Francisco de Aguilar

Francisco de Aguilar (1479 — 1571?), born Alonso de Aguilar, was a Spanish conquistador who took part in the expedition led by Hernán Cortés that resulted in the conquest of the Aztec Empire and the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec state in the central Mexican plateau.

Biography Francisco de Aguilar was born in Villalba de los Barros, in Extremadura, the son of Pedro de Aguilar and Elvira de la Torre. According to some reconstructions, he was born around 1479 or 1481. On 2 December 1512, at the age of thirty-three, he obtained a license to travel to the Indies together with his brother Alonso.

Around 1531, at about fifty years of age, Francisco abandoned secular life and entered the Order of Preachers under the guidance of friar Domingo de Betanzos.

Works Late in his long life, in his early 80s, his fellow Dominicans urged him to write an account of the Aztec conquest drawing from his experiences. This account, known as Relación breve de la conquista de la Nueva España ("Brief Record [Account] of the Conquest of New Spain"), went unpublished in his lifetime, however a manuscript copy of it was preserved at the royal library of El Escorial outside of Madrid, Spain. It was first published in 1900 by the Mexican historian and archivist, Francisco del Paso y Troncoso. A modern English translation of Aguilar's chronicle is published in The Conquistadors: First-Person Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico,