Even if time is what it is, the series has a number of historical deviations itself.
Culture
- Amelia claims the Muslim conquerors of Hispania weren't invaders and that Christians lived in harmony with them except in counted occasions. While it's true that a lot has been written to exaggerate the magnitude of the conquest from both sides, the state of life for Christians under their rule cannot be comfortably called "harmony", if anything because, as subjects of a Muslim rule, they were charged with extra taxations and abuses that didn't even disappear completely even if they converted to Islam (not all Muslims were treated equally, as it often marked an important difference whether they were ethnically Arabs, Berbers or Spaniards).
- The Spanish Inquisition (unexpectedly so) was actually much less harsh than depicted in the series. Unless being a recidivist of a grave heresy, only unrepentant defendants would in fact be sentenced to death, an issue that never even comes up at the trial shown, but which would be the key one for real Inquisition tribunals. Torquemada himself, despite his reputation in pop culture, was not as Ax-Crazy as portrayed here, and would have definitely never dared to ignore an edict from the Queen or the Pope as shown here, especially not for the sake of sending a random accused to the stake.
- Also, the Inquisition wasn't the King's personal body of interrogators as portrayed in Episode 21, where Philip II sends De las Cuevas to them to be forced to tell the door that will change the past. Regardless of his authority, they would have not accepted to give potro to a man that was not accused of heresy (in fact, few accused were tortured to begin with, heretics or not), and especially not as part of what is ostensibly a military matter, something absolutely outside of their jurisdiction.
- Episode 12 has Pacino going undercover as a priest and being horrified when he realizes that he has to say mass and he has no idea about how it is done. He manages in the end, but nobody finds strange the fact that he says mass in Spanish even though Catholic mass was still said in Latin in 1808.
- In line with the previous, although arguably weirder, Constanza and Don Fadrique's wedding in 1212 begins in Latin, but switches to Spanish later on. We can probably attribute this to Translation Convention, though.
- The Loarre castle crew speaks Spanish in the 11th century, when Aragonese would be appropriate.
- In Episode 21, Alonso laments that he misses Philip II's times, where the king supposedly "ruled over everything", and the episode proves it further by making Philip a time-travelling overlord, as if this were his usual policy. In real life, however, this conception of Philip's reign is wildly inaccurate. As a dynastic state, the Spanish Empire was not an absolute monarchy, but a composite one: the king ruled over many lands because he happened to have inherited them, but those territories still remained distinct political entities with their own jurisdictions, to which the king was himself subjected as if he was the king of every territory alone. An example is that of the Antonio Pérez del Hierro, a political enemy to Philip II that managed to save himself from prison and execution by resorting to the Fueros de Aragón, a legal code of the Kingdom of Aragon which not even the king himself could violate.
- When Amelia states her belief that "within every man, peasant or king, there is a human being who feels and suffers", Philip and Vázquez de Leca's reaction is bewilderment, with Leca even replying that she must be suicidal to openly proclaim that. To imply that the kings of a certain time of humanity didn't even concede their subjects a basis of humanity would be bizarre regardless of the time in question, but considering Philip and Leca come from the Spanish Golden Age, the age of humanism, natural law, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the School of Salamanca, this scene comes across as delirious.
- Episode 29, set in 1516 in Yucatán, has Spanish captain Gaspar de Entrerríos screaming racial slurs against the natives, exhorting his soldiers to "exterminate those beasts" and stating to Jerónimo de Aguilar that "they are not people, they are animals", and this is not implied to be anything unusual for the setting. It goes hopefully without saying that there was no such system of beliefs behind the Spanish conquest of America, or else the constant intermarriage between Spaniards and natives would imply Spain was populated by zoophiles.note In real life, the Spanish sense of superiority was religious and cultural, not racial, with the official stance being that it was the natives' Human Sacrifice, cannibalism and paganism which gave Christians the right and duty to rule over them for their own souls' sakeand even then (there were even free black conquistadores, and this was not more relevant than them being Christians and subjects to the king just like all the rest). Racial ideas against indigenous peoples only came in the Age of Enlightenment, when thinkers like Voltaire, Hume, Montesquieu and Kant made them popular.
