Seven Myths of the Spanish ConquestBy: Chelsea EnglandHIST 2711990

IntroductionBernal Diaz was speechless when he first saw the Aztec capital.

Diaz wrote about his experiences in the Aztec empire, but struggled to describe the sights he saw, which included the metropolis of Tenochtitlan.

Cortes was also challenged by finding a comparable city in the “old” world, just like Bernal Diaz.

They seven myths of the Conquest can be found in the Cortes legend.

Truth has been discredited as a concept relevant to historical investigation.

Every chapter in this book is about a myth about the Conquest, unveiling hidden truths.

IntroductionThe silences in Diaz’s narrative include his thoughts as well as the thoughts of his Spanish comrades, the Africans and the central Mexican natives.

This book is filled with uncertainty and endless possibilities to open one’s mind to new interpretations about the world.

Chapter 1 views the Conquest in a more concise way through the eyes of many Spaniards.

Chapter 2 explains the myth that the conquistadors were soldiers sent to the Americas by the king of Spain.

Chapters 3 and 4 are about the Conquest written by the conquistadors.

Chapter 5 travels through the myth of (mis) communication.

Chapter 6 involves the widespread misconception that the Conquest reduced the Native American world to a void.

Chapter 7 is about the final myth which is the concept that has served for five centuries and is the simplest explanation for the Conquest.

EpilogueIn 1525, several thousand Mayas lived in the capital of the kingdom of the Mactun people.

The presence of Cortes, the emperor and the rulers of the other major cities that had once been part of the Mexica empire were not welcome to the Mayas.

Cortes left within 5 days, leaving the body of Cuauhtemoc, headless, hanging by his feet from a tree.

The tale of Cuauhtemoc’s death has four stages which connect the perspectives of these accounts to the seven myths of the Conquest.

The incident at Itzamkanac reveals how misleading the image of the conquistadors as soldiers sent by their king as part of a Spanish army that invades and conquers with little assistance and against great numerical odds.

The myths about Cuauhtemoc’s death, like those of the Conquest, are metaphors for everything that had occurred during the Spanish invasion of the Americas.

In conclusion, history is meant to explore those metaphors and to find the motives of human behavior.

Neither Paid Nor ForcedCortes avoids the word “soldier” when referring to his army of 300 men on foot.

Conquistadors were soldiers and nothing else when Ilarione da Bergamo heard of the Conquest from Spaniards in Mexico in the 1760s.

The gradual adoption of soldado in the late sixteenth century related to wider shifts in the way Europeans waged war.

By the end of the century, Spanish armies had doubled in size.

By 1710, there were 1.3 million Europeans at arms, creating the word, “army”.

Spaniards joined conquest expeditions in hope of acquiring wealth and status. James Lockhart called them, “free agents, emigrants, settlers, unsalaried and ununiformed earners of encomiendas and shares of treasure”.

Conquistadors changed their self-identities in their writing such as claiming to be a professional man.

Fully literate were limited in Spain among conquest expeditions.

Neither Paid Nor ForcedConquistadors wrote reports in the standardized style of the probanza and about a quarter of the conquerors of Peru and Colombia were unable to write their signature.

It is a myth that literacy gave Spaniards an advantage over Native Americans, since members of conquistador companies could most likely read and write no better than the literate native societies, like the Mayas.

Francisco Pizarro, the early conquistador of Peru was illiterate his entire life.

The governor forced Cortes to marry Velazquez’s wife’s maid-in-waiting.

Velazquez received word of Cortes’s recruit, Francisco de Montejo’s departure with letters and gold on his ship and Velazquez sent a ship on an unsuccessful transatlantic chase after Montejo.

Montejo made use of his own network of patronage along with the related Cortes network.

Montejo’s company fell apart in 1532, as he wrote to the king.

Alvarado’s expeditions brought veterans from the Conquest wars in Mexico, Yucatan , Guatemala and more.

The armed Spanish entrepreneurs, conquistadors, were not the only ones involved in expeditions.

Under the Lordship of the

King“The New World is a disaster!” is what Queen Isabella says in the movie, Conquest of Paradise.

The “myth of completion” is about how the Spaniards were so concerned to depict their adventures as conquests and pacifications and as faits accomplis and why this was.

One reason was the Spanish system of patronage, contract and reward, beginning with Columbus and his insistence until his death that he had fulfilled his contract by discovering a route to Asia.

The second reason was the ideology of imperial justification that developed rapidly during the sixteenth century to portray the Conquest as divine intention and Spaniards as agents of providence.

The Conquest still remained incomplete even after these claims.

Columbus’ assertions of fulfullment or compliance were a crucial factor to him being able to take his third of all trade revenues from the discovered lands.

The letters of Cortes to the king are the best-known series of contract-related documents.

Spanish military activities were framed as campaigns of “pacification” rather than conquest and resistance leaders could be tried and executed for treason.

Under the Lordship of the

KingThere was a supposed completion of the Conquest.

The incompleteness of the military conquest of Mexico in 1522 is one part of the mystery.

