NAMED A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, THE TABLET AND THE LADY’This book is a terrific read … I could not put it down’ Matthew Restall, Literary ReviewThe ‘conquistadores’, the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation, as men who decimated the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas, and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory. In Conquistadores, Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to immerse the reader in the world of the late-medieval imperialist. It is a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadores thems