Not-so-New World(s)?

Here's what I've been rather busy with recently. Ask me anything!

Hello again! I know it’s been a while. Thank you to you all, my lovely subscribers, for being so patient with me while I used the tail-end of 2024 to make headway with my PhD thesis. In 2025, I’ll be going back to posting to my original schedule of one Substack per month. So, if there are any topics you’d particularly like to hear more about this coming year, please leave a comment or send me a message and let me know! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this insight into my day-job.

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Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all enjoyed merry and restful holidays.

Though my festive break did involve slogging through a mountain of PhD work, I managed to find the time to earn myself a coveted promotion within my family over the Christmas period. I can now proudly claim the title of ‘Chief Roast Potato Officer’ for my CV. The reviews were, if I may say so, spectacular.

I hope your Christmas feast was jolly and looked something like this. Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264.

For my first article of 2025, I wanted to take the opportunity to re-introduce myself and what I do for those of you who have joined this community in the last few weeks. If you are one of the many who have found me more recently through the kind recommendations of my supremely talented online history pals, you are very welcome here. I hope you stick around!¹

Since the beginning of my Substack hiatus at the end of September, I have been hard at work making progress on the writing of my PhD thesis, a lengthy labour of love entitled: ‘Not-So-New-World? Examining the Literary Genealogies of Sixteenth-Century Spanish Narratives of Conquest’. Giving you a taste of this project and, thus, a taste of my research obsessions, felt like the perfect way for you to get to know me a little better.

Frankly, this project is a dream come true.

It tacks together my skills as a trained linguist; my deep affection for Spain and Latin America, parts of the world where I’ve spent my happiest times; and my profound enthusiasm for the medieval and early modern period with all of its cultural, intellectual and political dynamism.

By the time I’m done with it, this project will have consumed three and a half years of my life. So, as I reach the business end of writing this bad boy up, I wanted to share a bit of it with you for my first Substack of 2025.

This early modern map of the Americas has full length portraits of Columbus and other New World voyagers. It was published in Americæ pars sexta. Siue Historiæ ab Hieronymo Bēzono... Frankfurt, 1596. G.6634.(1.). Image Source: British Library.

To give you an idea of what I’ve been up to, I thought I would share with you the abstract of my thesis and a little discussion of the background to my project.

Abstracts are a paragraph of writing which are basically designed to give those assessing your idea at the application stage a flavour of what your work hopes to achieve and how it might challenge or build upon the existing scholarship in your specific field.

So, without any further ado, here’s mine:

Marching on Iztapalapa, conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo² famously describes the scene before him as resembling “an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadís,” referencing a popular chivalric romance,³ employing the fantasy of heroic literature to communicate the unprecedented novelty of the ‘New World’ he was confronted with. By examining the ethical models and narrative structures of such texts that coexisted with the conquistadors in the Iberian literary imagination, this thesis establishes how accounts of New World conquest, such as that of Díaz, were founded upon the literary ideals of crusader and chivalric narratives and were forged by intercultural contact. While their historicity, use of legalistic rhetoric, and later shaping of Latin American foundation-myths have been extensively studied, this research interrogates the cultural roots of these narratives, foregrounding their literary techniques.⁴ I will confirm their inheritance from a corpus of heroic Iberian literature comprising narratives of pious warfare, of ambivalent ‘Otherness’, and chivalric achievement, tracing the properties of this legacy by cross-referencing literary motifs and genre-models. Predicated on the close source analysis of works of Spanish historiography and heroic fiction, this study uncovers the late-medieval bedrock of the conquistadors’ self-mythologising and illustrates how pre-existing literary models are recycled and adapted for the Americas and the Spanish state of the sixteenth century, affording us a fuller understanding of European cultural legacies in the New World.

The early colonists of the New World were enraptured by the unfamiliar flora, fauna and people of these new lands. Details of them were relayed back to Europe with…varying degrees of accuracy… (see above).

