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Who were the conquistadors? Ethnic, age, gender and social composition of Hernán Cortés’s company in 1519-21

18th Jun 2023

Mexicolore contributor Anastasia Kalyuta

We are sincerely grateful to Dr. Anastasia Kalyuta, Senior Researcher at the Saint Petersburg Institute of History, a research institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, for writing specially for us this intriguing article on the cultural background of the Conquistadores.

Following the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochitltlan it’s helpful to return to some eternal and much debated questions. Who were the conquistadors? What was their cultural background? What kind of social order did they wish to establish over the ruins of the Mexica capital? How did they view their role in the dramatic events of the conquest of the Aztec state?
From the Spanish discovery and colonisation of huge spaces in the Americas there have always been and still are two quite opposite concepts of the conquistadors’ deeds. The first one, conventionally named the ‘Rose Legend’ (La leyenda rosa) has prevailed in Spanish historiography for the past five centuries. The ‘rose legend’ presents the discovery and colonisation of America by Spanish migrants as the greatest deed in human history which incorporated isolated and ‘backward’ cultures of Amerindians into world civilisation. ‘Who dares to deny to Spain in America the glory of having served human progress in an incomparable way?’ asked the Spanish historian Pablo Alvarez Rubiano (Alvárez Rubiano 1944: 140).

The Black Legend ‘fathered’ by Spanish historian and theologian Bartolomé de las Casas (pic 2) states quite the contrary. The entire process of discovery, exploration and colonisation of America by Iberian migrants was nothing but a long chain of atrocious crimes committed by the worst representatives of the human race moved exclusively by incredible greed. The Black Legend always enjoyed popularity in countries that competed with Spain over dominance in the New World, in particular Great Britain and France. Today the Black Legend prevails in the most Latin American countries and in Russia, strongly influenced by the anticolonialist position of the former Soviet Union.
However, in recent years historians of different countries have tried to construct a more objective image of the conquistadors, examining their actions in the light of the historical, political, juridical and cultural realities of Late Middle Age Spain. Their research is based on two main groups of primary sources:-

1) Documents relating to Cortés’s campaign in Mexico in 1519-1521. There are five types of these documents: a) instructions addressed to leaders of expeditions; b) conquistadors’ letters of relations addressed to the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain Charles V; c) legal acts of Spanish authorities concerning the organisation of the new Spanish colony in Mexico; d) reports on the merits and services of conquistadors also addressed to the King of Spain, intended to obtain a grant for their loyal service to the Spanish monarchy; e) testimonies of witnesses during the long trial against Hernán Cortés in 1529-1547 (Martínez 1991:12).
2) Spanish chronicles focused on the Spanish colonisation of America composed mid-late XVI century.
The most informative and valuable sources of the first group include:-
1) the Instructions of the Governor of Cuba Diego Velázquez to Hernán Cortés dated October 23, 1518
2) Letters of Relations of Hernán Cortés to the Emperor and King of Spain Charles V. These letters embrace the timespan from the foundation of the first Spanish settlement in Mexico, La Villa Rica de Veracruz on the southeastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico in June 10, 1519 to the expedition of Cortés to Hibueras (the northern portion of modern Honduras) in 1524-1526.

3) Ordinances of Good Government Issued by Hernán Cortés for Residents and Inhabitants of New Spain on March 20, 1524.
4) Reports on the merits and services of the conquistadors by Andrés de Tapia (ca.1540) and Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia (ca. 1542) and Brief Relation about the Conquest of the New Spain written by the conquistador Alonso de Aguilar who later became a monk of the Dominican order under the name of Fray Francisco (1571).
In most cases the chronicles of the Spanish conquest of America are written by well-educated scholars and official historians appointed by the Spanish Crown who never visited the New World. Although most of these works were written years later after the Conquest, they contain much valuable data including oral and written testimonies of conquistadors which are lost today.
The notable exception among the Spanish historians of the Conquest is Bernal Díaz del Castillo, an ordinary foot soldier with Hernán Cortés (pic 4).

