By contrast, a non-specialist (who thought Torquemada arrived in New Spain in 1583 and made other elementary mistakes about his life in the few sentences he devoted to it) offered this observation which can be taken to be representative of the opposite tendency:-The value of "Monarquia Indiana" as a history of prehispanic Mexico and of its conquest by Cortes is marginal. This hodgepodge of facts and fiction and of a few interesting details lost in tedious disquisitions is important for other reasons. . . The merit of Torquemada, if merit it be, is the fact that in his compilation he quoted [..] unpublished chronicles, sometimes mentioning the names of their authors, sometimes plundering parts of their work for his "Monarquía Indiana", thus saving them from oblivion. Torquemada's plagiarism of Jeronimo de Mendieta's work . . part of which he included in his "pot-pourri" without any change, proved very useful to Joaquín García Icazbalceta [etc.]