Whew. Doesn’t it sound so fun though?

Shall I break it down a bit in slightly less outrageously complicated ‘please-give-me-a-PhD-at-the-end-of-this’ type language?

At its core, my thesis asks a very simple question: how did the literature that the conquistadors and chroniclers of the New World consumed affect the way that they chose to present themselves when it came to writing their own accounts of their experiences in the Americas?

Basically, how did what they read shape what they wrote?

To put it another way, when Hernán Cortés sat down to write an account of his conquest of Mexico that made him look like a hero in the eyes of the distant Spanish king, what kind of images and texts were informing his concept of what a hero is?

This rogues gallery from left to right is: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Hernán Cortés and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Oviedo wrote a history of the New World in the mid-1500s, Cortés is famous as the subjugator of Mexico and Cabeza de Vaca's moving account of being shipwrecked in Florida is a standout read to this day. I look at all of their works in my thesis.

That Bernal Díaz quotation used at the beginning of my thesis abstract is an extremely famous line, reprinted a million times in a million scholarly articles, that seems to speak to a connection between the consumption of popular literature and the imaginative landscapes of the soldiers marauding around Central Mexico in the 1520s. Amadís de Gaula was the early modern Spanish equivalent of ACOTAR (if you know, you know). It was a bestseller. It was bloody everywhere.

This proposal - that conquistadors looked to the heroes of popular fiction as sources of inspiration for their own work - has been hinted at a bunch of times by scholars from the 1930s onwards.⁵

But, interestingly, Díaz del Castillo’s statement of fantastical wonder is actually highly unusual. Making a clear and direct reference to a work of popular literature, and citing it by name, is extremely rare amongst the sixteenth-century chronicles of the Indies.⁶

So why is it that this connection has been acknowledged so many times? Where is the real evidence for it? How can we defend this hypothesis against scholars who argue that the majority of the conquistadors were too ill-educated to have had access to this kind of courtly literature?

My thesis, in essence, is hopefully going to answer these questions!

As a taster, though, I want to talk to you more in this article about that question of social class and readership.

This image is the title page of a 1632 edition of Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera, or True History of the Conquest of New Spain. This work was written to push back against earlier histories that, in Díaz’s opinion, gave Cortés too much individual credit for the success of the expedition.

Do you even read, bro?

In order to give my thesis solid foundations, I needed to consider a common criticism of the basic idea that the conquistadors’ writing was in part inspired by a specific kind of reading. Many notable academics had argued that these books were simply too expensive, too aristocratic in their content, and too exclusive for men of the conquistador-type to be able to get their hands on.⁷

And, unfortunately, Hernán and the lads didn’t exactly leave us the sixteenth-century equivalent of Goodreads which we could use to verify what kind of things they’d been reading. It was never going to be as simple as searching out obvious clues like the Díaz example to prove that the New World invaders were indeed filling their downtime with this kind of popular fiction.

But for all that questions do remain about the extent of literacy and access amongst the New World invaders (given the lack of other obvious examples in the Díaz model), I argue that when Díaz speaks of a ‘we’ (“we were saying it seemed like something from Amadís”) he is clearly indicating a shared frame of cultural reference that existed between a group of similar men of a low to moderate level of education.⁸

Clearly, all the men knew what Díaz was on about when he said “wow, isn’t that like something straight out of Amadís?”

Otherwise, all of his friends would have thought he was really weird.

A printed copy of Amadís de Gaula from Seville.

There are other clear indicators that these books did have a profound effect on the imaginations of such men.

The Amazon river and the state of California are names that both seem to have been inspired by a late-medieval sequel to Amadís de Gaula that revolved around his son, Esplandián. ‘California’ in the book was the name of the island abode of an Amazonian queen, Calafia, whose all-female warriors rode griffins into battle and wore armour of gold. When Spanish explorers came across the Amazon river, leading them deep into the heart of the rainforest, it seemed that at least some of them expected to find ‘Amazonian’ tribes of warrior women there.