A native of the ancient town of Medina del Campo in the province of Valladolid, Bernal Díaz at the age of 17 left for America to seek his fortune in these fabulous lands. He spent the rest of his life in America fighting with natives and constantly writing letters to the Royal Council of the Indies, the main administrative body in charge of Spanish colonies in America, to prove his merits as a conquistador. His famous True History of the Conquest of New Spain (pic 5) starts with discovery of the Yucatán Peninsula in 1516 and ends in 1550 in the city of Valladolid, the capital of the Spanish Empire in that period, when the assembly of leading theologians and lawyers were discussing the rights of the indigenous population of the Americas (Díaz del Castillo 1975: 93-95, 817).

Another curious case is that of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, the offspring of a noble family from Asturias, the northern province of Spain near the Cantabrian Sea. In 1513 Oviedo, together with the future governor of Panama, Pedro Arias Dávila, left for Central America, where at first he served as a notary and then as deputy governor. Later Oviedo was appointed mayor and commander of the fortresses of Santo Domingo and Española on what is today the island of Haiti. He participated in conquest expeditions to Central and South America and met many famous conquistadors including some participants in the conquest of Mexico. The fruit of his experience and knowledge was the voluminous General and Natural History of the Indies covering an extensive period of Spanish colonisation of the Americas from the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492 until 1543.

In the 1990s the French scholar Bernard Grunberg (pic 7, left) from the University of Reims was able to identify 1,175 individuals, more than half of the Spanish forces during the Conquest of Mexico, although without counting their native allies. At the start of the current century his study was supplemented and enriched by the works of Spanish historian María del Carmen Martínez Martínez (pic 7, centre) and her North American colleague John Frederick Schwaller (pic 7, right). The picture that emerged as a result of their efforts refutes the widespread myths about Cortés and his companions in arms. For example, contrary to the common view of conquistadors as impoverished nobles, only 69 individuals out of 1,175 (about 6%) in Cortés’s company were hidalgos or low ranking noblemen (Grunberg 2004:97). The remaining 1,106 were craftsmen, petty merchants, peasants and soldiers, although among the latter very few were professionals who had served in wars against the Ottoman Empire and the small Italian princedoms.

In terms of regional distribution 30% of Cortés’s men were from Andalusia (pic 8), the south-western Spanish province where the majority of the population were descendants of Muslims and Jews forcibly converted to Christianity, unable to boast the coveted ‘purity of blood’ so important for making a career in Spain in the early XVI century (Grunberg 2004:96). Among the rest, 17% were natives of León (pic 9) – the northern province of Spain with a long tradition of anti-Muslim conflict. Only 15% of the conquistadors including Cortés himself were from the south-western Spanish province of Extremadura, traditionally called ‘the cradle of conquistadors’ (Grunberg 2004:96). As for the rest of Cortés’s army, 12% were natives of Old Castile, the centre of wars against Muslims since the XIII century, and 7% of his army came from New Castile (pic 10) (Grunberg 2004:96).

The number of foreigners from the Old World in the Cortés’s company was small, about 6.2% and more than 85 % of them were Portuguese and Genovese (Grunberg 2004:97). A few were also Greeks and one Flemish. The most colourful member of Cortés’s expedition was certainly Juan Garrido, a native of the Congo, who first came to Portugal and later joined the conquistadors on his own initiative.
Two-thirds of Cortés’s companions in arms were young people in their late twenties or early thirties. Moreover, 28 % of his soldiers were even younger, their age varying from 15 to 20 (Grunberg 2004:97).

The cultural level of Cortes’s soldiers corresponded to their humble origin. Although 84% of 1,175 individuals signed their names, this doesn’t imply their capacity to read and write. Moreover, careful study of the petition of Cortés and his company to Charles V of Spain and his mother Juana I of Castile dated June 20th, 1519 by John Frederick Schwaller implies that in several cases those conquistadors who could write... possibly signed this important document on behalf of their illiterate comrades (Schwaller 2014:111). About 16% of 1,175 men were completely illiterate (Grunberg 2004:98). Even relatively well-educated conquistadors like Bernal Díaz del Castillo didn’t know Latin - the official language of the Catholic Church and of cultivated people of that time (Díaz del Castillo 1975: 779).
Thus, Hernán Cortés - a mature man of 35, born of a poor but noble family, trained as a notary and mastering both the sword and the written word, including a satisfactory knowledge of Latin - was a leader capable of controlling this multiregional, multinational, unexperienced and often defiant army using psychological, economic and ideological tools. One of the most effective tools was religion. During eight hundred years of the Reconquista the Catholic Church was the main consolidation factor for the divided Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and the most important criterion of self-identification for their inhabitants. It’s noteworthy that the native of the Andalusian town of Esija, Gerónimo de Aguilar, rescued by Cortes’s army from his long captivity among the Yucatan Maya asked his saviours: “Señores, are you Christians and whose vassals? (Tapía 1866:2).

