The Psychology of a Conquistador

By Louis Bertrand of the Académie Française

What were they like, these extraordinary men who had only to appear, so to speak, in order to bring the whole of an immense continent into subjection to the crown of Castile—a subjection which, as a matter of fact, was quite superficial, for the pacification took a long time, was interrupted by terrible wars and revolts, and may indeed be said to be not yet ended?

For such an adventure, undertaken so far from the motherland, with the primitive ships and armament of the period, there were required, as I cannot repeat too often, exceptional courage and endurance. For these were civilized men, who voluntarily accepted a return to uncivilized life, and resigned themselves to hunger, thirst, loss of sleep, and all the hostilities and all the cruelties of a tropical climate and of wild men and beasts.

Nor were they insensitive brutes. They suffered cruelly. They realized their wretchedness and their isolation. “What a terrible thing it is,” writes Bernal Díaz, “to go and discover new lands, and in such a way as we adventured there! Nobody can imagine our estate, unless he has himself endured these excessive toils.”

The worst risk was the perpetual one of shipwreck or, for those who escaped it, slow death on some desert island. Garcilaso de la Vega tells the story of one of these shipwrecked men who, reduced to living like the beasts, assumed the appearance of one, becoming so covered with hair that he looked scarcely human. When another shipwrecked man was cast away on the same island, the first occupant was afraid lest he should take him for some diabolical animal, half-man and half-beast. To reassure the new arrival, he had the touching inspiration of reciting the Credo as he advanced towards him. Other castaways, obliged to live naked, changed their skins, we are told, “twice a year, like snakes.”

It has been remarked that the majority of these heroic adventurers were natives of Andalusia and Estremadura, in other words of the more southerly provinces of Spain, and those were the struggle against the Moors lasted for centuries. They were hardened against the most burning suns of the Equator and tempered to endure anything, and at the same time they were already experienced in the kind of warfare which was to be imposed upon them.

They had practiced their hands in guerrilla warfare. It was the same kind of war that they had to wage against the Indians: raiding and marauding, burnings and devastations to starve or scatter the enemy. Those who had cut down fruit-trees in the orchards of Baza, or burned farms in the Granadine vega, had something on which to exercise their talents in Peru and Chile. In the school of those pillagers, seekers after treasure, and cutters-off of heads, the Arabs, they had learned useful lessons in rapacity and cruelty.

They were hard, merciless, bold and enterprising, as befitted conquerors and founders who had to battle ceaselessly against the most unfavorable conditions and against fierce enemies, and were compelled to exact the maximum of effort from themselves and from their auxiliaries. They were destined to perpetual guerrilla war. Of war on a large scale, as it was beginning to be understood in Europe, there could be no question in the New World, and those whose experience of warfare was confined to the campaigns against the French, the Swiss, or the Germans, found themselves hopelessly at a loss.

Some newly disembarked recruits, full of the glory of having campaigned under Gonzalo de Cordova or taken part in battles such as Marignano or Cerignola, presumed to give advice to the adventurers in sandals who fought against the Indians armed with bows and arrows and armored in cotton-wool. Rude misadventures were not slow in undeceiving them. It was another type of warfare which they had to learn.


It has been pointed out elsewhere that most of the great leaders of the Conquest were not professional soldiers: they were merchants, business men, shipbuilders, navigators, gold-seekers, whose principal advantage was they knew the natives well and had adapted themselves to the climate, as to the customs, of the country. These Spaniards, or these foreigners—for there were Europeans of all origins among them, and even Africans—need a regular process of Americanization, in other words years of acclimatization and apprenticeship, before the Conquest, properly speaking, could be undertaken with any chance of success.

This preliminary adaptation has to take place at all periods in all colonial environments. In Algeria the French soldiers and the great military leaders found themselves immobilized for years before they learnt how to fight against the Arabs and were in a position to advance into the interior.

For the conquistadors Americanization was a very rapid process. Historians have noted, indeed, how readily the Spaniards let themselves be contaminated by the natives. They explain this contamination by the influence of women and the multiplication of half-breeds. As Spanish women were very few, at least at the outset of the conquest, the conquerors had to take Indian women as wives or concubines. Those who lived in isolation, in remote regions, or again certain prisoners of war, by dint of living with the Indians ended by resembling them. The degraded civilized man in let himself go and became a regular savage.

Bernal Díaz tells us the story of a man, a native of Palos, who was captured by the Indians and became one of their chiefs. An emissary of Cortés tried vainly to win him back to the Christians. “I am married here,” the man replied to the envoy, “I have three children, and I am regarded as chief and leader in time of war. So leave me alone! I have my face tattooed and my ears pierced. What would the Spaniards say of me if they saw me decked out like this? Besides, look at my three little ones—how pretty they are! As you say that my brothers have sent me them from my country.”

Despite the most pathetic entreaties, there was no doing anything with him. The new savage did not want to become a civilized man again at any price.

In general, however, they reacted harshly against being mastered by their environment. As always happens in colonial countries, the character of the colonist was strengthened by the contradiction, or the hostility, of his surroundings. When he was subjected to the influence of foreign customs and new environment, some of his racial feelings and prejudices, some of this ideas, acquired fresh vigor. It happened also that, as the colonist was no longer in contact with the motherland, where national characteristics were in course of evolution; his own remained stationary.

The feelings, the instincts, the prejudices which he had brought with him from his native environment became intensified or exaggerated without being transformed. Ancestral character mummified in him. The hidalgo, cousin of the Cid or the Great Captain, became the Argentinean or Peruvian estanciero who, under the outward appearance of the most up-to-date business man, hides the hardened, set soul of a conquistador.

