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Summary Of Restall's Seven Myths Of The Spanish Conquest

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Restall’s work on the Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest are a elaboration on why some preconceived notion of history may not always be true. Chapters one and three of the work focuses on the myths: “The Myth of Exceptional Men” and “The Myth of the White Conquistador” , respectively. The chapters serves as a way to broaden and correct the understand on the conquest of New Spain with the respected myths being challenged. In this paper I will be focusing on define what each of these myths mean. The first myth I will focus on is the “myth of exceptional men”. This myth explains the reasoning that people hold men in history like Columbus or Cortes to such high regards as great. It is an idea that this men single handedly and through bravery and valour trail blazed the Spanish conquest of the Americas. This “great” men however …show more content…

The reality to this is that theses Conquistadors did have assistance from the locale people. I believe the following quote best summarise the falsity of this myth with Cortes, “the final siege and assault on the Mexica capital was carried out with 200,00 native allies, ‘even though they went virtually unacknowledged and certainly unrewarded.’” (Restall, 47). So, this context demonstrate that the Conquistadors were not alone in the conquest of the Aztecs, they happen to be on the right side of a civil war. The lack of recognition of the people also explores how this myth was able to manifest. The Conquistadors were able to present themselves as these great conquerors of the Americas, by ignoring the help of the natives as they wrote down history. They chose to paint themselves as theses epic warriors, when in reality they were assisted by the peoples of the Americas, and were later able to exploit these people; allowing their narrative to be favorable towards “their”

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