Tan tree calf binding with red and green title plates, gilt banding and lettering on the spine.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

This is a superb rendition of this famous book, but it is this books binding which places a unique value on this book.

Bernal Daz del Castillo(1492-1584) served under Corts through the entire Mexican campaign, and his narrative, one of only four extant firsthand accounts, is both an invaluable historical document and a spectacular epic. He was with Corts when the latter sank the ships, thus committing the small band of conquistadors irrevocably to the Conquest; he was privy to the counsels of the leaders and was at hand when Montezuma was made a prisoner in his own palace. Bernal Daz fought in over a hundred battles and skirmishes against an enemy who made living sacrifices of their prisoners. These things he saw and recorded in a bold blunt voice whose immediacy, in Maudslay’s classic translation, reaches across the centuries to invite readers to witness for themselves the horrors and wonders of the initial, apocalyptic clash between two great civilizations.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo memorial, in Medina del Campo (Spain)

Bernal Díaz del Castillo (c. 1492 – 3 February 1584) was a Spanish conquistador who participated as a soldier in the conquest of the Aztec Empire under Hernán Cortés and late in his life wrote an account of the events. As an experienced soldier of fortune, he had already participated in expeditions to Tierra Firme, Cuba, and to Yucatán before joining Cortés. In his later years he was an encomendero and governor in Guatemala where he wrote his memoirs called The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. He began his account of the conquest almost thirty years after the events and later revised and expanded it in response to the biography published by Cortés’s chaplain Francisco López de Gómara, which he considered to be largely inaccurate in that it did not give due recognition to the efforts and sacrifices of others in the Spanish expedition.