The Assassination of Francisco Pizarro, Lima, 26 June 1541 (EVM0058)

Killed by his own side, in his own house

On 26 June 1541, about twenty armed men crossed the square in Lima in daylight, walked into the governor’s palace and killed Francisco Pizarro. He was in his sixties, he fought — the accounts agree on that — and his half-brother Martín de Alcántara died beside him. None of the attackers were Inca. They were Spaniards.

The quarrel was about shares

They were Almagristas: followers of Diego de Almagro, Pizarro’s original partner in the conquest, who had been defeated at Las Salinas in 1538 and executed on Pizarro’s authority. His son, Diego de Almagro the Younger, inherited the faction and the grievance. The conquest of Peru produced a civil war among the conquerors almost immediately, over territory, revenue and royal favour — and that war killed more Spaniards in Peru than the Inca ever did.

An empire of some ten million people was taken by a few hundred men, who then could not agree on how to divide it.

Why this ending is the right subject

The conventional image of the conquistador is Cajamarca: the ambush, the captured emperor, the ransom room filled with gold. This plate shows what that enterprise actually was, six years on — a company of armed shareholders in a dispute over the proceeds, settling it the way they had settled everything else.

What the conquest ran on

The expeditions were not state armies. They were financed by private contract, with shares agreed in advance: so much to the crown, so much to the leaders, shares by rank, by horse, by weapon. A man who brought a horse drew several times what a man on foot drew. The whole undertaking was a joint-stock venture with a licence — which explains both its speed and the ferocity with which its members turned on each other once the profits were realised.

A postscript about the body, which is worth knowing

Pizarro was buried quickly and a body was later displayed in Lima cathedral as his, for generations. ⚠️ In 1977 workmen in the crypt found a lead box containing a skull, and separate bones, walled up. Examination showed the skull carried injuries consistent with the recorded manner of his death — including stab wounds to the neck and head — while the mummy that had been shown to visitors was somebody else. The remains were exchanged, and the man on display had to be corrected after four centuries. It is a fitting end for a career whose written record was contested from the first year: even the corpse required verification.

The consequence

Almagro the Younger held Lima briefly and was defeated and executed the following year. The crown used the disorder to impose direct rule, sending viceroys and, in 1542, the New Laws restricting the encomienda — which provoked yet another revolt. Peru took decades to become a governed province rather than a spoil being fought over. The private-contract logic of European warfare in the same centuries is in EVM0064.