The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  Both conquistadors then returned to Panama, claiming to have baptized eighty-two thousand Indians. They also had brought with them 112,000 pesos of gold. Pedrarias predictably claimed a fifth of that for himself, but González returned to Santo Domingo with his treasure without bidding him, nor indeed anyone, goodbye. He sought reinforcements there and dispatched Andrés de Cereceda to Spain with presents for Bishop Fonseca and a request that he, Gil González Dávila, should receive a governorship in Nicaragua independent of Pedrarias.

  But the latter was not prepared to abandon anything. Pedrarias wrote letters of protest to the Crown via his son and via Gaspar de Espinosa, a licenciado (graduate lawyer), and a bachelor of arts, who had been chief magistrate under Pedrarias.

  Pedrarias immediately dispatched Francisco Hernández de Córdoba to Nicaragua and Costa Rica to take possession of that region.11 That conquistador had come out to the Indies in 1517. Perhaps he was a distant relation of El Gran Capitán, who shared his name.

  Hernández de Córdoba set off by ship in the course of 1524. He and his men made for the Costa Rican coast to the south of Nicaragua and landed at Urutina, on the Gulf of Nicoya, near where a year earlier González Dávila had rested his expedition. He founded several towns: Bruselas (Brussels), for example, near Puente Arenas; Granada on Lake Nicaragua, near the Indian colony of Jalteba; Segovia; and León la Vieja, which would soon become the capital of the new settlement. Among the first thirty Spanish settlers there were men with brilliant futures in Peru such as Sebastián de Benalcázar and Hernando de Soto, who became chief magistrate of this new city. There was complete uncertainty among these isolated Spaniards in respect of their northern frontier: Whom would they have to defeat in order to establish their “independent” regime? Olid? González Dávila? Alvarado? Cortés himself? Or perhaps Pedro Moreno, the prosecutor of Santo Domingo, who, acting for the supreme court of that city, had been sent to Central America to find out where these and other conquistadors actually were.

  Hernández de Córdoba heard that González Dávila was planning a return expedition to those same Central American lands. He had, in fact, already come back with his friend Andrés Niño to Honduras and settled at Puerto de Caballos, hoping to prove to the Indians that Spaniards did not die. When they landed, they quickly came into contact with Hernández de Córdoba, and the two little Spanish armies fought two pitched battles. Eight Spaniards and thirty horses died.

  Hernández de Córdoba pressed the new municipalities of the places he had founded to recognize him as their governor. His usurpation of authority was not universally accepted, in particular not by Hernando de Soto, a brilliant horseman from Jerez de los Caballeros in Extremadura, the same city that had given birth to Balboa, who had married Pedrarias’s daughter, Isabel, and in consequence looked on Hernández de Córdoba’s actions as destructive. Hernández de Córdoba imprisoned Soto, but a friend, Francisco de Compañón, freed him, and the two rode back to complain to Pedrarias, who mounted an expedition to seize Lake Nicaragua. To that generation of conquistadors, the lake seemed a “paradise of God,” in the words of Las Casas, who relished not only the beautiful dark water but the rich black soil and the long row of volcanoes near the sea.12

  In these years, a number of powerful persons were trying to assert themselves in too small a space in Central America. But they were soon to find a way to prosperity and advancement, if not happiness. Pedrarias, aged but brutal to both his fellow countrymen and the Indians, remained, apparently, impossible to remove.

  The politics of Central America in the late 1520s is the central element in the preparations for the conquest of Peru. Most of the characters in that drama emerge from what happened in Panama or in Darien, in particular the dynamic figure of Francisco Pizarro.

  In 1528 Pedrarias was, however, still the dominant authority in the territory, as he had been for fourteen years. He was now governor of Nicaragua, taking up his new office there on Holy Saturday, 1528, finding anarchy.13 Diego López de Salcedo had illegally seized power as governor of Honduras, with no permission from the Council of the Indies. López de Salcedo was a nephew of the great governor of La Española, Fray Nicolás de Ovando, with whom he had first come to the Indies in 1502. There was a rebellion of Indian leaders.

