Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Both colonial and modern writers perpetuate the myth of Spanish superiority that dehumanized Indigenous populations and explained Spanish success. This final myth buffers the previous six. Restall presents a “set of antimythic explanations for the Conquest” in his final chapter (132).

The Spanish credited the Christian God with their success in the Americas—a concept that appears in miracle stories, like the tale of the Virgin’s apparition when the Incas besieged the Spaniards at Cuzco in 1537. The Conquest itself thus becomes a miraculous and divinely-inspired endeavor. This idea appears in sources composed by Franciscan and Dominican friars and secular colonial writers alike, thereby legitimizing colonialism. Others claim Indigenous peoples were responsible for the downfall of their societies because of paralysis inspired by their belief that the Spanish were deities. Similarly, Eurocentric perspectives hold that Indigenous people were “backward” and cultureless and therefore submissive, or they were inherently evil and worthy of conquest.

These views are not confined to the 16th century: “[T]hese cultural explanations were also perpetrated in modern history books” (134). For example, Benjamin Keen’s A History of Latin America (now in its ninth edition) credits the secular spirit of the Italian Renaissance with Spanish success and contrasts this attitude with the Indigenous peoples’ supposedly “archaic worldview” (137).