Título: THE SPANISH CONQUISTADORES. MEN OR DEVILS?
Autor: BAUMANN, JOHN FRANCIS
Año: 1960
Género: HISTORIA Y MITOLOGÍA
Formato: PDF
As he seeks to reconstruct the picture of the past, its personalities and its events, the historian is often, most regularly to be more exact, faced with evidence of a somewhat contradictory nature. This is at times the case when he studies events. It is more consistently true when the subject of his research is a person or a group of persons. Their contemporaries may have seen the individual or individuals with the eyes of friends and admirers, or with those of mere acquaintances, or, perhaps, with those of opponents or even enemies. The viewpoint will color the reporting and the judgments expressed. There will be instances in which the subject of the historian’s study will have written of himself. The mass of materials available is likely to be considerable and, at times, confusing. The historian has to interpret. And, besides the primary materials at his disposal, he may often have the views of his own predecessors or contemporaries to consider or contend with.
One of the reasons for this present work and the series to which it belongs is to introduce the student to the intricacies of this process of weighing sources, to show him some of the raw materials out of which history is constructed, and to give him an opportunity to try his hand at historical evaluation.
The subjects of this study are those Spaniards who came to the new world of the Americas in the last years of the fifteenth and the early decades of the sixteenth century to explore, conquer, settle. They are the men known to history as the conquistadores. Much bass been written about them; they or their scribes have w ritten m uch about themselves. Some of this “much” is highly laudatory; some is distinctly less so. And later writers have complicated, rather than clarified, the picture of these men by offering the most contradictory opinions concerning them. We read all this and ask ourselves: “The Spanish Conquistadores, were they simply men, much like ourselves, or were they devils, temporarily on leave from those nether regions where they belonged?”
As we work through this cross-section of selections, some from the actors themselves and others from more modem writers, there are several considerations which we, as historians, must bear in mind. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was, unfortunately, not too far from a rather true description of human kind when he spoke of homo homini lupus (man a wolf as regards fellow man). Men, unless profoundly and charitably motivated by a religious or, at least, a humanitarian ideal, are always ready to prey on their fellows. Crass selfishness is a constant in the human story, and not infrequently this vice turns up in a most ugly and extreme form, as frightening cruelty, or a callous disregard of others and their rights, or a very ugly manifestation of lower instincts.
The expansion of Europe which began in the late fifteenth century threw many temptations in the path of those sons and daughters of the West who went forth to win empires or to amass personal wealth and build their futures. The imperialist process has left records behind which are not always pleasant to read, which too often are embarrassing to us, its heirs. The strong have regularly conquered weaker neighbors with a large measure of ruthlessness; pagans have fought Christians and Christians have fought pagans and infidels and, in between times, one another; the white races have preyed on the colored; the “superior” peoples have felt compelled to bring their way of life to folk less fortunate, at least by their self-established standards. Sometimes these activities were powered by naked force, at others by perverted religious convictions or racial prejudices. It is in the light of this continuing, all too human record that one must judge the first Europeans who came upon the native Americans. In most instances these “first Europeans” were Spaniards, that breed of men known as the conquistadores.
From the beginning the conquistadores wrote of their exploits, official and unofficial accounts of the New World which they were subduing for both Majesties, King and God, and of the new subjects which they were adding to the rolls of both. The literate, such as Columbus and Cortes and Valdivia and a few more, penned their own stories; others had chroniclers, escribanos they were called, along on their expeditions or recounted their experiences to others who set them down for posterity.
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