Diaz del Castillo has an undoubted ideological bias in stressing how that the small band of Spanish soldiers, barely numbering in the several hundreds, could never have defeated the mighty Mexican army, but his account gives the reader pause. Diaz del Castillo's account, even if one allows for a certain amount of exaggeration here and there, to have a ring of authenticity, as he portrays his own people as well as the Aztecs warts and all, including their squabbling about gold: "now all men covet gold, and the more we have the more we want, yet several recognizable pieces were missing from the heaps" (Del Castillo 274) Morally...

Although it was not written to trouble the reader, the book does, in spite of itself. It initially seems to be written with a definite bias, but upon closing the book, one wonders if the modern reader has born witness to a common soldier's view, in plain-spoken terms, a view neither ideologically inflated with the moral good of his nation nor anxious to defend or condemn the conquered.