Francisco Pizarro (1471–1541) was a Spanish conquistador whose famed conquest of the Inca Empire in the 1530s made him and his men fantastically wealthy and won for Spain a rich New World colony. Today, Pizarro is not as famous as he once was, but many people still know him as the conquistador who brought down the Inca Empire.
The Inca Empire was rich in gold and silver, and Pizarro and his conquistadors all became very rich. Francisco Pizarro made out best of all. His share from Atahualpa’s ransom alone was 630 pounds of gold, 1,260 pounds of silver, and odds-and-ends such as Atahualpa’s throne — a chair made of 15 karat gold which weighed 183 pounds. At today’s rate, the gold alone was worth over $8 million dollars, and this does not include the silver or any of the loot from subsequent endeavors such as the sacking of Cuzco, which certainly at least doubled Pizarro’s take.
Most of the conquistadors were cruel, violent men who did not flinch from torture, mayhem, murder, and rape and Francisco Pizarro was no exception. Although he did not fall into the sadist category — as some other conquistadors did — Pizarro had his moments of great cruelty. After his puppet Emperor Manco Inca went into open rebellion, Pizarro ordered that Manco’s wife Cura Ocllo be tied to a stake and shot with arrows: her body was floated down a river where Manco would find it. Later, Pizarro ordered the murder of 16 captured Inca chieftains. One of them was burned alive.
During the civil wars, Diego de Almagro had the support of most of the recent arrivals to Peru. These men had missed out on the astronomical payoffs of the first part of the conquest and arrived to find the Inca Empire nearly picked clean of gold. Almagro was executed, but these men were still disgruntled, above all with the Pizarro brothers. The new conquistadors rallied around Almagro’s young son, Diego de Almagro the younger. In June of 1541, some of these went to Pizarro’s home and murdered him. Almagro the younger was later defeated in battle, captured, and executed.
Much like Hernán Cortés in Mexico, Pizarro is sort of half-heartedly respected in Peru. Peruvians all know who he was, but most of them consider him ancient history, and those who do think about him generally don’t hold him in very high regard. Peruvian Indians, in particular, see him as a brutal invader who massacred their forebears. A statue of Pizarro (which wasn’t even originally meant to represent him) was moved in 2005 from the central square of Lima to a new, out-of-the-way park outside of town.
