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 r
iver 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 penu
ry, 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.
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