Conquistadors: The Lives and Legacies of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro

During the Age of Exploration, some of the most famous and infamous individuals were Spain’s best known conquistadors. Naturally, as the best known conquistador, Hernán Cortés is also the most controversial. Like Christopher Columbus before him, Cortés was lionized for his successes for centuries without questioning his tactics or motives, while indigenous views of the man have been overwhelmingly negative for the consequences his conquests had on the Aztecs and other natives in the region. Just about the only thing everyone agrees upon is that Cortés had a profound impact on the history of North America. Of course, the lionization and demonization of Cortés often take place without fully analyzing the man himself, especially because there are almost no contemporaneous sources that explain what his thinking and motivation was. If anything, Cortés seemed to have been less concerned with posterity or the effects of the Spanish conquest on the natives than he was on relations with the Mother Country itself.

If Columbus and Cortés were the pioneers of Spain’s new global empire, Pizarro consolidated its immense power and riches, and his successes inspired a further generation to expand Spain’s dominions to unheard of dimensions. Furthermore, he participated in the forging of a new culture: like Cortés, he took an indigenous mistress with whom he had two mixed-race children, and yet the woman has none of the lasting fame of Cortés’s Doña Marina. With all of this in mind, it is again remarkable that Pizarro remains one of the less well-known and less written about of the explorers of his age. On the other hand, there are certain factors that may account for the conqueror of Peru’s relative lack of lasting glory. Cortés’s reputation was built on being the first to overthrow a great empire, so Pizarro’s similar feat, even if it bore even greater fruit in the long run, would always be overshadowed by his predecessor’s precedent.

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