Although the 1574 manuscript was published in 1632, long after its appearance in Spain, Díaz del Castillo continued to revise his manuscript in the Americas up until the time he died in 1584. Díaz del Castillo’s account is, thus, at least partially an attempt to describe the conquest as a heroic battle fought by courageous soldiers against fierce warriors. He was also reacting against an account published by Cortés’s secretary, Francisco López de Gómara, who published an account that seemed to give Cortés all of the credit for the conquest. His book appeared in Spain in 1576 after Fray Bartolomé de las Casas had published A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, his outspoken critique of Spanish policies in North America. ![]() The Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote his version of what he had witnessed during the conquest, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, decades after the Spanish victory in 1521. The published first letter was, in fact, not Cortés’s original letter, but one revised by a committee with the deliberate intention of positively influencing Charles V. Moreover, the first and fifth letters were lost until a French scholar found them in Vienna (sixteenth century Spain was part of the Hapsburg Empire) in the eighteenth century. But during much of the conquest, Cortés’s letters could be interpreted as an attempt to justify his deliberate failure to obey Diego Velázquez de Cellar, the Spanish governor in Cuba, the sponsor of his expedition. Many historians would accept only Don Hernán Cortés’s letters to King Charles V as “genuine” primary sources, since they were written by the Spanish conqueror in his native language at the time he was battling the Mexicas. ![]() There are only a handful of primary sources available on the conquest of Mexico, and all of them are “tainted” in at least some ways.
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