Conquistadores

June 1, 2020

A specialist in early modern European history at the University of Bristol, Mexican historian Cervantes provides interesting context to his new history: he's a descendant of a conquistador. Cervantes takes a new approach to the Spanish conquest of the New World, neither celebrating its adventurism nor condemning it as intentionally cruel.

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July 15, 2021
Broad-ranging survey of Spain's campaigns of conquest in the Americas. Cervantes opens with a provocation, asking that the Spanish conquistadors be considered with a touch less "revulsion" and in the context of an era during which religious conversion was a key goal. As he notes, the year Columbus set sail on his first voyage was the year that the last outposts of Moorish rule surrendered and Muslims and Jews who did not convert to Christianity were exiled. Soldiers such as Cort�s and Pizarro were given to conversion by force and not in the least bit shy about killing anyone who opposed the process and their subsequent rule. However, writes the author, they faced considerable criticism from the Spanish crown and clergy, the former promulgating policies that forbade slavery, the latter holding that forced conversion was sinful. Columbus may have overlooked such niceties to enslave the inhabitants of Hispaniola far from royal oversight and "without fearing any objections from moral theologians back in Spain." Even so, enslavement, Queen Isabel feared, was "a hurdle to effective evangelization," and that evangelization was, in the end, as important to Spain's rulers as the wealth that began to flow into their treasury from Mexico and Peru. The soldiers of Spain have dominated the literature, but it's often forgotten that their violence not only brought censure, but also inspired rivals to resist them. Columbus died without the honors he felt he deserved, Pizarro was stabbed to death by rebellious lieutenants, and Cort�s was put under the watchful eye of royal overseers who enjoyed salaries far higher than his. In the end, the business of the conquista was complex, for all the military might of the "brutally pragmatic enemy" that Native peoples faced, and one effect of the conquistadors' behavior was for the Spanish royals to withdraw support from further campaigns of conquest in favor of conversion by missionaries. A worthy if somewhat contrarian addition to the history of colonialism and European expansion.

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July 26, 2021
The founders of the Spanish Empire brought a “powerful spirit of humanist and religious reform” to their subjugation of the New World, according to this probing history. Cervantes (The Devil in the New World), a professor of early modern studies at the University of Bristol, recounts the great expeditions of Spain’s 16th-century conquest of the Americas, including Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the Caribbean, Hernán Cortés’s overthrow of the Aztec Empire, Francisco Pizarro’s destruction of Peru’s Inca Empire, and Hernando de Soto’s yearslong trek through the southeastern U.S. looking for cities of gold that never materialized. It’s a swashbuckling narrative, full of bold exploits against long odds, intrigues among rival conquistadors, and much brutality and bloodshed (though Cervantes contends that Bartolomé de las Casas’s contemporaneous and influential accounts of Spanish atrocities were exaggerated). Departing from the harshly condemnatory tone of modern treatments of the period, Cervantes highlights instead the Spaniards’ legal and religious self-justifications, the serious though inadequate attempts by the Spanish government to remedy abuses of conquered peoples, and the Spaniards’ success in creating a stable regime that accorded some security and autonomy to Indigenous communities. The result is an entertaining yet nuanced account of one of history’s most earth-shaking military adventures. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management.

Starred review from August 1, 2021
This robust reconsideration of the Spaniards who conquered the New World emphasizes the brutality of their tactics but also the religious and intellectual trade winds that filled their sails. Once considered praiseworthy adventurers, then condemned as rapacious destroyers of indigenous societies, Cort�s, Pizarro, and their contemporaries were for a time the only bridge between a rapidly transforming Europe and the previously isolated peoples of the Americas. Steeped in late-medieval religious culture, the conquistadors saw in the creation of New Spain the continuation of the Reconquista of Iberia from the Moors. They sought gold, but also divine favor. They were politically shrewd. Cort�s gutted the Mexica by playing factions against each other, and the Spaniards were frequently ruthless in their slaughter of innocents and combatants alike. But the conquistadors were also hobbled by limited resources, cultural misunderstandings, and friction with influential Franciscan friars. The resulting Spanish empire, which would last for over three hundred years in relative peace, would be the consequence not of the conquistadors' strength, but of the flexibility and tolerance forced upon them by circumstance. Cervantes, a historian at the University of Bristol, isn't out to redeem the conquistadors, so much as to explain them in context, and the result is a nuanced, compelling narrative that cuts against the historical grain.

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October 1, 2021

Cervantes (history, Univ. of Bristol; Angels, Demons and the New World) delivers a colorful and sophisticated revisionist take on the Spaniards who encountered and conquered the Aztec, Incan, and other Indigenous civilizations of the Americas. Cervantes situates the conquistadores in the context of 16th-century Spanish society, which saw little "inherent contradiction" in being "simultaneously high-minded and shamelessly lucrative." This mentality came from Spain's late-medieval religious culture in which the quest for gold and glory was part and parcel of holy war. Cervantes also places the conquistadores in a global context. Looted Incan gold paid for Spain's short-lived capture of Tunis from the Ottoman Empire in 1535. Cervantes lays bare dissent and in-fighting among the Spanish, from the assassination of Francisco Pizzaro to the humanitarian and theological concerns voiced by the friars Bartolom� de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria. The peoples of modern-day Mexico and Peru were even less united than the Spanish--the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was made possible by the conquistadores' many local allies. VERDICT A richly provocative retelling of the deeds of the conquistadores and the spirit of their age. Cervantes is a gifted scholar and storyteller who offers readers no easy moral clarity.--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

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