The Conquistadors Read Online Free Page A

small town of Medellín, Francisco Pizarro about ten or twelve years earlier in the city of Trujillo. There was, too, a family connection. Cortés was the son of Martin Cortés de Monroy and Doña Catalina Pizarro Altamarino. The Cortés, Monroys, Pizarros and Altamarinos were all old families of the nobility, so that his parents were
hidalgos.
Pizarro was the son of Gonzalo Pizarro, an infantry colonel, who later served with some distinction in Italy under
El Gran Capitán,
Gonsalvo de Córdoba. He was, however, a bastard, his father having had an affair with Francisca González, a woman of humble birth in Trujillo.
    These two men, Cortés and Pizarro, meet once, possibly twice, during their careers. Their stature as conquerors is entirely in keeping with their backgrounds, Cortés towering head and shoulders above the other. Both had courage of no ordinary sort. Both were adventurers, soldiers of fortune, men born to lead in an age of medieval chivalry when the only proper activity for a gentleman, indeed his only
raison d’être,
was to fight. Moreover, they were from Estremadura, and it was from this high, bleak upland area that they recruited the best of their men.
    If you travel the Estremadura plateau today you will find it little changed. The holm oak still covers large tracts of the country with its dark green foliage; its outsized acorns still provide fodder for pigs, horses and cattle, even a basic subsistence diet for man; the hill settlements are still little more than a scattering of hovels perched on the bare rock outcrops, the villages mainly one-storey cottages lining cobbled streets that slope to a central drainage kennel. Old castles dominate the hills and the keeps of great fortresses, like Belalcázar, still stand. At Medellín, in the town below the huge castle, there are still traces of the Cortésfamily home, as well as a great statue of the man himself, and the name has become a common one. At Trujillo, too, Pizarro now rides a bronze charger in the square, and inside the old walls, up twisting alleys of this still-medieval town, you come suddenly upon the church of Santa Maria, the only church inside the walls; climb to the belfry and you are looking down on the same grey stone buildings that Pizarro saw when he was a child.
    But it is the country that makes the deepest impression. It is a hard country that has changed little, the men still of the same type that Cortés and Pizarro recruited for their expeditions: short-statured and stocky, sturdy as their holm oaks, dark features lined by the hardness of the land that is their home. This is all high pastoral country, with everywhere distant vistas, the land running away to mountains that stand like islands on the horizon. Its wide skies inspire the desire to travel and it was this, as much as the poverty of the land, that drove men to seek beyond the mountains, one vista leading to another, with more hills like islands, until at last, riding north, they reached the Tagus, which flows westward to Lisbon and the ocean. The Tagus, the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir – all these rivers brought them news from the outer world, news first of the Portuguese discoveries in Africa, later of Spanish discoveries beyond the western ocean. The combination was irresistible, and the time was right.
    With the fall of Granada, there were suddenly no more infidels to slaughter, no more crusades to wage. The fighting machine of the
caballeros
had come to a halt. It was then that Christopher Columbus appeared on the scene. He was a Genoese navigator, who had left the sea at the age of about thirty and settled in Lisbon. He was married to a Portuguese woman, and a relative of hers, a well-known sea captain, left her all his papers, perhaps even his logs. With the aid of these, Columbus not only made and sold maps, but became convinced that by sailing westward a skilful navigator would pioneer a short cut to the Indies; he even