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"It is a magnificent epic," said William H. Prescott after the publication of History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843. Since then, his sweeping account of Cortés's subjugation of the Aztec people has endured as a landmark work of scholarship and dramatic storytelling. This pioneering study presents a compelling view of the clash of civilizations that reverberates in Latin America to this day. "Regarded simply from the standpoint of literary criticism, the Conquest of Mexico is Prescott's masterpiece," judged his biographer Harry Thurston Peck. "More than that, it is one of the most brilliant examples which the English language possesses of literary art applied to historical narration. . . . Here, as nowhere else, has Prescott succeeded in delineating character. All the chief actors of his great historic drama not only live and breathe, but they are as distinctly differentiated as they must have been in life. Cortés and his lieutenants are persons whom we actually come to know in the pages of Pres-cott. . . . Over against these brilliant figures stands the melancholy form of Montezuma, around whom, even from the first, one feels gathering the darkness of his coming fate. He reminds one of some hero of Greek tragedy, doomed to destruction and intensely conscious of it, yet striving in vain against the decree of an inexorable destiny. . . . [Prescott] transmuted the acquisitions of laborious research into an enduring monument of pure literature."… (more)
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I was struck by the resemblances with Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland. Both the Spaniards and the Cromwellians were convinced that they were fighting for Christ, and that this justified the bloodshed. And yet the Spanish had Bishop Las Casas to argue against their actions. And the more radical sections of Cromwell’s army were not merely radical in religion (no power for any bishop or presbytery [district committee]). They were also radical in politics. There were those who said that God would not welcome converts at the point of the gun. The Leveller William Walwyn said “the cause of the Irish natives in seeking their just freedoms … was the very same with our cause here in endeavouring our own rescue and freedom from the power of oppressors,” 1646.
There is a considerable and useful part of the book dedicated to biographies of Prescott's sources,