Conquistadors E-Book

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 131

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

During the Age of Exploration, some of the most famous and infamous individuals were Spain’s best known conquistadors. Naturally, as the best known conquistador, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) is also the most controversial. Like Christopher Columbus before him, Cortés was lionized for his successes for centuries without questioning his tactics or motives, while indigenous views of the man have been overwhelmingly negative for the consequences his conquests had on the Aztecs and other natives in the region. Just about the only thing everyone agrees upon is that Cortés had a profound impact on the history of North America.

Of course, the lionization and demonization of Cortés often take place without fully analyzing the man himself, especially because there are almost no contemporaneous sources that explain what his thinking and motivation was. If anything, Cortés seemed to have been less concerned with posterity or the effects of the Spanish conquest on the natives than he was on relations with the Mother Country itself. Of the few things that are known about Cortés, it appears that he was both extremely ambitious and fully cognizant of politics and political intrigue, even in a New World thousands of miles west of Spain itself. Cortés spent much of his time in Mexico and the New World defending himself against other Spanish officials in the region, as well as trying to portray and position himself in a favorable light back home.

While those ambitions and politics understandably colored his writings about his activities and conquests, scholars nevertheless use what he wrote to gain a better understanding of the indigenous natives he came into contact with. Even then, however, what he wrote was scarce; Cortés's account of his conquest of Mexico is comprised of five letters he addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. As Adolph Francis Bandelier noted in the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1908, “Cortés was a good writer. His letters to the emperor, on the conquest, deserve to be classed among the best Spanish documents of the period. They are, of course, coloured so as to place his own achievements in relief, but, withal, he keeps within bounds and does not exaggerate, except in matters of Indian civilization and the numbers of population as implied by the size of the settlements. Even there he uses comparatives only, judging from outward appearances and from impressions.”

If Columbus and Cortés were the pioneers of Spain’s new global empire, Pizarro consolidated its immense power and riches, and his successes inspired a further generation to expand Spain’s dominions to unheard of dimensions.  Furthermore, he participated in the forging of a new culture: like Cortés, he took an indigenous mistress with whom he had two mixed-race children, and yet the woman has none of the lasting fame of Cortés’s Doña Marina.  With all of this in mind, it is again remarkable that Pizarro remains one of the less well-known and less written about of the explorers of his age.

On the other hand, there are certain factors that may account for the conqueror of Peru’s relative lack of lasting glory.  For one, he was a latecomer in more than one sense.  Cortés’s reputation was built on being the first to overthrow a great empire, so Pizarro’s similar feat, even if it bore even greater fruit in the long run, would always be overshadowed by his predecessor’s precedent.  But Pizarro also lacked the youthful glamour of Cortés: already a wizened veteran in his 50s by the time he undertook his momentous expedition, he proceeded with the gritty determination of a hardened soldier rather than the audacity and cunning of a young courtier. 

Leseprobe

Conquistadors: The Lives and Legacies of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro

By Charles River Editors

Pizarro Statue in Lima, Peru

About Charles River Editors

Charles River Editors was founded by Harvard and MIT alumni to provide superior editing and original writing services, with the expertise to create digital content for publishers across a vast range of subject matter. In addition to providing original digital content for third party publishers, Charles River Editors republishes civilization’s greatest literary works, bringing them to a new generation via ebooks.

Introduction

Francisco Pizarro González (circa 1471/6-1541)

“Friends and comrades! On that side [south] are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.” – Francisco Pizarro

.

If Columbus and Cortés were the pioneers of Spain’s new global empire, Pizarro consolidated its immense power and riches, and his successes inspired a further generation to expand Spain’s dominions to unheard of dimensions. Furthermore, he participated in the forging of a new culture: like Cortés, he took an indigenous mistress with whom he had two mixed-race children, and yet the woman has none of the lasting fame of Cortés’s Doña Marina. With all of this in mind, it is again remarkable that Pizarro remains one of the less well-known and less written about of the explorers of his age.

On the other hand, there are certain factors that may account for the conqueror of Peru’s relative lack of lasting glory. For one, he was a latecomer in more than one sense. Cortés’s reputation was built on being the first to overthrow a great empire, so Pizarro’s similar feat, even if it bore even greater fruit in the long run, would always be overshadowed by his predecessor’s precedent. But Pizarro also lacked the youthful glamour of Cortés: already a wizened veteran in his 50s by the time he undertook his momentous expedition, he proceeded with the gritty determination of a hardened soldier rather than the audacity and cunning of a young courtier.

Conquistadors chronicles Pizarro’slife, but it also examines the aftermath of his conquest and analyzes the controversy surrounding his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about Pizarro like you never have before, in no time at all.

Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro (1485-1547)

“Among these temples there is one which far surpasses all the rest, whose grandeur of architectural details no human tongue is able to describe; for within its precincts, surrounded by a lofty wall, there is room enough for a town of five hundred families.” – Hernán Cortés

During the Age of Exploration, some of the most famous and infamous individuals were Spain’s best known conquistadors. Naturally, as the best known conquistador, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) is also the most controversial. Like Christopher Columbus before him, Cortés was lionized for his successes for centuries without questioning his tactics or motives, while indigenous views of the man have been overwhelmingly negative for the consequences his conquests had on the Aztecs and other natives in the region. Just about the only thing everyone agrees upon is that Cortés had a profound impact on the history of North America.

