Pizarro E-Book

Stuart Stirling

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 545

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Establishing Francisco Pizarro firmly as a man of his time, Stuart Stirling shows that there was little difference in moral terms between Elizabeth I's political expediency in ordering Mary Queen of Scots's execution and Pizarro's killing of the Inca Atahualpa - a deed for which his name has been regarded with infamy.

Leseprobe

PIZARRO

CONQUEROR OF THE INCA

STUART STIRLING

First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Sutton Publishing Limited

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved© Stuart Stirling, 2005, 2013

The right of Stuart Stirling to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9533 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Map of Peru

One

The Old Slaver

Two

The Conquest of Paradise

Three

The Capture of the Sun God

Four

Cuzco

Five

The Siege of the Holy City

Six

The Death of Almagro

Seven

The Frontiers of New Castile

Eight

Marqués of the Indies

Nine

The Most Magnificent Lord Gonzalo

Ten

Inca Princesses, Courtesans and Wives of Pizarro’s Conquistadores

Eleven

The Legacy of Pizarro

Genealogy

Glossary and Placenames

Notes

Bibliography

For my mother Dora-Elena,and to the memory of her grandfather Rubén Díez de Medina y Leguizamón,a descendant of Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, one of Pizarro’s horsemen.

Preface

On 18 June 1977 four workmen restoring the crypt of Lima’s cathedral discovered in one of its walls a metal casket and box containing a man’s skull and bones, together with fragments of a sword and a pair of silver spurs. The casket bore the esoteric emblem of a six-pointed star within four concentric circles, and the words: ‘This is the head of the Lord Marqués Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered and conquered these realms of Peru, and who placed them in the Royal Crown of Castile.’1 For almost four and a half centuries after his killing at his palace in Lima the remains of the conqueror of the Inca empire had remained hidden from the world, his name virtually forgotten during South America’s evolution from colonialism to independence and statehood.

Francisco Pizarro is possibly one of the most reviled figures in world history, his memory branded by the stigma of Spain’s colonial past, inspired as much by the cruelty of its conquistadores as by the envy of its European neighbours. Their own later colonisations would be no less bloody, and their economic motives not dissimilar. History, art and legend, on the other hand, have bequeathed a romanticised image of his victim the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, whose execution he had ordered at Cajamarca, and who in reality was a man equally brutal and ambitious.

In moral terms, Pizarro was no better and no worse than any other contemporary European military commander, deriving his livelihood in his service to his sovereign from booty and the sale of prisoners and slaves. Nor was the method of war he employed any more bloody than that of his Native American adversary or of the Inca warriors whose armies had subjugated the Andes in less than a hundred years. What made him exceptional was his ability to consolidate his conquest in political terms, laying the foundations of an empire whose wealth would shape the course of world history, and whose killing at the hands of his own countrymen was the sacrifice he paid for his endeavour.

Pizarro was no educated cartographer such as Columbus, or courtly adventurer like Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico. The illiterate and abandoned son of an Extremaduran army captain of probable part African ancestry, for some thirty years he had made a living as a slaver and frontiersman in the early settlements of the Caribbean and Central America – known as the Indies because of Columbus’s misguided belief that it formed part of the continent of India, and for which reason its natives were called by that name. Very little is known of those early years other than what the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo records in a few references, when Pizarro was in the service of Nicaragua’s elderly governor Pedro Arias Dávila.

Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire, however, unfolds much later, almost half a century after Columbus had first set foot in the New World, at a time when Spanish dominion over the Caribbean islands and Central America was already well established, and some ten years after the conquest of Mexico.

It is a story of how a man’s courage and endeavour led him to the discovery and conquest of one of the greatest civilisations of the New World, accompanied by no more than 200 poorly armed volunteers, with whom, and against all odds, he defeated the might of the Inca armies. It is also the story of the plight of the Inca people in the aftermath of Pizarro’s conquest, and of the succession of his youngest brother Gonzalo as ruler of his colony, who in all but name created the first independent state in the Americas: a legacy that laid the foundations of modern Hispanic South America.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Doña Magdalena Canellas Anoz, Director of the Archivo General de Indias at Seville, for her kind assistance, and to the Directors of the Archivo General de la Nación at Lima, and the Archivo Regional at Cuzco. I would also like to thank Señorita Josefa García Tovar for her invaluable help in transcribing innumerable manuscripts for me.

Chronology

1476

Francisco Pizarro born, Trujillo, Extremadura

1492

Columbus discovers the New World

1502

Possible date of his departure for the New World and the island of Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti)

1509

Arrives in the Isthmus from Hispaniola

1513

Accompanies Vasco Núñez de Balboa in discovery of the Pacific Ocean

1514

Diego de Almagro and Hernando de Soto arrive in the Isthmus in the armada of its new governor, Don Pedro Arias Dávila, known as Pedrarias

1515

St Teresa of Ávila born

1519

Hernán Cortés conquers Mexico

1522

The Basque Pascual de Andagoya reconnoitres the Pacific coastlands of Colombia and Ecuador, the northern empire of the Incas

1523–7

Exploratory voyages by Pizarro and Almagro to Ecuadorian coast

1527

Death of Inca Emperor Huayna Cápac

1529

Civil war between Inca Emperor Huáscar and his half-brother Atahualpa

At Toledo Emperor Charles V awards Pizarro the Capitulación de Conquista, right of conquest, of Inca empire

1532

Pizarro’s conquistadores seize Atahualpa at Cajamarca

1533

Almagro’s reinforcements reach Cajamarca

Distribution of treasure at Cajamarca

Execution of Atahualpa at Cajamarca

Capture of Cuzco

1535

Hernando de Soto leaves Peru for Spain

Almagro leaves Cuzco for conquest of Chile

Pizarro founds City of the Kings at Lima as capital of colony of New Castile

1536–7

Cuzco besieged by Emperor Manco

1537

Almagro relieves Cuzco and captures the city for himself

1538

Almagro’s forces defeated at Battle of Salinas by Hernando Pizarro’s loyalist army. Almagro executed