Really, then, the question is not actually whether these men were reading these books. The map of the modern Americas bears clear witness to the fact that they were.

The more important question is what was it about these books made them so attractive to these middle-class men who were seeking their fortune in the New World?

Why were they such a good thematic fit for the moments when the conquistadors sat down at a writing desk to reimagine themselves as the heroes of their own adventure stories?

An image of part of a cartilla de leer, a literacy aid designed to help aspirant professionals learn how to read. The demand for these materials suggests that plenty of middle class people recognised the opportunities that being able to read and write could bring in terms of social advancement.

To answer this question, we need to consider that the Spanish chivalric romance had undergone a bit of a transformation at the end of the 1400s. No longer only sold to wealthy nobles who could afford painstakingly handwritten and expensive manuscripts, these texts were now being more effectively produced by the printing press in greater numbers.

The image above is an example of a cartilla de leer, a short educational primer designed as a tool for people to learn how to read. Comparatively few of these survive as by their very nature they were fragile, often between 4 and 12 pages long, inexpensive, and made with accessibility rather than longevity in mind.

However, surviving documentary evidence suggests these were quite widespread things. In the 1556 inventories of Toledan bookseller, Juan de Ayala, there were 18,041 cartillas de leer amongst the more expensive books, speaking to a growing literate public who understood the opportunities for social advancement that literacy presented.

This isn’t really that surprising. Spain itself at this time was in desperate need of capable bureaucrats. Since the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Aragón had been brought together by the marriage of Isabél of Castile and Fernando of Aragón, navigating all the political admin required a massive expansion of the equivalent of the civil service. When Spain got its claws into the New World after 1492 and started establishing its early colonies, that demand for literate people ballooned all over again.

Through the grumbles of the established intellectual classes, we get a sense that more and more people who hadn’t previously been literate were becoming so.

In 1525 Miguel de Eguía (1495-1544), a well-educated humanist printer working out of Alcalá de Henares, complained that:

“printing shops bring out vulgar and even obscene songs, inept verse and even more illiterate books,”

One interpretation of Miguel’s moaning is that it appears as a response to the fact that Spanish printers, rather than focusing their energy on the tastes of the intellectual elite, were now catering to a more diverse audience of lower-class individuals who obviously had the means to purchase these ‘illiterate’ materials.

What precisely Eguía means by ‘illiterate’ in this instance is unclear: he could be using the term to mean simply written in such a sloppy manner so as to suggest their authors were poorly educated, or perhaps he is using the term to mean ‘unable to read Latin’ - still the language of choice for ‘proper’, morally valuable literature. Either way, both of these interpretations could correspond to the Spanish-language romances of chivalry and his lament points to a booming publishing scene that is consciously responding to the tastes of those of lesser means.

Left to right: Title pages of early printed copies of Palmerín de Oliva, the Crónica de Ruy Díaz, and Sergas de Esplandián. Note the mixed attire: two of these knights are garbed in plate armour that would have been fairly old fashioned by this point, perhaps representing a romanticised middle-class idea of knighthood. Palmerín, on the other hand, is dressed the civvies of a well-to-do merchant or lawyer type, directly reflecting (maybe) the kind of man who might be purchasing the book.

Literary Tastemakers: A Genre Transformed

As the literate public expanded, the physical books that contained the printed romances developed a distinct visual language. While in reality all the accoutrements of late medieval knighthood (plate armour and lances etc.) were becoming increasingly socially outdated, these books continued to sell a romantic and antiquated vision of knighthood to those upper-middle-class climbers who aspired towards that rank.

The title pages above are from left to right: Palmerin de Oliva, the Chronicle of Ruy Diaz – a retelling of the story of El Cid, and Las Sergas de Esplandián, that famous continuation of the Amadís de Gaula cycle. These are all chivalric romances that boomed in the early years of the 1500s.

