Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain) is a first-hand history of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico by the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Del Castillo served under three of the leaders of the Spanish expeditions, most notably under Hernan Cortés in his 1521 conquest of the Aztec Empire and the capture of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan.
Finished in 1568, del Castillo’s account was written to counter arguments made by writers such as Bartolome de las Casas that conquistadores, and the encomienda system they established, had caused untold suffering to the Indigenous people of the Americas (see RCIN 1022658). It also aimed to to correct what he perceived as errors in the biography of Cortés by Francisco Lopez de Gomara (which had been commissioned by Cortés's nephew) that overly praised his role in the conquest of Mexico. Instead, del Castillo recounted the conquest as a dramatic sequence of events and praised the 700 soldiers that formed the expedition, declaring that they had endured much suffering and hardship in acquiring Mexico for Spain, and that they had not received due recognition for their actions. However, he did not deny that many of these men, like himself, had travelled to Mexico in search of their fortunes, stating that they were disappointed on discovering that Tenochtitlan did not contain the riches that Cortés had promised.
Although the book was read in scholarly circles in Spain and in its colonial possessions for several decades after its completion, it was not published until 1632. This copy of the work contains marginalia and several loose pages of notes to the text written by an eighteenth-century reader inserted throughout.