1539

Birth of historian Garcilaso de la Vega at Cuzco

Gonzalo Pizarro leads first invasion of Vilcabamba

1540

Gonzalo leads expedition to Amazon

1541

Pizarro killed at Lima

1542

Governor Vaca de Castro defeats Almagro’s son at Battle of Chupas

1544

Gonzalo Pizarro leads an armed rebellion in Cuzco and governs the colony for four years until his defeat at the Battle of Jaquijahuana

1545

Discovery of silver mine at Potosí

1552

Hernando Pizarro marries Pizarro’s daughter, Doña Francisca, at the castle of La Mota in Medina del Campo

1556

Abdication of Emperor Charles V in favour of his son King Philip II

1557

Inca Sayri Túpac induced to leave Vilcabamba

1560

Young Garcilaso de la Vega leaves Peru for Spain, never to return

1561

Hernando Pizarro released from the castle of La Mota

1572

Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo orders inquiry into Inca history

Toledo orders second invasion of Vilcabamba. Capture and execution of Inca Túpac Amaru

1578

Death of Hernando Pizarro

1590

Death at Cuzco of last of Pizarro’s conquistadores

Peru

ONE

The Old Slaver

He was a tall man, with a fine face and a thin beard.

Pedro Pizarro, Pizarro’s page and kinsman

Rising above the skyline on a barren plain, Trujillo’s crenellated walls and church towers could be seen clearly from the main Extremadura road to Badajoz that winds its way to the Portuguese border. A blistering sun hung over the town’s windless approach as the old slaver and his small caravan of horses and mules entered its northern gate, by the old castle, their hooves resounding across the narrow streets. It was the autumn of 1529, sixteen years since he had accompanied his fellow Extremaduran Vasco Núñez de Balboa on a voyage that culminated in the discovery of the Pacific Ocean.

In a corner niche of one of the town’s palaces, overlooking the main square that was built over a quarter of a century later, his thin bearded features are sculpted alongside the coat of arms which the Emperor Charles V awarded him and that depict his prisoner, the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, chained by the neck. It is the only known contemporary portrait of Francisco Pizarro.

One of his conquistadores recalled that he was the strongest and bravest man he had ever known, and that ‘no man was his equal’.1 It was an opinion shared by many of the veterans of the Inca conquest, among them Nicolás de Ribera, known as ‘the old man’, who told the historian Agustín de Zárate that when crossing a river, and seeing that one of his Indian servants had been swept away by the current, Pizarro had swum to his rescue, dragging him up by the hair, an action for which the rest of his men were too terrified to volunteer.2

The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who had served with Pizarro in the Caribbean islands and isthmus of Central America, recorded his ruthlessness and stated that he had been well trained in the cruelties of the Indies. He was also, according to those who knew him, modest and reserved, a man of few words and simple tastes, preferring the matting of a floor or a hammock to the luxury of a bed. A plain-speaking man with the soft peasant accent of the Extremaduran, he possessed few social graces but would never demand anything of his men that he was not prepared to carry out himself. Others saw in him an almost secretive ambition and a vision few of his fellow slavers and veterans of the Indies could understand; it was a vision that had brought him back to Spain after an absence of twenty-seven years.

For almost an entire year Pizarro had prolonged his stay in Spain at court in Toledo. There he had been granted an audience with the young Emperor Charles V, to whom he had presented part of the small booty of gold, and the llamas and tropical birds he had brought back from his exploration of the equatorial coast of South America. This land had been discovered some seven years previously by the Biscayan Pascual de Andagoya, who had mistakenly given it the name of a local tribe, known as Birú or Perú. Impressed by the gifts and artefacts the old slaver had brought with him, and by the animals and birds he had ordered placed in his small zoo outside the city walls, the emperor neither denied nor granted his subject’s request for permission to raise an expedition of conquest of those lands. Instead, he instructed his private secretary to forward the matter to his Council of the Indies, the body that controlled Spain’s sole governance of the newly founded American empire of the New World.

The appearance at court of the plain and ill-dressed Indies veteran, who could neither read nor write, accompanied by two Indian boys and a Greek mariner from the small settlement at Panama, had met with some initial curiosity and even a certain acclaim. However, it had elicited none of the euphoria demonstrated the previous year on the return to Spain of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico. He had entranced the emperor and his court with the lavishness of the wealth and treasure he had brought, and the magnificence and plumed apparel of his train of native princes. Possessing neither a recommendation of any note nor the patronage of any grandee or court official, the future conqueror of Peru in contrast presented an insignificant, if not impoverished figure. Lodged in one of the poorer boarding houses hidden in the labyrinth of narrow streets of the city’s Jewish quarter, he began a routine that would last for several months. Each day he joined the long line of petitioners to the chambers of the Council of the Indies, where he eventually presented his plans for conquest to its chief minister, the count of Osorno, a member of the powerful Manrique family. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that the emperor, who soon after Pizarro’s arrival left Toledo for Barcelona on his way to his coronation in Bologna, had readily acceded to his petition; or that Cortés, a distant and possibly unacknowledged relative of Pizarro, had influenced any such decision. (Years later it would be Cortés’s secretary who discredited Pizarro’s achievements and belittled him by inventing the story that as a foundling he had been raised by swine.)

The only recommendation the virtually unknown colonist had been able to count upon other than the small quantity of gold he had brought with him was that of a minor Crown official from the port of Panama, Gaspar de Espinosa. He would later be one of the principal investors in his expedition, and it was he who attested to Pizarro’s character and years of service in the founding of the Central American territories of Nicaragua and Panama. While Espinosa’s correspondence may have added some insight into Pizarro’s past service, it was Pizarro’s simple logic and plain words, and his quiet and unassuming belief in his ability to succeed at such an undertaking that attracted the count of Osorno.

