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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.
As Diaz states: some fifty of us soldiers clambered up and overturned the idols, which rolled down the steps and were smashed to pieces. Some of them were in the form of fearsome dragons as big as calves and others half-man half-dog and hideously ugly. When thy saw their idols shattered the Caciques and the papas who were with them wept and covered their eyes; and they prayed to their
Treatment of Women in Mexican Culture The choices for women have, across both time and space, almost always been far more constrained than the choices of men. They have in fact all too often been reduced to a single pair of opposing choices: The pure or the corrupt, the white or the black, the chaste or the sexual - the virgin or the whore. Mexican culture is certainly not exempt from this
At the time, the understanding was that state must be relatively autonomous from major religious concerns. The post-reformation European political theorists believed that Europe had experienced the religious conflict within states and between states, with support from the church. This experience called for a change in the relations between European religious institutions and political institutions. 5. Conquest and Colonization of the New World The centralization of Spain as a state within independent
Also, these cotton capes were so valuable that a family or individual lucky enough to own twenty or more could support themselves for an entire year in the city of Tenochtitlan; these capes could also be used to barter for more expensive items like gold jewelry and necklaces made from jade (Van Tuerenhout, 184). Out of all the goods that were available in the Aztec marketplaces, two were of primary
Ancient A Brief History of the Mayan Civilization The Maya are a group of people of southern Mexico and northern Central America with some three thousand years of loaded history. The Maya were a division of the Mesoamerican Pre-Columbian civilizations. Dissimilar to popular belief, the Maya people never vanished completely, there are millions that still live in the area, and a lot of them still speak one of the many Maya languages