- In the same episode, Pacino and Alonso argue back and forth about whether Spaniards or Mayans can be considered more humane than the other, and in the process Pacino indulges in several modern pop culture misconceptions about the Spanish Empire that are half-truths at the best.
- He claims that Spaniards stole all the gold from America. This is uber-present in pop culture, and true to the extent that a lot of silver and gold extracted in Mexico went (or tried to go) to continental Spain, but in actuality, the biggest part of it was actually invested in their own lands, being used by the Viceroyalty of New Spain to develop its own infrastructure, of which many natives themselves benefitted (as mentioned above, race by itself was simply not a hot thing there, so being in the upper class of any culture and/or having good ol' money were way more decisive for your status than belonging to one race or another).
- His claim that the Spaniards "worked the natives off like mules" seems to imply that Mesoamerican societies didn't have their own brutal system of slavery, which the Spaniards officially abolished because in their laws it was illegal for a Christian to enslave another (only Africans could be slaves by this point, and even those were legally given a lot of leeway to become freedmen). While similar abuses were committed by the arriving encomenderos or land-owners, as it happens in any conquest, so did the indigenous upper class whenever they could keep their status, and the Spanish crown generally attempted to stop those excesses, not endorse them. Even Pacino's phrasing is ironic, as Spaniards also introduced pack animals and carts for the first time in America, substantially easing transport and working conditions; up to that point, native workforce had been exclusively based on human porters or tamemes.
- Pacino also compares the tribes' human sacrifice and cannibalism to the executions Spanish Inquisition, and Gonzalo later repeats this, claiming that they are not any more brutal than Europeans. It's tempting to underline that both sacrifices and executions were religiously-motivated murders, but even this comparison carries only qualitative weight, not quantitative; it would not be inaccurate to estimate that, in especially sacrifice-friendly states like the Mexica Empire, a single year likely outdid any number of executions carried over by the Spanish Inquisition in all of its centuries of existence. Again, making a cultural judgement is not the same as presenting a falsely balanced portrayal.
- The finish is given in the form of a comparison, specifically how would Alonso feel if a Mayan entered his house and started telling him what to do. Again, this is a half truth; while it's undeniable that there was a change on central power, most native chieftains actually stayed on their thrones after being conquered, either in reward for having allied with the Spaniards or just because it was simply easier to keep things under control that way, and many of their descendants ended up in high positions within the viceroyalties. For indigenous of the level of development shown in the series, the biggest change brought by the conquest would be becoming Christians and having their native overlords being busy elsewhere.
Warfare
- Episode 29 presents an artsy, but otherwise surreal introduction in 1516 where a fictional expedition of Spanish arquebusiers disembark on the Yucatán forming a wall of rifles and mowing down a cadre of native attackers (with a priest blessing them in real time a la Age of Empires II to give it flavor). Literally everything in the scene is inaccurate, from the historical event to the battle considerations, but especially the latter.
- The most notable aspect might be that the Mayans are portrayed as Stone Age-style savages, wearing only loincloths and wielding only crude bows and clubs, rather than showcasing the variety of clothing, armor and weapons used by their civilization at the time. They lack shields, spears, bladed maces, battle standards, headdresses, protections, cloaks or just anything really Mayan, to the point their portrayal resembles arguably more the Chichimecs, the primitive nomads of the central region of Mexico who warred against both the Mexica and the Spaniards. Only Gonzalo is later shown wielding a true Mesoamerican weapon, a bladed mace or macuahuitl, which feels almost out of place there, but even this weapon's usage is portrayed incorrectly - it seems to strike bluntly like a baseball bat, as if its obsidian blades were dull, when in real life it was a powerfully cutting weapon whose strikes could decapitate a man if well placed.
- Conversely, the Spaniards from this prologue are ludicrously overequipped, with full armors that would have looked fancy in Charles V’s royal guard and arquebuses for just everybody, and save for their rapiers, no other kind of weapon, not even pikes or halberds. In reality, complete armor was rare in the Conquest of America, as expeditions were often sorely undersupplied, while firearms were actually pretty uncommon, because they were difficult to maintain in the humid tropical climate and were always running short of gunpowder (crossbows were favored over them for those very reasons). In any case, arriving to an unknown beach guns ablazing was absolutely not the way conquests were started, not without previously trying to make peaceful contact with the tribes in control in order to learn about the land and whether they could be peacefully attracted to their side (which was, in fact, the exact way Hernán Cortés would later make contact with Guerrero's tribe).
