For several decades after the first expedition of Columbus in 1492, Spain took control of the territory of a dozen modern states of America and conquered the two most powerful civilizations of the continent - the Aztec and Inca empires. Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and other conquistadors are firmly entrenched in history as exemplars of arrogance toward foreign cultures, rampant avarice, and often irrational cruelty. There was a lot of this in their actions, but this was not the only thing driving these first real European colonialists. They were bearers of medieval chivalric romance culture, had complex ideas about rights, citizenship and the limits of royalty, and would not have been able to win their victories without the energetic support of many natives. Conquistadors, who, quite in the spirit of the Late Middle Ages, did not distinguish faith and glory for themselves, and were also adherents of those forms of political organization in which any division of secular and spiritual issues looked absurd, may seem to us hopeless retrogrades. Yet for all their undeniable flaws, the histories of the conquistadors can only be adequately judged if we are open and receptive to the culture of their world, which, alien as it may seem to us, was as human and as fallible as our own.