The Last Days of the Incas Read Online Free PDF Page A

native empires grew up within forty miles of each other, however, is certainly one of the world’s most extraordinary facts.
    Pizarro’s native city of Trujillo, which had a population while he was growing up of only about two thousand
vecinos
, or citizens who had full rights, was divided into three sections. Each corresponded to the social stratification of the city’s inhabitants. The walled town, or
villa
, rested on top of a hill with a view of the countryside. Here rose the turreted houses of the knights and of the lower nobility, with their coats of arms, or lineages, prominently displayed over their doorways. It was here, too, that Francisco’s father and his father’s family lived. The second section of the city, formed around the town’s plaza, lay on flat land beside the hill. Herelived the merchants, notaries, and craftsmen, although, somewhat later, more and more of the hilltop nobility moved to homes occupying prominent positions on the plaza, including Francisco’s father. The final section of the city lay along its outer periphery, along the roads that led off toward the fields. Referred to derogatorily as the
arrabales
, a connotation that combined both the notion of “outskirts” and “slums,” it was here that the peasants and artisans lived in homes that were as far physically as they were socially from those at the town’s center. It was amid the outer section of this rural yet highly stratified city, which mirrored Spanish society at large, that Francisco Pizarro grew up with his mother, a common maid. A person who grew up in an
arrabal
was called an
arrabalero.
The latter referred to a person who was “ill-bred,” or, in modern parlance, a person who has grown up on “the wrong side of the tracks.” Such was the social stigma that Francisco Pizarro labored to escape from long before departing for the New World.
    Pizarro, however, was not only stigmatized by growing up in an
arrabal
, he was also stigmatized by the fact that his father had never married his mother. That meant that not only would he be unlikely to inherit any part of his father’s estate (even though he was the eldest of four half-brothers), but that he was also illegitimate, meaning that he would forever be regarded as a second-class citizen. In addition, Pizarro had received little if any schooling and thus remained illiterate for his entire life.
    Pizarro was only fifteen years old (and Cortés eight) when Columbus returned in from his first voyage across the unexplored ocean. In announcing his supposed discovery of a new route to India, Columbus wrote a letter to a high-ranking official describing his voyage that was quickly published and became a runaway bestseller for the age.
    It is likely that Pizarro overheard Columbus’s fantastic tale, either as part of an eager group of listeners to whom the story was read, or else as the story was passed along by word of mouth. In any event, it was an extraordinary account, a tale as rich as any fiction, one that told of the discovery of an exotic world where riches could literally be plucked like so much ripe fruit from a landscape similar to the Garden of Eden. And, like the popular novels that had started circulating since the printing press had been invented two decades earlier, Columbus’s
Letter
, or
Carta
, hit Europe like a thunder-bolt:
    I found very many islands, filled with innumerablepeople, and I have taken possession of them all for their Highnesses [King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella], done by proclamation and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me…. The people of this island [Hispaniola, the island that today Haiti and the Dominican Republic share] and of all the other islands that I have found and of which I have gotten information, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them…. They refuse nothing that they possess, if it be asked of them; on the contrary, they invite any one to share it and display as much love