The Conquest of New Spain
Title page of the first edition (1632)
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| Author | Captain Bernal Diaz del Castillo |
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| Original title | Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España |
| Translator | Maurice Keatinge |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Cortés, Hernán, -- 1485-1547. Mexico -- History -- Conquest, 1519-1540. |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Published | 1800 (Printed for J. Wright, Piccadilly, by John Dean, High Street, Congleton) 1963 (Penguin Books) |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 514 |
| ISBN | (1963) |
| OCLC | 723180350 |
Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (English: The True History of the Conquest of New Spain) is the first-person narrative written in 1576 by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492–1581), the 16th-century military adventurer, conquistador, and colonist settler, who served in three Mexican expeditions; those of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba (1517) to the Yucatán peninsula; the expedition of Juan de Grijalva (1518), and the expedition of Hernán Cortés (1519) in the Valley of Mexico; the history relates his participation in the fall of Emperor Moctezuma II, and the subsequent defeat of the Aztec empire.
In the colonial history of Latin America, The Conquest of New Spain is a vivid, military account that establishes Bernal Díaz del Castillo “among chroniclers what Daniel Defoe is among novelists”. Late in life, when Díaz del Castillo was eighty-four years old, and residing in his encomienda estates in Guatemala, he wrote The True History of the Conquest of New Spain to defend the story of the common-soldier conquistador within the histories about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. He presents his narrative as an alternative to the critical writings of Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose Indian-native histories emphasized the cruelty of the conquest; and the histories of the hagiographic biographers of Hernán Cortés — specifically that of Francisco López de Gómara, whom he believed minimized the role of the 700 enlisted soldiers who were instrumental to conquering the Aztec empire. That said historians and hagiographers speak the truth “neither in the beginning, nor the middle, nor the end”, is why Díaz del Castillo strongly defended the actions of the conquistadors, whilst emphasising their humanity and honesty in his eyewitness narrative, which he summarised as: “We went there to serve God, and also to get rich”.
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