It’s important to stress that the word conquistador dates back to the Reconquista, the Iberian version of the Crusades. In 1238 Jaime I of Aragón regained Valencia and received the honorific nickname El Conquistador - “the Conqueror” (Grunberg 2004: 95). The conquistadors’ forefathers participated in wars against Muslim states in the Iberian Peninsula. Most of the conquistadors including Cortés were born when the Reconquista was still going on until its culmination in 1492 when the last Muslim stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula, the Emirate of Granada, fell (pic 11). It’s no wonder that Cortés and his followers identified themselves with the Crusaders fighting against infidels under the sign of the cross. According to the testimony of Andrés de Tapia during the conquest of Mexico Hernán Cortés...
…carried a banner with white and blue fires and a scarlet cross in the centre and its motto was: Amici, sequamur crucem, et si nos fidem habemus, vere in hoc signo vincemus (Friends, follow the cross and if we have faith, we’ll see that we’ll win by this sign) (Tapía 1866: 1).

Like the chronicles of the Crusaders, the conquistadors’ narratives about the Conquest of Mexico constantly mention the miraculous appearance and intervention of saints in battles against their non-Christian opponents. For instance, Andres de Tapia states that during Cortes’s battle with the Chontal Maya near the river Tabasco:-
’When the enemy had already besieged the footmen from all sides, a man on a dappled horse appeared in their rearguard and the Indians started to flee and to leave us because of the damage which this horseman caused them’ (Tapía 1866: 4).
Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia repeats the same episode with some differences:
’Having entered the settlement, we had two other very cruel battles with them, and they almost killed us and we were in great danger if it were not for the horses which we brought from the ships, and here a great miracle happened: being in great danger in battle someone on a white horse appeared, fighting, because of him the Indians fled; yet the horse wasn’t among those we had brought with us’ (Vázquez de Tapía 1953: 29).
Since the legendary Battle of Clavijo between King Ramiro I of Asturias and the Emir of Cordova Abd-ar-Rahman II on May 23, 844, the Apostle St. James the Great (Santiago), the celestial patron of Spain, has always ‘helped’ the Christians at critical moments in battle, always appearing as a horseman on a white horse (pic 12).

Even Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who was rather sceptical in respect of many things, doesn’t miss the opportunity to mention the miraculous appearance of Saint James the Great and the Virgin Mary during the storming of Cortés’s headquarters by Mexica warriors in May and June of 1520, when he writes:
’Pedro de Alvarado said that when Mexican Indians fought with him, many of them spoke of one great teleciguata, a great lady, who threw dirt in their eyes and blinded them, and of one great teule who rode a white horse and who caused them even greater damage…’ (Diaz del Castillo 1975:385).
Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia also states that when storming the Spanish headquarters in Tenochtitlan the Mexica and their allies ‘saw a woman of Castille very comely and shining like a sun who threw into their eyes handfuls of dirt’ (Vázquez de Tapia 1953: 43). It’s difficult to find a more evident allusion to the Woman Clothed with the Sun of the Apocalypses, that is the Virgin Mary, in the eyes of medieval Christians (pic 13).

