Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Written by Matthew Restall

Narrated by James Cameron Stewart

Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro.



Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each myth. This vividly written and authoritative book shows, for instance, that native Americans did not take the conquistadors for gods and that small numbers of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. We discover that Columbus was correctly seen in his lifetime—and for decades after—as a briefly fortunate but unexceptional participant in efforts involving many southern Europeans. It was only much later that Columbus was portrayed as a great man who fought against the ignorance of his age to discover the new world. Another popular misconception—that the Conquistadors worked alone—is shattered by the revelation that vast numbers of black and native allies joined them in a conflict that pitted native Americans against each other. This and other factors, not the supposed superiority of the Spaniards, made conquests possible.



The Conquest, Restall shows, was more complex—and more fascinating—than conventional histories have portrayed it. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest offers a richer and more nuanced account of a key event in the history of the Americas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Feb 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781977372895

Matthew Restall

Matthew Restall is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and director of Latin American studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written twenty books and sixty articles and essays on the histories of the Mayas, of Africans in Spanish America, and of the Spanish Conquest. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife and the youngest of his four daughters.

Reviews for Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

[pranogajec_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very valuable revisionist history of the Spanish invasion of the Americas and its related colonial enterprise. By distilling this history into seven distinct yet overlapping myths that the author sees perpetuated in both popular and academic histories of the invasion (usually referred to as the Conquest, even in the book's title), Restall has provided a coherent accounting of how our understanding of this history has been shaped by a plethora of omissions and biases, both overt and covert, since the sixteenth century. The book is not a history of the invasion, and some understanding of the basic chronology, names, and geography is helpful to really understand what Restall is debunking. In a number of places he seems rushed--for instance, in chapter one on Columbus, he deals with the historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in just two paragraphs (p. 11). In the end, this book is indispensable for understanding the invasion and conquest.

[Aylea Wilkins · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Great book, and well written...

...but holy Hera, the audiobook voice actor's mispronunciation of words like "conquistador" (kuhn-KWIST-uh-door instead of kahn-KEEST-ah-door) and "Nahuatl" (NAH-what-uhl instead of NAH-waht) nearly made me stop the book.

For heaven's sake, if you're going to get a British colonialist accent to talk about 16th century Spanish colonialism, at least have the decency to pronounce names correctly.