Spanish · 1495–1584
Bernal Díaz del Castillo was a Spanish soldier and chronicler born in Medina del Campo, Castile. He sailed to the Americas as a young man and took part in expeditions to Yucatán and Mexico, including Hernán Cortés's march on the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1519. Díaz claimed to have fought in more than a hundred battles. After the conquest he received an encomienda in Guatemala, where he settled, served on the town council of Santiago de los Caballeros, and lived until old age. Around 1568 he began writing his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, a response to Francisco López de Gómara's account, which gave Cortés nearly all the credit. He finished it in the early 1570s, and it was first printed in 1632, decades after his death. The book is the best-known eyewitness account of the conquest of Mexico, valued for its detail, its naming of ordinary soldiers, and its plain voice.