Another piece of incompleteness connects to the protracted nature of the military conquest of the so-called fringe or marginal regions of what became Spanish America.

In 1701, Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, author, admitted that Spanish expansion had left “great portions” of the Americas partially or entirely unconquered- due to the intractability of some natives and to the difficult terrain in some regions.

He argued it was because God was saving some natives for generations of Spaniards.

The first founders of Buenos Aires in the late 1520s turned to cannibalism.

More aspects of the myth of completion include the pax colonial, the peace among naties and between them and the Spanish colonists that supposedly came in the Conquest’s wake. The impression of a colonial peace overlooks the ubiquity of everyday forms of resistance.

Conquest’s incompleteness was the degree to which native peoples maintained a degree of autonomy within the Spanish empire.

Spaniards did not seek to rule natives directly and take over their lands. They instead, hoped to preserve native communities as self-governing sources of labor.

Spiritual conquest and cultural conquests were both complex and protracted, defying completion to the point of rendering the very concept of completion irrelevant.

James Lockhart called the process of cultural interaction in colonial Mexico one of Double Mistaken Identity.

The Lost Words of La Malinche

In 1519, Moctezuma met Cortes. This meeting has been seen as symbolic and with good reason.

This was the first time a Native American emperor greeted a European representative who had come to conquer and settle in his lands.

Cortes had taken Marina back within a month.

It was discovered that she was able to converse with the “Indians” through whose territory the Spaniards were now moving.

The Nahuas dubbed Cortes with the name of Malinche, as though captain and interpreter were one.

The myth of communication was constructed by the conquistadors and predominated during Conquest and colonial times.

This was convenient to Spaniards in that claims of communication with native peoples bolstered claims that natives were subjugated, and converted.

The themes of communication have been misused as explanations of the Conquest.

Malinche’s lost words are between the lines of sixteenth century texts, in glyphs of the Florentine Codex, and her ghost stills walks the corridors of a house where she once lived.

The Lost Words of

La Malinche

Francisco de Jerez threw the Bible at the ground because he was too illiterate to read it.

Historian Patricia Seed suggested that the text read by the friar to Atahuallpa was “presumably” the Requirement, which is “an imperialism of speech.”

The Requirement is normally looked upon as a paragon of miscommunication or, in Las Casa’s words, communicational “absurdity.”

Cortes has Moctezuma telling the Spaniards that his people had always awaited the arrival from overseas of a lord descended from their original ruler, and that they now believed the king of Spain to be that lord.

Malinche was able to understand tecpillahtolli. It was a legacy of her noble birth, and she had been translating it into Spanish for months before the Cortes-Moctezuma meeting.

Columbus eventually understood that the Native Americans on the river bank were hostile toward him but it made no difference to the natives in the village.

Atahuallpa and Moctezuma learned of Spanish intentions and methods too late to save their own lives, but their successors led campaigns of resistance hampered not by lack of information but by crippling epidemics, native disunity, differences in weaponry, and other factors.

In the early decades of the Conquest, the sword and the compass were the most successful ways of communication used by the Spaniards.

Apes and MenThe Florentine Codex stated, “Many were the miracles which were performed in the conquest of this land.”

Franciscans and Dominicans worked hard in order to promote their evangelization efforts in the Americas not just as God’s own work but as the very purpose and justification of the entire Conquest.

Conquistadors, including Cortes, claimed to being agents of providence, and chroniclers such as Oviedo and Gomara constructed Conquest history around the nontion that it was in God’s plan to unite the world under Christendom and the Spanish monarchy.

Cortes used this idea to convince people the Conquest was a “just cause”.

The concept of Spanish superiority was always transparent.

Mythic explanation blames natives for their own defeat, combining the notion that native resistance was hindered by the belief that the Spaniards were gods, with the interrelated blaming of the Mexica and Inca emperors for the collapse of their empires.

It was argued that Mexica civilization “went down above all because its religious and legal conception of war paralyzed it”. The juxtaposition is between a progressive and traditional civilization.

Apes and MenThe fourth myth-based explanation of the Conquest assumes a Spanish superiority in language, literacy, and reading “signs”.

Antonio Nebrija said that “language has always been the partner of empire” which has been a very famous quote because it supports the idea of Samuel Purchas when he termed, “litterall advantage.”

This was supposed to mean that literacy gave its possessors both a moral and technological advantage.

“The Indians,” declared the Spaniard, were “little men in whom you will scarcely find traces of humanity, who not only lack culture but do not even know how to write.”

The last myth-based explanation is about the notion that Spanish weaponry in and of itself explains the Conquest, something that not even the conquistadors believed.

The conquistadors had two great allies which include disease and native disunity in its many forms and manifestations- if these did not exist, the Conquest would not have taken place.

Horses and guns were of limited supply and were extremely important to the conquistadors. A steel sword was worth more than either of these.

The culture of war played an important role as well because it is only one aspect of the combat that took place during the Spanish invasions of Mesoamerica.

In conclusion, “We are still living through the long period of uneven encounters and the gradual globalization of resources.”