Of course, the lionization and demonization of Cortés often take place without fully analyzing the man himself, especially because there are almost no contemporaneous sources that explain what his thinking and motivation was. If anything, Cortés seemed to have been less concerned with posterity or the effects of the Spanish conquest on the natives than he was on relations with the Mother Country itself. Of the few things that are known about Cortés, it appears that he was both extremely ambitious and fully cognizant of politics and political intrigue, even in a New World thousands of miles west of Spain itself. Cortés spent much of his time in Mexico and the New World defending himself against other Spanish officials in the region, as well as trying to portray and position himself in a favorable light back home.

While those ambitions and politics understandably colored his writings about his activities and conquests, scholars nevertheless use what he wrote to gain a better understanding of the indigenous natives he came into contact with. Even then, however, what he wrote was scarce; Cortés's account of his conquest of Mexico is comprised of five letters he addressed to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. As Adolph Francis Bandelier noted in the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1908, “Cortés was a good writer. His letters to the emperor, on the conquest, deserve to be classed among the best Spanish documents of the period. They are, of course, coloured so as to place his own achievements in relief, but, withal, he keeps within bounds and does not exaggerate, except in matters of Indian civilization and the numbers of population as implied by the size of the settlements. Even there he uses comparatives only, judging from outward appearances and from impressions.”

Conquistadors chronicles Cortés’slife, but it also examines the aftermath of his conquest and analyzes the controversy surrounding his legacy. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about Cortés like you never have before, in no time at all.

Undated engraving of Cortes

Conquistadors: The Lives and Legacies of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

Chapter 1: Heading to the New World

Chapter 2: Cortés’s Conquest of the Aztecs

Expedition to the Mainland

The Aztec Empire

Spaniards and Aztecs in Tenochtitlán

The Fall of Tenochtitlán

Chapter 3: Pizarro’s Conquest of the Incas

Pizarro’s First Two Expeditions and the Capitulación

The Inca Empire

The Fall of the Inca

An Incomplete Conquest

Chapter 4: Ignoble Ends

Chapter 5: Legacies

Cortes’s Second Letter to Charles V

Bibliography

Chapter 1: Heading to the New World

Hernán Cortés was born on an uncertain date in 1485 in Medellín, in the Spanish province of Extremadura. A dry, dusty, and hot backwater in the southwest of Spain, Extremadura was the home of many families of noble descent who had fallen into poverty, and it would prove to be the breeding ground of a majority of the conquistadors, most of whom came from honorable lineages but had few viable prospects in their native country. Indeed, this was the case for Hernán, son of Martín Cortés de Monroy and Catalina Pizarro Altamarino (through his mother, Cortés was a distant cousin of the conqueror of Peru, Francisco Pizarro). Though he is commonly referred to as Hernán today, he called himself Hernando or Fernando during his life.

The Spanish nobility was traditionally a warrior caste forged in the reconquista, the slow but ultimately successful reincorporation of the Iberian peninsula into Christendom at the expense of the Arabic-speaking Muslims who had ruled it for centuries. Cortés’s father, a captain in the military, had remained true to the martial vocation of his class, but it held little tangible reward now that the Moors had been finally driven back into North Africa in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus first arrived in the New World thinking it was Asia.

Apparently a bright and ambitious child, Hernán Cortés left home for the prestigious University of Salamanca at the age of 14 with the intention of studying law. His parents, like many today, probably saw the legal profession as a steady and promising career path for their son, one which might help him restore the family’s diminished fortune. But Cortés only remained at the university for two years, thus falling short of earning a degree. His evident impatience with the need for prolonged, sustained study reveals the restlessness and impetuousness that would become one of his most prevalent character traits. On the other hand, his legal studies provided him with knowledge that would later prove valuable when he was attempting to justify his claims to the land he conquered across the ocean and negotiate with the Spanish crown over his share of its wealth.

Thus, two of the qualities that Cortés would share with later conquistadors are evident from his early choices. First, he did not wish to follow a slow, gradual route to wealth and prominence; he wanted to achieve these things in a dramatic and immediate fashion. Second, he was willing to use the most influential forms of knowledge of the time and place, especially law and theology, to pursue his own aims, but he had no real reverence for learning in itself. His departure from Salamanca set a pattern. As he would do again and again, he left behind the old, the familiar, and established for the new, the uncertain, and the adventurous.

Spain’s great writer Miguel de Cervantes, in a story about a man from Extremadura, described the Americas as “the refuge of the despairing sons of Spain, the church of the homeless, the asylum of homicides, the haven of gamblers and cheats, the general receptacle for loose women, the common center of attraction for many, but effectual resource of very few.” As a contemporary view of the conquistadors and other arrivistes in the new colonies, Cervantes’s is not a flattering portrait of what motivated men like Cortés to make the dangerous crossing of the Atlantic. And yet from what we know of his personality and early life, it seems like an accurate enough characterization of the man and the circles he frequented. A restless, mischievous young man, he found employment as a notary in the port city of Seville, but he soon found himself attracted to the new lands to the West, for which ships were departing regularly from Seville’s harbor, and from which new wealth was arriving and remaking the city’s economy.

