Pedro de Alvarado
Pedro de Alvarado was Cortes's second in command in Mexico, the red-haired captain the Aztecs called Tonatiuh, the sun, who was left in charge of Tenochtitlan in May 1520 while Cortes went to the coast to deal with Narvaez and who, during the festival of Toxcatl, ordered his men to fall on the unarmed nobles dancing in the temple precinct and kill them, which brought the city up in arms and, when Cortes returned, drove the Spaniards out on the Night of Sorrows with the loss of most of their men and all their gold. He then conquered Guatemala and El Salvador on his own account with the same methods, was made governor of Guatemala, sailed for Peru and was bought off, sailed for the Spice Islands and was recalled, and died in 1541 under a horse that rolled on him during a campaign against the Indians of Jalisco. He was born at Badajoz in Extremadura, came to Hispaniola about 1510 with his brothers, sailed with Grijalva along the Mexican coast in 1518 and with Cortes in 1519, and was the captain Cortes trusted most and had most to forgive. The massacre at Toxcatl, in which some hundreds of the Mexica nobility died, was explained by Alvarado as a pre-emptive strike against a plot. The Mexica accounts describe men being cut down as they danced. At the retreat from the city he commanded the rearguard and, the story goes, vaulted a gap in the causeway on his lance at the place still called the Leap of Alvarado. He fought at Otumba and the siege of 1521, commanded the Tlacopan causeway, and after the fall of the city was sent south in 1523 with some four hundred Spaniards and thousands of Mexican allies into the Maya highlands, where he beat the Quiche at Xelaju, burned their capital, killed their kings and founded the city of Santiago de Guatemala in 1524. His government there was brutal even by the standards of the conquest; Las Casas made him the type of the conquistador, and the crown tried him for it and let him off. He had himself made adelantado and governor in Spain in 1527, married two sisters of the house of Cueva in succession, and in 1534 landed in Ecuador with a fleet to take a share of the Inca gold and was paid a hundred thousand pesos by Almagro to go away. He was preparing a fleet for the Pacific when he died at Guadalajara in July 1541, and his widow Beatriz de la Cueva, who succeeded him as governor of Guatemala, was killed with her household two months later when a mudslide from the volcano buried the city.
- Lived: 1485 CE – 1541 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: conquistador, governor
