Historia, di Don Ferdinando Cortes, marchese della Valle, capitano valorosissimo

$3,500 · Offered by Book Collector Inc

Author: Francisco Lopez de Gomara ( 1511-c1566) Year: 1564 Publisher: Giovanni Bonadio Place: Venetia (Venice) Description: [8]+355 leaves+[Venetia 1564 page] with l ists of words in Nahuatl: leaves 299-303. Small octavo (5 3/4" x 4") bound1 8th-century stiff vellum. (European Americana 564/25; Medina BHA 159n; Sabin 27741; Wagner, Spanish Southwest 2v) Early Italian translation of the stand-alone third part of Lopez de Gomara's 1552 landmark History of the West Indies, dedicated to the exploits of Hernán Cortés. Francisco López de Gómara was a Spanish historian who worked in Seville, particularly noted for his works in which he described the early 16th century expedition undertaken by Hernán Cortés in the Spanish conquest of the New World. Although Gómara himself did not accompany Cortés, and had in fact never been to the Americas, he had firsthand access to Cortés and others of the returning conquistadores as the sources of his account. However other contemporaries, among them most notably Bernal Díaz del Castillo, criticized his work as being full of inaccuracies, and one which unjustifiably sanitized the events and aggrandized Cortés' role. As such, the reliability of his works may be called into question; yet they remain a valuable and oft-cited record of these events. With the information given him by the conqueror and other persons who had returned from the New World (he himself cites Gonzalo de Tapia and Gonzalo de Umbria) he wrote his Historia general de las Indias .

• Binding: Hardcover

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