The Wrath of God: Lope de Aguirre, Revolutionary of the Americas by Evan L. Balkan (review)

In the sixteenth century, travel narratives, chronicles, letters, and maps attested to European processes of exploration and conquest of the New World. Conquistadors played a major role in these processes, expanding and recording colonial territory, and enacting imperial rule. Evan L. Balkan’s book focuses on the history of Basque conquistador Lope de Aguirre, historically known as “The Tyrant,” and popularly as the mad conquistador in Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Despite Aguirre’s cruelty and fatal failure, Balkan’s book sets out to portray him as one of the first revolutionaries of the Americas. Balkan reads Aguirre’s project of liberating Peru from the Spanish Crown as a precedent for George Washington and Simón Bolívar’s independence campaigns. By contrasting Aguirre to these figures, Balkan places the conquistador as an early iteration of a latent anti-imperialism.

Even though Balkan is aware of Aguirre’s historical wickedness and questionable strategies to reach his goals, he exalts Aguirre’s ability to persuade other explorers to join his cause. In an attempt to depict Aguirre against the grain, Balkan explores how it came to be that a man “who was evil incarnate managed to lead more than a hundred others … for almost a year as they undertook an insurrection against the world’s most powerful empire” (4). His analysis is based on a variety of sources comprising historical accounts, letters, and chronicles from Aguirre’s soldiers who survived him, as well as oral traditions, literature, and psychiatric analysis. While the book lacks a systematic quotation format, this is explained early in the first pages as a way of making the story accessible to a wide readership. However, this decision does not affect Balkan’s understanding of the source material, and it leads him to inquire about the many faces of Aguirre and his significance in colonial Latin American history. In addition to the written documentation on Aguirre, Balkan includes the visual legacy of the conquistador through portraits, sculptures, plates and pictures, and maps with Aguirre’s itineraries.

Balkan provides the reader with an intriguing and well-documented narrative that traces Aguirre’s rise and fall across two of his journeys in the New World: the expedition along the Amazon River seeking El Dorado, the legendary Amazonian city of gold, and his journey back to Peru to find real wealth and freedom from the Spanish Crown. As Balkan highlights, Aguirre proved a stealthy strategist whose modus operandi oscillated between coercion and persuasion, imposing fear and consolidating trust among his men by means of his bellicose actions and speeches. Balkan’s book successfully portrays this rhetorical movement between fear and trust on which his journeys rested.

In the first part of the text, Balkan presents the quarrelsome Aguirre, who, after many hazardous years in the New World, decides to join General Pedro de Ursúa’s expedition as a last chance to succeed as a conquistador. However, when foreseeing the fruitlessness of Ursúa’s expedition and the decimation of the general’s soldiers, he changes plans. Aguirre conspired against Ursúa arguing for his failure as leader, which, eventually, led to the captain’s death. After strategic movements and persuasive speeches about leadership, treason, and freedom, which Balkan’s book anthologizes, Aguirre proclaimed himself “Prince of Liberty” and convinced a group of men to abandon the project of El Dorado, go back to Peru with him, and rebel against royal power. This turning point reveals, according to Balkan, Aguirre’s revolutionary spirit, which the author believes distinguishes him from previous rebels who sought only personal gain.

The last section of the book is dedicated to Aguirre’s downfall and death. Balkan engages Aguirre’s last months historically, but also through a psychiatric analysis as an awkward attempt to diagnose the infamous conquistador and trace his...