Bernal Diaz and the “Discovery and Conquest”

Unlike other chronicles, such as the highly entertaining  “Chronicles” of Froissart or the page-turning  “Commentaries” of Caesar, Bernal Diaz’s “The Discovery and Cnquest of Mexico” presents an immediacy and intimacy that the others lack. Froissart did not bear witness to most of the events he describes, and Caesar always refers to himself in the third person. Diaz, although writing decades after the events he describes, clearly retained a sharp memory into old age; despite the occasional errors and omissions (thoughtfully noted by the early twentieth-century interpreter, A. P. Maudslay) it is no mystery why Bernal Diaz has come to be remembered as one of the principle figures of the Mesoamerican Conquest, after Cortes himself. In the process of writing the “true history” of that process–to counter the starry-eyed hagiographers of Cortes–Diaz has assured his place in the broader history of the fifteenth century.

Cortes, as viewed through Diaz’s eyes (and years upon years of recollection) is far from perfect. Certainly he is not the demigod of myth and legend. Throughout the text, for example, Diaz takes pains to remind his audience that Cortes was obliged always to speak through an interpreter–Dona Marina, we are told again and again, was always at the Captain’s side. Why is this? My guess is that, on some level, Diaz wished to impress upon his readership that Cortes was a man like any other, one who was obliged to operate within the confines of his situation and the limitations of his own abilities.  (Or perhaps I am reading too much into this; perhaps Diaz only wished to give due credit to Dona Marina, who clearly was in an awkward situation.)

Too, Diaz presents Cortes as the consummate politician, a keen reader and manipulator of men; on more than one occassion Cortes solicits opinions from his lieutenants in an effort to convince them of their own influence upon him. Having long since cosen a course of action, Cortes lead his men to believe they convinced him. It is a brilliant, and global, tactic among great generals. Caesar certainly practiced it. For that matter, so did George Washington. While the reader should be cautious in reading into the text (as I have overtly done above), these episodes do reveal much about Diaz himself. Clearly he is a bright guy; despite his aversion to those who engage in “lofty rhetoric in order to give lustre and repute to their statements” he is as sharp as anyone else on the expedition. If anything, one wonders if his lack of formal erudition allows him to recognize things that others do not.

A strength of this work–they key strength, in my view, too often absent from even the most readable chronicles in world history, is the intimacy it presents. One can read a magnificent synthesis of the Conquest, but Diaz provides the details. We see Cortes and Montezuma laughing with each other (through the medium of the ubiquitous Dona Marina) in one of their early conversations, while they played a board game together. Later, Diaz mentions in passing that they held morning prayers in lieu of daily Mass, as the expedition had run out of wafers and wine for Communion. These small comments, this collection of anecdotes, removes the dust from history and reminds the reader that these were living, breathing human beings, in contingent situations and with their own (to one degree or another) agency. Granted, even re-reading this last sentence, I recognize it as a cliche.  Nevertheless, I think even the most competent historians should be reminded of it once in a while.

Reading the Chronicle of Bernal Diaz, I am reminded of one of the first books I read on Latin American history. (Truly read; not merely for a graduate seminar, but for myself.  I came across Salvador de Madariaga’s “The Rise of the Spanish American Empire” in a used bookstore for fifty cents. (Amazing, is it not, how sometimes the books we treasure are the ones we get for dirt cheap?) I was impressed with Professor Madariaga’s articulation of the idea of the body historic, and the necessary reminder that the Conquest was the beginning of a new and unprecedented civilization in human history. Diaz’s account serves as a reminder that that event was anything but preordained.