As Pierre Chaunu points out in his preface, Bernard Grunberg’s book is a résumé of a 3,034-page grande thèse, formerly in France the prerequisite to getting a university chair. It represents the extract, provided with footnotes and the abovementioned intruments, of the academic result of 19 years of patient research in Spanish and Mexican archives, pursued by someone also engaged in secondary teaching. Following the prosopographic method, the author engages in constructing a social and mental history of the approximately 2,100 men and a few women who directly participated in the conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
It is an effort that relies much more on the older tradition of the French annales school than on the more recent orientation of this group of scholars, especially in its semiotic, statistical, and graphic aspects. Grunberg managed to identify and follow the traces of 1,212 “conquistadores,” using as much published and unpublished documentary evidence as is known. In the first of seven chapters, he analyzes their demographic characteristics —regional and social origins, ages, cultural level, professional and family situation, and the emigration waves that brought them to Mexico. Even in this context, the author demonstrates some sophistic stubbornness. For example, he pretends to rectify the current opinions about northern Spaniards’ participation in the conquest of Mexico, trying to augment a bit the number of Leonese in relation to Castilians by adding Zamora and Salamanca to León and not Castile, as Peter Boyd-Bowman and other scholars do.
The second chapter deals with the conquerors’ motivations: religious, feudal (service to the king), material, and personal. The end of this chapter begins the discussion of one of the book’s main concerns: the problem of the success or failure of these people. Here one learns the author’s general conviction, also emphasized by Chaunu in his preface, that the conquerors, with few exceptions, failed to obtain the “rewards of conquest,” suffered enormous losses, went into debt, and never managed to get rich, as more popular opinions still believe.
The third chapter is dedicated to the physical sufferings and death of these individuals. It is followed by sections on the reconstruction of the town and how the conquerors settled down, including their family life, types of marriages and fertility, celibacy, and concubinage, as well as the situation of the conquerors’ descendants in society. The two remaining chapters describe the conquerors’ relations with the Indians, and their daily life: political and professional activities, nourishment, clothing, and violence and passion.
The reader gets the impression that the original version of Grunberg’s thèse must have been a very interesting and exhaustive treatment of the topic and should have been published. The reduced version here — aside from being a paperback that hardly survives a first reading intact—appears overburdened with topics and scholarly details. The author seems to have been unable to concentrate on a reduced set of important topics and to discuss them in the sound way the subject, the rich findings, and the preceding bibliography would require.
Despite these limitations, however, this is an important contribution for experts in the history of the conquest of Mexico, especially because it allows one to contrast the fate of the group of conquerors “proper” with the later immigrants, who came to Mexico when the fighting was over. Together with Peggy Liss, Mexico Under Spain, 1521-1556 (1975), and James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1552-1560 (2d edition, 1994) and The Men of Cajamarca (1972), Grunberg must be considered one of a triad of authors who have most contributed to our knowledge of the social history of the groups that conquered America’s two great Indian empires, even if his book is much drier to read.
