The «New Spain» of the Conquistadors: Polyphony in Search of Truth

Abstract

Book review: Kofman A.F. Praying to God, Striking with Sword: the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. The View of the Victors and the Vanquished. Hernán Cortés and Others. Text Andrei F. Kofman.- Saint Petersburg, Kriga, 2025 (In Russian).-632p.

In 2025, the Saint Petersburg Publishing House Kriga released the final book by the distinguished Russian historian Andrei Kofman: Praying to God, Striking with Sword: the Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. The view of the Victors and the Vanquished. Hernán Cortés and Others. Published after the author’s death, this work continues the series of his studies on the Spanish conquest of the territories of future Latin America and Southwestern United States in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like his earlier books on the rebellion of Lope de Aguirre and the conquest of Peru, the work is not a monography but a collection of primary sources translated by Kofman from Spanish into Russian. It should be emphasized that A.F. Kofman was the first Russian specialist in Latin American studies to translate and publish in full the Second and the Third Letters of Relation by Hernan Cortes to the Emperor Charles V, the accounts of the conquistadors Andrés de Tapia, Bernadino Vázquez de Tapia and fray Francisco de Aguilar, as well as the instructions of Diego Velázquez to Hernán Cortés. This alone represents an important scholarly achievement. At the same time, the book is not merely an anthology of sources on the conquest of Mexico, but an ambitious attempt to use these texts to create a complex and multidimensional picture of one of the pivotal events in Latin American history.