1. Seven Myths of the
Spanish Conquest
By: Chelsea England
HIST 27
11990

2. Introduction
Bernal 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.

3. Introduction
The 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

4. Epilogue
In 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

5. Neither Paid Nor Forced
Cortes avoids the word “soldier” when referring to his
army of 300 men on foot.
Conquistadors were soldiers and nothing else when
Ilarioneda 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

6. Neither Paid Nor Forced
Conquistadors 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.

7. 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
faitsaccomplis 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.

8. Under the
Lordship of the
King
There 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.

9. 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

10. The Lost 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
Words of La friar to Atahuallpa was “presumably” the Requirement,
which is “an imperialism of speech.”
Malinche 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.

11. Apes and Men
The 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.

12. Apes and Men
The 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.