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Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496 – 1584) was a conquistador, who wrote an eyewitness account of the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards under Hernán Cortés, himself serving as a rodelero under Cortés. Born in Medina del Campo (Spain), he came from a family of little wealth and he himself had received only a minimal education. He sailed to Cuba in 1514 to make his fortune, but after two years found few opportunities there. Much of the native population of the island had already been killed by epidemics and forced labor, and in 1517 an expedition was sent to the smaller Caribbean islands to find alternative sources of labor. Díaz joined this group, under the command of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba. It was a difficult venture, and although they discovered the Yucatán coast, by the time the expedition returned to Cuba they were in disastrous shape.
Nevertheless, Díaz returned to the coast of Yucatán the following year, on 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. In this third effort, Díaz took part in one of the legendary military campaigns of history, bringing an end to the Aztec empire in Mesoamerica. During this campaign, Díaz spoke frequently with his companions in arms about their experiences, collecting them into a coherent narration. 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 claims to have participated, culminating in the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521.
As a reward for his service, Díaz was appointed governor of Santiago de los Caballeros, present-day Antigua Guatemala. He began writing his history in 1568, almost fifty years after the events described, in response to an alternative history written by Cortés's chaplain, who had not actually participated in the campaign. He called his book the Verdadera Historia ("True History"), in response to the claims made in the earlier work.
Díaz died in 1584, without seeing his book published. A manuscript was found in a Madrid library in 1632 and finally published, providing an eye-witness account of the events, often told from the perspective of a common soldier. Today it is one of our most important sources for understanding the campaign that led to the collapse of the Aztec Empire and the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
References
- Díaz del Castillo, Bernal [1632] (1963). The Conquest of New Spain, J. M. Cohen (trans.), 6th printing (1973), Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-044123-9. OCLC 162351797.
- 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). History of the Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View of Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortes (online reproduction, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library), New York: Harper and Brothers. OCLC 2458166.
- Wilson, Robert Anderson (1859). A New History of the Conquest of Mexico: In which Las Casas' denunciations of the popular historians of that war are fully vindicated. Philadelphia, PA: James Challen & Son. OCLC 9642461.
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