History: It was Frank O'Connor who attributed to Turgenev (though others say it was Dostoevsky) the remark about the origins of the contemporary short story, that "we have all come out from under Gogol's Overcoat", that 19th-century Russian masterpiece of tragic and humorous circumstance.
In like manner, I feel that students of contemporary Spanish history have been indelibly marked by two works of exceptional worth: Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth, which succinctly sets out the origins and background of the Spanish Civil War, and the simply magisterial account of that same war by historian Hugh Thomas in his book, The Spanish Civil War. In its later editions, Thomas's book has undergone a certain transmogrification, not always for the better, from its original 1961 edition. This is, I feel, due in part to a discernible political shift to the right by Thomas, now a peer, and carrying a new name, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton.
Since The Spanish Civil War days, Hugh Thomas has indefatigably turned his historian's mind to the vexed history of Cuba, and more recently, in the 1990s, to the colonisation and conquest of Mexico in his book The Conquest of Mexico. In this book, which surely has some authoritative claim to being the worthy successor of William Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), Thomas marshalled his sources with aplomb and intelligence. However, there were, in my view, two basic flaws, one occasioned by ideological, the other by historiographical, blindness, though they may be one and the same thing. The first was that, by dint of emphasising the horrors of human sacrifice as practised by the Aztecs, Thomas more or less occluded the tortures and death by fire of the Inquisition. The uncomfortable fact is that the Spaniards, too, practised human sacrifice. The second was that there was serious lack of cognisance given to indigenous sources. The Florentine Codex, written in Nahuatl during the 1550s, and now translated into several languages, is an indispensable source of knowledge of the Conquest. European historiography ignores indigenous sources at its peril.
Thomas's new book, Rivers of Gold, subtitled "The Rise of the Spanish Empire", purports to tell the wider story of the rise of the Spanish Empire. It is a substantial tome, taking us from the siege of Granada by King Fernando and Queen Isabel of Spain and the end of Muslim rule in Europe, to Columbus's voyages, to the bloody conquest of Mexico and Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe. Undoubtedly, Columbus's exploits, as Thomas makes clear, led in a future generation to the conquest and settlement of half the Americas by Spain. This, despite the fact that he had no idea that North America existed, and that he persisted in believing that the continent south of the Caribbean was part of Asia.
However, there is something curiously vapid, not to say, inadequate, about Thomas's summation of Columbus when he comments that "he was, in addition to being a wonderful sailor, a man of vision and determination who prevailed upon the monarchs of Castile to do something for which they had no inclination".
As Tzvetan Todorov has noted in his incomparable book, The Conquest of America, an examination of Columbus's commentaries shows that, far from being "a man of vision", he was smitten by a deep racial prejudice and an uncomprehending attitude when confronted by the indigenous Indian. This is entirely glossed over by Thomas.
It is relevant to note that 1492 also is the year that sees the publication of the first grammar of a modern European language - the Spanish grammar of Antonio de Nebrija. In his introduction, Nebrija writes: "Language has always been the companion of empire". It is clear, though not to Thomas, that Columbus has taken this to heart. Time and again, Columbus's own words betray him. Indians are cultureless because "they do not speak the way we speak". One of Todorov's most telling comments that is worth quoting in full is the following: "The entire history of the discovery of America is marked by an ambiguity: human alterity is at once revealed and rejected. The year 1492 already symbolises in the history of Spain this double movement: the country repudiates its interior Other by triumphing over the Moors in the final battle of Granada and by forcing the Jews to leave its territory; and it discovers the exterior Other, that whole America which will become Latin".
Rivers of Gold is divided by Thomas into 10 sections which he calls Books. Book Eight, entitled "New Spain", is by far the most interesting, but it, too, is not without its problems. Traversing ground already crossed in his previous Conquest of Mexico study, Thomas takes us through the different stages of the pre-Columbian history of Mexico. The climax of Book Eight recounts the Spanish expedition of Cortés which culminates in the siege, and conquest, of Tenochtitlán, today's Mexico City.
Though Thomas refers to the "artful letters" Cortés wrote to Charles V, we get no real sense of the enormous contradictions in Cortés's account of his encounter with the indigenous peoples of Mexico as evidenced in the letters themselves. These letters are beautifully crafted in Spanish, and are now available in English in Anthony Pagden's excellent edition of the letters, published by Oxford University Press. Whilst they are tantalising to read, mainly for what they tell us about the way Spaniards viewed and encountered this "other world" of the Americas,they are nonetheless documents of obfuscation and political self-serving, as the historian J.H. Elliott makes clear in his introduction to Pagden's edition of the letters. Thomas does not acknowledge this fact nearly enough.
What I feel is absent from Thomas's account, and what even the Spanish Fransciscan and Dominican chroniclers of the time document, is the sheer brutality of the Spanish military conquest, allied to the catastrophic effect of ravaging disease (the indigenous peoples had no immunity to the newly imported "European" disease of smallpox). Thomas's tone at times comes across as too eurocentric for my taste. His concluding rhetorical question at the end of his book, "Who can doubt now that the conquistadors were right to denounce the idea of religion based on human sacrifice or the simple worship of the sun or the rain?" seems facile and smug. Todorov gives us quite a different slant on the whole imperial venture. He declares with some justification that "the sixteenth century perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history".
In 1500, 80 million people inhabited the Americas. By the middle of the 16th century, there remained 10 million. Rivers of Gold has sumptuous illustrations, maps, a glossary and an ample bibliography. But, as Roy Foster has written in another context, "if history is to mean something more than war and the conduct of public affairs", then, to quote Foster again, "the histories of the unwritten must come crowding in".
Hugh Thomas's book suffers, in my view, from its stiffly imperious tone. History becomes a roll-call of significant personages who statically adorn the canvas of Imperial Spain.
What Rivers of Gold should alert us to, by virtue of what it excludes as well as what it includes, is that the processes of history writing, as commentators as diverse as Hayden White and the great short story writer Jorge Luis Borges have shown, are not a million miles away from the processes involved in the writing of fiction. Historiography can only and ever be writing filtered through a particular lens, itself the product of ideological formation. The period covered by Rivers of Gold is a harsh, violent and forbidding one. Cultural and linguistic advantage flow from imperial subjugation, undoubtedly. We are surely glad to have that rich legacy of Latin American writing in the Spanish language that has given us some of the best novels, short stories and poetry produced in the 20th century. But, in the telling of the "story" of an historical period such as this, perhaps it behoves historians not to underplay the fact that imperial conquest always was, and is, a bloody matter. Hugh Thomas's metanarrative is often not alert enough to the fact that the "masters" of the narratives of conquest such as Columbus and Cortés are themselves often "blind" to the insights they afford.
• Ciaran Cosgrove is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin