Reviews for History of the Conquest of Mexico (Library of Essential Reading Series)

The average rating for History of the Conquest of Mexico (Library of Essential Reading Series) based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-09-01 00:00:00 Melissa Bonner The thing I like about this book is both its strong narrative, almost novelistic, thrust, and its heavy footnoting throughout (at the end of most chapters there's a little bibliographic essay). Prescott's familiarity with his sources seems exhaustive. Reading him is a little bit like reading Gibbon. One has to make provision for the passage of time and the change of values. "Conquest" is hardly the word we would use today. Today the word is the neutral contact--pre-contact, post-contact. The book to my mind does not really begin until chapter 6 (p. 122 in this edition) when we learn about the golden age of Tezcucan civilization. This was one of three affiliated Aztec city states living in close allegiance in the Valley of Mexico. All that precedes this is a rather patchy look at state religion (hideous, of course), law, regional politics, astronomy, the famous calendar, etc. I don't recommend skipping the beginning though for it contains essential information you'll need in later reading. About halfway through, when Cortés and his men climb from the buggy, malarial gulf coast, up to the tableland (7,500 feet) on which the Valley of Mexico sits, the writing becomes incredibly vivid. How Prescott, a partly blind man, was able to do this — it couldn't have been easy for a sighted person — makes his achievement all the more astonishing. He's particularly good at showing us the pristine-looking Aztec state as it sits among its network of lakes from the surrounding cordilleras. Along the way the Spaniards are welcomed by a jubilant public which line the road and celebrate their progress. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, a myth told the story of Quetzalcoatl, god of the air, who, incurring the wrath of one of the principal gods: . . . was compelled to abandon the country . . . When he reached the shores of the Mexican gulf, he took a leave of his followers, promising that he and his descendants would revisit hereafter . . . . The Mexicans looked confidently to the return of the benevolent deity and this remarkable tradition, deeply cherished in their hearts, prepared the way . . . for the future success of the Spaniards. (p. 53) A few favorite quotes. The first on Aztec religious practices: Scarcely any author pretends to estimate the yearly sacrifices [of captive pow's] throughout the empire at less than twenty thousand, and some carry the number as high as fifty. (p. 64) And about the early career of Hernando Cortés: He became familiar with toil and danger, and with those deeds of cruelty which have too often, alas! stained the bright scutcheons of the Castilian chivalry in the New World. (p. 174) And on the forced conversion of the Indians: The sword was a good argument, when the tongue failed; and the spread of Mahometanism had shown that seeds sown by the hand of violence, far from perishing in the ground, would spring up and bear fruit to after time. (p. 196) The picture drawn here of Aztec religious practice and its attendant cannibalism is appalling. At one point Cortés' small force comes upon several priests at a local ziggurat or teocalli smeared black with blood from head to toe. The inner sactum held a tray under a depiction of the god of war Huitzilopotchli containing human hearts ripped from the chests of unfortunate victims. At another point they come upon a cache of 130,000 human skulls. In light of such revelations, the prostelitizing Christianity they force feed the natives seems tame. And much as I dislike the depredations of Christianity, its hard to deny that part of what Spain did here -- in addition to enriching itself enormously, and enslaving millions -- was to stop a carnage that may have been without precedent in human history. I have to admit that I think Prescott was something of a naïve puppy. The worst depredations of the Spanish he never believes and argues away. He hagiographizes Cortés. His was the Great White Male school of historiography, which is not to be entirely disdained because of its great literary merit. One wonders though if this good man, Prescott himself, wasn't simply too good to believe in the great evil perpetrated by Cortés et al. Sometimes he does not hesitate to question claims of past historians, but then he'll produce a quote from one of his fellows like this, with regard to the "conqueror's" desperate fighting retreat from the Mexican capital: "There was no people so capable of supporting hunger as the Spaniards, and none of them who were ever more severely tried than the soldiers of Cortés." (p. 607) Really? How about the Greeks at Thermopylae?-- to chose the first example that springs to mind. And then again: The period which we are reviewing was still the age of chivalry; that stirring and adventurous age, of which we can form little conception in the present day of sober, practical reality. The Spaniard, with his nice point of honor, high romance, and proud, vainglorious vaunt, was the true representative of that age. (p. 715) But knights as a class, as Steven Runciman and others have shown, were predacious and murderous beings who used the cross as the ultimate justification. I mean, it's not as if examples of this don't occur in the present text. Such teeming cognitive dissonance seems bizarre at times, especially in a scholar of the Spanish Empire. By the way, you may also wish to consult Nigel Davies' The Aztecs: A History. Moreover, I would lay odds that Euclides da Cunha's Backlands: The Canudos Campaign--about a late 19-century millenarian revolt in Brazil--was at least in part inspired by Prescott, whose history was translated into ten languages not long after its 1843 publication.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-15 00:00:00 Heidi Piette This book is astounding! Like others, I suspect, I thought I had some decent grasp on the story of the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortés and his conquistadores. I was aware of the Aztec belief that a white god was returning in the very year that Cortés showed up, a belief that attenuated their response to his advent. And the fact that they were overawed by the horses and hardware. All that stuff. The truth, I found, was that I hadn't a clue until I read this splendid history. It is an utterly fascinating, nearly unbelievable story told in an admirable style. Published in 1843, William H. Prescott's style takes a little getting used to. One is soon in the swing of it, however, and soon after that one begins to relish it.