The Writings of Hernan Cortes and Bartolome de las Casas
The Writings of Hernan Cortes and Bartolome de las Casas In the half-century following Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the so-called “New World” of the Western Hemisphere, millions of indigenous peoples were slaughtered, hundreds of villages had been destroyed, and a hundred-year-old empire had fallen. Though all of these events took place at the hands of Spanish conquistadors, contemporary narratives of this tragic moment in history vary. In the early sixteenth century writings of Hernan Cortes and Bartolome de las Cases, two divergent views of the native population of the Americas and the justification for Spanish conquest emerge. This paper ...
