Last Modified: 7/9/2008


Links

By Stephen Pressfield

Gates of Fire

With an uncanny ability to preserve the ancient feel of the Homeric voice while bringing the narrative into the twentieth century, Steven Pressfield has crafted a completely absorbing and dramatic epic of battle and the Spartan way of life and death.

Bernard Cornwell

Sword Song

Sword Song continues the story of Uhtred, the Saxon warrior who is a reluctant ally of Alfred the Great. This story, which occurs some five years after the events described in Lords of the North, tells how Alfred's forces evict the Danes from London. Wessex, Alfred's kingdom, has survived the great Viking assaults and now, with Uhtred as a leader, the West Saxon forces begin the campaigns of conquest that will end with a new kingdom called England.

Bernard Cornwell

Sharpe's Eagle

Book Series: The Sharpe Books
Richard Sharpe and the Talavera Campaign, July 1809
Publishing Information: Harper Collins Publisher, 1981; Paperback, Audio Cassette and Video
Buy Sharpe's Eagle: at Amazon.com and at Amazon.co.uk

Wilbur Smith

The Burning Shore

This first volume of the second Courtney sequence, The Burning Shore is a marvellous epic of courage and love that moves from the blazing skies of war torn France to the secret heart of the African wilderness.
It is the odyssey of a beautiful young woman of aristocratic birth, Centaine de Thiry, in search of love and fortune a monumental journey of mystery and discovery.

Gary Jennings

Aztec Autumn

Aztec Autumn takes us to a time one generation after the Conquest, when the magnificent Aztec empire has fallen beneath the brutal heel of the invading Spaniards. But one proud Aztec, Tenamaxtil, refuses to bow to the foreign conquerors - and secretly begins to recruit from among the struggling survivors of the Conquest, an army of insurrection.

Samuel Schellabarger

Captain from Castile

The list author says:
"1518 AD - Spain and Aztec Mexico - Fleeing from false accusations made to the Spanish Inquisition by corrupt officials, young nobleman Pedro de Vargas travels to Cuba where he joins the expedition of Hernan Cortes and his Conquistadors as they set out to battle the Aztecs and conquer Mexico."

Bernal Diaz Del Castillo

The Conquest of New Spain

Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496 - 1584) was a conquistador, who wrote an eyewitness account of the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards under Hernán Cortés, himself serving as a rodelero under Cortés. Born in Medina del Campo (Spain), he came from a family of little wealth and he himself had received only a minimal education. He sailed to Cuba in 1514 to make his fortune, but after two years found few opportunities there.

William H. Prescott

History of the Conquest of Mexico

The country of the ancient Mexicans, or Aztecs as they were called, formed but a very small part of the extensive territories comprehended in the modern republic of Mexico. Its boundaries cannot be defined with certainty. They were much enlarged in the latter days of the empire, when they may be considered as reaching from about the eighteenth degree north to the twenty-first on the Atlantic; and from the fourteenth to the nineteenth, including a very narrow strip, on the Pacific. In its greatest breadth, it could not exceed five degrees and a half, dwindling, as it approached its south-eastern limits, to less than two. It covered, probably, less than sixteen thousand square leagues. Yet, such is the remarkable formation of this country, that though not more than twice as large as New England, it presented every variety of climate, and was capable of yielding nearly every fruit found between the equator and the Arctic circle.

William H. Prescott

History of the Conquest of Peru

History of the Conquest of Peru is a companion volume to William H. Prescott's "History of the Conquest of Mexico".  It continues his chronicle of Spanish exploits in the New World.  

Recommended Reading

Italian Wars
by Angus Konstam

Codex Medoza
by Kurt Ross

Codex Nuttal
by Zelia Nuttall

Codex Borgia
by Gisele Diaz

Glory Days of Baja
by Larry Stanton

Arriba Baja
by Larry Stanton

The Origins of the Inquisition
by B. Netanyahu