Fernando Cervantes

A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world "The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill Cervantes applies. . . . [He] conveys complex arguments in delightfully simple language, and most importantly knows how to tell a good story." --The Times (London) Over the few short decades that followed Christopher Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean in 1492, Spain conquered the two most powerful civilizations of the Americas: the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and the other explorers and soldiers that took part in these expeditions dedicated their lives to seeking political and religious glory, helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. But centuries later, these conquistadors have become the stuff of nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation as men who decimated ancient civilizations and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory. In Conquistadores, acclaimed Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes--himself a descendent of one of the conquistadors--cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to help us better understand the context that gave rise to the conquistadors' actions. Drawing upon previously untapped primary sources that include diaries, letters, chronicles, and polemical treatises, Cervantes immerses us in the late-medieval, imperialist, religious world of 16th-century Spain, a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadors themselves. His thought-provoking, illuminating account reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World and the half-century that irrevocably altered the course of history.

A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest

Conquistadores

Conquistadores. Una historia diferente

Until the end of the eighteenth century, missionaries to the New World agreed that diabolism lay at the heart of the Native American belief system and at the root of their own failure to establish a church purged of Satan and pagan superstition. The Devil mattered, and he occupied a central place in discussions of all non-Christian religious systems and in the bitter disputes over how to combat them. In this elegant and sensitive analysis, Fernando Cervantes gives the Devil his due, illuminating a neglected aspect of the European encounter with America and setting the full history of the "spiritual conquest" in a rich and original context. He reveals how Native Americans reinterpreted the view of Christianity presented to them, how they refused to see the world as the missionaries saw it. Drawing on archival sources, he brings into clear focus the complex, often bewildering, and sometimes tragic clash between a theology that posited the existence of competing forces and one that insisted that all deities were multiform beings within which good and evil coexisted. He deals in compelling and persuasive detail with the social history of the interaction between the two cultures, explaining not only the impact of European ideas upon the New World but the influence of diabolism on the ideology of the Old. And he provides a subtle account of the role of diabolism in the emerging baroque culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that strikingly challenges conventional explanations of the growth of skepticism in the period.

The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain

The Devil in the New World

Andrew Redden

This volume depicts the intricate cultural, religious and intellectual kaleidoscope of interactions between angels, demons and the heterogeneous populations of Spanish America including New Spain (Mexico), New Granada (Colombia) and Peru. Essential reading for students of religion, anthropology of religion, history of ideas, Latin American colonial history and church history.

Fernando Cervantes

About

Books

Join the club