BY SWORD AND CROSS

In a single human lifetime, a scattering of self-financing adventurers from the poorest corners of Spain toppled the two greatest empires of the Americas, claimed a hemisphere for a distant king, and set in motion the biological and human catastrophe — and the great exchange — that made the modern world. This is the complete story of the Spanish conquistadors.

E.B Cohen begins in the forge that made them: eight centuries of holy war in Iberia, ending in the miracle year of 1492, that produced a surplus of ambitious, under-employed, sword-carrying minor nobles just as an ocean opened westward. From the dying of the Taíno in the Caribbean, the narrative follows Cortés onto the causeways of Tenochtitlan and Pizarro into the trap at Cajamarca — told, for once, from both sides, with full weight given to the interpreter Malinche, the Tlaxcalan allies, and the smallpox that reached the Andes before the Spanish did.

Then the story fans out across a continent: Cabeza de Vaca walking barefoot across Texas, Coronado chasing cities of gold into Kansas, Orellana swept the length of the Amazon, Valdivia broken by the unconquered Mapuche, and Magellans survivors closing a loop around the Earth. Cohen weighs the machinery that followed — the encomienda, the silver mountain of Potosí that flooded the world with money, and the friars who destroyed the old gods while recording them — and the moral reckoning at home, where Bartolomé de las Casas forced Spain to argue, at Valladolid, about what a human being is.

Even-handed, vivid, and up to date with the scholarship that has overturned the old hero-myths, this is the conquest as it actually happened — the courage and the cruelty, the plague and the plunder, and the long shadow it still casts from Mexico City to the statues coming down today.