Toni Gonzales

Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Intro: The Lost Words of Bernal Diaz Diaz’s struggle to describe

what he saw “the metropolis of Tenochtitlan, studded with pyramids, crisscrossed with canals, seeming to hover on a lake.

Cortes would be most gratified by the credit given to him for the fall of the Aztec Empire in many a website and textbook.

The realization that conquistadors before and after Cores behaved like him leads to others, equally fascinating stories.

Ch.1 A Handful of Adventurers In 1845 the Mexican artist

Jose Maria Obregon completed a painting titled “the Inspriation of Christopher Columbus.” The painting captures the two principal elements of the Columbus myth.

The painting tells us much more about the nineteenth century and views of Columbus in Obregon’s day than it does about Columbus himself.

Ch. 1 A Handful of Adventurers One historian, Jeffrey

Burton Russell, has written an entire book about the aspect of the Columbus myth.

Columbus had profound Portuguese connections.

His discoveries were the accidental geographical byproduct of Portuguese expansion two centuries old, and of Portuguese-Castilian competition.

Ch. 7 Apes and Men: The Myth of Superiority The opposition of man and

native, the civilized and the barbarian, and the advanced and the primitive is seen everywhere, not only in colonial and early modern sources.

The greater numbers of people in the Old World, and the greater variety of domesticated animals, Europeans and Africans arrived in the New World with a deadly array of germs.

Ch.7 Apes and Men Sudden epidemics had

immediate impacts on the invasions of the Mexico and Inca empires.

Diseases moved through the Americas faster then germ-carrying Europeans and Africans could.

The two great native empires in the early 16th century were not the only regions hit by Old World diseases.