It’s noteworthy that in the XII century - the times of Crusades in the Near East and the active progress of Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula - the cult of Saint Mary started its triumphal expansion in Western Europe. Moreover, during this period the Virgin Mary turned into an invincible warrior incessantly fighting the legions of Satan.
It’s easy to observe that the conquistadors’ piety is a form of popular religiosity, very different from the Humanist religious thought which revolutionised Western Europe early in the XVI century. Due to the low educational level of the mass of conquistadors and the general prohibition by the Catholic Church on laymen concerning reading and interpretation of the Scriptures, the only sources of religious knowledge for conquistadors were painted and sculpted images of saints, sermons of clergy, oral tradition and adapted literature, in particular the famous Golden Legend – a collection of hagiographies gathered by the Dominican monk Jacobus de Voragine in the mid-XIII century. We should stress that even in the Letters of Relation of Hernán Cortés quotations from the Bible are very few and almost all of them are from the New Testament, including the famous quotation from Saint Luke 11, 171 and Saint Matthew 12, 25: Omne regnum in se ipsum divisum desolivatur that is ‘Every kingdom divided against itself will be devastated’ (Cortés 2007: 52). At the same time returning to his homeland in 1529 Cortés didn’t miss an opportunity to make a stop at the Monastery of Santa María of Guadalupe, the most important centre of the Virgin Mary’s cult in southwestern Spain, where he made his novena - prayers repeated for nine successive days - and donated to the Virgin a gold figurine of a scorpion decorated with emeralds (pic 14) as a token of gratitude for his miraculous healing from a scorpion’s bite (Martínez 1990:502).

Another feature revealing the self-identification of the conquistadors with the Crusaders is their description of the Mesoamerican indigenous world in terms traditionally applied to Islamic culture. The discoverer of the Yucatan Peninsula Francisco Hernández de Córdoba named the first Maya city he found on the Yucatan Coast the Great Cairo (Díaz del Castillo 1975: 93). In his letters to Charles V Hernán Cortés calls the native temples ‘mosques’ (mezquitas) (Cortés 2007: 26, 56, 72, 79). Diego Velázquez in his instructions to Cortés refers to Mesoamerican priests as alfaqui, a corrupted form of the Arabic word al-faquih - a Muslim jurist and theologian (Velázquez Diego 1993:52). Furthermore, the conquistadors never fail to mention such commonly alleged negative features of Muslims, Jews and Native Americans as cruelty, cowardice, lust, and deceitfulness. To the Spanish these faults were proof of their common origins and... inferior nature.
The medieval mentality of the conquistadors turned the Mesoamerican deities into demons and infernal protectors of Indians, as real as Saint James the Great and the Virgin Mary. As soon as Spaniards erected the Cross and the image of the Virgin Mary on the top of the main temple in Tenochtitlan, Aztec gods Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca started to ‘threaten’ their priests to leave the city forever (Díaz del Castillo 1975:338). From time to time infernal powers also appeared to the conquistadors. Fray Francisco de Aguilar remembers one curious episode on the eve of the Sad Night (La Noche Triste) when Spaniards and their indigenous allies were besieged in the palace of Axayacatl by Mexica troops:-
’It happened that one soldier, confined inside a church which we used for a certain fault which he committed, left the church at midnight running and screaming that he saw dead human heads, among them his own, walking and jumping in the church, and in the same vein the guards came running to say that they had seen legs and heads of the dead falling into a ditch’ (Aguilar 1977:89).

These macabre visions are the fruits of a medieval mentality which always gave Death and the dead a place of honour especially after the epidemic of the Black Death which devastated Western Europe in the XIV century (Olivier 2006:177). Since the century of the Black Death, the Danse Macabre (pic 15) was regularly performed in various parts of Spain during the arrival of pilgrims at sanctuaries and even at the coronation banquets of the kings of Aragón. Precisely in 1520, in Seville a new book was published in which 58 characters of different social rank converse with Death to know when the hour of their passing will come (Olivier 2006:177). One more distinctive feature of the conquistadors’ medieval mentality was their geographical knowledge and notions about the world. The instructions addressed to the leaders of expeditions and official reports by the conquistadors frequently mention legendary cities, fabulous islands and lands populated with fantastic creatures and monsters ‘borrowed’ from the books of medieval travellers Benjamín de Tudela, Odoric of Pordonone, Marco Polo and Jordanus de Severac. One more important ‘source of information’ about distant countries for the conquistadors was books of chivalry which enjoyed extreme popularity in Late Middle Age Spain. No wonder that paragraph 26 of the Instructions of the Governor of Cuba Diego Velázquez to Hernán Cortés requires:-

