Francisco de Aguilar was a soldier on the Grijalva and Cortes expeditions to the New World. After the Conquest of Mexico Aguilar joined the church and spent the rest of his life as a man of the cloth. By the time he wrote his account, Relación breve de la conquista de la Nueva España, he was supposedly in his 80s.
It’s clear he felt some guilt for his part in the bloodier parts of the Conquest. He barely describes the Cholula Massacre, one of the most bloodthirsty and devastating events of the Conquest.
Mexico has a digital version of Relación breve available.
English Excerpt: Aguilar describes the first encounter with Otomies in Tlaxcala territory.
“And then Cristóbal de Olid came out with another one on horseback, like a man possessed, to hit the warriors, and as the horses were running with their bells and the shots were fired, the Indians, terrified of seeing something so new, stopped a little, and only two Indians waited for those on horseback, one on one side of the road and the other on the other, and one of them cut off the whole neck of the horse where Cristóbal de Olid was riding, and then the horse died; and the other who was on the other side threw another knife at the other who was on horseback, and cutting all the pastern of the horse on which he made the blow, he also fell like the other, dead.”
