ABSTRACT

So far we have explored a few accounts by the actors in the experience of the discovery, conquest and settlement of America. But in the course of the sixteenth century this vast historical process was also translated into political and military narratives ultimately aimed at discussing the political rights of the Indians, glorifying the exploits of a given conqueror or eulogizing the whole enterprise of imperial Spain. Some very significant works, such as Bartolomé de las Casas’s History of the Indies and Brief Apologetic History (Apologética historia sumaria) were not published until the nineteenth and twentieth century; Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain was edited in 1632 and Ginés de Sepúlveda’s De orbe novo went through the presses by the end of the eighteenth century. The Spanish crown followed a fairly consistent policy of treating any kind of information about the Indies as a state secret, which may account in part for the fact that many works remained for centuries in manuscript form. Thus the few major treatises on the New World made available to contemporary readers in the course of the sixteenth century became a source upon which many authors drew for compilations and much work that was derivative in nature.