Francisco Pizarro Quotes

Bolívar was one of the shapers of the modern world, leading his ragged band of followers to take on what was then the longest enduring empire, that of Spain, which disposed of some 36,000 troops and 44,000 seamen to preserve an entire continent in its iron grip. He liberated no fewer than six modern countries from the Spanish stranglehold – Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Panama – in a series of astonishing marches that led his army across Amazonian rainforests, sodden marshes, dizzying mountains, parched outbacks and prosperous highlands to exceed the achievements of the conquistadors, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro (because the Spanish empire was so much better armed than the Aztecs and the Incas).

Indeed, superior weapons had enabled Spanish expedition leaders to vanquish large numbers of indigenous opponents. When Hernán Cortés first reached the coast of Mexico, he had his ships grounded to prevent his men from going back and would go on to bring down Mexico-Tenochtitlán, a city of 250,000 inhabitants, with a little more than 1,000 soldiers. Similarly, in 1536- 1537, Francisco Pizarro and some 180 Spaniards held off perhaps 100,000 indigenous attackers for more than a year in the heart of the Inca Empire. Thousands of Indians perished, but only one Spaniard died, a man who had failed to wear his helmet.3

On the American side, the shock of incomprehension was registered more brutally, by a devastating loss of population. It is impossible to estimate safely the numbers living in the Americas before European contact. Estimates vary between 13 million and 180 million. But everywhere there is evidence of a massive fall in the early years after the Europeans arrived. First of all, the Spaniards complained of depopulation in the first islands they colonised, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the figures bear them out: a census of Hispaniola in 1496 gave a figure of 1.1 million, but just eighteen years later the repartimiento of 1514 listed 22,000. Mexico witnessed a series of epidemics, beginning with the Spanish visit to their capital Tenochtitlán, which carried off most of the native population, and spread southward into Guatemala. Of the whole Caribbean, Joseph de Acosta was writing in the 1580s: ‘the habitation of which coasts is…so wasted and condemned that of thirty parts of the people that inhabit it there wants twenty-nine; and it is likely that the rest of the Indians will in short time decay’.3 Hernando de Soto led an expedition through Florida and the North American south-east in the mid-sixteenth century, finding a thick population of Indians, clustered in small cities, on the Mississippi river near modern Memphis. In 1682, when the area was next visited by white men (this time French), it was deserted. The diseases travelled faster than the spearheads of Spanish conquest: smallpox arrived in Peru in 1525, Francisco Pizarro in 1532. It had already killed Huayna Capac, the Inca, and many of his relations, and precipitated the dynastic struggle that the Spaniards were to turn to their own advantage. Thereafter, as everywhere, further epidemics, of typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles as well as more smallpox, ravaged the population. The Spanish were not notably humane conquerors, but they had no interest in genocide.

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Francisco Pizarro, the illiterate Spanish adventurer who conquered the Inca Empire in Peru, was born about 1475, in the city of Trujillo, Spain.