ABSTRACT
Bernai Diaz was a product of the European Renaissance and had seen the
grand cities of Moorish Spain. He was not easily impressed, but the first
sight of the great Aztec capital overwhelmed him and his comrades with
its extraordinary setting and grandeur. He retained this sense of wonder at
what they had seen and done for the next sixty years of his long life and
transmitted it to us by way of his memoirs, written in his old age. Simi-
larly, the Spanish conquerors of the Inca realm, eleven years later, experi-
enced difficulty in comprehending such a different and yet remarkable
cultural tradition. As the colonial period continued through 350 years,
and as the mixture of Iberian and Native American cultures produced a
new set of civilizations, memories and information about the original
high cultures were largely reduced to the status of legend or myth, and the
achievements of the natives were discounted and denigrated. However,
eyewitness accounts survived, both of the conquest itself and of the native
cultures. Spanish churchmen were largely responsible for writing about
the latter, but even these books and manuscripts were relegated to dusty
archives in Spain or to decrepit monastic repositories and libraries in
Spain s former colonies, the new national states of Latin America.
