Cortés's Second Letter to Charles V

The second letter of Hernán Cortés to Charles V, dated 30 October 1520, was printed in Seville by Jacobo Cromberger in 1522. Two witnesses were compared: a copy of this first edition, held at the John Carter Brown Library and digitized on Internet Archive, and the collection of Cortés's letters published in Paris in 1866 by Pascual de Gayangos, in the Harvard copy digitized by Google. The 1866 collection, the first critical edition of the letters, reproduces the text more than three centuries after its publication, with the apparatus of its time; the 1522 printing gives the letter as it first circulated. The text we selected for our work is therefore the Seville edition of 1522, in the John Carter Brown Library copy.

The scan, printed in black-letter type, was converted to text, then proofread and cleaned; a few passages remain illegible. Two additions by the printer, later than the letter, were set aside: brief news items placed after Cortés's signature, and the colophon dated November 1522. The letter runs as a single continuous piece, without chapters or divisions. The text thus established runs to about 32,000 words.

How we transform the text. This book is neither a literal translation nor a facsimile: it is a rewriting in today's language, carried out in three stages. Modernisation renders the text in contemporary English; each place and person receives a single modern form, and period terms (currencies, measures, titles) are kept, with a light gloss where needed. Clarification untangles the long sentences of the period, one idea per sentence, adding nothing and removing nothing. Shaping the narrative divides the text into titled chapters and restores its flow; repetitive passages are condensed, but no dated, numbered or named fact is removed. Each stage is followed by a review of fidelity to the original text.