Setting History Straight and Relocating King Carlos III

Your article, “The Right Statue, but the Wrong King,” (Metro, Sept. 24) was nothing short of hilarious. The City Council members who supported council members Richard Alatorre and Gloria Molina in opposition to the moving of the statue of King Carlos III to Olvera Street must, like (presumably) Alatorre and Molina, have studied Hispano-American history in a California public school.

Mistaking Carlos III for Ferdinand V is bad enough, alleging that Ferdinand “basically conquered Mexico and the Mexicans” is even worse, but imputing the conquest of the Aztecs solely to Hernando Cortes, authorized (according to Molina) by Ferdinand, really makes it a comedy of errors.

Ferdinand V died Feb. 23, 1516, three years before the Spanish expedition under Cortes sailed from Cuba on Feb. 18, 1519. The King of Spain at that time was the Emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain), a man more French and Flemish than Spanish. He had spent most of his life in Holland and could hardly speak Spanish at all. To attribute the conquests of the Aztecs solely to the Spanish force is a basic error.

At no time up to and including the fall of Mexico City did the Spanish number more than 1,500; in the final assault upon the Aztec capital they were assisted by more than 20,000 Tlascalan Indians who had been at war with the Aztecs for years before the coming of the Spaniards. What Cortes did, in effect, was to intervene in a Mexican civil war with his little Spanish force and, playing off one Indian nation against another, subjugated all--certainly a tribute to his great strategic generalship.

Charles III (1716-1788) had nothing to do with the conquest of Mexico. He was a contemporary of our own George Washington whom he assisted in our own revolution to establish our independence from Britain. He expelled the Jesuits from Spain for their excessive zealotry and resisted the Spanish Inquisition in its excessive persecution of “heretics” Spanish, Mexican and otherwise.

He is generally thought to be one of the greatest of the Bourbon kings and, as an ex-king of California, he probably deserves his statue in Olvera Street along with his governor, Capt. Felipe de Neva. Who knows, maybe George III also deserves a statue in Washington, D.C., his ineptitude in colonial politics (as Molina suggests) enabled our own independence.

DUKE MILLER

Yucca Valley