Abstract: My dissertation examines how Bernal Díaz del Castillo in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España not only uses Francisco López de Gómara's Historia de la conquista de México as a justification to validate his work but also employs Gómara's writing as a lay-out for his own chronicle. The importance of these two works was established by William H. Prescott who asserted that they represent the 'two pillars' of the history of the conquest of México. Seven decades ago, Ramón Iglesia revaluated Prescott's statements and suggested the need of a comparative study of Gómara and Bernal. My dissertation takes that challenge and answers two main questions. First, what are Bernal's seventy-five accusations towards Gómara's history and what are their merits. Secondly, how Bernal goes from attacking Gómara to reproducing narrative elements and details from his Historia de la conquista de México. Bernal's main criticism centers on the idea that Gómara had never been in America and was not a witness to any of the events. However, that does not stop Bernal from taking a substantial amount of information from Historia de la conquista de México to use it on his book as his own. In the first two chapters, I show that Gómara's apparent seventy-five mistakes are in some cases erroneous and in others Bernal fails to substantiate his accusations. Then, in the last two chapters, I confirm Iglesias' suspicion on the influence of Gómara in Bernal and demonstrate that indeed Bernal borrows a large number of details from Gómara, whose influence is traceable throughout the Historia verdadera. At the end, the accusations as well as the influence of Gómara in Bernal are examples of the lasting impact that the historian had on the old soldier. Most importantly, it is a tribute to the appeal of Gómara's history, a fact that has not been fully explore for more than three centuries.