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The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico
Bernal Diaz del Castillo
One of history's great eyewitness accounts, written by a foot soldier who was there. Bernal Díaz del Castillo marched with Cortés into the Aztec empire, and decades later, old and irritated by polished court histories that left out the ordinary men, he set down his own blunt, vivid version. This 1956 American edition uses the classic A. P. Maudslay translation with an introduction by the scholar Irving A. Leonard. Díaz remembers the causeways of Tenochtitlán, the faces of his comrades, the terror and greed of the campaign, with a directness that still startles. It is a primary source and a cracking narrative at once—partisan, self-justifying, unforgettable. For anyone wanting to understand the conquest of Mexico from inside the ranks, there is no substitute for Díaz's plain, aggrieved, astonishing voice.
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The author
Bernal Díaz del Castillo (c. 1496–1584) was a common soldier in Cortés's expedition who settled in Guatemala and, late in life, wrote his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España—the 'true history'—partly to rebut chroniclers who had never left Spain. He wrote from memory, without literary polish, and that is exactly his value.
The book
This is the 1956 Farrar, Straus and Cudahy edition, using Genaro García's authoritative Mexican text and A. P. Maudslay's translation, with an introduction to the American edition by Irving A. Leonard. It runs to some 478 pages and covers the campaign of 1517–1521.
How to read it
Díaz is a partisan witness who justifies the conquest and rarely questions its brutality toward the peoples of Mexico, so modern readers weigh his testimony against Indigenous and later scholarly sources. Read that way, its immediacy is unmatched—few historical documents place the reader so bodily inside an event of this magnitude.
For more context
Díaz's account is often paired with the letters of Cortés and with Indigenous records such as the Florentine Codex to triangulate what actually happened at Tenochtitlán.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Bernal Diaz del Castillo
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1956
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine