Cortés and Bernal Díaz

The Cartas de relación were written between 1519 and 1526 from the field and from early colonial Mexico. Bernal Díaz composed the Historia verdadera in Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala, most probably in the 1560s, though the manuscript he corrected dates to around that period; it was first published in Madrid in 1632. Both accounts concern primarily the Basin of Mexico and the Gulf coast Totonac territories, with the Tlatelolco market as the central food-historical locus.

Two men, one event, two utterly different purposes — and between their accounts, the foundation of almost everything written about the food of pre-contact and early colonial Mexico. Hernán Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo arrived in what would become New Spain within the same campaign; they wrote at different distances from those events and for different audiences. Read together, with clear eyes about what each was and was not doing, they remain irreplaceable. Cortés composed his Cartas de relación — five letters dispatched to Charles I of Spain between 1519 and 1526 — as an administrator and self-advocate. His descriptions of the great market, identified by Bernal Díaz and subsequent historians as Tlatelolco, are among the most cited passages in any discussion of Mexican food history. He reported over 60,000 people a day in that market: gold, feathers, cacao, chile, honey, copal, rubber, game, fish, prepared foods sold from stalls. The number is almost certainly an approximation made under pressure, and Cortés was writing to justify an unauthorized conquest to a monarch who had not commissioned it. His eye was politically calibrated. What he recorded he recorded because it astonished him as evidence of civilisation; what he omitted he omitted for reasons that had nothing to do with culinary exactness. He is not an impartial witness. He is, however, a contemporary one, and the Tlatelolco market passage is detailed enough — and corroborated sufficiently by other sources — to be cited with appropriate caution. Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España at the other end of a life spent as a minor colonial functionary in Guatemala. He composed it in old age, from memory, reportedly in irritation at the official histories produced by men who had not been there. His goal was credit — a soldier's pension and recognition — and his method was the granular, argumentative recall of a man who had been present in the market, at the causeway, in the kitchens. He smelled things. He noted which stalls sold what. He remembered the texture and colour of tortillas, the foam on the cacao drink, the separation of raw and cooked goods in the market lanes. He is warmer as a source than Cortés precisely because his purpose was to insist on lived experience. He is also, precisely because of that purpose, a man constructing a heroic memory. Cross-reference everything. Neither man was a disinterested observer of Indigenous foodways. Both wrote from within a colonial framework that placed European categories — grain, meat, civility — against what they encountered. Maize tortillas are 'bread' in their accounts; the cacao drink is compared to wine; tamales are parsed against European pastry. This compression is not merely a translation problem. It tells us which elements struck them as analogous to the familiar and which seemed simply foreign, and therefore received fewer precise words. Where Bernal Díaz is most useful — on the market, on the organisation of Moctezuma's household meals, on the range of chiles and produce visible to someone walking the stalls — he is most useful because he was not theorising but describing what he could not ignore. The Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua collaborators and completed in 1577, provides a corrective and a complement. Where Cortés and Bernal Díaz give the view from outside the market, the Codex gives the taxonomy from within — the vendors, the preparations, the standards of quality and adulteration, the things that were considered proper to eat and the things that were not. Used alongside each other, these three sources triangulate something closer to the reality of Tlatelolco's food culture than any one of them could manage alone. For the food writer and the food historian, several practices apply. First, name the source and name the date: 'Bernal Díaz, writing in the 1560s from Guatemala' is not the same as 'Bernal Díaz saw'. Second, prefer specifics over summary: the market passage in the Cartas de relación runs to several pages; do not compress it to 'an enormous market with all kinds of food'. Third, note what is absent. Neither Cortés nor Bernal Díaz records the names of most dishes in any language; they record goods, ingredients, and preparations only when these struck them as remarkable or comparable to something European. Fourth, treat the 60,000-a-day figure as a contemporaneous impression, not a census. Fifth, and most importantly, remember that these accounts describe a world already under radical stress — the Totonac allies of Cortés, the disrupted supply lines, the siege of Tenochtitlan months later — and that what they describe is not a stable, ethnographic cross-section of Mexica daily life but a high-stakes moment seen from the winning side. The honest use of these sources is not to abandon them but to read them as what they are: extraordinary, partial, politically shaped, and irreplaceable. Mexican food history has no earlier firsthand accounts in alphabetic writing of the Tlatelolco market or of the foods offered at a Mexica ruler's table. That is their authority. Their limitations are the price of that authority.