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duplicity, greed, and utterly callous and unbridled cruelty.’12 The success Pizarro enjoyed in Peru was even more spectacular than Cortés’s triumphs in Mexico, though Pizarro had far fewer soldiers. But, regardless of the relative merits of the military campaigns in Peru and Mexico, the result was a considerable flow of gold and particularly of silver into Spain which, over the coming decades, would transform the economy of Western Europe. Francisco Pizarro had been born in Trujillo, a town in Extremadura in Castile, in the late 1470s. He was in fact a distant cousin of Hernan Cortés, whose grandmother, Leonor, had been a Pizarro. As he was the illegitimate son of a soldier, Francisco Pizarro’s prospects were unfavourable, and reports that he had been a swineherd in his youth are plausible, since pigs were important in the local economy.13 Despite being illiterate and poor, he was bold and determined. As early as 1502, he had left Spain to travel to the New World and had, over the years, made a fortune in the new Spanish colony of Panama. In 1532, accompanied by a mere 168 men, he arrived in Peru. These men were mostly in their mid-twenties to early thirties; they constituted more of a gang than a regular battalion of soldiers, and there was ‘the spirit of a gold rush’ about the expedition, combined with the ‘conviction of a crusade’. They came to the New World to better themselves, to ‘be worth more [valer más]’, in the language of their time, which meant the acquisition not only of wealth but also of honour and social status.14 These men were generally drawn from the dispossessed, the poor and aspiring. Only about a quarter of the 168 men who followed Pizarro could claim any trace of lineage from the gentry, and none was entitled to be addressed as ‘don’, which was at the time reserved for those in Castile who had close family ties to the nobility.15 Pizarro himself has been described as a man with a ‘reputation for leadership’, coupled with extraordinary stamina which enabled him to endure the most arduous conditions. Like many good leaders, he had an easy manner and was popular with his men. To his own men, or to those of the Inca who had won his favour, he was modest and gentle. His clothing was austere, even old-fashioned, since he never abandoned the black cassock he had worn in his youth. Later, in a more expansive mood, he would
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