Columbus was “O.K.”...but Pizarro and Cortes were real assholes.
By 21st century standards, perhaps they were, but they lived 500 years ago and were courageous examples of their kind. Cortes burned his boats. Literally. You and I may not approve of their methods and their ruthlessness, but to their contemporaries they were conquering heroes. And to their contemporaries, they did nothing wrong.
Christopher Columbus was a navigator, colonizer, and explorer from Genoa, Italy, unlike Cortes and Pizarro who were both Spanish conquerors
They were both from a rough, low-class neighborhood, the Extremadura—the absolute outlaw-outback of Spain. Hard, mountainous desert. Not like the cosmopolitan Genoa of Columbus. Don't know that much about Pizarro, but Cortes was probably the only man who could have brought down the Aztecs—the predator people of Mexico who had finished their merciless conquest of Mexico only a half-century before he arrived—and the other Indians loved him for it.
Once Cortes won (and he nearly didn't), he fought like crazy to bring down the corrupt carpetbaggers who arrived from Spain to exploit the Indians. Cortes suffered brutally at the hands of those liars and thieves until, back in Spain, he was finally vindicated.
He was a rough man with his faults, but Cortes was self-disciplined, serious about his faith, and utterly heroic for what he achieved. Such as saving 10 million or more people from the cannibal empire he confronted when he landed, and bringing them to Christ. Mexicans love their periodic socialist revolutionaries, but to this day, they proudly retain Cortes's language and his faith.
Yeah, but the Aztecs were worse. Their neighbors helped Cortez.