Though Pizarro had proposed a dual command for the expedition, to be shared with one of his principal partners, such a notion was rejected, if not simply on military grounds. Months were spent on further meetings covering every aspect of the Crown’s share of the proposed expedition’s booty and of the rights of its volunteers, who in exchange for their service were to be rewarded equally. Both Osorno and Pizarro knew that what had been agreed at worst would cost his life and those of his men, but at best would open up for Spain a wealth and a continent as great as Cortés had discovered in Mexico. Neither man, however, harboured any illusion that the expedition’s success was assured, or believed without reservation that the riches Pizarro’s Greek companion Pedro de Candía had sworn he had seen on his solitary journey into the hinterland of the equatorial coast were an indication of even greater wealth, rather than simply representing an isolated discovery. Osorno, nevertheless, was persuaded to gamble simply on the strength of the character of the man who stood before him.

A decision was finally taken and Osorno was received by the Empress Isabel at her Council of Ministers. His recommendations were accepted by the empress, and befitting a royal command, Pizarro was awarded the knighthood of Santiago. The articles of the decree, known as the Capitulación de Conquista and signed by the empress in July 1529, stipulated that the name New Castile be given to the conquered territories, of which Pizarro would be governor and captain-general. His partner Diego de Almagro, who had remained behind at Panama, was awarded the future governorship of the coastal settlement of Túmbez which they had founded, and the rank of hidalgo. His other partner, the priest-merchant Alonso de Luque, also then at Panama, was awarded the bishopric of the future colony. The evangelical purpose of the enterprise was emphasised by the inclusion of several Dominican missionaries. Provision was also made for the limited purchase of artillery in the Isthmus of Panama and the award of twenty-five horses from the island of Jamaica and of thirty African slaves from the island of Cuba.

Though Pizarro and his colonist partners were awarded an annual pension from the Crown’s anticipated revenue from the territories and booty of their conquest, they were in effect to receive no direct financial backing for their expedition other than an advance on their future incomes. Nor were they compensated for what they had already spent in fitting out and manning their earlier voyages of exploration; as one of the conquistadores would later recall:

… in the desire to serve Your Majesty and to enhance the Crowns of Castile and León, the said Francisco Pizarro determined on the discovery and conquest of these realms of Peru at his own cost and mission, for which this witness neither saw, nor heard it said, that Your Majesty nor the Royal Treasury did aid him for the expense of the discovery and conquest, and that this witness, being one of the discoverers and conquistadores, would have known had it been thus … for the said Francisco Pizarro set on the conquest at his own cost, and there spent the patrimony of his years of labour, for it was known to me that he was a man of wealth in the realm of Tierra Firme [Panama].3

His sojourn at Toledo was a triumph of patience and endurance, qualities that would serve Pizarro well in the months and years to come, and which would help him turn what then seemed little more than a simple aspiration into a reality of extraordinary dimensions, the consequences of which few would ever have dreamed possible.

At the time Francisco Pizarro left Toledo for his birthplace of Trujillo to recruit the first contingent of men for his expedition he was fifty-three years old, and regarded as virtually an old man by the townsmen and farm labourers who had come to hear him speak in the modest stone house that had once belonged to his father. One by one they had gathered in its dimly lit main chamber, staring at the tall grey-bearded stranger, his black cape embroidered at the shoulder with the scarlet sword-shaped knightly cross of the Order of Santiago; only a few of the older townsmen remembered him as the washer-woman’s son. His two Indian boys Martín and Felipillo, whom he was training as interpreters, squatted on the stone floor beside him. Behind him clustered a handful of volunteers he had brought with him from Toledo, among them his young kinsman Pedro Pizarro, a lad of fifteen, who acted as his page and servant, and Alonso de Mesa who was the same age, and who had also been entrusted into his care at Toledo. Both boys would live to be the oldest of his conquistadores and among the very few to die in their beds. Towering above the small group was the Greek Candía, a giant of a man whose knowledge of gunpowder had secured him the appointment as Pizarro’s captain of artillery.

It had been almost forty years since Pizarro had left Trujillo with his mother for the southern Seville region, where she had married and raised another family. All of those who listened to him knew that he was the son of the hidalgo Gonzalo ‘Pizarro the tall’, the infantry captain who had died in Pamplona seven years previously, and who had left more bastards than anyone cared to remember. They also knew that his half-brother Hernando, some twenty years younger than him and the captain’s only legitimate son, had never met him before. Neither, for that matter, had his other two half-brothers Juan and Gonzalo, nineteen and seventeen respectively. Tall and dark featured, the brothers were ‘as arrogant as they were poor’, recorded Fernández de Oviedo, who described Hernando as ‘of great stature and girth, his lips swollen, his nose veined’.4 It is a description echoed in the time-worn features of Hernando’s funerary sculpture in Trujillo’s old cemetery, which is probably the only surviving realistic portrait of him. His distinctive African appearance also possibly confirms such ancestry in the Pizarro family – maybe due to the fact that Trujillo was once a slave market town, and that one of Pizarro’s volunteers was the piper Juan García Pizarro, who was referred to in later documents as a ‘Negro’.5

Pizarro well knew that the door to his brother’s house had been opened to him after so many years solely because of the circumstances that had brought him to Trujillo. Nor had he forgotten that only a few weeks previously not a single one of his relatives had been willing to testify on his behalf at the investigation into his lineage by the Friar Pedro Alonso, a formality the officers of the Order of Santiago required of its newly created knights. Only a few of the townspeople had been prepared to speak on his behalf.6 One of the witnesses, the elderly town whore Inés Alonso, confirmed that she had been present at his birth in the small shanty quarter, below the town’s castle walls. Another remembered having seen him as a boy in the house of his grandfather, the captain’s father. Each testified to the identity of his mother as Francisca González, who at the time of his birth had been a young servant in the town’s convent of La Coria, close by the castle and church of Santa María la Mayor.

