When I read Bernal Diaz, I was stuck by how Cortez automatically understood the Aztec empire. Empire formed from a bunch of city-states, check. Run by heart-ripping heathen, check. Form alliance with free republican city-state that has good archers, check. Order 40,000 copper crossbow bolts, check. Hump Malinche, check. Learn local language? No. Just hump Malinche again. Double check. Fight a bunch of all-infantry Agincourts, using small force of cavalry and crossbowmen for command, control, communication, check. Kidnap enemy Emperor, check. Fight your way out of enemy capital, check. Allow disease to trash enemy civilization, check. Come back and conquer enemy empire, write home and make it look good, check.

Maybe that’s how Cortez really was, or maybe it’s just how Cortez was seen by a guy who spent the rest of his life unable to sleep unless he had his spiked sandals on and a cocked crossbow within reach.

It’s set initially in a Norse civilization in eastern North America. It presents an eerie medievalish take on life in a long-colonized region of eastern woodlands America, the Appalachian frontier, and out on the great plains, and [spoiler] ultimately sees the main character sign on with an unexpected army heading into Mexico to take on the Aztecs.

A Norse supporting character who also takes part in this invasion notes rightly that from the Aztecs perspective this represents the end of the world, and in a mixture of pride and awe observes that he is taking part in a kind of Ragnarok.

Good times.

It’s a first-hand account of a hardy band of adventures conquering an empire run by human-sacrificing priests from atop their pyramid-temples built on a lake inside an extinct volcano.

No accident you frame it that way: Bernal Diaz himself framed The Conquest of New Spain with the tropes of chivalric romance, a then popular genre Cervantes would murder 20 years after Bernal Diaz’s death.

Also, greatest occupational title ever, “conquistador”; only “international man of mystery” beats that!