Cervantes

When he departed for the island of Hispaniola in 1504, the memory of Columbus’s discoveries was still fresh in the minds of the Spanish public. Columbus himself was still alive, but as a result of his disastrous stint as governor of Hispaniola, he had been relieved of his title of Viceroy of the Indies, and the crown had moved to centralize control over the new colonies and ensure their profitability. And though Columbus’s voyage to the New World is remembered as one of the seminal events of the last millennium, at the time it still represented a bit of a disappointment. After all, Columbus’s goal had been to reach Asia and ensure Spain’s access to the trade in luxurious commodities such as spices and silk, and he had also hoped, later in his career, to reach the legendary gold mines of King Solomon.

Instead, what he had actually achieved was now uncertain, but it was becoming clear that rather than reaching the eastern edge of Asia, Columbus had arrived at a different land mass altogether. Justifying himself by the claim that the natives were barbaric heathens who needed to be civilized and converted to Christianity, Columbus had initiated a treatment of the native inhabitants that was at best paternalistic and at worst horrifically brutal and exploitative.

Making matters worse, Columbus had attempted to exploit the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba for gold only to find that the deposits were scarce. In the meantime, a system of thinly disguised slave labor came into being under the name of the encomienda, or “entrustment.” The notion was that Spanish settlers would be granted a piece of land and power over the natives who inhabited it; their responsibility would be to instruct the natives in religion, in return for which “service” they could exact tributes of gold or other valuables, or labor in extractive or agricultural activities. The system laid the ground for the plantation-slave economy that would later become prevalent in the Caribbean.

It was into this environment that Cortés arrived in 1504, still not yet 20. Although Columbus had met with a friendly reception from the inhabitants of the islands he first visited, the conflict between Spanish settlers and natives had now become implacable. Understandably, the natives were not fond of the encomienda system or of the extreme savagery and cruelty of many Spaniards, and some had taken up arms against the new arrivals. One of Cortés’s first experiences in the New World was to participate in expeditions against the remaining groups of Indians who had not yet been subjugated. It was here that he got his first taste of the casual brutality of the colonial frontier culture, as well as of the rewards that military exploits could bring. Through his military involvement, Cortés was granted a large encomienda in Hispaniola, including control over several hundred subjugated natives. In the meantime, he also offered his services as a notary and clerk to other settlers, establishing a fruitful set of relationships with the colonial authorities. Just over five years after arriving in the Indies, Cortés would move on from Hispaniola and take part in an expedition to Cuba, a larger island with far more as yet unconquered land.

Cortés’s services to the new governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, earned him a prominent position in the new colony. He became clerk and secretary to the governor himself, gained control of a large encomienda, and accumulated enough prestige to become mayor of the city of Santiago. However, he soon got ahead of himself, amassing debts through an extravagant lifestyle and gaining the hostility of the governor on account of his unapologetic ambition and his seduction of the governor’s sister-in-law, Catalina Juárez, whom Cortés ultimately married. Furthermore, he proved not to be a model citizen of the colony. According to chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who would accompany Cortés on his expedition to Mexico, the soon-to-be conquistador was a dandy, a lover of fineries, and unrestrained spender; despite his apparent wealth, Cortés accumulated vast debts during his years in Cuba through his luxurious lifestyle. Such a predicament provides a relatively banal explanation for his desire to set off and conquer new lands. If he was ever going to repay his creditors, he would need a windfall much bigger than the encomienda he had already acquired. By obtaining the title of Captain General, necessary for leading further expeditions, Cortés also obtained a higher credit limit, so to speak, because his creditors would now be guaranteed a share of any further profits he obtained.

Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar

Like Hernán Cortés and many other members of the front line of Spanish imperial expansion, Francisco Pizarro was born in the southwestern Spanish province of Extremadura. It was more or less the closest region geographically to the Indies, and due to its proximity to the great ports of Seville, Cádiz, and Lisbon, it had a more maritime and Atlantic orientation than the northern and eastern regions of Spain, which tended to look more to Europe and the Mediterranean. It was also a bone-dry and economically marginal region of greater than average poverty, where the experience of long-term war with the Moors and with Mediterranean rivals had created a frontier-like mentality and helped form a large class of men who sought their fortune in war rather than in commerce, the church, or courtly activity.

Francisco’s father, Gonzalo Pizarro, belonged to this class and was an infantry officer with a relatively prestigious lineage who fought in a number of Mediterranean campaigns. His mother, on the other hand, was a poor woman who bore her son out of wedlock and later married another man, with whom she had several other sons. In part because of the humble circumstances of his birth and in part because of the general scarcity of birth records from the period, it is not clear exactly when Pizarro was born, although his birth occurred sometime in the 1470s and possibly in 1471. His city of origin was Trujillo, which would later become the name of a major city in Peru.