It was his half-brother Hernando who first addressed the townsmen. Then Pizarro spoke to them. He described how as a boy he had enlisted in the army of Italy, following his countrymen to Naples as is recorded in the grant of his coat of arms the empress had also awarded him; and how as a young man he had later sailed to the New World in the armada of the Friar Knight Nicolás de Obando to the island of Hispaniola, of which his father’s younger brother Juan had been one of the founding settlers.7 He then told them how he had served under the command of the slaver Alonso de Ojeda before eventually sailing to the settlement of the Daríen, from where he had accompanied Núñez de Balboa as his second in command in his discovery of the Pacific.

Finally, he spoke of the two voyages of exploration he had later made from the port of Panama along that southern Pacific coastline, and he showed them the samples of gold jewellery, pearls and other precious stones he had brought back with him to Spain. In his testimonial to the Audiencia of Lima in 1553 Nicolás de Ribera, who had served as his quartermaster, gave what is a little-known account of these voyages:

It must have been some thirty years, more or less, when I first arrived in Tierra Firme from the kingdoms of Spain, and where in the town of Panama I met the captains Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, and the priest Luque, who had formed a company for the discovery of these realms of Peru. And I joined them in this venture and helped them collect all the necessary goods and provisions for the ship they would use in their discovery, being the only one of that size on this southern sea of the Isthmus.

And in that year of 1523 I sailed from the port of Panama with the Captain Pizarro to the harbour of Piñas, where we landed and explored the interior, which was of great hardship, cutting our way through dense terrain and marsh land, and where one of our men drowned. And we returned to our ship and sailed along the southern coast till we reached another cove, which we were to call the ‘cove of hunger’, because of the suffering we endured there …

It was from there that the captain sent our ship back to Panama to bring us food and provisions, and I remained on the island with the other men, and where many of them were to die of hunger … and on the ship’s return, the earth being so denuded and poor, we once more set sail south to where a cacique, whom we called the ‘cacique of the stones’, had his lands, and whose Indians we fought, and where four or five of our men were killed. The captain was himself wounded and I also suffered two wounds, one in the head, and a lance wound in my shoulder.

And as it was impossible for us to sustain ourselves there, we sailed again to the province of Chochama, where the captain remained with the few men that had survived, and I went back with the ship and the other men to Panama, to refit the barque and to inform the Governor Don Pedro Arias Dávila about our voyage. And as we were sailing back we heard news that Almagro’s ship of provisions had passed us, and I sent word of this in a canoe to the captain, informing him that help was on its way.

And in Panama I later learnt that Almagro had suffered the loss of his eye in a skirmish with the same ‘cacique of the stones’, and where many of his men had been killed. And on his orders I went across the Isthmus to the port of Nombre de Dios to enlist more men, and together we finally set off to rescue the captain, whom we found at Chochama, and from where all our combined men sailed in two ships as far as the river of San Juan, the basin of which we explored with the canoes we had taken with us.

Seeing the poor condition of the land, it was decided that Almagro would once more return to Panama, and I with him, where we enlisted a further fifty men and acquired six horses. And again we sailed back to where we had left the captain, from where we sailed south to a bay we named San Mateo, where we disembarked the horses and explored the interior of the land, and where we saw many villages. But after two days we were attacked from both the land and by canoes from the sea, and we retreated to the bay, from where we sailed to the neighbouring island we called Gallo, and where we stayed with the captain, while Almagro once more returned to Panama with the two ships.

For some six months we remained there, suffering great deprivations and hunger, and where we built a small raft so that we could search for food, and it was when the governor of Panama, Don Pedro de los Ríos, sent out a search party for us …

And I remained with the captain on the island with nine other men, and I helped persuade my companions to remain there also, in the service of His Majesty. But seeing that we could no longer survive, for we were being constantly attacked by the Indians of that coast-land, we went to another neighbouring island, Gorgona, where we remained for some six or seven months, awaiting our rescue, experiencing terrible hunger and affliction.

Eventually Bartolomé Ruiz came from Panama in one of our ships, bringing us food and provisions, and from there we sailed south and continued in our exploration, reaching the port of Santa, and from there we returned to Panama, taking with us many llamas, gold and silver, and woollen garments of many colours, and much information about these lands, together with some Indian captives, whom we later used as interpreters.8

Pizarro was a truthful man and he admitted to his small audience that on his last voyage many of his men had rebelled against his authority. Half-naked and in rags, their feet and skin bleeding from sores and infection, some of them out of their minds from sunstroke, they had accused him of being little more than a butcher. And it was how many of them described him to Pedro de los Ríos, who had succeeded Arias Dávila as governor of Panama. And he told his audience how with his sword he had drawn a line across the sand, allowing most of them to return to Panama, and declaring that to those who wished to share his fate he could offer nothing but hardship, hunger and probable death, but if God was willing, the riches of the earth. And he listed the names of the thirteen men who had chosen to remain with him on the island, among them Ribera and Candía, and for whose loyalty he had secured for them from the emperor the rank of hidalgo: the Andalucians Cristóbal de Peralta, Pedro de Halcón, García de Jarén and Alonso de Molina; the Castilians Antón de Carrión and Francisco de Cuéllar; the Leonese Alonso Briceño; the Extremadurans Juan de la Torre and Gonzalo Martín de Trujillo; the Basque Domingo de Soraluce; and Martín de Paz, whose origin is unknown.

The men of Trujillo had listened to Pizarro in polite silence, and some had even been moved by his words and courage, but they had heard such words before, from the mouths of other slavers and adventurers, men with similar ideas and purpose. Few had come home rich. Many had never returned. Other than the Extremadurans of Mérida, who had followed Cortés in his conquest of Mexico ten years previously, most of them had died in unknown graves, mourned by their mothers and wives: old women clad in black, who could still be seen praying for their souls in the town’s churches, with little more than their memories to fend off the poverty of their daily lives.