With bare columns of text, few woodcut illustrations and little ornamentation besides these elaborate title pages, we can theorise that these kind of copies of the romances would have been inexpensive enough to be well within the scope of wealthy merchant families, professional men, as well as the down-and-out hidalgos⁹ whose families boasted illustrious names but scarce financial assets.

Not inconsequentially in my opinion, many of these romances were either printed for the first time, or reprinted, in Seville, a city with a population that exploded during the early imperial period due to its unique status as the main port for New World voyages. The population increased most dramatically amongst the middle classes. The city attracted merchants, notaries, asset-poor clerics, and younger sons not in line to inherit – all of whom gravitated to the gateway to the Indies in search of the social mobility that centuries of frontier warfare against the Moors in Andalusia had given their ancestors. It’s not hard to imagine a relatively wealthy young man whiling away the hours waiting for his ship to depart for Cuba by reading tales of romance and adventure in faraway lands populated by cannibals, pagans and monsters.

A view of sixteenth-century Seville by Alonso Sánchez Coello. Source: Museo de América de Madrid. Seville was the main port to the New World. By law, all New World trade had to go through the Sevillian trade authority, the Casa de Contratación, including shipments of books.

One chivalric work in particular demonstrates the dual role of print technology in Spain at this time. As print gave space and brought new audiences to older, medieval works that had only ever circulated in manuscript before, it also provided an exciting new medium for the next generation of writers and artists.

In the same way that the technological revolution of print adapted and modified the physical qualities of medieval books, the next generation of writers offered an updated, modified, and, in their eyes, improved version of the ethical models that had governed the books of their medieval predecessors. A new model of aspirational ‘knightly’ behaviour that was more to the taste of their expanded middle class readership.

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Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s Sergas de Esplandián, the fifth book in the Amadís de Gaula series, was probably published for the first time in the 1490s.

At its heart, Esplandián is the story of this generational leap forward. Montalvo had previously published his own version of Amadís de Gaula that he claimed to have corrected and extended by adding a fourth book. In his fifth book, Montalvo introduces the Esplandián character as a son who arrives destined to supersede his famous father.

As a very brief overview: Amadís as a character fits neatly into the medieval mould of a knight errant. He is deeply mistrustful of authority, prone to illicit love affairs, and perpetually on a quest for self-aggrandising glory no matter the cost to those around him. In a medieval world of powerful barons with private armies who fell out with their king regularly and pretty much did whatever they wanted, Amadís made perfect sense as the archetypal hero.

Esplandián, however, offers a very different vision for early modern knightly perfection. His martial ethics are deeply imbued with the political and religious philosophies of the new Spanish state under the Catholic Monarchs (Isabél and Fernando), making him much more representative of the civic values shared by the upwardly mobile middle classes.¹⁰

Amadís’ extreme and egoistic sexual fealty to Oriana, the object of his personal devotions, drives him to the brink of madness. For Esplandián, whose own tale includes a love story with a princess Leonorina, romance is only ever a secondary objective to his true calling which is saving and expanding Christendom.

Where Amadís’ warrior prowess is measured primarily by his destruction of his enemies, Esplandián’s is measured also by his ability to argue the truth of the Christian faith through his words, echoing the role of a missionary. He converts various foes to his own side by force of reason and not at the tip of the sword.

Where Amadís repeatedly rejects monarchical authority, Esplandián is faultlessly loyal to the Emperor of Constantinople, a symbol in the text for the earthly powers of Christendom more widely.¹¹

What’s the key difference?

Fundamentally, Amadís’ claim to heroism is based on his status as the lost prince of a noble house (his bloodline) and his extraordinary military abilities (his physical prowess). For Esplandián, it is his unquestioning faithfulness to the political and religious hierarchies he serves and his qualities as a commander of men. It is his ability to defend and expand the Christian faith as part of a wider unit. He is measured ultimately by his usefulness to the social environment in which he operates, not by his personal accolades.

