Pizarro : Conqueror of the Inca

by Stirling, Stuart

• ISBN13: 9780750936828
• ISBN10: 0750936827
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-30
• Publisher: Sutton Pub Ltd

Summary

Francisco Pizarro is possibly one of the best known yet least understood figures of world history. His life is an extraordinary story of adversity and tragedy. An illiterate Spanish slaver of possible African ancestry, he set out in 1530, at the age of 55, to finally make the conquest of Peru. Establishing him firmly as a man of his time, Stuart Stirling shows that there was little difference in moral terms between Elizabeth I's political expediency in ordering Mary Queen of Scots's execution and Pizarro's killing of the Inca Atahualpa - a deed for which his name has been regarded with infamy. Nor was the pillage and destruction of England's medieval artistic heritage at the reformation any less barbaric than the looting of Cusco by the conquistadores ten years previously. While Pizarro may legitimately be described as audacious, ruthless and cruel, luck played a part in his success also - his 200 men should not have been able to defeat an army of more than 30,000. But they did and Pizarro joins the few whose military influence literally changed the course of history and the future of a continent and its peoples. Stuart Stirling's book brings Pizarro fully to life while also doing justice to the extraordinary background of exploration, discovery, empire building and the clash of cultures.