True history of the conquest of New Spain II

True History of the Conquest of New Spain recounts the American experience of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. In 1514, when Bernal Díaz embarked for the New World, he had not turned twenty, and three years later he participated in the expedition led by Hernán Cortés to Mexico, where a few Spaniards, in just under two years, managed to defeat the Aztec Empire. Forty years later, Bernal Díaz recounts, with a desire for fidelity as tenacious as it is problematic, one of the great expeditions that have most marked the Western imaginary: the challenges posed by power, the tactics of Cortés to approach the empire of Montezuma and, later, that of Cuauhtemoc, the clash of beliefs, the exploitation of the natives to obtain gold and other treasures, or the battles that were fought until the fall of Mexico.
The true history of the conquest of New Spain is, along with the

• Diaries of Christopher Columbus,
• Cortés’ Relationship Letters
• and the Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Father Bartolomé de las Casas

one of the works of the literature of the Conquest that best testifies to the Western mentality of the time.
If, as Todorov pointed out, the conquest of America is

“The most amazing encounter in our history. In the ‘discovery’ of the other continents and of other men there is not really that feeling of radical strangeness” (The Conquest of America: The Problem of the Other),

It is quite possible that this radical strangeness was the only thing shared by the men who participated in that meeting.