- It's also odd that the conquistadores here are composed solely by white Spaniards. While it's true that Indian allies would not be deployed in plenty in Mexico until Hernán Cortés popularized it, most Spanish expeditions at the time still would have featured some Cuban native auxiliars and more than a few black slaves, who were often given active roles in the fights and could buy their freedom with the booty gained (something which was not only legally possible, but actually very common in the Spanish Empire's system of slavery). Those non-white fighters were presumably Adapted Out so the "historical" message the series intended to give was clearer.
- Guerrero claims the Spaniards killed half of the women and children in their last attack. It's never explained why did they decide to butcher innocent non-combatants, especially going out of their way to do so in midst of a battle (and a losing one to boot), which makes it look like it was a sort of irresistible custom For the Evulz or a deliberate attempt at weed out population, as if unnecessarily destroying native manpower wasn't already a bad thing for the conquistadores' future cities and encomiendas. Ironically, this kind of act was more typical of tribal warfare, like those of the Mayans themselves.
Characters
- Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros appears as a Cardinal next to Queen Isabel in 1491, a blatant anachronism (which was officially acknowledged by TVE) because Cisneros was not in the Castilian Court until one year later and was not made Cardinal until 1507, long after Isabel's death. Also, while the actor is the same that played Cisneros in the series Isabel (Eusebio Poncela), he is characterized to look way older, closer to what he looked like in the sequel Carlos, Rey Emperador, which is set 12 to 24 years later depending on the episode. It's likely that Poncela shot his scene between takes of the second series and they didn't bother to change the makeup used.
- The legend of Constanza and Don Fadrique was invented for the series, although the characters themselves are vaguely historical, only transplanted from a later age. Fadrique seems to be based on a historical figure, Fadrique Enríquez de Castilla, while Constanza echoes his illegitimate lover Constanza de Angulo, who he had two children with. The episode claims Fadrique fought in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), which took place well over a century before his historical counterpart was even born.
- The series doesn't make any favors to Charlton Heston, who appears portrayed as a boorish idiot who asks whether there were rifles in El Cid Campeador's time and whether El Cid and Christopher Columbus were related. The real Heston might have not been a historian, but he studied at the Northwestern University and even specialized in Shakesperian theatre, so it would have been exceedingly unlikely for him to be so damn uncultured about medieval stuff. The story about Ramón Menéndez Pidal being completely ignored in the set of the film is true, only that the filmmakers weren't as ignorant as shown here.
- Ximena, El Cid's wife, describes the fake Cid as a loyal, noble, caring and just person, and is outspoken enough about how superior he is to the real deal that we can feel exactly what she thought of the latter. In real life, there is no evidence that Ximena and Rodrigo had an unhappy marriage, or that Rodrigo wasn't worthy of those adjectives himself. It's even strange that Ximena seems to dislike that Rodrigo worked as a mercenary, when this was actually a perfectly reputable activity among lordless knights, especially for those unjustly banished like El Cid was (hence the famous verse "¡Dios qué buen vassallo! ¡Si oviesse buen señor!").
- The decision to have Ambrogio Spinola as an exemplar military badass and a Bruce Willis lookalike probably comes from the series' creator Javier Olivares being a friend of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, whose series Alatriste features of a bit of Spinola. The historical Spinola was very far from this image of career general, as he was first and foremost a Genoese merchant with little interest for war and whose career in the tercios, in which he was more of a private military contractor than a soldier, happened very later in his life and not entirely on his own will.
