Cortés has not been fortunate in his biographers. Salvador de Madariaga’s fanciful and triumphalist reconstruction of the conqueror’s hazañas is now little more than a curiosity. So, too, are Francis MacNutt’s earlier, if more scholarly, Fernando Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico and Carlos Pereyra’s Hernán Cortés, although for Mexican readers the latter must be interesting in other ways. José Luis Martínez has tried, he tells us, to be guided by “un honesto afán de conocimiento,” a conceptually difficult task even for one detached from the historical processes described; but for Martínez, conscious as he is that “muchos rasgos de nuestra vida política, social y cultural” have their origins in “las acciones de Cortés y en las de su tiempo,” it is seemingly impossible. What he has written is a survey of all the details about Cortés’s life now available. His reading seems to have been exhaustive, but his book offers little that is new because there is almost no material left to discover and because the “honesto afán de conocimiento’’ has prevented Martínez from writing what would have been a more obviously solipsistic, but also more interesting book: something like the intellectual genealogy of those rasgos de nuestra vida.”
The book begins with two fragmentary and largely superfluous chapters, one on preconquest Mexico, the other on contemporary Spanish culture. It ends with a detailed account of the battle over Cortés’s bones, his role in nineteenth-century Mexican political imagery—something which deserves a book of its own—and some rather sketchy remarks on the style and fortuna critica of Cortés’s writings. In between we have the longest, most detailed, and most comprehensive biography of Cortés now available. Its value will be greatly enhanced when the four volumes of Documentos cortesianos, which according to the blurb should accompany this volume, are finally published.
