Diego de Almagro
Diego de Almagro was Francisco Pizarro's partner in the conquest of Peru, the man who raised the money and the men in Panama while Pizarro sailed south, who lost an eye to an Indian arrow on the second voyage, arrived at Cajamarca in April 1533 with the reinforcements that made the march on Cuzco possible, took no share of Atahualpa's ransom because he had not been there when it was promised, and led the expedition to Chile in 1535 that found no gold and came back over the Andes and the Atacama with the survivors. He then seized Cuzco from the Pizarro brothers as part of the grant the king had made him, was beaten by them at Las Salinas in April 1538, and was garrotted in his cell in Cuzco in July, aged about sixty-three. He was a foundling from Almagro in La Mancha who had come to the Indies in 1514 and made a small fortune in Panama, and the partnership of 1524 with Pizarro and the priest Luque was a business venture in which Pizarro commanded, Almagro supplied, and Luque found the capital. When Pizarro went to Spain in 1528 to get a royal licence he came back with the governorship, the title of adelantado and the command for himself and only a fortress command for Almagro, and the quarrel that ended in two civil wars began there. He joined Pizarro at Cajamarca with a hundred and fifty men in the spring of 1533, argued for Atahualpa's execution and marched with the army to Cuzco, where he took the city's submission in November. The king made him governor of New Toledo, the two hundred leagues south of Pizarro's New Castile, in 1534, and to find out what that was he went to Chile in July 1535 with five hundred Spaniards and thousands of Andean bearers, of whom most died crossing the Andes at four thousand metres in winter. He came back to Cuzco in April 1537 to find it besieged by Manco Inca, broke the siege, and then took the city and the two Pizarro brothers in it, Hernando and Gonzalo, prisoner, claiming it lay in his grant. Hernando was released on terms, raised an army at Lima, and beat the Almagrists on the salt flats outside Cuzco. Hernando Pizarro had him tried and executed in prison while pretending to consider an appeal. His mestizo son, Almagro the younger, murdered Francisco Pizarro in Lima three years later in revenge and was executed in his turn.
- Lived: 1475 CE – 1538 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: conquistador
