Titans of History

Returning to the New World, Pizarro sent emissaries to meet the representatives of the Inca emperor, Atahualpa. It was agreed that Pizarro would meet the emperor at the town of Cajamarca in November 1532. Advancing with his army of 80,000 men, Atahualpa believed he had little to fear from Pizarro’s force of 106 infantry soldiers and 62 cavalry. On arrival at Cajamarca, Atahualpa decided to leave most of his troops outside the city and entered with a far smaller retinue—not realizing he was walking into a carefully laid trap. In a brief exchange, the emperor contemptuously rejected the suggestion that he should become a Spanish supplicant. Pizarro immediately ordered his men to open fire on the astonished Incas. Almost all of Atahualpa’s escort party—perhaps 3000 or 4000 men—were slaughtered, and the massacre continued outside the city. In total some 7000 Incas perished in a hail of gunfire; the Spanish took fewer than ten casualties in reply. The emperor himself was taken hostage. Pizarro took as his mistress Atahualpa’s teenage sister with whom he would go on to have children.

Pizarro demanded a vast ransom be paid for Atahualpa’s release: the room where the emperor was being held was to be filled from floor to ceiling with gold and silver. Amazingly, Atahualpa’s people delivered as requested. But rather than release his enemy, Pizarro now went back on his word and had the emperor executed.

Rewarded by Charles V with the title Marquis of the Conquest, Pizarro sealed the conquest of Peru by taking Cuzco in 1533, and in 1535 he founded the city of Lima as its capital. He then set about accumulating an astonishing fortune. Power and wealth bred jealousy, however, and Pizarro soon fell out with his partner, Almagro, over the spoils. In 1538 the dispute between them came to war. Pizarro defeated Almagro at the Battle of Las Salinas, and had his former comrade executed. The dead man’s son vowed revenge, and in 1541 his supporters attacked Pizarro’s palace and murdered him within its walls.

This was not the end of the Pizarro story. His brother Hernando returned to Spain to answer the case against the family and was imprisoned for decades. When he was finally released, he married Pizarro’s super-rich half-Inca daughter and built the Palace of Conquest in Trujillo. Meanwhile another brother Gonzalo seized Peru, rebelled against the royal authorities and considered making himself king—but he was ultimately defeated and killed by the royal viceroy.

BARBAROSSA & SILVER ARM

c. 1478–1546 & c. 1474–1518

They came upon a ship from Genoa laden with grain and seized it on the spot. Then they saw a fortress-like galleon, a merchant ship laden with cloth, and took that without any difficulty. Returning to Tunis, they handed over the fifth of booty [due to the ruler], divided the rest, and set out again with three ships for the infidel coasts.

Katib Chelebi, in his History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks (c.

1650), describing an early episode in the life of Barbarossa and his older brother Oruc

Barbarossa—a brilliant Ottoman admiral, canny politician and founder of his own dynastic kingdom—was one of the four free-booting Muslim corsair brothers who dominated the Mediterranean and slaughtered and enslaved innocent Christians with audacious enthusiasm in the early 16th century.

Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha was born on the Aegean island of Lesbos around 1478 as Yakupoglu Hizir—one of four sons and two daughters—to a Turkish Muslim father, Yakup Aga, and his Christian Greek wife, Katerina. Hizir was an intelligent youngster, blessed with charisma and the ability to lead others. Dark in complexion, he later boasted a luxuriant beard with a reddish hue—hence his European nickname Barbarossa, meaning “red beard” (a corruption of Baba Oruc, an honorific title later inherited from his gifted brother Oruc, who earned it in 1510 after helping large numbers of Spanish Muslims flee persecution).

As young men, the four brothers—Ishak, Oruc, Hizir and Ilyas—bought a boat to transport their father’s pottery products, but with Ottoman vessels subject at the time to repeated raids at the hands of the hated Knights of St. John, based on the island of Rhodes, Oruc, Ilyas and Hizir soon turned to privateering, while Ishak helped oversee the family business at home. Hizir worked the Aegean Sea, and Oruc and Ilyas the coast of the Levant until their boat was intercepted by the Knights. Ilyas was killed and Oruc imprisoned for three years at the castle of Bodrum before Hizir launched a daring raid to rescue him.