War God (82 page)

First and foremost I am grateful to my wife and partner Santha, my fiercest critic and constant companion who has read every word of this book and of the two subsequent volumes that follow it and who never lets me get away with any short cuts. My children Sean, Shanti, Ravi, Leila, Luke and Gabrielle, as well as my son and daughters in law Lydia, Simone, Jason and Ayako, have all also been helpful and inspiring presences, reading draft after draft and offering encouragement and advice.

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, 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.

My editor Mark Booth at Coronet has been 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.

My communities on my Facebook author page (
www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock
) and on my Facebook personal page (
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 are 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 this first volume of the
War God
trilogy:

Primary sources

Hernan Cortes,
Letters from Mexico
, Translated and with a new Introduction by Anthony Pagden, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1986.

Bernal Diaz,
The Conquest of New Spain
, Translated by J.M. Cohen, Penguin Classics, London, 1963.

The Bernal Diaz Chronicles
, Translated and Edited by Bernard Idell, Doubleday, New York, 1956.

Fray Diego Duran,
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
, The Orion Press, New York, 1963.

Francisco Lopez de Gomara,
Cortes: The Life of the Conqueror
by his Secretary, Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson, University of California Press, 1966.

Fray Bernardo de Sahagun,
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, 1975.

Miguel Leon-Portilla (Ed),
Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico
, Beacon Press, Boston, 1990.

Secondary sources

J.M.G. Le Clezio,
The Mexican Dream: Or The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations
, Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, The 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, 1961.

John Eoghan Kelly,
Pedro de Alvarado, Conquistador
, Kennikat Press, Port Washington, N.Y., and London, 1932.

William H. Prescott,
History of the Conquest of Mexico
, The Modern Library, New York.

Karen Sullivan,
The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors
, University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Hugh Thomas,
Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes 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, 1983.