NONFICTION - Oct. 17, 1993

CORTES: The Great Adventurer and the Fate of Mexico by Richard Lee Marks (Alfred A. Knopf: $27.50; 339 pp.). The approach to history in this book is so dated you’d think it was written 40 years ago--Montezuma is described as “a blood-besotted, heathen, cannibal king,” Spanish women are said to be “in the amplitude of their passion equal if not exceeding of Spanish men,” an Aztec attack on Cortes’ rear guard is called a “nuisance.” Forget such ill-advised characterizations, however; the story of Hernan Cortes, conquistador, is too grand to be damaged by minor fumbles. Cortes showed few leadership abilities when he sailed from Cuba in 1519 to make a legal claim on New Spain for his superior officer, but he grew into the job quickly--and deeply, too, for within the year he was founding unauthorized settlements and searching for Mexico’s gold on his own behalf as well as that of Carlos V, newly crowned king of the Holy Roman Empire. Hearing of the great American king Montezuma in the island city of Tenochtitlan, upon which Mexico City now stands, Cortes ventured there initially as a peaceable Christian and later, opposed, as a warrior (with rebellious non-Aztec tribes by his side). Richard Lee Marks, who notes in an introduction that he has “a Spanish heart,” is a Cortes partisan, but that doesn’t prevent him from painting a credible picture of the man: Cortes seems guileful and sincere simultaneously, respecting the Indians he encountered yet determined nonetheless to conquer them in God’s name, regardless of the cost--perhaps 250,000 lives in the 1521 siege of Tenochtitlan alone. Cortes died in Spain in 1547, rich and famous, probably never knowing that the natives who crossed themselves in the churches they were forced to build were very likely honoring the ancient, now broken idols from which they had constructed parts of the Christian icons.