War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent
Page 59
Mark Booth, my editor at Coronet (Hodder & Stoughton), was brilliant as ever, seeing what needed to be done at each stage of the writing process, and keeping me on the right course with amazing professionalism and insight.
Others who have read and been kind enough to comment on the manuscripts of the evolving War God series and who have given me much valuable advice, but who are of course not responsible in any way for the shortcomings of what I have written, include Chris and Cathy Foyle, Luis Eduardo Luna, Father Nicola Mapelli, Ileen Maisel, Jean-Paul Tarud-Kuborn, Ram Menen and Sa’ad Shah. I’m grateful to each and every one of these good and true friends of mine for their generosity with their time and their many constructive suggestions. Xavier Bartlett Carceller kindly provided translations of selected passages of the letters of Hernán Cortés. I found Adam Sharp’s The True Swordsman particularly useful as background to my descriptions of sword training and combat.
My communities on my Facebook author page (http://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock) and on my Facebook personal page (http://www.facebook.com/GrahamHancockDotCom), and also my website community (www.grahamhancock.com) have been incredibly supportive of me through the several years of my life that War God has dominated my writing and my creativity.
Last but not least I want to put on record my appreciation for those Spaniards and Mexica of the sixteenth century who were caught up in the events of the conquest and wrote about it at first hand, leaving accounts luminous with the spirit and terror of the time that I have been able to draw on in creating this book – sometimes even putting the exact words of the individual concerned into the mouth of his or her character in my story. A number of modern scholars have also written important works on the events of the conquest, without which I would not have been able to develop a full appreciation of the period, and again I am grateful for the tremendous job they have done. Needless to say none of them is responsible in any way for the shortcomings of War God, but if the book has strengths it is in large part owed to them. Many more works of reference on which I have drawn could be cited here, but I list in particular the following texts to which I have most frequently had reference as primary and secondary sources for the first and second volumes of the War God trilogy:
Primary sources
Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, translated and with a new Introduction by Anthony Pagden, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1986.
Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain, translated by J. M. Cohen, Penguin Classics, London, 1963.
The Bernal Díaz Chronicles, translated and edited by Bernard Idell, Doubleday, New York, 1956.
Fray Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, translated by Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas, Orion Press, New York, 1964.
Patricia Fuentes (translator), The Conquistadors: First Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, Orion Press, New York, 1963.
Miguel León-Portilla (ed.), Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, Beacon Press, Boston, 1990.
Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson, University of California Press, Oakland, 1966.
Fray Bernardo de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain (Florentine Codex), translated from the Aztec into English by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, School of American Research, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1975.
Secondary sources
J. M. G. Le Clezio, The Mexican Dream: Or The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2009.
David Friedel, Linda Schele and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1995.
C. Harvey Gardner, The Constant Companion: Gonzalo de Sandoval, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1961.
John Eoghan Kelly, Pedro de Alvarado, Conquistador, Kennikat Press, Port Washington, NY, and London, 1932.
William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, The Modern Library, New York.
Laurette Séjourné, Burning Water: Thought and Religion in Ancient Mexico, Shambhala, Berkeley, 1976.
Karen Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2011.
Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York and London, 1993.
Hugh Thomas, Who’s Who of the Conquistadors, Cassell & Co., London, 2000.
John Grier Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner, Dogs of the Conquest, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1983.