This more meritocratic approach to idealised knighthood, with religious supremacy and centralised monarchical authority at the heart of the ideal, sells all the elements of Isabél and Fernando’s vision for an imperial Spanish identity to the bourgeois classes that were to sustain it with their administrative and military labour in the New World.

People like the conquistadors.

A wedding portrait of Fernando of Aragón and Isabél of Castile. Their wedding in 1469 led to the amalgamation of their two kingdoms and was the first major step on the path to the creation of ‘Spain’. They massively centralised Spanish governmental bureaucracy and pursued aggressive religious policies to ‘purify’ (ick) the kingdom such as the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscos.

Hernán Cortés: A Knight of the New World

Having started with the Bernal Díaz, to conclude, I’d like to leave you with that most famous and machiavellian of conquistadors: Hernán Cortés.

Cortés was a different creature to Díaz. Whilst a stable consensus on the extent of his education remains elusive, he represents a level of learning superior to his subordinates. The only intertextual references in his extremely long Letters from Mexico wherein he describes his subjugation of the Aztecs are drawn from the Bible and he never makes explicit reference to popular reading at all.

Indeed, our only solid evidence of Cortés engaging with popular heroic literature is via Díaz, who notes in his own account that prior to a military engagement in Mexico, Cortés encouraged the men with words from the ‘romancero’ – a collection of chivalric ballads.

That’s not to say, however, that the conventions of chivalric romance left no trace in Cortés’ writings.

The scene which follows occurs having left Cempoala in Mexico, as the company of conquistadores head further inland in search of the great empire of Motecuhzoma which the coastal peoples had described to them, and with the company having been subject to repeated ambushes from hostile indigenous groups. Having suffered losses and hardship due to exposure and lack of supplies, dissent begins to fester amongst the soldiers who begin to question the wisdom and ultimate achievability of Cortés’ stated goal of reaching the seat of the Mexica empire.

“And after they heard of the victory which God had been pleased to give us, and how we had pacified those villages, there was great rejoicing, for I assure Your Majesty that there was amongst us not one who was not very much afraid, seeing how deep into this country we were and among so many hostile people and so entirely without hope of help from anywhere. Indeed, I heard it whispered, and almost spoken out loud, that I was a Pedro Carbonero to have led them into this place from which they could never escape. And, moreover, standing where I could not be seen, I heard certain companions in a hut say that if I was crazy enough to go where I could not return, they were not, and that they were going to return to the sea, and if I wished to come with them, all well and good, but if not, they would abandon me. Many times, I was asked to turn back, and I encouraged them by reminding them that they were Your Highness’s vassals and that never at any time had Spaniards been found wanting, and that we were in a position to win for Your Majesty the greatest dominions and kingdoms in the world. Moreover, as Christians we were obliged to wage war against the enemies of our Faith; and thereby we would win glory in the next world, and, in this, greater honor and renown than any generation before our time. They should observe that God was on our side, and to Him nothing is impossible, for, as they saw, we had won so many victories in which so many of the enemy had died, and none of us. I told them other things which occurred to me of this nature, with which, and Your Highness’s Royal favor, they were much encouraged and determined to follow my intentions and to do what I wished, which was to complete the enterprise I had begun”.

Cortés’ sense of the chivalric ideal, disruptive and disobedient though he was in practice, is profoundly civically-minded. Rejecting the socially corrosive and anti-authoritarian models of Amadís in favour of the ethics of his son Esplandián, it is Cortés’ desire and ability to “win for your majesty the greatest dominions and kingdoms in the world marks him out as a heroic protagonist of stature, not his mindedness toward independence, nor even (as in the case of many of the literary heroes) his particular military skill.

