"The Spanish conquest of South and Central America during the 16th century is an almost unmatchable story of human courage and cruelty, resourcefulness and duplicity, profit and exploitation. It has been celebrated and deplored in histories, novels and poems, and to this day -- five centuries later -- it remains a subject of endless debate. Like the American Civil War, it has the power to provoke passionate emotions long after the deaths of those who fought in it. The most famous campaign in the conquest is Hernando Cortés's invasion and subjugation of Mexico in 1519-21. It was carried out by a force of a few hundred men, who by dint of superior arms and armor managed to overcome the seemingly invulnerable Aztec Empire. This astonishing and supremely bloody accomplishment is the subject of one of the early classics of American literature, William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), a monumental three-volume epic that treats Cortés and Montezuma, the emperor whom he overthrew, as heroic, larger-than-life figures. Four years later Prescott published his History of the Conquest of Peru, a somewhat shorter (two volumes) and less successful study of Francisco Pizarro's eradication of the Inca Empire of western South America, a campaign that began in the early 1530s and continued for another three decades, well past Pizarro's assassination in 1541. Whatever its shortcomings, Prescott's remained the dominant history (in English, that is) for more than a century, until the publication of the magisterial The Conquest of the Incas by the British scholar John Hemming (1970, revised 1993). This is likely to remain the definitive account for many years to come, but The Last Days of the Incas, by filmmaker and writer Kim MacQuarrie, is a welcome addition to the literature. Lively and dramatic, it should appeal to a popular readership, but there is no evidence that -- apart from a certain amount of forgivable invention -- MacQuarrie has sacrificed historical accuracy in order to hype the story." Get the Story:
Epic clashes from the Andes to the Amazon in an ancient New World (The Washington Post 6/24)
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