ABSTRACT
Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo was the last survivor of Hernán Cortés’s motley band of soldier-adventurers. Born in the year Columbus landed in the Indies, Díaz died on his estates in Guatemala in 1581. His life spanned the greater part of the Spanish subjugation of Central and Latin America, but he never became wealthy. Blessed with a graphic memory and a great sense of the dramatic, the aged conquistador bequeathed his family and history a priceless account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and of Aztec civilization. He wrote his History of the Conquest of New Spain while in his seventies and added a preliminary note to it at the age of eighty-four. Díaz was no writer, but his memories of Tenochtitlán and the brilliance of Aztec civilization resonate with a vividness that places the reader by the young soldier’s side. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, every detail of the great capital and of a vanished civilization was still etched in an old man’s mind. The colors, the costumes, the smells, the bustle of Tenochtitlán’s great market, all come down to us across nearly fi ve centuries with an immediacy one can never gain from archaeological sources alone. Díaz wrote of a society headed by a supreme ruler, Moctezuma, who lived in great state and was surrounded by immense wealth. Hundreds of people attended to his personal well-being and administered his government. And high above Tenochtitlán towered the great temple of the sun god, Huitzilopochtli, with its great drum that could be heard 10 kilometers (6 miles) away. The blood-stained shrine of the god symbolized the immense power of the divine forces that controlled the fate of the Aztec world. Aztec civilization was a pyramid, with all political, religious, and economic power centered in one personMoctezuma, the tlatoani , “the Speaker.” But this same ruler and his predecessors and equivalents in other societies were often the victims of economic circumstances, presiding as they did over societies based on the effi cient collection of tribute and the labor of thousands of commoners.
