Diego de Almagro
Diego de Almagro’s story is one of betrayal, lost kingdoms and dishonour. Even his birth was a secret. His mother became pregnant before she was married and left him as a foundling in a Spanish village, although everybody seems to have soon worked out who he was, because by the age of four he was living in the house of an uncle of his who beat him. By age 15 Almagro was working as a servant in Seville and stabbed a fellow servant who nearly died. This was probably the reason he enrolled as s sailor in the armada that was about to travel to the New World. By the time Almagro reached Panama, many other future conquistadors had arrived, among them Francisco Pizarro.
Almagro undertook his first conquest in 1515, when he left Darien in command of 260 men and founded Villa del Acla, during this and subsequent journeys into the interior of the New World, Almagro, Pizarro and Hernando de Luque became close friends. By 1524 an ‘association of conquest of South America’ was formed between Almagro, Pizarro and Luque, who obtained royal permission to discover and conquer lands further south. After several expeditions to South America, Pizarro secured his stay in Peru and explored the territory held by the Incas. He succeeded in defeating the Incan army under Emperor Atahualpa during the Battle of Cajamarca in 1532. After splitting the treasure of the Inca emperor Pizarro and Almagro travelled towards Cuzco and took the city in 1533.
However, Almagro's friendship with Pizarro had been showing signs of deterioration since 1526 when Pizarro began to employ his brothers rather than his friends, and thus increase the family fortune. In 1532 the Spanish King awarded Almagro the title of ‘Sir’ and he was given a coat of arms.
Almagro decided to embark on his new quest for the discovery of the riches of Chile and with a band of fifty men, left Cuzco in 1535, following the Inca trail. The expedition turned out to be a difficult and often fatal enterprise. Survivors told how their fellow adventurers would stop and rest, only to die frozen. A common experience was that men would stop and light a fire to keep them warm overnight, take off their outer coat and boots and they discover that several of their toes, the victims of frostbite, had stayed in the boots!
Almagro began to explore this new territory in the direction the valley of the Aconcagua River, where he was well received by the natives. However he was unaware he was being conspired against by his interpreter who secretly urged the local natives to attack the Spanish. Rather surprisingly the Chileans declined, seeing little threat in the ragged band of frostbitten travellers.
Because Almagro found no gold in Chile, he decided to return and take possession of Cuzco so as to consolidate an inheritance for his young son. But in the interim, the Spanish King had divided Peru into two parts and the town of Cuzco was in the section offered to Pizarro, not the part offered to Almagro!
Then it got even more complicated; an Inca chief, Manco, had led a rebellion, which caused Pizarro’s army to head into the Andes to find him. This allowed Almagro’s men to defeat the small garrison that remained in Cuzco and to capture two of the Pizarro brothers, Hernando and Gonzalo, at which point Francisco Pizarro sent another army to liberate them.
During this time Almagro fell ill, and Pizarro and his brothers defeated him at the Battle of Las Salinas in 1538. He was captured by Hernando Pizarro and ignored his requests for appeals to the King. Almagro was condemned to death and decapitated while in confinement on July 8, 1538. His body was taken to the public Plaza Mayor of Cuzco and displayed to the natives.
His body was rescued by a female servant and details of his burial can be found here
Other Great Explorers
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