The Conquest of Mexico

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the sources describing the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Historians all have continuously asked the same question: How was it possible for five hundred Spaniards to conquer a Mexican empire? In trying to resolve the question, historians have applied all kinds of methodological instruments but particularly they have critically analyzed the sources. All have recognized the obvious subjectivity of the main sources of Hernán Cortés, López de Gómara, and Díaz del Castillo. The response has been either to verify the information given by these authors with that of archival documents and other accounts by Spanish conquerors, or to confront the Spanish sources with indigenous ones. These have been very useful methods that have clarified many of the doubts and mistakes represented in the main sources, but they have always confirmed the main story line of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.