Unlike many conquistadores, who hailed from the poorest lands of Spain, Díaz was born in a relatively comfortable family in Castile. A bookworm in arms in the vein of Don Quixote, he departed from the New World in the search of fortune, possibly in the grand fleet of the infamous Pedrarias Dávila. Díaz might have met Vasco Núñez de Balboa at this point, although it remains a speculation. In any case, their time in the Darién (modern day Colombia) turned out much less promising than they had been told, with plenty of deadly famines and tropical epidemics, which led Bernal and many other expeditioners to give up and try luck in other points of the nascent empire.
Díaz eventually landed in Cuba, where he became an usual crewmember of the expeditions that were exploring the Yucatan Peninsula under Governor Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar. He then joined Cortés' fleet as an Ensign Newbie, and the rest is history. Díaz ended his career as a governor in Guatemala, where he decided to write his autobiography to counter contemporaneous false beliefs about their exploits, like those of Francisco López de Gómara and Bartolomé de las Casas, though dying before publishing his work, which would be ultimately released by one of his sons.
As accustomed, Díaz was one of the earliest participants of mestizaje, in his case in a way reminiscent of a Romantic Comedy Light Novel from today. According to himself, Bernal literally asked Emperor Moctezuma II for a wife, claiming to be too poor to marry a Spanish woman, and because Moctezuma and the Spaniards were in good terms at the time, the emperor laughed and conceded, gifting him an Aztec noblewoman that was baptized as Francisca. The match had two children, Diego and Teresa, although Bernal would be later politically forced to marry a mestiza that had become widowed young, Teresa Becerra, who gave him nine other children. He also enjoyed the goods of the conquest in other ways, reportedly being almost a teetotaler yet addict to chocolate.
Díaz participated in some capacity in the 1550 Valladolid Debate, where he supported the right to conquer and own land in order to eliminate practices like Human Sacrifice and cannibalism (probably a result of almost being sacrificed himself twice during the wars), but otherwise he sided firmly with the indigenous against any abuse from his fellow conquistadores. Due to his good relations with the natives, he was made part of the investigative committee that outlawed the custom to enslave war captives accused of treason, which by this point was the only form of native slavery legally allowed in the Spanish Empire.
Not everything is nice and clean, though, as his chronicle is also an early testimony of PTSD, which plagued him and probably many other veterans even before the end of the conquest. The sum of his war experiences and the vision of the bloodthirsty Aztec culture left him suffering from anxiety, as well as unable to sleep unless fully dressed, armed and lying on the floor, until the day of his death. Although he was renowned as a soldier, claiming to have spent a not too unbelievable total of 119 days of his life fighting, he always credited luck and God (and Cortés) as the main reasons he didn't end up with his heart ripped out atop a stepped pyramid.
Díaz's work is especially valuable for his unique perspective in the events he lived. Although not a Cunning Linguist, he learned to handle himself to some degree in Taíno, Nahuatl and Cakchiquel Mayan, and by virtue of being a member of Cortés' entourage, he got to know and treat personally most of the historical characters he wrote about, like Cortés, La Malinche, Pánfilo de Narváez, Moctezuma, Ixtlilxochitl and the lords of Tlaxcala, which helped him perform a journalistic job, often with native translators to complete his own tongue, in order to gather all the possible info. His writings are also ready to criticize Cortés whenever he sees it fit, snarking about his irregular distributions of booty, his occasional blunders and his chorus of bootlickers, while at the same time stressing out his own loyalty and admiration for him.
He is not devoid of controversy, though. Although most of what he wrote harmonizes with what we know of the real events, several inconsistencies in the registers have led some authors to speculate, as with Amerigo Vespucci, that Díaz did not actually participate in the conquest of the Aztecs and the whole True History was not written by him, with popular theories going from Cortés himself being the author using Díaz as a cover, to Díaz's children having hijacked memoirs of Cortés or another conquistador to aggrandize their father. Although those theories lay outside of the mainstream, truth remains unknown.
In fiction
Live-Action TV- He appears as an agent of the title ministry in The Ministry of Time, played by Josep Julien, although he turns out to be a fake.
- Played by Miguel Ángel Amor in Hernán.
