Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España

The 1904 edition of Díaz del Castillo eyewitness account of the conquest of Mexico, based on the original manuscript.

This two-volume 1904 edition of Díaz del Castillo's history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico was based on the original manuscript. Díaz del Castillo's highly accessible eyewitness account, written from the viewpoint of a common soldier, first appeared in 1632 and became even more successful than the official chronicles.Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492–1584) was a foot soldier in the army of Mexico's conqueror Hernán Cortés. The first edition of his True History of the Conquest of New Spain (as it was entitled in a later English translation) was published in Madrid in 1632 from a manuscript copy sent to Spain shortly after the author's death. Written in a highly accessible style, and describing the experiences of the troops themselves, the work became even more successful than the official accounts and went through many editions and translations. The two-volume edition reissued here was first published in 1904 and is considered a more reliable text, as it was based on the original manuscript preserved in Guatemala City. Volume 1 contains an introduction by the editor, the influential Mexican historian and book-collector Genaro García (1867–1920), a table of variant readings, and chapters 1–139 of the text.