Francisco Pizarro

Francisco Pizarro was a Spanish conquistador who led the invasion of the Inca Empire, the largest state in the Americas. In 1532, with fewer than 200 men, he ambushed and captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca, killing thousands of his unarmed attendants, extracted a vast ransom in gold and silver, and then had him executed. The conquest that followed, fought with Indigenous allies and against long Inca resistance, made Peru the centre of Spain's South American empire, and Pizarro founded its capital, Lima, before being murdered by rival Spaniards in 1541.

Pizarro was born in Trujillo, in Extremadura, probably in the late 1470s; 1478 is the most commonly given year, but others have been proposed. He was the illegitimate son of Gonzalo Pizarro, an infantry officer, and Francisca González, a woman of humble background, and he grew up poor and never learned to read or write. Through his father he was a distant cousin of Hernán Cortés, a fellow Extremaduran.

He sailed to the Americas around 1502, probably to Hispaniola, and joined the early Spanish ventures on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia. In 1513 he was with Vasco Núñez de Balboa when Balboa's party crossed the isthmus of Panama and became the first Europeans to see the Pacific from the Americas. When the governor Pedrarias Dávila turned against Balboa in 1519, it was Pizarro who arrested him, and Balboa was beheaded. Pizarro became a landowner and town official in the new settlement of Panama City, holding Indigenous labourers in encomienda.

News of Cortés's conquest of the Aztec Empire and rumours of a rich kingdom to the south led Pizarro, the soldier Diego de Almagro and the priest Hernando de Luque to form a partnership in 1524. The first voyage down the Pacific coast, in 1524 and 1525, met storms, hunger and hostile peoples; Almagro lost an eye to an arrow. On the second, from 1526, the pilot Bartolomé Ruiz captured a large ocean-going balsa raft from Tumbes carrying fine textiles, silver and gold, the first proof of the wealth of the Andes. When Panama's governor ordered the exhausted expedition home, Pizarro is said to have drawn a line in the sand on the Isla del Gallo and invited those who wanted riches to cross it; thirteen men stayed with him. In 1528 they reached Tumbes, a prosperous town of the Inca Empire, where they saw its stone buildings and orderly society.

Pizarro then went to Spain and met Charles V. In the Capitulation of Toledo of July 1529, the crown made him governor and captain general of a territory called New Castile, giving Almagro much less, the beginning of a lasting quarrel. He returned with his half-brothers Hernando, Juan and Gonzalo, all of whom would play large parts in the conquest.

Pizarro sailed from Panama at the end of 1530. By chance he arrived at a moment of catastrophe for the Incas. A smallpox epidemic that had spread ahead of the Europeans had killed the ruler Huayna Capac and his chosen heir around 1527, and his sons Atahualpa and Huáscar had fought a bitter civil war. Atahualpa's generals had just won it when the Spaniards founded their first settlement at San Miguel de Piura in 1532.

Atahualpa, camped with his army at the hot springs near Cajamarca, agreed to meet the strangers. On 16 November 1532 he entered the town square carried on a litter with several thousand attendants, mostly unarmed or lightly armed. The Dominican friar Vicente de Valverde approached him with a breviary and called on him to accept Christianity and Spanish rule; when Atahualpa let the book fall or threw it down, Pizarro gave the signal. Cavalry, cannon and arquebuses burst from the buildings around the square, and over a few hours the Spaniards killed thousands of people, perhaps 2,000 and by some estimates many more, without losing a single man. Atahualpa was taken prisoner.

To win his release he offered to fill a large room once with gold and twice with silver. Over the following months Inca officials stripped temples and palaces across the Andes, including the Coricancha in Cusco, and the Spaniards melted the treasures into ingots; the ransom amounted to roughly six tonnes of gold and twelve of silver. In captivity Atahualpa ordered the killing of Huáscar. In July 1533, fearing an attack by Inca troops and pressed by Almagro's newly arrived men, who had no share in the ransom, Pizarro had him tried on charges including treason and fratricide. Sentenced to be burned, Atahualpa accepted baptism and was garrotted instead. The traditional date is 26 July 1533, though some historians now argue for 29 August.

Pizarro installed puppet rulers and, with Indigenous allies who resented Inca rule or had backed Huáscar, marched on Cusco, which the Spaniards entered in November 1533 and looted. Atahualpa's generals fought on, and the general Chalcuchímac was burned alive by the Spaniards. Pizarro made the young prince Manco Inca ruler, but the conquerors treated him with contempt, and his wives and property were seized. In 1536 Manco escaped and raised a great army that besieged Cusco for months and threatened Lima. The siege failed, and he withdrew to Vilcabamba in the forested mountains, where an independent Inca state survived until the Spanish captured and executed its last ruler, Túpac Amaru, in 1572.

On 18 January 1535 Pizarro founded Lima, the City of the Kings, near the coast, which became the capital of Spanish South America. The crown made him a marquis in 1537. For Andean people, the decades after the invasion brought war, looting, forced labour, new epidemics and the breakdown of the Inca system of storehouses and reciprocal obligations; the population fell dramatically over the sixteenth century. Pizarro took as partners Inca noblewomen, including Atahualpa's half-sister Quispe Sisa, baptised Inés Yupanqui, with whom he had a daughter, Francisca.

The quarrel with Almagro over who held Cusco turned into open war. In 1538 Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro defeated Almagro at the Battle of Las Salinas and executed him. Almagro's followers, impoverished and humiliated, gathered around his mestizo son, Diego de Almagro the younger. On 26 June 1541 about twenty of them broke into Pizarro's palace in Lima and killed him with swords; he was in his sixties. The civil wars continued for years, and royal authority was established only after the creation of the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542 and the defeat of Gonzalo Pizarro's rebellion in 1548.

Pizarro's conquest gave Spain the silver of the Andes, including the mines of Potosí discovered in 1545, which financed the Spanish Empire for generations, and it placed Andean peoples under colonial rule for nearly three centuries. In Spanish tradition he was long admired for daring and endurance. Andean accounts, such as the chronicle of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, written around 1615, and the testimony of Manco Inca's son Titu Cusi Yupanqui, present the invaders as greedy, faithless and cruel, an image now widely shared by historians. The Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire is remembered in modern Peru with deep ambivalence. His remains lie in the cathedral of Lima, but his equestrian statue was removed from the main square in 2003 to a less prominent site, a sign of how far his reputation has fallen.