The subjects touched upon in the Letters are so little known to the general reader (though they constantly engage the attention of able specialists) that I have supplied notes to accompany the text, which are intended to explain and complete the narrative of Cortes. These notes deal with various and very large subjects, on some of which historical authorities are not in agreement, while on many others of the greatest interest and importance the last word has not yet been spoken. The statements I have made and the opinions I have expressed on these debatable questions are based upon the results of my researches in the works cited in the Bibliographical Note preceding the Letters: their scope is explanatory and complementary—not controversial.
The portrait of Cortes which appears as a frontispiece is after the alleged Titian, now in the possession of the Duque de Plasencia.
The portrait of Charles V. represents that monarch in his early youth, at the time when Cortes first began his correspondence; it is reproduced from a print in the British Museum.
The plan of the City of Mexico is taken from the Historia Antigua of Señor Manuel Orozco y Berra and the several maps are from the editions in which they originally appeared of the Storia Antica del Messico of Clavigero, 1780, Lorenzana's Historia de Nueva Espana, 1770, and of C. St. John Fancourt's History of Yucatan from its Discovery to the Close of the Seventeenth Century.
Since the days when those illustrious pioneers in this particular field of historical research, Washington Irving and William H. Prescott laboured with results that have won them enduring fame, the classification of the vast and scattered archives of Spain has gone steadily forward, with the result that the worker of to-day finds a mass of valuable material easily accessible that had formerly to be sought at great cost of time, labour, and expense in the
