Francisco Pizarro

Anyone asking who was Francisco Pizarro must begin in Trujillo, a hill town in the Spanish region of Extremadura, where he was born, by most reckonings on March 16, 1478. He was the illegitimate son of Gonzalo Pizarro, an infantry colonel who fought in Spain's Italian campaigns, and Francisca González, a woman of modest standing in the town ^[1]. The irregular circumstances of his birth shut him out of his father's inheritance and status, and he grew up poor. Tradition holds that he herded pigs as a boy, and he never learned to read or write, signing documents later in life with a rubric drawn between letters written by a clerk ^[2].

Extremadura was a hard, dry province that produced a striking number of conquistadors, including Hernán Cortés, who was a distant relative of Pizarro through the Extremaduran gentry ^[1]. For young men with military fathers, no land, and no letters, the newly opened Indies offered the only plausible route to wealth. Pizarro appears to have soldiered in Italy before crossing the Atlantic, though the record of his youth is thin and much of it rests on later chroniclers ^[2].

In 1502 he sailed for Hispaniola in the large fleet that carried the new governor Nicolás de Ovando to the Caribbean. He was in his mid twenties, unknown, and would remain so for another thirty years ^[1].

Pizarro served a long apprenticeship in the brutal frontier politics of the early Spanish Caribbean. In 1513 he marched with Vasco Núñez de Balboa on the expedition across the Isthmus of Panama that gave Europeans their first sight of the Pacific Ocean, an experience that later shaped his own ambitions on that coast ^[3]. When Balboa fell from favor, it was Pizarro, acting on the orders of governor Pedrarias Dávila, who arrested him in 1519 before his execution. The episode showed a man willing to serve power without sentiment ^[1].

He settled in the new town of Panama, where he received land and Indigenous laborers, held municipal office, and became one of the wealthier citizens of a poor colony ^[2]. Rumors of a rich kingdom to the south, called Birú or Perú in garbled reports, circulated through Panama in the 1520s. Pizarro formed a partnership with the soldier Diego de Almagro and the priest and financier Hernando de Luque to explore and conquer it ^[3].

The first two voyages, launched in 1524 and 1526, were miserable affairs of hunger, mangrove swamps, and skirmishes, and Almagro lost an eye to an arrow. Yet the second voyage reached Tumbes on the edge of the Inca world and returned with gold, fine cloth, and llamas, proof that the rumors were not fantasy ^[3]. When the governor of Panama ordered the survivors home, Pizarro is said to have drawn a line in the sand on the Isla del Gallo and invited those who wanted riches over safety to cross it. Thirteen men stayed with him, an episode the chroniclers made famous ^[1].

Needing royal backing, Pizarro sailed to Spain and in July 1529 secured the Capitulación de Toledo, a contract with the Crown naming him governor and captain general of the lands he proposed to conquer ^[4]. He recruited his half brothers Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo in Trujillo and returned to Panama, leaving Almagro with lesser titles and a lasting grievance ^[2].

Any list of Francisco Pizarro achievements is dominated by the events of 1532 and 1533. His third expedition left Panama in December 1530 with roughly 180 men and fewer than 40 horses, a tiny force by any measure ^[3]. Timing favored him. The Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu by its people, had just endured a devastating epidemic, probably smallpox spread ahead of the Spaniards, and a civil war between the half brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa over the succession to the emperor Huayna Capac ^[5]. Atahualpa had won that war shortly before the Spaniards marched inland.

On November 15, 1532, Pizarro's company entered the Andean town of Cajamarca, where Atahualpa was camped with an army the Spanish estimated in the tens of thousands. The next day the emperor came into the town square with a lightly armed retinue. After a Dominican friar presented him with a breviary, which Atahualpa cast aside, the hidden Spaniards attacked with cannon, cavalry, and steel swords. Thousands of Inca attendants died in the massacre, and Pizarro seized the emperor alive ^[3].

Atahualpa offered a ransom that became legendary: a large room filled once with gold and twice with silver. Over the following months llama trains carried treasure to Cajamarca from across the Andes, and the melted metal made even common Spanish footsoldiers rich ^[6]. The ransom did not save its payer. In July 1533, fearing an Inca counterattack and pressed by his officers, Pizarro had Atahualpa executed by garrote after a hasty proceeding, an act condemned by many Spaniards at the time, including eventually the Crown ^[5].

The Spaniards then marched south and occupied Cusco, the Inca capital, in November 1533. Pizarro installed a young prince, Manco Inca, as a client ruler, a relationship that collapsed within three years when Manco escaped and raised a massive rebellion that besieged Cusco through 1536 and 1537 before retreating to the mountain refuge of Vilcabamba ^[5].

