In the spring of 1519, Hernán Cortés and his expedition landed on the coast of what would become Mexico. Shortly thereafter, they began to distance themselves from Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, and set the expedition inexorably toward Tenochtitlan and the conquest of the Mexica. The critical document explaining those events, the petition of the town of Veracruz, was lost from the historical record. Now, after nearly 500 years, two books have published and analyzed this petition, appearing within months of one another. The present volume is one of those; I wrote the other with the assistance of Helen Nader, published by the University of Texas Press. One of the more remarkable features of the petition is that it was signed by the members of the Cortés expedition. Although most sources indicate that around 500 men accompanied Cortés, only some 340 signatures (318 full signatures and over 20 fragments) appear on the document, due to a large tear on the bottom of many of the pages.María del Carmen Martínez Martínez has done a solid job in her study of the document. For her analysis, she draws heavily on the literature in Spanish relevant to the Age of Discovery and to the conquest in particular. Most importantly, she looks at all the various references in roughly contemporary documents to the petition of the town, such as ones by Bernal Díaz del Castillo and many others. Other documents of the expedition, such as the power of attorney for the agents in court, also refer to the petition. Thus she uses these references to provide a deep context for the document. Nonetheless, she does not discuss the historiography of the document at any great length and how later historians looked on the events that surrounded it in their treatments of the conquest narrative. The analysis of the document itself focuses to a certain degree on its physical reality: the torn edges, the placement of the signatures on the pages, the structure of the petition. The book does include a transcription of the document in Spanish and a photographic reproduction of the original as appendixes. This makes for a bit of awkwardness, forcing the reader to flip back and forth from time to time.In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Martínez Martínez pieces together a rough chronology of events surrounding the landing at Veracruz, the founding of the town of Veracruz, the writing of the petition, and the eventual march inland to Tenochtitlan. By throwing off ties to Velázquez, Cortés and his men performed an act of treason. The petition of the town sought to ameliorate that act by providing a legal justification for their later actions. Scholars have also been confused about the movement of the expedition in this period because Cortés and his men actually founded two towns, both called Veracruz: one near present-day Veracruz and the island of Ulúa, the other a bit further north by the altepetl known as Quiahuiztlan. Martínez Martínez does a fine job of dealing with all these nuances and tracing the actions and activities of the expedition.Unquestionably the most interesting part of the document is the signatures. Martínez Martínez both analyzes the structure of the signatures and provides thumbnail biographies of the men. She notes, quite rightly, that in many instances one person signed for several of the men. She also details the rubrics, those squiggles that precede and follow the actual name. Unlike most other scholars who study the expeditions, she does not spend much time looking at the social structure of the company, the occupations of the members, or the changes in the composition of the expedition after Veracruz. She has opted to organize the thumbnail biographies alphabetically rather than in the order in which the individuals appeared on the petition, although she does cross-reference the location of each signature. The biographies occupy about a third of the book. In writing them, she has drawn from the standard biographical collections, such as Bernard Grunberg's Dictionnaire des conquistadores de Mexico (2001), as well as on various documents from the Archivo General de Indias and references in the writings of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and others. The signatures are devilishly difficult to decipher. It seems that she has interpreted some of them differently than I have. For example, we agree that Pedro de Ircio signed the document. I believe that his brother, Martín, was also a signer on folio 4 recto, a person she identifies as a Martín de Odiaga.This is a well-researched and well-crafted book that offers a tremendous amount of information for those willing to invest the time and effort in its study. It is tightly focused on the men and events of Veracruz, without significant content on how this expedition compares to those of Peru, New Granada, or Chile.
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Oct 22, 2018
Jilin Xie + 5
Open Access