For Cortés, his heroic value is predicated in large part on the fact that he is successfully able to make good on his promises of aggrandisement for the realm, irrespective of any internal or external setback. In essence his value is centred around his Christian receipt of divine favour and his ability to deliver on his word for the ‘greater good’.¹²

An artist’s impression of the 1521 siege of the Mexica capital city, Tenochtitlán, under Hernán Cortés.

Compare the words of Cortés to the following excerpt taken from Sergas de Esplandián. In this scene, a hermit begs Esplandián not to risk his life on a dangerous mission to relieve Constantinople from the threat of a Muslim siege:

“Good friend, I thank you very much for the advice you give me, but I must pursue that which I was born into this world for, seeking and tasting those things outside of the order of nature itself. If I didn’t do as such those great wise men who made predictions at my birth and during my marvelous upbringing, not only would their judgements be in vain, but they would be considered liars. Well, if what they said about me was true, what greater glory could there be for me than to finish such things as were impossible and frightening to others? And if by chance this wisdom turned out to be a lie, I would prefer that the fault appeared to lie with their false knowledge rather than with any cowardice of mine. There is only one remedy available to me; to be set against the evildoers, ministers and followers of the Devil, with the hope of achieving victory, and if it be otherwise, the Lord I believe in will have mercy on my soul”.

The roots of Cortés’ sense that the pinnacle of heroism is being able to deliver the impossible, keep one’s promises against incredible odds, and render glorious service to God and country are clear to see here in Esplandián’s impassioned oration. The tacit recognition that this kind of heroism is the result of a unique divinely-ordained destiny as well as individual excellence is equally obvious.

Seeking the dual approbation of court aristocrats and the general reading public for whom Cortés knew his letters would be published, this most self-conscious of protagonists deliberately speaks the language of popular literature to appeal to their sense of what constitutes praiseworthy heroic achievement.

As he fashions his own image across the breadth of five long letters, Cortés meditates on the meaning of what it is to be a perfect hero and Spaniard in sustained dialogue with the heroes of fantastical fiction.

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Let’s wrap this up, shall we?

To conclude, from 1492 onwards, books containing romances of chivalry poured into the Americas and inflected Spanish expressions of the New World experience, like that of Díaz, Cortés and many, many others. As the Iberian romance of chivalry transformed in material and ideological terms in the late medieval period, texts that were once exclusive to aristocratic circles were made more freely available, promoting a modified chivalric, masculine and national ideal in which the moderately wealthy mercantile and professional classes who made up the bulk of the New World invasion forces could more actively participate.

And my beloved upcoming thesis intends to demonstrate this connection extensively via a series of detailed case studies.

Now, I would love to discuss this more with you! And I would love to know whether there’s any aspects of my thesis work that you’re curious to know more about.

So please, consider this month’s article as an Ask-Me-Anything! Leave your questions in the comments below and I’ll answer them in a future post.

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Did you enjoy this article? I really want to hear whether any of this discussion piqued your curiosity. Leave your comments and questions for me down below! And if you did enjoy this read, please do consider sharing the article or telling a friend! You can also support my work by subscribing for free, choosing a paid subscription, following me on social media, or even leaving me the occasional ‘tip’ via Ko-Fi. This content takes a while to put together and your kind donations allow me to keep doing it! Thanks again for taking the time to read this article and for supporting my work.

1. Special thanks to Beth, Amy, Jake and Charlotte (@lady_of_the_mercians) who have all (by recommending or directing people to my Substack) been kindly supportive of my work.

2. Bernal Díaz del Castillo (c. 1492 - 1584) was a soldier in the company of Hernán Cortés. He’d previously served in other New World expeditions joining Cortés in 1519 and remaining with him throughout the conflict with the Mexica (the Aztecs).

He wrote his account of the conquest of Mexico in his eighties, many years after the events he describes, largely in response to histories that had been published by close allies of Cortés who Díaz felt had given Cortés too much credit for the success of the expeditions. His Historia verdadera (‘True History’) was an attempt to correct the record.