‘In all the islands which might be discovered you should disembark with your notary and many witnesses and on behalf of Their Highnesses take possession over them with full solemnity and in all of them you should try by any possible way and with good manner and order to take an interpreter who might inform you about other islands and lands and kinds of inhabitants, because it is said that there are people with big and broad ears, and others who have faces like dogs… and in that part amazons live…’ (Velázquez 1990: 56).
Later in 1532-1539 Hernán Cortés organised four unsuccessful expeditions to the northeastern portion of the Pacific coast of Mexico in search of an island to which he gave the name of the Queen of Amazons Calafia, the main character of the book of chivalry Las sergas de Esplandián written in 1510 (pic 17). Curiously the memory about these expeditions would be conserved in the modern geographical name California.

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés cites with absolute confidence testimonies about an island near the northwestern coast of Mexico inhabited exclusively by women and very rich in gold and pearls (Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés 1852:447). Moreover, Oviedo includes in his work the report of the conquistador Nuño de Guzmán about the city of amazons named Ciguatlan (corrupted form of the Nahuatl toponym Cihuatlan – ‘the place of women’) situated somewhere in the northwest of Mexico (Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés 1853: 576, 1855: 389).
In 1540 the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado departed with 340 Spaniards from Mexico City in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola (pic 18) established by seven Visigoth bishops who escaped the Muslim invasion into the Iberian Peninsula in the VIII century (Weckmann 1983:16). Many of his soldiers earlier participated in expeditions led by Cortés.
During his stay in Tlaxcala in the autumn of 1519 Bernal Díaz del Castillo measured a femur of a ‘giant’. To his astonishment he found out that this bone:
’...was very thick, of the height of a man of reasonable stature, and this bone was from the knee to the hip, I measured my height with it and it had the same height as mine, although I am of good stature’ (Díaz del Castillo 1975:250).

A large portion of tales about unknown lands, fabulous treasures and monsters came to Cortés and his men through the books of chivalry dedicated to the heroic deeds of wandering knights which were popular characters of fiction in XVI century Spain. Their constant characters also included giants, dragons, wizards and witches, who the main character - a wandering knight - always fought and won. The most popular book of chivalry in the time of Cortés was certainly the adventures of the Amadis of Gaule, the first edition of which was printed in Zaragoza in 1508 (pic 19) (Martínez 1990:66). It’s no coincidence that Bernal Díaz del Castillo compares the panorama of the Basin of Mexico with ‘things and enchantments which are told in the book of Amadis’ (Díaz del Castillo 1975: 278).
The main political and legal concepts of Hernán Cortes and his followers were inspired by the Seven Parts Code (Las Leyes de las Siete Partidas) (pic 20), the legal code of the Kingdom of Castille composed during the reign of King Alfonso the Wise in 1256-1265. In his letters and petitions to Charles V and his mother Juana I Cortés and his men frequently refer to the concept of ‘the public good’ which dates back to the works of Saint Isidore of Seville and Saint Thomas Aquinas (Frankl 1962:15). According to this concept any law is issued not for the benefit of a particular person but for the well-being of the community. Therefore, if it contradicts the interests of a certain community of citizens, it can be broken or even cancelled. In full accordance with medieval mentality expressed in the Seven Part Code the ‘public good’ is embodied in the person of the King who lives in inseparable unity with his people, and loyal vassals should inform their sovereigns about every important event in their realms including any geographical discovery and every possibility to extend the King’s territorial possessions (Frankl 1962:34). Not for nothing does Cortés stress his constant desire to know ‘the secret of land’: the geographical location and natural resources of future Spanish colonies.
Cortés and his companions-in-arms also inform the King and his mother about their decision: ‘to establish a settlement on behalf of their Royal Highnesses where justice should be, so that it would have been government in this land just as in the kingdoms and realms you have’. The marked contrast between the well organised and well governed civilised Christian city and the ‘barbarian world’ without law and justice which surrounds it is also a direct legacy of the Reconquista (Frankl 1962:43-44).