Description:
First the Trojan War, then the eras of Alexander the Great and King Arthur. Now, in this companion volume to the BBC/PBS television series, the indefatigable writer-filmmaker Michael Wood turns his lens and pen on the restless, sometimes homicidal men who established Spain's empire in the Americas. "The conquest opened up the world," Wood writes, "marking the beginnings of a globalization which was not only commercial, but also ideological and philosophical, a remaking of mental horizons no less than a redrawing of physical geography." Grand themes all, but Wood is less interested in sweeping statements than in exploring the particular circumstances surrounding the careers of Spain's freebooter-warriors. Following in their footsteps, Wood takes his readers first to the dusty, bleak Spanish province of Estremadura, which gave rise to a remarkable generation of conquerors, hungry for land and wealth and well schooled in the arts of war. One of those men, Hernán Cortés, was also schooled in law--or so his contemporaries thought--and he was able to turn a talent for fighting and learned disputation into a great personal fortune made first in Cuba, then in Mexico, which he won not so much with weaponry but with great cunning. Another, Francisco Pizarro--a distant cousin of Cortés--recruited a semiprivate army to capture the great Inca empire, relying on force more than guile. Wood also follows the paths of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Orellana, accidental wanderers who helped open the interiors of North and South America to conquest. His latter-day, low-tech journeys underscore the difficulties the conquistadors faced in their time, and they help readers appreciate the sheer scale of their often bloody achievements. The story of the conquest, Wood writes, "never wearies in the retelling," and he proves it in this accessible, literate, and lively book. --Gregory McNamee
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