3. Chivalric romance is a catch-all term for works of poetry and prose that dealt with knights, quests, monsters, maidens and all that jazz. These works celebrated courtly manners and exceptional feats of individual honour and heroism. Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto described them as “the sixteenth-century equivalent of airport-bookstall fiction […] in which a hero, destined for greatness […] takes to a life of adventure, battles monsters or giants or pagans, and ends up conquering an island or ruling a kingdom”.

See Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (USA: Oxford University Press, 2012) p. 10.

4. This essentially means that I’m not interested in treating these New World accounts as historical documents, rather I’m examining them as pieces of literature. My main concern isn’t whether what Díaz, Cortés et al. said about their campaigns is true or not (spoiler: it’s often not), it’s why and how they present themselves and their actions in a certain way. I’m asking what kind of techniques and images they use in order to portray themselves in a favourable light.

5. Professor Irving Leonard, Stephen Gilman, Anthony Cascardi, Américo Castro, Rolena Adorno, David Wacks … to name just a few!

6. Chronicles of the Indies is a gigantic body of literature that Jorge Checa defines as “a huge textual corpus revolving around the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” - “touching upon heterogeneous subject matters and disciplines – history, geography, ethnology, theology”.

See Jorge Checa, ‘Didactic Prose, History, Politics, Life Writing, Convent Writing, Crónicas de Indias’, in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. by David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 283–90, p. 286.

7. Clive Griffin, Daniel Eisenberg & Maxime Chevalier, for example, have all argued that the democratising influence of the arrival of print technology in Spain has been overstated and that an increased demand for printed books does not necessarily correspond to a diversification of readership. Basically, just because more books were being made after the introduction of print, it doesn’t mean lowlier people were suddenly able to purchase them - the lower-middle class professional types that tended to be attracted to service in the Indies (New World).

8. The Spanish is “decíamos” which translates to ‘we were saying’ or ‘we used to say’.

9. The Spanish word ‘hidalgo’ is a contraction of ‘hijo de algo’, meaning ‘son of someone or other’. It’s a great way to describe the kind of man who might have had a noble lineage and a prestigious surname, but perhaps who was in reality quite cash-poor and not in the inner circles of the aristocracy. Hernán Cortés is a really good example of this kind of social rank.

10. The influence of the Catholic Monarchs on the political and cultural life of late medieval Spain is enormous. Both had lived through decades of civil war and rebellion as young people and so a key focus of their reign was the centralisation of government and the bringing to heel of rowdy frontier nobles. Isabél’s extreme piety manifested in the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition and horrific persecutions of religious minorities.

In the year 1492, Fernando and Isabél completed the conquest of Granada, the final Muslim city-state on the Iberian peninsula, as well as beginning to reap the benefits of their support for Christopher Columbus’ transatlantic voyages and the beginning of Spanish colonisation in the New World.

The combination of these myriad factors meant that Spain’s fledgling national identity was intensely preoccupied with religious purity and supremacy, militarism, and respect for centralised monarchical authority.

11. Esplandián’s eclipsing of his father culminates in a physical brawl where he defeats his predecessor. Symbolically, Amadís also fails in the first four books to withdraw an enchanted sword from a stone in the lair of a beautiful enchantress, while Esplandián is finally able to do what his father could not. If this hulking a magic sword out of a stone sounds at all familiar, it is worth noting that Spanish and Catalan adaptations of Arthurian romances were big business in 15th and 16th century Iberia.

12. To be clear, conquest, forced conversion and genocide is not ever in the interest of the greater good but Cortés’ contemporaries would have been thoroughly on board with most of this. We have to recognise that as a swashbuckling chancer who supposedly brings down a pagan empire almost singlehandedly and then writes about it in careful prose, he is setting himself up as a hero in accordance with the Renaissance standards of his own age: a man of arms and letters.