I'm reading Bartolomé de las Casas chronicle on the conquest of the Nueva España and it makes me sick. I was especially impressed by his witnessing of a Spanish soldier who, not finding anything for his hound to eat, took a toddler away from his mother, cut his arms off and fed the dog with them.

I understand that atrocities happened in every war, but the Spanish conquest of Mexico seems especially brutal to me. Also, I found that the Spaniards were not like that when they conquered the Kingdom of Granada, for example, nor during the Reconquista. I read about that a lot and, although horrors and death happened, I haven't found anything like feeding hounds with living children. I don't understand the reasons behind this different treatment of fallen enemies.

Have historians wondered about and studied the possible causes of this brutality? Were they influenced by the food? Was it the weather, illnesses? Weren't they on their minds? Were they extremely scared? What drove this inhuman behavior?