  López de Salcedo eventually surrendered to Pedrarias and, after some months in the new fortress of León, was sent home to Spain. His lieutenant was Gabriel de Rojas, a member of the famous family of Cuéllar in Castile (Gabriel was a brother of Manuel de Rojas, then governor of Cuba, both being cousins of Diego Velázquez, whose palace in Cuéllar was next to their own). Pedrarias continued to be reproached even by his own men, such as his chief magistrate Castañeda. But it made no difference to his conduct. He was defended by Martín de Estete, whose brutality toward Indians was without parallel.

  At that time, the traffic in slaves still seemed the only way to make any money in Central America. Among those active in the commerce were Hernando de Soto and Juan Ponce, who collaborated with the mayor Castañeda; “their” Indians were sold not only in Panama but in the Caribbean. Ponce’s galleon San Jerónimo habitually carried 450 piezas (fully grown slaves); Soto and Ponce’s La Concepción could carry 385.

  Soto and Ponce were also already showing interest in Birú. But Pedrarias, having been persuaded to sell his own interests in Pizarro’s dramatic project there for 1,000 pesos, was reluctant that anyone under his command should engage in it. If Soto and Ponce went to Peru, he argued, Nicaragua would lose her best men.

  Francisco Pizarro’s friend the pilot Bartolomé Ruiz de Estrada arrived at Soto’s farm, La Posesión, in the Santiago looking precisely for new projects for Birú. Pedrarias prohibited all contact with them. But Ruiz himself met Soto and Ponce and almost certainly undertook to provide ships in return for a major role in what Pizarro was planning. Soto also agreed to supply thirty or forty men, mostly debtors, and perhaps three hundred slaves. Then, in August 1526, Pedrarias gave permission to Ponce to ship slaves for the estancia at La Posesión in the San Jerónimo. But Soto had to agree to stay on in León. On October 15, Ponce left La Posesión in the San Jerónimo carrying 402 slaves, with the royal factor Alonso Pérez on board. But once in Panama, he seized the opportunity to discuss with Pizarro’s friends his and Soto’s hope to participate in the promising Peruvian adventure.

  We recall how in 1522 Pascual de Andagoya had sailed two hundred miles south of Panama in the Pacific Ocean (the Southern Sea) and ascended the Río San Juan; we have observed how Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and Fray Hernando de Luque bought Andagoya’s ships and secured the financial support of Licenciado Gaspar de Espinosa, the second most important man in Castilla del Oro after Pedrarias. In 1524, Pizarro himself sailed south along the Pacific coast from Panama with eighty men and four horses to reach Puerto de Ayuno, where his comrade Almagro lost an eye in a skirmish with Indians at Pueblo Quemado.

  In March 1526, Pizarro set off on a second voyage south with fewer than two hundred men and a few horses in two small ships captained by his friend, the pilot Bartolomé Ruiz de Estrada. Crossing the equator for the first time in the Southern Sea, they came in touch with Peruvian civilization—though they were still far to the north of where modern Ecuador gives way to Peru. They encountered a balsa raft traveling northward and fitted with sails of cotton, which was preparing to trade Peruvian artifacts: silver and gold, cotton and woolen cloaks, and other clothing in many colors, not to speak of tiny weights with which to measure gold. Eleven of the men on that raft leaped into the ocean to avoid capture, but three were held by the Spaniards, to be trained as interpreters. The conquest of Mexico had taught Spaniards that a good interpreter is more valuable than one thousand soldiers. The sight of sails inspired the Europeans, for neither the Mexica nor the Maya had enjoyed such a benefit.

  In June 1527, Pizarro caused his men, now reduced to eighty, to turn back north to take shelter back on Gallo Island, a barren spot, off Panama near Perequeté. Thence he sent Almagro to Panama for
supplies, and Bartolomé Ruiz carried a letter to the new governor, Ríos, in Castilla del Oro, insisting that his encounter with the balsa raft showed that Birú was full of riches: “Very fine gold,” he reported.14 In August 1527, other letters were sent by Pizarro’s men about their hunger, their despair, and their physical determination to survive. Some of them said that they were being detained on the expedition against their will.15 Governor Ríos gave permission for those of the expedition to leave if they wished. Many did so in boats sent by the governor under the command of Juan Tafur, who brought a message from Governor Ríos’s wife, Catalina Saavedra. She wanted to buy cotton cloth from Peru.