Only seventeen men in Trujillo were to volunteer for Pizarro’s expedition, among them the 24-year-old Diego de Trujillo, who some forty years later, together with Pedro Pizarro and Alonso de Mesa, at the behest of the Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo would record their reminiscences of the conquest. It was a far cry from the 150 volunteers Pizarro was obliged to raise under the terms of his warrant. Only a further nineteen men were raised from the other regions of Extremadura, and only a handful of those who accompanied him would ever return.9

The homelands and social hierarchies Pizarro’s volunteers were to leave behind in their poverty-stricken villages and townships of Extremadura, Castile and Andalucía had evolved in the feudalism of the Middle Ages, an era that had transformed Spain from an amalgamation of semi-autonomous Visigoth and Arab kingdoms into a nation of imperial power. In that age too the throne of Spain had passed to the Flemish-born grandson of Queen Isabella of Castile and her consort King Ferdinand of Aragón. As Charles V he had been elected Holy Roman Emperor and had succeeded to the great Burgundian inheritance of the Low Countries and to the kingdom of Naples: a legacy which was to divide the political and religious map of Europe, and would in time witness Spain’s hegemony of the New World.

The realm which the young Austrian Prince Charles of Habsburg inherited from his Spanish mother – a recluse who was confined for most of her life because of her insanity – was a land steeped in another legacy, that of its past Arab and Judaic cultures, the last remnants of which had been symbolically exorcised with the surrender of the kingdom of Granada in 1492. It was the same year that his grandmother’s Genoese Admiral Columbus (Cristóbal Colón) had discovered the New World. In the eighth century possibly as many as a million Arabs and North African Berbers had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and settled in the Iberian Peninsula, of which three-quarters was under Muslim rule by the eleventh century, populated not only by Christians but by a large urban Jewish community. It was a land divided as much by its geographical contrasts as by its racial distinctions.

Only in the mid-thirteenth century had its Christian armies re-established its former Visigoth capital, at Toledo. The reconquered territories were placed under the protection of encomiendas, lands entrusted by the Crown to families of old Christian lineage, Cristianos viejos, and held in lieu of feudal service. Evangelical as well as territorial in its purpose, it was a system that would dominate the social structure of a vanquished people, destroying both their identity and traditions, and which would serve as the template upon which Spain’s colonial settlement in the New World would later be modelled – and which would, in effect, become a licence for Native slavery and a reward for their conquistadores.

The fate of the country’s Jews had followed a similar course of persecution. In 1492, the tax returns of Castile, whose kingdom comprised three-quarters of the Peninsula’s populace of an estimated 7 million people, record some 70,000 Jews, almost half of whom would refuse to accept conversion and face exile in Portugal or North Africa.10 Those who remained, known as conversos, as in previous centuries, would be assimilated into a society governed by the tenets of a religious Inquisition, in which they would face the stigma of their race in the proofs of limpieza de sangre, racial purity – an unjust and cruel anachronism that was perpetuated well into the nineteenth century. Even St Teresa of Ávila, venerated by king and courtier alike, never disclosed the ignominy shown her grandfather, a converso, who had been publicly flogged in Toledo at an auto-da-fé for his apostasy. Paradoxically, much of the New World’s expeditionary armadas, among them Columbus’s early voyages, were financed by conversos in Seville and Cádiz.

The empire embraced a widely divergent people, ranging from the largest component, the mainly destitute peasantry governed by its Church and feudal nobility, which owned 95 per cent of the land, to a small urban middle class comprising tradesmen, artisans and clerks, many of them incorporated in the Hermandades, guilds dependent on the Crown for their privileges. The hidalgo – hijo de algo, son of a man of rank – represented the untitled nobility which for generations had served the Crown as soldiers – as in the case of Pizarro’s father, a minor hidalgo – or as warrior monks in the military Orders modelled on the crusading Orders of the Holy Land.

Bound by their distinct codes of chivalry, the hidalgos had traditionally derived their livelihood from the booty of war and from the rents of their small country estates, regarding trade and any form of commerce as below their dignity, an attitude that brought many of them to penury, and which Cervantes was to satirise in the character of the hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Some were landless and lived in townships or in the garrison castles of the Orders: Calatrava, founded in 1158 for the defence of Toledo by Ramón Serra, Benedictine abbot of the Navarre monastery of Santa María de Fitero; Alcántara, founded in about 1170 for the defence of Extremadura; and Montesa, founded in 1317 by King James II of Aragón as the result of the disbanding of the Knights Templar, whose lands he acquired.

The Order of Santiago to which Pizarro had been appointed a knight commander had been founded in about 1160 and was the most prominent of all the Christian military Orders, owning some quarter of a million acres of land. It had been established by knights of León for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of St James the Apostle, at Compostela in Galicia, where, according to tradition, his body was buried. Proclaimed patron of Spain and its armies because of his legendary apparition at the Battle of Clavijo in the ninth century, his image as Santiago mata moros, slayer of Moors, mounted on a white charger and in full armour would emblazon one side of Pizarro’s banner of the Conquest. St James’s emblem of the cockleshell owes its origin to the legend that at Clavijo a Christian knight discovered his chain mail studded with cockleshells after making his escape across the River Ebro: a symbol that became synonymous with pilgrimage to his shrine at Compostela and to that other great Christian shrine at Mont St Michel in Normandy, in honour of St Michael the Archangel, and whom Pizarro would later name as patron of his settlement of San Miguel de Piura. With the demise of Muslim Spain the Orders would witness the end of their crusading role, their lands and wealth prey to the political and financial demands of the Crown. It would also witness the demise of the hidalgo as a crusader knight, relegating him to the romances of a bygone age, and his title to a mere appendage of nobility.