Conquest made Pizarro an administrator. On January 18, 1535, he founded the Ciudad de los Reyes, the City of the Kings, on the Rímac River near the coast. The city, soon known as Lima, gave the colony a capital connected by sea to Panama and Spain, and it remains the capital of Peru ^[4]. He also refounded Cusco and other towns as Spanish municipalities and distributed encomiendas, grants of Indigenous tribute and labor, to his followers, a system that imposed heavy burdens on the Andean population ^[6].

As governor of New Castile, Pizarro proved better at rewarding kinsmen than at building durable institutions. His brothers held the richest grants and key commands, which bred resentment among other veterans ^[2]. Contemporaries described him as austere in dress and habit, physically tough into his sixties, generous to allies, and implacable toward rivals ^[1].

The gravest problem was Diego de Almagro. The Crown had granted Almagro a governorship to the south, and after his expedition to Chile in 1535 and 1536 found hardship instead of gold, he returned and claimed that Cusco lay within his jurisdiction. He seized the city in 1537, imprisoning two of Pizarro's brothers, and the quarrel became open civil war among the conquerors ^[3].

Pizarro never married. In Peru he took as his companion Inés Huaylas Yupanqui, a daughter of the emperor Huayna Capac who was baptized with a Spanish name. She bore him two children, Francisca and Gonzalo, whom the Crown legitimated by decree in 1537 ^[6]. He later had two more sons with another Inca noblewoman, Angelina Yupanqui, who had earlier been a wife of Atahualpa. Such unions between conquistadors and Inca royal women were common in the first colonial generation and produced an influential mestizo elite ^[6].

His daughter Francisca Pizarro Yupanqui became one of the wealthiest heiresses of the Spanish world. Sent to Spain as a girl, she eventually married her uncle Hernando Pizarro, the only one of the brothers to die of old age, and their descendants held the marquisate later attached to the conquest ^[2].

Despite the torrent of gold that passed through his hands, observers noted that Pizarro lived simply, played bowls with his soldiers, and spent his last years absorbed in building Lima, personally inspecting the construction of its church and his own house on the main square ^[1].

The feud with Almagro ended on the battlefield. In April 1538, at Las Salinas near Cusco, an army loyal to the Pizarros defeated Almagro's forces. Hernando Pizarro had the aging Almagro tried and executed by garrote that July, a killing that shocked opinion in Spain and left Almagro's mestizo son, Diego de Almagro the Younger, at the head of a bitter faction of dispossessed veterans ^[3].

Francisco Pizarro, by then a marquis by royal grant, ruled from Lima but took little care to reconcile the Almagrists, who were stripped of encomiendas and drifted around the capital in poverty ^[5]. Warnings of a plot reached him and were dismissed.

On Sunday, June 26, 1541, about twenty armed Almagrists forced their way into his palace on Lima's plaza as he was finishing dinner. Most of his guests fled. Pizarro, past sixty, fought back with sword and cuirass in hand, killing or wounding several attackers before he was overwhelmed and stabbed to death ^[1]. The chroniclers wrote that he died tracing a cross on the floor in his own blood. The assassins proclaimed the younger Almagro governor, but a royal army crushed the faction at Chupas in 1542 and executed him. Pizarro's remains rest in the cathedral of Lima, where a body long displayed as his was confirmed by forensic study in the 1980s after the true remains were found in a lead box in the crypt ^[7].

Few careers in a Francisco Pizarro biography chart such a climb: an illiterate, illegitimate swineherd's son ended as marquis and governor of an Andean empire. The conquest he led redirected world history, sending Peruvian and later Bolivian silver into the global economy and binding the Andes to the Spanish Crown for nearly three centuries ^[6]. Lima, his most constructive act, grew into the seat of a viceroyalty and one of the great cities of the Americas ^[4].

The costs fell on the Andean peoples. War, forced labor, and above all epidemic disease caused a demographic collapse in the decades after 1532, and the destruction of Inca political and religious institutions is now studied as a central catastrophe of the early modern world ^[5]. Modern historians such as John Hemming have paired admiration for the audacity of Cajamarca with a full accounting of the violence that followed ^[5].

His memory remains contested. An equestrian statue of Pizarro that once stood beside Lima's main plaza was removed from that place of honor in 2003 and relocated to a park, a sign of Peru's ongoing argument over how to weigh its Spanish and Inca inheritances ^[7]. Among the basic Francisco Pizarro facts, the dates endure: born in Trujillo in 1478, master of Peru by 1533, dead by conspiracy in the city he founded on June 26, 1541.