  Pizarro held a meeting of his followers on the beach. He told the eighty or so Spaniards who were still with him that they were all free to leave. But he appealed to them to stay with him. He recalled the riches of the raft. He drew a line with his sword in the sand, and proposed that those who preferred the glory and the gold of an adventure in Peru to the misery and obscurity of Panama should cross the line. Only thirteen did so. The rest had heard too many promises of wealth and glory.16

  The thirteen became famous. There were among them five Andalusians, two Castilians, three Extremeños, a Cretan, a Basque, and one whose origins are unclear.17 Pizarro sent his remaining boat back to Panama under the inspector Carbayuelo to bring back Almagro.

  On Gallo Island, Pizarro and his thirteen followers did what they could to survive. They made a canoe out of a ceiba tree and went fishing daily, catching excellent fish. Then they killed animals called guadaquinajes, which were bigger than hare and gave good flesh to eat. There was little other food but “mosquitoes enough to make war against the Turks.” After a month or so, some of Pizarro’s men thought openly that “death would be the end of our sufferings.”

  Back in Panama, Almagro and Luque are said by the chronicler Cieza to have allowed many tears to fall when they read the sad letters brought back from Gallo Island—though those two hardened conquistadors did not often weep. It was said that Pizarro had personally sent back a couplet, which ran:

      Oh my lord governor look well and take pains

      For there goes the knife and the butcher remains.

  Ruiz eventually set off back to Gallo Island and found Pizarro in despair. Ruiz suggested that all return to Panama in six months’ time. Pizarro agreed but suggested that first they should together sail to the south and see what the coast of Peru was like. Ruiz agreed to do this, leaving behind the most debilitated of the Spaniards.

  In the next few months, Pizarro and Ruiz made their way to Tumbes, a town on the coast where they were well received, and then to the island of Santa Clara and the Río Santa to the south of the modern Trujillo, just north of Chimbote. The Andalusian Alonso de Molina here gave a cacique two pigs, a cock, and two Spanish chickens, and the Cretan Pedro de Candía gave an exhibition of shooting with an arquebus. Antonio de Carrión, a Castilian, then took possession of the land in the name of the King of Castile. The unimpressed Indians gave many presents: llamas, pottery, fine cloths, metals, and also some more boys to be trained to act as interpreters.

  Pizarro’s expedition in this year may have reached as far as the mouth of the river Chincha, well to the south of the modern capital of Lima. There were several such stops on the way back, for example at Tumbes, where Alonso de Molina was left behind to learn Quechua. Pedro de Halcón, from Seville, fell in love there and also asked to be allowed to remain. A sailor of Ruiz’s named Cunés decided to remain for a similar reason at Pinta. The rest returned to Panama, where they were well received by the governor, Ríos.

  The story of “the thirteen of Gallo Island” kept Panama agog for a long time with tales of llamas, gold, cotton cloaks, and other wonderful textiles. For a while, Pizarro was silent. Then he, too, talked with his old friends Almagro, Luque, and Espinosa. It was agreed that an expedition should be mounted to establish settlements in Peru. Nothing was said of conquest. But it was understood that if the people of Peru were to refuse the King’s command, transmitted by the immortal Requirement, they would be made dependent—of course, in the most humane way possible. Pizarro would be governor, Almagro proconsul (adelantado), Luque bishop, and the pilot Ruiz would be alguacil. But Luque thought it essential to send a representative to Castile to receive the Crown’s formal approval. He thought that Diego del Corral, an experienced Castilian from Hoz de Ovejar, in the province of Burgos, would be the best man to do this. Almagro thought the right man was Pizarro himself. Luque was doubtful, since he considered Pizarro “a consummate warrior but one with little culture and little informed of the subtleties of rhetoric.” He was popular, and Oviedo wrote of him that he was “a good person with a good temperament if slow and deliberate in conversation.”18 In the end, Pizarro went to Spain, accompanied by Diego del Corral and Pedro de Candía, the Cretan artilleryman.

