of history reveal the dilemma he had faced as a soldier-cum-encomendero who entered a field of activity customarily occupied only by the learned. Two types of authority—one of humanist learning, the other of Castilian law—were called up; Bernal Díaz acknowledged that he could not meet the demands of the former, but he strove mightily to master those of the latter. To express his views in the debate on authority in history he cast his argument in the form of a conversation he presumably had with two learned gentlemen (chapter 212).

As Bernal Díaz told the tale, two gentlemen with university degrees asked to read his just-finished account of the conquest of Mexico in order to determine if and how his version differed from the Historia de la conquista de México (History of the Conquest of Mexico) of Francisco López de Gómara. Bernal Díaz loaned his interlocutors his manuscript and warned that they were not to change anything in it because its contents were all true: “And I told them not to alter a single thing, for all that I write is quite true” (True History 5:286 [chapter 212]). After having read Bernal Díaz’s account, one of these readers rebuked him for having written about his own deeds: the old conquistador should have relied on the historians who had written about those events, because a man could not serve as a witness on his own behalf (True History 5:287). Thus, in a single stroke, Bernal Díaz’s sole claim to authority—that of the eyewitness—was dismissed and his monumental efforts brushed aside. He reports that he replied, “But if I tell the truth (and His Majesty and his Viceroy, the Marquis, witnesses, and evidence attest it, and moreover the story gives evidence of it), why should I not say so? For it ought to be written in letters of gold. Would they wish the clouds or the birds which passed above at the time to report it?” (True History 5:288).

Bernal Díaz thus responded to the challenge placed before him from within his own frame of reference by proclaiming the authority of the mundane documents that certified his achievements. He remarked that the Marqués del Valle, Hernán Cortés, had made a report to the emperor in 1540 commending his deeds and services; he pointed out that the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza had done the same. Alongside these witnesses, Bernal Díaz declared, stood the probanzas (the certified testimony of witnesses to his deeds) that had been presented on his behalf at the Council of the Indies in Spain in 1540. Readers in Bernal Díaz’s day would have known that the probanza was a written document consisting of the plaintiff’s statement of his case, along with the testimony of friendly witnesses who corroborated his petition. As a form of legal testimony taken of witnesses under oath, a probanza or información represented the plaintiff’s side of the case only. Witnesses were called and presented with an interrogatory, on which basis they affirmed the points the party sought to prove. Designed to clarify facts or assertions that the plaintiff wished to set forth in perpetuity, the probanza was the means by which lawyers or advocates informed the judges about the claims of the parties they represented.

If the marqués and the viceroy and the captains (the latter as witnesses in his probanzas) and the probanzas themselves were not enough, Bernal Díaz insisted,...