Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of the Conquest falsely describe large numbers of Indigenous peoples overwhelming the exceptional and heroic conquistadors who triumph anyway. While the Spanish were always outnumbered by their foes, their Indigenous and African auxiliaries played significant roles in the Conquest—an aspect of Conquest history that is often overlooked.

The Song of the Aztecs, composed in Nahuatl during the 16th century, provides evidence of the significance of Indigenous allies in the Conquest of the Mexica (or Aztec) Empire. The epic portrays the defeated Mexica as nevertheless victorious because of their status compared to rival Mesoamerican groups. The war that caused the empire’s collapse is thus depicted as a “civil” and “local” one with the Spanish on the periphery (46) as one deciding factor among many.

The people of the Mexica tributary city, Tlaxcala, allied with the Spanish because they believed that such a strategy would cause the Mexica’s downfall. Cortés, however, “claimed that the Tlaxcalan role resulted from a strategy of his own devising” (48), a claim that numerous scholars accept. According to Restall, such views ignore two significant historical contexts: the aforementioned complex Indigenous political situation, and the established Spanish procedures that included building alliances with Indigenous populations. Pizarro did the same when conquering the Inca Empire: “[F]our years of Inca disunity during the Pizarro-Almagro invasion had given the Spaniards a steady enough supply of native allies to permit Spanish survival in the region” (49, emphasis added).

Though the Spanish classified all Indigenous groups as “Indians,” regional and highly-localized rivalries divided them so that mass unification against the Spanish was never a plausible strategy. What Cortés did was therefore not original or unique to the conquest of the Mexica, and involved pitting Indigenous groups against one another instead of engaging in a conflict that was purely one of Spaniards versus Indigenous peoples. Centering Cortés’s genius also ignores the equally-strategic thinking of Indigenous peoples, such as the Tlaxcalans, who exploited the Spanish to challenge and destroy the Mexica Empire that had made their city a tributary.

The Spanish also regularly used enslaved Indigenous Americans during the Conquest, who comprised the majority of their forces. Africans were also active in these campaigns, some enslaved and others as servants. Both groups formed a significant portion of the Spaniard-led forces that undertook the Conquest: “That Spaniards expected to have several native of black auxiliaries, and that they considered it a great hardship to go without them, is evidence enough of their importance in the Conquest” (51). Colonial chronicler Diego Durán writes about servants and Black people in the Spanish forces, while the Indigenous account in the Florentine Codex explains that the Spanish arrived in the Americas with Black people. Pedro de Cieza de León provides some insight into Black participation in the Conquest while also obscuring their participation. He mentions Black conquistadors multiple times and across South America, but never provides specific names or numbers.

Juan Valiente serves as an ideal example of the “typical” Black conquistador. He was born in West Africa in the early 1500s. Enslavers transported him to Mexico after Cortés’s conquest of the Mexica Empire, where the Spaniard Alonso Valiente purchased him to work as a domestic servant and converted him to Christianity, after which Juan took on his new Spanish name. He became a conquistador around 1533 with the permission of his enslaver, who expected him to bring back the spoils of war and any wealth rewarded to him.

Juan Valiente made his way to Peru and Chile, where he became a captain by the early 1540s. He eventually received an encomienda, never returned to Mexico, and died in battle in 1553. Though his story may seem exceptional, Restall argues that “every aspect of it can be related to larger patterns either of Spanish conquistador activity or of the African experience in early Spanish America” (54). Unlike the Portuguese, the Spanish relied mostly on an Indigenous labor force to work lands, leaving “the black slaves of Spaniards in the colonies […] to function more as personal auxiliaries […] They were servants who were, by necessity, armed; by fighting and surviving they usually earned their freedom and became conquistadors in their own right” (54-55).

Much research on the enslavement of Africans who were brought to the Americas focuses on plantation slavery. Indeed, most of the people brought to and enslaved in the Americas were taken to sugar plantations in the Caribbean if they survived the horrors of the Middle Passage. The image of the enslaved plantation laborers is what persists in popular culture and memory, while the roles of enslaved Africans who became conquistadors are lesser-known. A search of the academic database, Gale Ebooks, which houses hundreds of digital encyclopedia entries, turns up no entry on “Black conquistadors” under a basic or keyword search, though several entries on specific Black conquistadors appear, written by Restall (who also published a 2000 monograph on the topic). A search for articles on this topic turns up multiple results with Restall and a few other scholars as authors. Tzvetan Todorov, author of the widely-read academic history, The Conquest of the Americas, makes no mention of either Juan Garrido or Juan Valiente, two of the significant Black conquistadors covered in Restall’s study. The subject is clearly one that is ripe for further study and which historians largely ignored until the last few decades.