It was an image of knighthood to which few of Pizarro’s volunteers aspired; though many of the methods they would later employ in their colonisation mirrored their country’s reconquest from Muslim rule, in which their fathers and grandfathers had served. Theirs would be a crusade clothed in the mantle of the Church and a purpose aptly described by the conquistadore chronicler of Mexico, Bernal Díaz del Castillo: ‘to serve God and His Majesty, to give enlightenment to those in darkness, and to share in the riches for which all men search’.11

The dream of the wealth of the New World, inspired by the tales of the returning conquistadores of Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean, had gripped the imagination of the entire country. Between the years 1520 and 1539 some thirteen thousand men and seven hundred women sailed for the New World: townsmen, merchants and yeomen, some of their names hispanicised to hide their converso origins; prostitutes and penniless daughters of government officials; friars of the Orders of St Dominic and Merced, driven by the zeal of their mission or charged to live out their penances in the exile of an unknown world; former criminals and conscripts of the Italian wars; peasants and hidalgos with only their black capes to hide their penury, queuing in their hundreds for their passage to the Indies and the fortunes each believed awaited them. It was a dream few would ever realise.

It is not known when Pizarro left his native town, nor even the length of time he had stayed there. The town’s council had regarded his presence of such little importance that there is no official mention of him in any of its records, though the price of wheat and pigs for the season, and the repair of the town’s clock, are noted in detail.12 The journey south to the port city of Seville, possibly towards the end of the autumn of 1529, would have taken almost a week to complete along the road to the Roman city of Mérida. The men, many of them barefoot, followed the column of horsemen, mules and carts, and the small herd of pigs Hernando Pizarro is recorded to have brought with him, towards the distant farmlands and orange groves of southern Extremadura and its fortress town of Jerez de los Caballeros, once the fiefdom of the Templars. The town had been the birthplace of Núñez de Balboa and of the slaver Hernando de Soto, who would command Pizarro’s cavalry in the conquest. From there, the caravan would have headed due south to the great plain of Seville, its full contingent by then numbering only thirty-six men.

Pizarro’s volunteers would have camped outside Seville’s walls, setting their tents near the livestock of goats, pigs, mules and horses they had brought with them, and where they would have been prey to any number of wandering bands of brigands that thrived by attacking the unsuspecting caravans of would-be Indies colonists, most of whom carried all their worldly possessions with them. Pizarro had only received a fraction of the money he had asked for from the Crown’s treasurers at Toledo, and which had been mostly in the form of a loan. His purpose was to obtain not only the authority from Seville’s officials of its Casa de la Contratación, Custom House, for permission to leave the port, but to fit out his expedition and purchase ships, and to raise the 150 volunteers from Spain stipulated in his Capitulación of conquest.13

One of the few contemporary descriptions of Seville was left by the Venetian ambassador Andrea Navagero, who had visited the city three years previously for the emperor’s marriage to the Portuguese Infanta Doña Isabel, held in the old Moorish palace of the Alcázar:

The city is set in a plain on the left bank of the Guadalquivir river, its circumstance is some four or five miles, and resembles more an Italian city than a Spanish one; its streets are wide and elegant, though the greater part of its houses are not so fine; even though there are some palaces whose beauty cannot be rivalled in all Spain, in which there are numerous gardens … There are some fine churches, especially its cathedral, which is beautiful and far larger than the cathedral at Toledo, though not so richly decorated … its patio is planted with orange trees of great beauty, at the centre of which is a fountain; around the entire building there is a market place, enclosed by chains, whose steps descend into the street; here all day hidalgos, merchants and passers-by assemble, for it is the most lively place in all the city …

In the street and adjoining square a great number of people can be found, and where many thefts take place and rogues abound, and which is also a type of market place; the square is both wide and large. Beside the cathedral is a bell tower of much beauty, with fine bells; to reach its top one climbs a ramp, and not stairs as at the tower of St Mark’s in Venice, though the climb is comfortable and steady [Giralda Tower].

Not very far from the cathedral is the Alcázar, which is the palace that once belonged to the Moorish kings and very beautiful, its masonry richly decorated in the style of the Moors, and with magnificent marble and fountains, the waters of which pass through various chambers and bath houses. It has a patio filled with orange and lemon trees, and gardens of the greatest beauty, among which there is a wood of only orange trees, where not even the sun can penetrate, and which is possibly the most beautiful sight in all Spain. The Casa de la Contratación is also situated in the city, and to which are brought all the goods and produce from overseas, for no shipping is allowed to unload in any other port.14

Shortly before her death, the emperor’s grandmother, Queen Isabella of Castile, had awarded the city the sole right to administer and regulate Spain’s American empire, establishing the Casa de la Contratación, which also served as its school for mariners and pilots. Among those who studied there were cartographers and ship builders, some of whom had received their early training at the Portuguese naval academy at Lisbon, founded by King Henry the Navigator, responsible for Portugal’s great maritime discoveries. Sailors and soldiers of fortune from every region of Spain had over the years made their way into its tiled and mosaic-floored chambers, in what had once been a palace of the city’s Almoravid Muslim dynasty, situated behind the Alcázar. Even the maps required by Magellan, who circumnavigated the world in the years 1519 to 1522, had been submitted to its authority. ‘So many men abandon the city to seek their fortune in the New World,’ Navagero recorded, ‘it is virtually in the possession of its women.’ It was a scarcity that would plague Pizarro’s attempts to find volunteers in a city that had shown him little hospitality on his arrival from the New World, and where for a short time he had been imprisoned because of a debt it was claimed he owed an Indies veteran who had denounced him.

Within three months three ships were purchased and provisioned by Pizarro: the Santiago, the Trinidad and the San Antonio. One hundred and twenty Spanish volunteers, horses, mules, mastiffs, goats and pigs boarded the vessels. Among the new recruits was his other half-brother, Pedro de Alcántara, his mother’s son, whom he had also met only recently for the first time, and the treasurer appointed by the Crown, Alonso de Riquelme. Six Dominican friars made up the contingent of missionaries the Crown had also ordered should accompany the expedition, including the 28-year-old Extremaduran Fray Vicente de Valverde.

