- Bernal Díaz del Castillo
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Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492 – 1585)[1] was a conquistador, who wrote an eyewitness account of the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards for Hernán Cortés, himself serving as a rodelero under Cortés.Contents
Early life
Bernal Díaz del Castillo was born 1492 in Medina del Campo (Spain), he came from a poor family and received little education. He sailed to Tierra Firme with the expedition led by Pedrarias Davila in 1514 to make his fortune, but after two years found few opportunities there. Many of the settlers had been sickened or killed by an epidemic, and there was political unrest.
Expedition to Yucatán
He later sailed to Cuba, where he was promised a grant of Indian slaves (as a part of the Encomienda system). That promise was never fulfilled, leading Díaz, in 1517, to join an expedition being organized by a group of about 110 fellow settlers, and similarly disaffected Spaniards, from Tierra Firme. They chose Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, a wealthy Cuban landowner, to lead the expedition. It was a difficult venture and although they discovered the Yucatán coast, they later returned to Cuba in ruins.
Nevertheless, Díaz returned to the coast of Yucatán the following year, in an expedition led by Juan de Grijalva, with the intent of exploring the newly discovered lands. Upon returning to Cuba, he enlisted in a new expedition, this one led by Hernán Cortés.
Conquest of Mexico
In this third effort, Díaz took part in the campaigns against the Aztec. During this campaign, Díaz spoke frequently with his fellow soldiers about their experiences, collecting them into a narrative. The book that resulted from this was Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (English: The True History of the Conquest of New Spain). In it he describes many of the 119 battles in which he participated, culminating in the defeat of the Aztecs in 1521. In the book, Castillo describes the Conquest of the Aztecs, in which he describes the Indoamerican cultures predominant in Mexico at that time. He also gives accounts of the human sacrifices, cannibalism and idolatry that he witnessed first hand.
Governor of Antigua Guatemala and later life and death
As a reward for his service, Díaz was appointed governor of Santiago de los Caballeros, present-day Antigua Guatemala. He finished writing his history in 1568, almost fifty years after the events described, a work he had begun (probably in the mid-1550s) in response to an alternative history written by Cortés's chaplain, who had not actually participated in the campaign. He called his book the Historia Verdadera ("True History"), in response to the claims made in the earlier work.
Díaz died in 1585, without seeing his book published. A manuscript was found in a Madrid library in 1632 and published, providing an eye-witness account of the events, told from the perspective of a common soldier.
Notes
- ^ Díaz del Castillo 2005, pp.7, 11.
References
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- Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (1963) [1632]. The Conquest of New Spain. Penguin Classics. J. M. Cohen (trans.) (6th printing (1973) ed.). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-044123-9. OCLC 162351797.
- Díaz del Castillo, Bernal (2005) [1632]. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez (Introduction). Mexico: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, S.A.. ISBN 968-15-0863-7. OCLC 34997012. (Spanish)
- Mayer, Alicia (2005). "Reseñas: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Manuscrito Guatemala)" (PDF). Estudios de Historia Novohispana 33: pp.175–183. ISSN 0425-3574. http://www.ejournal.unam.mx/historia_novo/ehn33/EHNO3304.pdf. (Spanish)
- Prescott, William H. (1843) (online reproduction, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library). History of the Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View of Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortes. New York: Harper and Brothers. OCLC 2458166. http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PreConq.html.
- OCLC 9642461.
External links
Categories:- Spanish conquistadors
- Spanish historians
- People of New Spain
- Colonial Mexico
- Encomenderos
- Aztec history
- History of the Yucatán Peninsula
- 16th-century Spanish people
- 16th-century writers
- 1496 births
- 1584 deaths
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