VISION OF THE VANQUISHED

Vision of the Vanquished

Vision of the Vanquished

Introduction

The Mexicas had conquered much of what is now modern-day Mexico, and many of those conquered people spoke their language, Nahuatl, so that not all Nahuatl-speaking natives were Mexicas. Others, especially in the south and what is now Central America, spoke various dialects of Mayan. Where possible, I will try to identify the specific indigenous people who wrote the manuscripts. There are only a handful of primary sources available on the conquest of Mexico, and all of them are “tainted” in at least some ways. Many historians would accept only Don Hernán Cortés's letters to King Charles V as “genuine” primary sources, since they were written by the Spanish conqueror in his native language at the time he was battling the Mexicas. But during much of the conquest, Cortés's letters could be interpreted as an attempt to justify his deliberate failure to obey Diego Velázquez de Cellar, the Spanish governor in Cuba, the sponsor of his expedition. Moreover, the first and fifth letters were lost until a French scholar found them in Vienna (sixteenth century Spain was part of the Hapsburg Empire) in the eighteenth century. The published first letter was, in fact, not Cortés's original letter, but one revised by a committee with the deliberate intention of positively influencing Charles V.

Analysis

The Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote his version of what he had witnessed during the conquest, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, decades after the Spanish victory in 1521. His book appeared in Spain in 1576 after Fray Bartolomé de las Casas had published A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, his outspoken critique of Spanish policies in North America. He was also reacting against an account published by Cortés's secretary, Francisco López de Gómara, who published an account that seemed to give Cortés all of the credit for the conquest (Kicza, 1992, pp 22-181). Díaz del Castillo's account is, thus, at least partially an attempt to describe the conquest as a heroic battle fought by courageous soldiers against fierce warriors.

Although the 1574 manuscript was published in 1632, long after its appearance in Spain, Díaz del Castillo continued to revise his manuscript in the Americas up until the time he died in 1584. The 1584 manuscript was not published until 1904, so most out of copyright copies of the book are based on the earlier 1576 version (Karttunen, 1994, pp 22-191).

Authorities disagree over how early the Nahuas adopted the Spanish alphabet to render Nahuatl into a written language to produce their own codices or written accounts of the conquest. The Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla, author of The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, believes that a rare French Bibliothèque National manuscript--variously described as “Manuscript 22,” Unos anales historicos de la nacion mexicana, or the Tlatelolco Codex--was written in Nahuatl by a group of anonymous natives of Tlatelolco in 1528, just seven years after the ...