The ever present threat that the Contratación would prevent their departure, due to their inability to raise the stipulated number of volunteers, forced Pizarro to sail ahead on a skiff from San Lúcar de Barrameda, Seville’s port of entry into the Atlantic, leaving his brother Hernando and Candía to deal with the authorities. Eventually, they too were able to slip anchor and, under cover of darkness, follow him out to sea. It was January 1530.

It was the third time Pizarro had sailed across the Atlantic, and each time he would have sensed its endless solitude and its vast expanse, which within an hour could change in colour and shape, its calm turned to grey, and its seas rising like mountains, breaking across the fragile wooden decks of his ships, and scattering his few frightened horses and animals, some of which would have been lost overboard. The small flotilla took a route by then well established for crossing the Atlantic: of some thirty days to the Canary and Windward Islands, where they would have taken on fresh water and food, and a further twenty days to the Caribbean port of Nombre de Dios in the Isthmus of Panama. It was the route the Isthmian Governor Don Pedro Arias Dávila, a converso, had himself taken when he had led an armada of 17 ships and 2,000 men in the conquest of the Isthmus fifteen years earlier, piloted by Juan Vespucci, nephew of the Florentine navigator Amerigo whose name would be given to the continent of the New World.

Spain’s right to lay claim to the Indies had been established by the Valencian Pope Alexander VI in his bull Inter Caetera, issued in May 1493 in Castile’s favour and amended a year later to include Portuguese rights of conquest – 300 miles to the east of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. During his tenure as governor of the Pacific port of Panama, whose colony he had founded in 1519 as the settlement of Our Lady of the Assumption, Arias Dávila had succeeded in exploring and conquering its tropical terrain and its westerly regions of Nicaragua and Veragua, an enterprise in which lesser men would certainly have failed. A veteran of the reconquest of Granada, he had imposed his authority on a ruthless and often corrupt administration, and had not flinched from ordering the execution of Núñez de Balboa, his own son-in-law, on a charge of sedition, and whose capture had been carried out by Pizarro.

As mentioned, it is a period of Pizarro’s early life for which there are virtually no known sources other than a few references by his great detractor and enemy the chronicler Fernández de Oviedo; he claimed that not only did Pizarro betray Núñez de Balboa to Arias Dávila, but that he played a full part in his capture and hanging. Whatever the truth of Pizarro’s involvement in Balboa’s death, and irrespective of Oviedo’s animosity towards him, what is certain is that for several years Pizarro served the elderly Arias Dávila, a sadistic psychopath and one of the most bloodthirsty individuals ever to have governed Spain’s colonies, as one of his militia captains, acting under his orders in the Isthmian Indian wars and slave trade.

In the years of his governorship Arias Dávila had transformed what had been little more than an outpost on the borders of the great Mayan empire of Central America into one of the most lucrative settlements in the Indies. The commodity that had enabled him to achieve his ends was neither the by then diminishing deposits of gold from which the Isthmus had earned its name – Castilla del Oro – nor the spices its early explorers had believed existed in its hinterland, but the human gold of slavery. In an age when scholars at the universities of Salamanca and Bologna were deliberating the theological implications of recognising the natives of the New World as human beings, while others were advocating the theory that they were one of the lost tribes of Israel, under the guise of an evangelising mission slaves would become the labour force supplying Spain’s colonial wealth.

Queen Isabella of Castile had prohibited the enslavement of the Isthmians unless they were prisoners of war – a code to which her grandson Charles V would also in principle adhere – but it was an interdict that would never be implemented with any rigour, nor possess any real validity. Its irrelevance had been marked even further by the introduction of the encomienda system, which would be far more apparent in its function as a slave labour force than in its other manifestation, in the Muslim land enclosures of southern Spain, whose subject people would rise in rebellion in the later part of the century. It was a trade from which both the Crown and the colonists would acquire their principal revenue, augmented over time by the importation of Africans from Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, and a means of organisation which would eventually dominate the society and economy of Central America and the Caribbean.

The natives of the early Spanish settlements, moreover, faced an even greater threat to their survival – their vulnerability to disease imported from Europe and Africa, principally smallpox. Within the space of fifty years, nine-tenths of the indigenous people of Mexico, Central and Andean America would be wiped out by the epidemic.15 Syphilis, which had been introduced into Spain by Columbus’s mariners, and which had spread to King Ferdinand’s army in Italy between the years 1494 and 1495, had also taken its toll on the lives of the Isthmian colonists: its name derived from an allegorical poem, written c. 1520 by a physician from Verona, Girolamo Fracastoro. The work describes the odyssey of an explorer in search of King Solomon’s mines who discovers a tribe in the Indies stricken by a disease given them by a shepherd called Sypilius.

The most authoritative account of Pizarro’s return to the Isthmus and of the events that took place there was left by his young kinsman Pedro Pizarro:

Finally we arrived at the port of Nombre de Dios, where Don Diego de Almagro had come to meet us, but once he learnt that Don Francisco Pizarro had not brought him the joint command of their future governorship, even though His Majesty had not wished to do so in order to have one single commander, he told Don Francisco that the money and provisions he had collected during his absence were his as he had already spent his share in his voyage to Spain; and this also was said by the priest Luque, because the bishopric he had asked for himself had not been awarded him; ignoring that His Majesty had first desired to be informed of his character before making such an appointment. And for all these various reasons we were left in great deprivation, and even some of our men died; and for the time it was impossible to continue with our expedition.16

