THE RELUCTANT CONQUISTADOR: One Man's Conscience Against an Age of Conquest

He crossed an ocean for gold. He found a civilization. He helped destroy it. And he spent the rest of his life trying to decide what that made him.

Diego de Herrera is twenty-three years old when he joins the expedition of Hernan Cortes in 1519, a second son from a minor Castilian family with nothing to inherit and everything to prove. What he finds on the far side of the Atlantic is not the savage wilderness of Spanish imperial mythology but the most sophisticated city he has ever seen: Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire, larger than Seville, more orderly than anything in Europe, and incomprehensibly, unbearably beautiful.

He participates in its destruction anyway.

Set across five decades of the Spanish conquest and colonization of Mexico, The Reluctant Conquistador follows Diego from the beaches of Veracruz through the massacre at Cholula, the wonder and horror of Tenochtitlan, the catastrophic Night of Sorrows, and the seventy-five-day siege that ended one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. It follows him through forty years of colonial life as an encomendero, the moral deterioration that such a life produces, and his eventual encounter with Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican friar whose arguments against the conquest were the most radical defense of human rights produced in the sixteenth century.

Drawing on the actual chronicles of the conquest, including the letters of Cortes, the testimony of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, and the Nahua accounts preserved in Sahagun's Florentine Codex, Rafael Aguirre-Solis has written a novel of moral complexity that refuses the comfort of easy villains and impossible heroes. Diego de Herrera knows what is wrong almost from the beginning. What he does with that knowledge, across a lifetime, is the question the novel never stops asking.

This is a book about one man's conscience. It is also a book about the ten million people who had no say in whether his conscience was enough.

He stood on the causeway and looked at what he was about to help destroy. He kept walking anyway. This is the story of what knowing costs, and what it is worth, and what happens when the answer to both questions is not enough.