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Conquistadores

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Conquistadores

Von: Fernando Cervantes
Gesprochen von: Luis Soto
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Brought to you by Penguin.

'With reason, evidence, common sense, uncompromising candour and disciplined imagination Fernando Cervantes makes the conquistadores believable' Felipe Fernández-Armesto

The 'conquistadores', the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation, as men who decimated the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas, and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory.

In Conquistadores, Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to immerse the reader in the world of the late-medieval imperialist. It is a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadores themselves. Drawing upon a wide range of sources including diaries, letters, chronicles and treatises, Cervantes reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World, set against the political and intellectual landscape from which its main actors emerged. At the heart of the story are the conquistadores, whose epic ambitions and moral contradictions defined an era.

From Columbus to Cortés, Pizarro and beyond, the explorers we think we know come alive in this thought-provoking and illuminating account of a period that irrevocably altered the course of world history.

© Fernando Cervantes 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Europa Neuere Nord-, Mittel- & Südamerika Politik & Regierungen Welt

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Lively, complex, compelling ... Cervantes is too good a historian to try to whitewash the half-century of conquistador activities that is his focus. Atrocities accompanied conquistadores wherever they went, and Cervantes seldom shies away from detailing and condemning them ... This book is a terrific read ... I could not put it down. (Matthew Restall)
The arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas is one of the most exciting stories in history. Fernando Cervantes retells the story with learning and gusto, and is excellent on the wider context ... Blood flows at every turn, yet he persuasively argues that the conquistadors have been greatly misunderstood, and invites us to think again about one of the past's greatest turning points. (Dominic Sandbrook)
Enlightening ... For a vivid portrayal of a clash of very different cultures, each equally astonishing to the other, and a group of men who "whatever their myriad faults and crimes ... succeeded more or less through their own agency, in fundamentally transforming Spanish and European conceptions of the world in barely half a century", Conquistadores makes for fascinating reading. (Jude Webber)
Superb ... Conquistadores tells the story of the discovery and conquest of the New World, and tells it very well. His portraits of Cortés, Pizarro, Hernando de Soto and the other conquistadors are as vivid as one could wish. (Daniel Johnson)
Superlative ... subtly recasts Columbus, Cortés and Pizarro as ambiguous figures rooted in medieval ideas of holy war as much as in greed for gold. (David Abulafia)
Cervantes places the conquest of the Americas in Spain's political context ... a rich portrait of a period that is almost unimaginable today ... a persuasive reassessment. (Daniel Rey)
A superb new look at the conquistadors that puts them in their true context. (Simon Sebag Montefiore)
A veritable compendium on the Spanish conquest of the Americas ... the book is welcome, and it most certainly meets its goal of presenting the colonisers as real people ... Professor Cervantes is a talented man, and his book is staggeringly thorough. (Camilla Townsend)
Cervantes skilfully constructs a complex story, packed with disturbing nuance, which obliterates that simplistic narrative of brutal conquistadors subduing innocent indigenes. The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill Cervantes applies to his discoveries. He is equally at home in cultural, literary, linguistic, artistic, economic and political history. All this sophisticated scholarship could so easily result in an unwieldy book, easy to admire, but difficult to read. Cervantes, however, conveys complex arguments in delightfully simple language, and most importantly knows how to tell a good story. (Gerard DeGroot)
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The author gives a detailed account of the events that lead to the conquest of the Americas. However,IMO the book petered out when the book in the end talked too much about Spanish politics that were only peripherally related to the conquest.

A thorough study of this violent period

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Fernando Cervantes is a serious scholar, and this book reflects genuine archival work and wide reading. The prose is elegant, the narrative scope impressive. But the methodology conceals a consistent apologetic drift that the uninformed reader will struggle to detect.

The pattern is consistent: Cervantes identifies formal weaknesses in the arguments of the conquest's harshest critics — and then allows those philological corrections to cast doubt on the broader moral critique they were making. The result is a subtle displacement: the reader's attention shifts from what the conquest actually did to questions of historiographical method, and the perpetrators emerge looking considerably more reasonable than the evidence warrants.

This is not crude revisionism. Cervantes never defends atrocities outright, and his erudition is real. The problem is precisely that the bias is sophisticated enough to be invisible to anyone without independent command of the primary sources. Readers who lack that grounding will come away with a systematically distorted picture.

Pair with Matthew Restall's "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" or Camilla Townsend's "Fifth Sun" for necessary counterbalance.

PS. The reader, Luis Soto, does an outstanding job!

Erudite, but read with caution

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