CONQUISTADORS

A NEW HISTORY

FERNANDO CERVANTES

Allen Lane, 491pp, £30

‘Hailed by the Romantics as courageous explorers, the Spanish conquerors are increasingly seen as violent and rapacious exploiters,’ wrote Daniel Rey in the Spectator. ‘That, says Fernando Cervantes, oversimplifies the complexities of the early modern period.’ By ‘providing a rich portrait of a period that is almost unimaginable today (one in which horses elicited preternatural fear, and Columbus and Cortés both thought they’d reached China), Cervantes does make the conquistadors slightly more sympathetic.’ But despite his ‘persuasive reassessment, it remains difficult to look beyond their massacres and greed’.

Sunday Times reviewer Dominic Sandbrook applauded the book for being ‘carefully researched and vividly written’, and for ‘blasting hole after hole in the 21st-century view of the conquistadors as little more than 16th-century Nazis. In his account they are often tortured by self-doubt, holding anguished debates about their treatment of the indigenous peoples.’ Also, their success as conquerors ‘depended on finding local allies, who were often using the newcomers just as much as the newcomers were using them’.

Over in the pages of the Times, Gerard Degroot largely concurred: Cervantes ‘skilfully constructs a complex story, packed with disturbing nuance, which obliterates that simplistic narrative of brutal conquistadors subduing innocent indigenes. The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill.’ And ‘most importantly’, the author ‘knows how to tell a good story’. Yet ‘while this rehabilitation of the conquistadors is undoubtedly impressive, some readers might be dismayed by the cold rationality of its conclusions’.

‘The depth of research in this book is astonishing’