- Spinola not only asks since when do women like Amelia lead soldiers, but also claims that women cannot even interpret a map. Someone from the 17th century should not be expected to be the most egalitarian person imaginable, but this characterization is too sexist even for his own age and doesn't make much sense for his personal circumstances. In real life, Spinola’s father died when he was young and his siblings were raised by their mother Policena, apparently a woman quite capable to lead their family, and for most of his own military career, Ambrogio himself served under a woman of all people, Isabella Clara Eugenia of Austria, who was governor of Flanders and even ruled alone for a time. Furthermore, being a general of the Spanish Empire, he should have been familiar with names like Isabella I, Isabella of Portugal and Elizabeth I, all of them women that ruled alone over entire countries in times of war (oddly, he does actually mention Isabella I, but only to mock Amelia). If anything, one would think Spinola should be an excellent case to be portrayed the opposite way.
- It's also intriguing that both Alonso and Spinola are instantly hostile to the Muslim liaison, to the point that Alonso almost kills him without a word and Spinola's first assumption is that the Moor probably killed their real agent. As Spanish veterans from the 16th and 17th centuries respectively, this attitude comes across as a bit unexplainable. Although the Spanish Empire was at war with Muslim states like the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary pirates, it was common knowledge at the time that there were Muslims opposed to those as well, and the Spaniards weren't shy to invoke Enemy Mine with them whenever they saw it fit. Alonso may have been excused for being mistrustful of the Moor on cultural reasons (less so Spinola, a much worldlier, cultured person who, as a Mediterranean merchant, would have likely have traded with Muslims in his life), but attacking him in sight would have been excessive for someone who would never be old enough to see the Expulsion of the Moriscos in his lifetime.
- The series accurately shows that the Cantar del mio Cid is a work Very Loosely Based on a True Story, if at all, but in turn, the series itself falls in this too when Ximena mentions the Infantes de Carrión, villains of Cidian myth that didn't exist in real life (there are speculations that they might have been a No Historical Figures Were Harmed version of certain Leonese nobles, but this is much discussed).
- A lot of emphasis is made on Mary Tudor's burning of heretics, looking like she spends all of her days executing people and making her nickname of Bloody Mary an understatement. Alonso even puts them at the level of the Spanish Inquisition, which in this series is subjected to its usual Historical Villain Upgrade. In reality, and Protestant propaganda aside, the number of executions ordered by Mary was around 280, which for the European wars of religion was almost Poke the Poodle.
- Bernal Díaz del Castillo is played here by the 51 years old Josep Julien, who basically looks his age, when the historical figure would have been 22 at the time. Admittedly, he turns out to be an imposter, but Aguilar reveals he knew the real Díaz and he still comments nothing about the imposter's blatant age difference. Aguilar's tale about their encounter in Écija also implies Díaz was already a veteran soldier rather than a teenager when he embarked for the Indies.
- Gonzalo Guerrero is portrayed in classical Going Native light, being there to claim that even with their cannibalism and human sacrifice, Mesoamericans are not more brutal than Europeans. It's unlikely the real Guerrero had any pretension of morality to elect to stay, especially such a questionable one; according to the chronicles, he only stayed because he had a wife and children, as well as an important status, and because he doubted Spaniards would welcome him back after having become a native.
- Jerónimo de Aguilar, on the other hand, is portrayed here as a pathetic figure, with a deep crisis of faith about the Christian god, who still wears his old cassock among the natives, having refused to adopt their clothing and ways like Gonzalo Guerrero does. Nothing of this is even remotely true; in real life, Aguilar was dressed in a Mayan cloak and loincloth when the Spaniards found him, as he had quite successfully adapted to their ways just like Guerrero, and was quite in high spirits about his faith. Also, this version of him is constantly mistreated by the natives, even their children, when his real life self was popular with the locals, to the point his chieftain constantly offered him women and was amused that Jerónimo refused to marry for religious reasons.
- The choice of portraying Philip II as a Big Brother-like megalomaniac feels more than a bit out-of-character in coherence with his reign for what we know. In real life, while Philip was certainly an infamous workoholic and bureaucreat, as well as an inflexible Catholic, he didn't stand out for any Orwellian attitude, but rather the opposite: his reign was a perennial target of hostile propaganda from his many enemies, even from his own Spanish subjects for his political mistakes,for instance yet he never really bothered to contest those views or merely cultivate a political image for him and his kingdom, something that would have been unthinkable in the England, France or Netherlands of the time, and only ordered to ban official biographies of himself. The show half-justifies it by implying that the defeat of the Spanish Armada broke Philip into this state of mind, but this brings its own problems, as underlined in Events below.
