THE True History of the Conquest of New Spain, written by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of the Conquerors, was known and appreciated by historians and bibliographers before it was published. Antonio de Herrera quotes it frequently, Friar Juan de Torquemada also refers to it on several occasions, and the Licentiate Antonio de Leon Pinelo devotes some lines to it in his brief bibliography.

Although the original manuscript has always been kept in Guatemala, first by the Author, and afterwards by his descendants, and still later by the Municipality of the Capital, in whose archives it is preserved to-day, a copy of it was made in the sixteenth century and sent to Spain to King Philip II and was there consulted by the Royal chroniclers. After its publication in Madrid by Friar Alonzo Remón of the Order of Mercy in the year 1632 the True History was universally accepted from that time onwards as the most complete and trustworthy of the chronicles of the Conquest of New Spain. A second edition followed almost immediately in the same city, some four years later a third, a fourth, and a fifth. It was translated into English by Maurice Keatinge in 1800 and John Ingram Lockhart in 1844; into German by Ph. J. von Rehfues in 1838 and Karl Ritter in 1848; into French by D. Jourdanet in 1876 and José María de Heredia in 1877, and into Hungarian by Károly Brózik in 1878 and Moses Gaal in 1899.