In the small shanty harbour township of Nombre de Dios, Pizarro’s reunion with his two partners was so heated it could well have led to their deaths. It was they who had helped finance his journey to Spain; in return he was to have secured for them at court an equal share of the honours and privileges for their discovery and right of conquest. Pedro Pizarro, who patently disliked Almagro, described him as ‘a profane man, foul mouthed, and who when roused to anger maltreated those around him, even if they were gentlemen; physically strong, he was a brave fighter and popular, a spendthrift though miserly in rewarding his men’.17 Almagro’s background was equally as humble as Pizarro’s and he had at one time been the foreman of his encomienda. Disfigured by the loss of an eye from an Indian javelin wound and by the facial warts that scarred the bearded features of many of the early colonists, he had been born in the township of his name in the Mancha of Castile, and had lived in Panama for almost as long as Pizarro. An Indian tracker by trade, it was said that ‘he could follow an Indian through the thickest of forests merely by tracing his tracks, and in the event the Indian might have a league’s advantage on him, yet would he catch up with him’.18 Not much is known about the priest Hernando de Luque. An Andalucian who had spent many years in the Isthmus and Caribbean islands, though only a schoolmaster by profession he had accumulated a considerable fortune, possibly as a trader or by ignoring the prevalent promiscuity of the colonists in exchange for commercial favours.

Though Pedro Pizarro may well have exaggerated the plight of his comrades by claiming that several of them had died of hunger owing to the sudden departure of Almagro and Luque, taking with them the money they had gathered for financing the expedition of conquest during Pizarro’s year-long absence, the situation in which Pizarro found himself was unenviable. Not only did he face the near mutiny of his own men, but he had to contend with the opportunism of the port’s merchants and traders in securing sufficient funds from the sale of his ships in order to transport his small army across the Isthmus.

Eventually Pizarro was able to settle his affairs in the port and make the long trek across the Isthmus with his men to Panama. It was a journey travellers would record even into the eighteenth century as being both hazardous and unhealthy: the dirt road virtually hidden by jungle and swamp, its staging inns infested with mosquitoes and vermin, places where travellers, rich and poor alike, had no choice but to pay the extortionate charges in exchange for the paltry food and accommodation provided them. The port and township of Panama was itself little more than a stockade of wooden buildings and huts lying at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Its small central square was filled with traders, many of them barefoot and dressed in taffeta and lace; accompanied by their Indian women they would sell to one another for the labour of their land or the solace of their sexuality. It was a world in which the senses were overwhelmed by the colour and sounds of its tropical vegetation, of exotic fruit and cane alcohol, parrots, and caged monkeys, and by the handfuls of African slaves, who had also made the long trek across the Isthmus from the caravels that had transported them from the Caribbean islands.

It was a world, however, that showed little prospect of gain for Pizarro’s disgruntled volunteers who with every passing week witnessed their hopes dwindle in the lengthy and often acrimonious meetings their commander and his brother held with Almagro, without whose support and money the expedition would founder. Pedro Pizarro recalled:

On a number of occasions Don Francisco and Don Diego de Almagro met; and on one of these occasions, when Hernando Pizarro was taken ill, Almagro went to visit him, and discussing the provisioning of the expedition Hernando told him that he wished he were able to afford a horse for his two squires whom he had brought with him, and Almagro told him not to preoccupy himself with this for he would find each of the squires Juan Cortés and [Alonso de] Toro a horse. But this he never honoured, and for this reason Hernando Pizarro spoke very ill of him, calling him a ‘son of a whore’, and other such insults. I have wished to mention this event so that the origin and cause be known of so much ill-feeling that has resulted in the future wars and killing of so many of Pizarro’s and Almagro’s men … And matters being as they were, it came to pass that Hernando Ponce de León, an encomendero of Nicaragua, came to this port of Panama with two of his ships laden with slaves to sell, and which belonged to him and to his partner Hernando de Soto. Hernando Pizarro then spoke to Ponce and persuaded him to loan us his two ships, for our greatest need was ships. Hernando Ponce agreed to this, though at a great price, securing for himself and for his partner Soto an award of the finest land in the territory we would conquer, and for his partner Soto the command and the governorship of its principal city. To all this Pizarro and his brother agreed. And seeing what had been arranged, and realising that the expedition could be mounted, Almagro decided to reach an accord with Pizarro and his brother, even though with much ill will on both sides, as future events would demonstrate.19

Pizarro saw the arrangement with the two slavers as the last opportunity he would have to comply with his warrant of conquest. Past insults and hurt pride were also put aside by the two former partners, and once more the contract they had originally made between themselves and Luque was revived. So too were honoured the provisos Pizarro had secured at Toledo. In the eyes of some of Panama’s officials the agreement made between the two elderly slavers appeared almost comical, as they distributed honours, natives and lands between them, without ever contemplating the possible failure of their expedition. It was an opinion held generally among the traders of Panama, most of whom, other than Gaspar de Espinosa, had refused to invest in the expedition. Some are recorded as having sold horses and even armour and swords to the volunteers at exorbitant rates of interest, which in the event of their deaths would be collected from the few sureties they were able to muster.

Almagro and Luque secured the basic provisions for the expedition and for the transportation of the artillery, horses and African slaves who had been sent by the Crown’s officials from Jamaica and Cuba to Nombre de Dios. A third and much smaller group of volunteers under the command of another Nicaraguan slaver Sebastián de Belalcázar was also contracted by the use of Almagro and Luque’s gold. However, having been ill for some time, Almagro decided to remain behind in Panama to recruit a second armada of reinforcements to serve under his own command. Of these men Almagro would later enlist many in the neighbouring provinces of Nicaragua and Veragua, accompanied by Nicolás de Ribera. Luque was to die almost two years later, shortly after Almagro’s departure from Panama with his army of reinforcements and ignorant of the outcome of their venture.

In the last week of 1530 the first of the three caravels that would transport the 180 men and horses of Pizarro’s expeditionary force shed its mooring and sailed out of Panama’s small harbour, calling to mind the words of one of its volunteers: ‘When in ancient or modern times has so great an enterprise been undertaken by so few against so many odds, and to so varied a climate and seas, and at such distances, to conquer the unknown?’20