- In Episode 21, Philip II learns that the United States rule the 21th century, and upon assuming wrongly that said nation is formed by native Americans, he becomes shocked and angry that some "savages" could become so powerful. This disdainful slur strikes as odd, not only because he of all people should have known better about America's potential (his viceroyalties in America, which were the richest and most developed in his empire, had been built over absolutely massive indigenous empires), and but also because Philip was never unkind to any potential native subjects (among other measures, he introduced a reform that officially restricted violent conquest, and ordered crimes against natives should be investigated with more care that those against other Spaniards, as it was understood that the administration of the new lands was still irregular and it made natives more prone to be abused). While it could be chalked to the character being really pissed off at that scene, his disdain is still bizarre for a historical character with his attitudes.
- In Episode 31, as part of the story's motif about discrimination, Philip III's Expulsion of the Moriscos is contrasted against the goals of Simón Bolívar, who is presented as a fighter for freedom and tolerance. The comparison is unfortunate, as in real life, Bolívar was quite racist himself, not only against both indigenous Americans and black Africans, but also against Spaniards themselves, whom he saw as a different race from criollos like him. While the real life Philip was not a paragon of tolerance by modern standards either, his reasons for the Expulsion of the Moriscos were actually political and religious (there was the popular suspicion that many Moriscos were secretly Muslims plotting against the kingdom, and their participation in Barbary pirate attacks and the bloody Rebellion of the Alpujarras didn't exactly help to disprove this), which, in the eyes of an audience of the 2010s, would have likely not outweighed Bolívar's racial attitudes had the latter been portrayed faithfully.
Events
- The tag at the beginning of Episode 9 identifies the location of El Cid as "Valencia, year 1079". However, El Cid did not go east until the following year, and arrived in the Valencia region for the first time around 1087.
- In the same episode, Amelia claims that Muslims have been living in the Iberian Peninsula for centuries and, except by the Almoravids, are not conquerors. It hopelessly goes without saying that those claims are more than a little bit inaccurate. She even claims that the rest of the Muslim taifas live peacefully with the Christians, which should be refuted by the own episode's plot point that El Cid was actually an amoral mercenary working even for Muslims – if everybody lived in peace and only the Almoravids broke it, who and why used to hire Rodrigo in the first place?
- Episode 6's time door is in a confession booth, even though confession booths had not been invented yet in 1520.
- In the series Pablo Picasso's Guernica is recalled from the Guggenheim Museum, when in real life it was from the Museum of Modern Art. This mistake at least was acknowledged by the creators.
- Gonzalo Guerrero claims the local chieftain gave him his daughter to marry in reward for trouncing the Spanish invasion pictured in the prologue. In real life, he married his daughter in reward for fighting off other Mayan tribes.
- The series follows pop belief by heavily overstating the failure of the Spanish Armada, which in real life was neither as traumatic nor as deadly as it is commonly believed. In the show, Medina Sidonia's messengers claim 70 ships lost, almost half of the original 154 ships, but those numbers are Dated History, as careful modern research in the official registers showed only 35 were lost, being most of them light vessels; still large losses, but neither critical nor exceedingly higher than a tough battle against the British fleet, which actually outnumbered the Armada. It was also followed by a big victory over the English Armada, after which the war ended in a treaty that was favorable to Spain and its dominance of the seas - in other words, things that should have reasonably come up in the talks with De las Cuevas and Martí, instead of acting as if the Armada was a sort of final life failure that Philip II must endure.
- The greatest license of the Armada, however, might be Philip II's reaction to the event, as in real life he reportedly took it quite in stride, as it was usual for him in those cases; he accepted stoically that it had been a monumental bout of bad luck, especially not an irreversible one, and explicitly didn't blame the Duke of Medina Sidonia for the fiasco. In the series, meanwhile, the defeat of the Spanish Armada is enough of a Despair Event Horizon to break down the already bitter Philip II into using the Ministry to change time, an option he clearly always had but had apparently never been tempted to use in any of his previous battles (and he does blame Medina Sidonia onscreen).