The two mainsprings of this soul, at the time of the conquest as still, perhaps, today, were the pride of race and the instinct of domination. The Spaniard of pure blood, not crossed with Jew or Moor, regarded himself as an individual of higher quality, and could feel nothing but contempt for other peoples. It was he who had fought for centuries against Islam, and ended by throwing it back into Africa—who had, in fact, inherited the Empire of the West, and looked forward to European and World hegemony.

By virtue of Pontifical Bulls, he was the sovereign master of the New World, the conqueror to whom everybody must bow the knee, the apostle designated by the Vicar of Jesus Christ to win millions of souls to the Christian faith. Subject of His August Caesarian and Catholic Majesty, he was, in his own eyes, the perfect type of Catholic and Christian. In warrior virtue, in purity of blood, as in purity in faith, he was without rival. He had all the pretensions, as he had all the rights.

Such feelings could only develop a bellicose and irreducible individualism. The conquistador was a superb individual. He had a high idea of his own worth, as also of the worth of his comrades.

In proportion as he and they felt themselves to be a small number, in short an élite, lost amid barbarian hordes, this sense of individual worth became exalted in them. They were human beings of value, inasmuch as they were almost unique examples of humanity. They considered themselves superior even to their compatriots of the motherland, because their adventurous and perilous life developed in them aptitudes unknown to the civilized man.

Personality affirmed itself in characterizes sometimes excessive and brutal. That is what always happens in colonial countries. Because of their small number, of the isolation in which they live, Europeans attribute an extreme importance to the personality of another European. They all know one another by their names, or, what is more significant, by their nicknames. In America they knew one another’s birth places, and were proud of the fact: Hernando López came from Avila, Juan Velázquez from León. Often the name of origin ended by effacing the family name. One became Juan the Castilian, or Miguel the Valencian. Spanish waggoners whom I have met in the South of Algeria carry on the tradition of the conquistadors in this respect.

Together with pride in their birth-place, they had an almost aristocratic sense of the worth of the individual. In their eyes, as in the eyes of Bernal Díaz, Alonso the one-armed, or Ortiz the musician, simple manual laborers or porters, were person on a level with Captain-General Hernán Cortés.

The horse themselves and the war-dogs, on account of their small number, assumed importance and inspired a touching consideration. A kind of personality was acquired by the precious animals through their contact with men. Their names have been piously preserved for us, together with their traits of character, and even their deeds, carefully noted and even celebrated in the heroic fashion.

Such highly individualized people could not be very well disciplined, or very obedient. The old Spanish particularism, still more strengthened by the example of the Berbers and the Arabs, led directly to anarchy through personal rivalries and quarrels. The conquistadors made the mistake of their ancestors in the presence of Islam: they split up into fiercely contending factions and exterminated one another in the presence of the enemy.

Little by little, the instinct of independence led them to open rebellion against the motherland. For a long time, loyalty to the King was, in America as in Spain, the only link between these individualists at odds with one another. After fighting with one another, they ended by turning against the King and the motherland itself—and the ancestral separatism had its way.


It would be a mistake to regard these violent men as rough veterans, adventurers without education and without culture. Their leaders and those among them who were successful, who conquered or populated countries, were in general hidalgos.

By way of proving their ignorant and destructive barbarism, it is often recalled that, for example, Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru himself, did not know how to read or write, and could barely sign his name. On the other hand, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, was a former student of the University of Salamanca, and had at least a certain literary culture which made him a clever and fluent orator, who adorned his discourses with allusions and examples borrowed from classical antiquity. One even feels in him, as in Bernal Díaz, an anxiety to imitate, if not eclipse, the illustrious captains of Greek and Roman history.

Together with that, this fine speaker prided himself on being a man of good manners, a model of courtesy an elegance, as careful to observe all the rules of etiquette towards Aztec sovereigns and caciques as towards a Grandee of Spain. He was, moreover, as magnificent as he could be in his dress and his retinue.

But these refinements of civilization, and intellectual culture itself, are things altogether secondary in colonial countries. The inborn intelligence of Pizarro, absolutely illiterate, that intelligence so perfectly adapted to a barbarous environment, was worth more than any diplomas. Firmness, endurance, strength of will, gift of command, perfect knowledge of the country, a spirit of initiative united with all the resources of guile and ingeniousness—all this put Pizarro high above all the present-day products of our Staff colleges, still more above our universitarian Diafoiri.

These conquerors have also been accused of destroying, through ignorance and barbarism, precious civilizations like those of the Aztecs and the Incas. This is making civilization a laughing-stock. Let me repeat once more: those rudimentary civilizations have been overestimated in the most ridiculous way, with the object of lowering and defaming Spaniards and Catholicism, held as responsible for this alleged destruction.

Can one regard as civilized the Peruvians, who did not know how to write, and who reckoned years and centuries by knots tied in cords; or the Mexicans who used infantile hieroglyphics for history and chronology; peoples who had neither draught beasts nor beasts of burden, neither cows, cereals, nor vines; peoples who were not acquainted with the wheel, and had not reached the Iron Ages; peoples among whom man was reduced to the rôle of a quadruped, whose bloody religion admitted human sacrifices, and who had markets for human flesh?

If the conquistadors destroyed much and practiced needless cruelties—destruction and cruelties which are as nothing beside those of modern war—they blazed the trail for the missionaries who saved for history everything that was essential in those embryonic civilizations, and but for whom we should know absolutely nothing about pre-Columbian America.