Overview

After invading highland Guatemala in 1524, Spaniards claimed to have smashed the Kaqchikel and K'iche' Maya kingdoms and to have forged a new colony - with their leader, Pedro de Alvarado, as Guatemala's conquistador. This volume shows that the real story of the Spanish invasion was very different. Designed to be both an accessible introduction to the topic as well as a significant contribution to conquest scholarship, the volume presents for the first time English translations of firsthand accounts by Spaniards, Nahuas, and Mayas.Alvarado's letters to Cortes, published here in English for the first time in almost a century, are supplemented with accounts by one of his cousins, by his brother Jorge, and by Bernal Diaz and Bartolome de Las Casas. Nahua perspectives are presented in the form of pictorial evidence, along with written testimony by Tlaxcalan and Aztec veterans who fought as invading allies of the Spaniards; their claim to have done most of the fighting emerges as a powerful argument. The views of the invaded are represented by Kaqchikel and Tz'utujil accounts. Together, these sources reveal a fascinating multiplicity of perspectives and show how the conquest wars of the 1520s were a profoundly brutal moment in the history of the Americas.

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9780271027586

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Reviews

<p> This book is a great introduction as well as a scholarly contribution to conquest studies of the Americas. <p>--R. A. Santillan, Choice

Author Information

Matthew Restall is Professor of Latin American History at Penn State and author of eight books on colonial Latin America, including Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Florine G. L. Asselbergs is a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the author of Conquered Conquistadors, a groundbreaking study of the Guatemalan conquest.

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