Conquistadores: A New History by Fernando Cervantes. Allen Lane, London 2021. Hbk. 491 pages. £18.99.
We’ve all heard at least parts of the epic story of the discovery of America and its conquest by the Spanish adventurers, the infamous conquistadores such as Cortés and the Pizarro brothers. But who exactly were these villains of popular legend, sowing destruction and mayhem wherever they went, massacring the native population and stealing their gold? This new history seeks to address this question. But the reason it is subtitled ‘A New History’ is because its author, Fernando Cervantes, Reader in History at the University of Bristol, believes that the conquistadors have been quite misunderstood and misrepresented.
This detailed history, informed by extensive archival research, presents a gripping narrative, its graphic detail giving something of a ringside view as the drama unfolds. What soon becomes apparent is that the success of the conquistadors lay not so much in superiority of their formidable fighting skills and weaponry – steel swords, arquebus, canon, but above all the mounted knight, of which the natives had never seen the like – but also their skill in exploiting the rivalry that existed amongst the numerous native tribes they encountered. These saw an opportunity to overthrow, sacrifice and eat their enemies. So already this narrative is not just one of conquest but collaboration, of a cultural interchange that provides a theme of the book.
But what really interests Cervantes is the nature of the meeting of two cultural worlds that in some respects were totally alien but of equivalent sophistication. As they penetrated to the heartland of the Mexica the conquistadors were amazed at the beauty and scale of the cities, the quality of life and sophistication of the inhabitants, which surpassed anything seen in Spain. Equally impressive was the social organisation and cultic hierarchy. The vertical structures of the Aztec and Inca empires replicated that of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the authority of Montezuma as absolute as that of Charles V. To this the conquistadors could relate and simply replaced one with the other. Many native chiefs were quite willing to accept this new authority, together with Christian beliefs that they readily accommodated to their spiritual world.
It is in the exploration of this religious interaction that Cervantes reveals the larger ambition and intention of his new history. It is, he declares, a ‘Baroque’ approach to history which not only assesses the contrasting spiritual worlds as they coalesced but challenges the traditional historiography of the West. This, he contends, has been largely shaped by the secular and sceptical influence of the Enlightenment obscuring a deeper understanding of both the motivations of the conquistadors and the sort of society that they created. As he writes, ‘It is only by placing the conquistadores in their pre-nationalist and pre-empirical context that we can have any hope of appreciating the medieval religious culture that motivated them and which, in turn laid the foundation of a non-unitary system of government.’ (p.335).
In many ways this was a world in transition on the cusp of modernity and one of the most interesting aspects of this investigation is its exposure of the conflict of interest that lay between the desire of the conquistadors to gain glory, gold and status, and the concerns of the Spanish government that took an increasingly critical view of their behaviour. This was fuelled particularly by the alarming reports of Bartholomé de Las Casas, whose polemics Cervantes examines in some detail.
Also valuable is his evaluation of the seminal work of the Franciscan jurist Francisco de Vittoria on the nature of dominium. His argument for a ius gentium (law of nations) that took precedence over the law of individual societies challenged much conventional thinking and laid the basis for the modern understanding of international law. The problem for both the Spanish crown and Hapsburg emperors was that they needed the gold of the new world as much as the conquistadors. For their part the latter were happy to acknowledge the authority of the crown but then, in typically Spanish fashion, continue to pursue their own interests.
The resulting society that the conquistadors created in Latin America was very different from that of Protestant North America. Though each could be brutal and rapacious, Cervantes claims that in Latin America Catholicism became much more integrated with native beliefs but in a more polarised society. The divisions between the rich hidalgo elite and the exploited poor live on, contrasting with the democratic north that allowed the emergence of a middle class providing a more stable and prosperous state. Cervantes does his best to encourage a benign appreciation of the world of the conquistadors but their legacy remains one of deep seated inequality, instability and violence.
Dominic Kirkham’s books include From Monk to Modernity (SOF 2015) and Our Shadowed World (Wipf and Stock, Eugene OR, 2019).