  Pizarro in 1528 was in his fifties, and very experienced in the Indies, where he had arrived in 1502 with Ovando. He was tall, lean, and strong. Like Ovando and, indeed, Cortés and Núñez de Balboa, he was an Extremeño, being the illegitimate son of a well-known soldier and aristocrat, Gonzalo Pizarro, who had fought in Navarre as well as in Italy. Pizarro’s mother, Francisca González, had apparently been a servant girl who had worked in the convent of San Francisco in Trujillo, for Sister Beatriz Pizarro de Hinojosa, a distinguished member of the family. Francisco may also have been in Italy with his father in the 1490s, but in his early days in Santo Domingo, he was just one more impoverished soldier, though impressed by Ovando.19 When he received a coat of arms in 1537, it was recalled that he had served in Italy.20 He reached Darien before Pedrarias went there and worked under Núñez de Balboa, though it was he who arrested the latter in 1519. He also was second-in-command to other leaders. He showed himself incomparably tough, a good leader, and one loved by those who served with him. He could neither read nor write, and his horsemanship was modest since he had not been brought up to live with horses. The gossip and memoirist Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán, however, said that he was “a good companion without any vanity or pomposity.”21 Garcilaso, the half-Peruvian chronicler who wrote so well, said of him that he was “kindly and gentle by nature and never said a hard word of anyone.”22 He once saved an Indian servant from death by leaping into a river, exposing himself to great danger. When reproached for taking such a risk, he replied that his interlocutor obviously did not know what it was to be fond of a servant. He practically never altered the style of the clothes he had worn in his youth: a black cassock with a skirt down to the ankle, with white deerskin shoes and a white hat, his sword and dagger worn in an old-fashioned way, though he would later often wear a fur coat that Cortés sent him from Mexico. He often wore napkins round his neck since he spent much of his life in time of peace playing bowls or some ball game such as ninepins and “they served to keep the sweat from his face.”23

  Despite all these good qualities, like most conquistadors he was quite prepared to be cruel to enemies and to kill Indians in a ruthless manner in order to achieve a psychological advantage, thereby compensating for his inferiority in numbers.24

  His friend and eventual rival Almagro was of a different character, though he, too, was illegitimate and illiterate. He was a few years younger than Pizarro and so, in 1528, must have been in his late forties. He seems to have been born in Bolaños de Calatrava on the road from Manzanares to Ciudad Real. Probably he was the illegitimate son of a Gallego hidalgo, Juan de Montenegro, by Elvira Gutiérrez, a servant girl in Almagro. Elvira perhaps had Moorish blood, a fact that later exposed Almagro to fierce insults. He lived for a time with his mother’s cruel brother, Hernán Gutiérrez, and fled to find his mother married to a shopkeeper named Celinos in Ciudad Real. Almagro then went to Toledo, where he served Licenciado Luis González de Polanco, one of the court magistrates (alcaldes de corte) of the Catholic Kings and a long-lived counselor of the Crown in Castile. Almagro had a violent fight with another boy; in consequence, he fled to Seville,
where in 1513 he joined the expedition of Pedrarias in the humblest of fashions, as a page, and he was then involved in many of the entradas in Central America, becoming an intimate friend of Pizarro about 1515.25

  Almagro had different qualities from Pizarro. He was apparently “so excellent a woodsman that he could follow an Indian through the thickest forests merely by following his tracks and, although that Indian might have a league’s advantage, Almagro would catch up.” He was always swearing, and when angry, he treated those who were with him very badly, even if they were gentlemen. But his soldiers loved him for “his liberal disposition.” Enríquez de Guzmán thought him “generous, frank and liberal, affectionate, merciful, correct and just-minded, very fearful of God and the King.” He also forgave debts as if he were a Prince, not a soldier. To look at, Cieza says, he was “a man of short stature with ugly features but of great courage and endurance.”26

  Almagro never got closer to the court than Toledo in his teens. For that reason, he played a lesser part than did Pizarro in the manufacture of the myth of the empire. It is uncertain whether the Emperor knew his name except as one who challenged and disputed royal authority. Yet he played an essential role in imperial politics in his lifetime.

  The two conquistadors were linked in those days of exploration by their joint membership of a so-called “companía,” a society made up of a firm or a group of men, each of whom was in charge of his own equipment and weapons and received in return a previously stipulated share of the spoils. This was a change from the idea of a compaña, a type of organization based on an Italian model whereby a group of men such as the Columbus family hired the services of salaried men.

  It seemed for a time likely that Pizarro and Almagro had a third partner, the cleric Hernando de Luque. That now seems improbable. But the first two were linked in their compañía, which went by the name of the Compañía del Levante. Pedrarias the governor seems to have taken an interest, and some money was probably provided by the rich settler Gaspar de Espinosa, a financier from Medina de Rioseco, who had much experience in Panama, and who acted through his son Juan, who was for a time Almagro’s secretary.27