Pizarro encountered human sacrifice among the Inca people. They practiced it less than their Aztec counterparts in Mexico, but would respond to momentous events (such as a natural disaster, or the death of an emperor—who was worshipped as a god) by engaging in the tradition of capacocha—the sacrifice of children—in an attempt to ensure the gods’ continued blessing.
Anxious to build on this promising initial encounter with a vulnerable and wealthy empire, but short on resources, Pizarro returned briefly to Europe to appeal in person to Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, who now agreed to assist him.
Returning to the New World, Pizarro sent emissaries to meet the representatives of the Inca emperor, Atahualpa. It was agreed that Pizarro would meet the emperor at the town of Cajamarca in November 1532. Advancing with his army of 80,000 men, Atahualpa believed he had little to fear from Pizarro’s force of 106 infantry soldiers and 62 cavalry. On arrival at Cajamarca, Atahualpa decided to leave most of his troops outside the city and entered with a far smaller retinue—not realizing he was walking into a carefully laid trap. In a brief exchange, the emperor contemptuously rejected the suggestion that he should become a Spanish supplicant. Pizarro immediately ordered his men to open fire on the astonished Incas. Almost all of Atahualpa’s escort party—perhaps 3000 or 4000 men—were slaughtered, and the massacre continued outside the city. In total some 7000 Incas perished in a hail of gunfire; the Spanish took fewer than ten casualties in reply. The emperor himself was taken hostage. Pizarro took as his mistress Atahualpa’s teenage sister with whom he would go on to have children.
Pizarro demanded a vast ransom be paid for Atahualpa’s release: the room where the emperor was being held was to be filled from floor to ceiling with gold and silver. Amazingly, Atahualpa’s people delivered as requested. But rather than release his enemy, Pizarro now went back on his word and had the emperor executed.
Rewarded by Charles V with the title Marquis of the Conquest, Pizarro sealed the conquest of Peru by taking Cuzco in 1533, and in 1535 he founded the city of Lima as its capital. He then set about accumulating an astonishing fortune. Power and wealth bred jealousy, however, and Pizarro soon fell out with his partner, Almagro, over the spoils. In 1538 the dispute between them came to war. Pizarro defeated Almagro at the Battle of Las Salinas, and had his former comrade executed. The dead man’s son vowed revenge, and in 1541 his supporters attacked Pizarro’s palace and murdered him within its walls.
This was not the end of the Pizarro story. His brother Hernando returned to Spain to answer the case against the family and was imprisoned for decades. When he was finally released, he married Pizarro’s super-rich half-Inca daughter and built the Palace of Conquest in Trujillo. Meanwhile another brother Gonzalo seized Peru, rebelled against the royal authorities and considered making himself king—but he was ultimately defeated and killed by the royal viceroy.
BARBAROSSA & SILVER ARM
c. 1478–1546 & c. 1474–1518
They came upon a ship from Genoa laden with grain and seized it on the spot. Then they saw a fortress-like galleon, a merchant ship laden with cloth, and took that without any difficulty. Returning to Tunis, they handed over the fifth of booty [due to the ruler], divided the rest, and set out again with three ships for the infidel coasts.
Katib Chelebi, in his History of the Maritime Wars of the Turks (c. 1650), describing an early episode in the life of Barbarossa and his older brother Oruc
Barbarossa—a brilliant Ottoman admiral, canny politician and founder of his own dynastic kingdom—was one of the four free-booting Muslim corsair brothers who dominated the Mediterranean and slaughtered and enslaved innocent Christians with audacious enthusiasm in the early 16th century.
Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha was born on the Aegean island of Lesbos around 1478 as Yakupoglu Hizir—one of four sons and two daughters—to a Turkish Muslim father, Yakup Aga, and his Christian Greek wife, Katerina. Hizir was an intelligent youngster, blessed with charisma and the ability to lead others. Dark in complexion, he later boasted a luxuriant beard with a reddish hue—hence his European nickname Barbarossa, meaning “red beard” (a corruption of Baba Oruc, an honorific title later inherited from his gifted brother Oruc, who earned it in 1510 after helping large numbers of Spanish Muslims flee persecution).
As young men, the four brothers—Ishak, Oruc, Hizir and Ilyas—bought a boat to transport their father’s pottery products, but with Ottoman vessels subject at the time to repeated raids at the hands of the hated Knights of St. John, based on the island of Rhodes, Oruc, Ilyas and Hizir soon turned to privateering, while Ishak helped oversee the family business at home. Hizir worked the Aegean Sea, and Oruc and Ilyas the coast of the Levant until their boat was intercepted by the Knights. Ilyas was killed and Oruc imprisoned for three years at the castle of Bodrum before Hizir launched a daring raid to rescue him.
Determined to avenge his brother, Oruc secured the support of the Ottoman governor of Antalya, who supplied him with a fleet of galleys to combat the Knights’ marauding. In a series of attacks, he captured several enemy galleons, subsequently raiding Italy. Joining forces, from 1509 Oruc, Hizir and Ishak defeated a host of Spanish ships across the Mediterranean. In one such battle, in 1512, Oruc lost his left arm, earning the nickname Silver Arm after replacing it with a silver prosthetic limb.
Undeterred, the three brothers raided yet further off the Italian and Spanish coasts, in one month alone capturing a further twenty-three ships. They began producing their own gunpowder, and over the next four years raided, destroyed or captured a succession of ships, fortresses and cities. In 1516, they liberated Algiers from the Spaniards, Oruc declaring himself a sultan, though he relinquished the title the following year to the Ottoman sultan, who in return appointed him governor of Algiers and chief naval governor of the western Mediterranean—positions he held until 1518, when he and Ishak were killed by the troops of Charles I of Spain (later Emperor Charles V).
Hizir, the sole surviving brother and the man remembered today as Barbarossa, took on his brother’s mantle. In 1519, he defended Algiers against a joint Spanish–Italian attack, striking back the same year by raiding Provence. Then, following numerous raids along the French and Spanish coasts, in 1522 he contributed to the Ottoman conquest of Rhodes that finally vanquished the Knights of St. John. In 1525, he raided Sardinia, going on to recapture Algiers and take Tunis in 1529, launching further attacks from both.
In 1530, Emperor Charles V sought the help of Andrea Doria, the talented Genoese admiral, to challenge Barbarossa’s dominance, but the following year Barbarossa trounced Doria, winning the personal gratitude of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who made him Capudan Pasha—fleet admiral and chief governor of North Africa—and giving him the honorary name Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha.
In 1538—already a living legend among the Muslims for freeing African Muslim slaves from Spanish galleys and bringing glory to the Ottoman empire—Barbarossa scattered a combined Spanish, Maltese, Venetian and German fleet at the Battle of Preveza, thereby securing Turkish dominance of the eastern Mediterranean for nearly forty years. In September 1540, Charles offered him a huge bribe to switch sides, but Barbarossa refused outright, and in 1543, as his fleet lurked in the mouth of the River Tiber, he even threatened to advance on Rome, but was dissuaded by the French, with whom he had entered into a temporary alliance. By now the cities of the Italian coast, including the proud Genoese, had given up trying to defeat him, choosing instead to send huge payments in return for being spared from attack. Barbarossa was master of the Italian and Mediterranean coasts.
In 1545, undefeated and having ensured Ottoman dominance of the Mediterranean and North Africa, Barbarossa retired to a magnificent villa on the northern shore of the Bosphorus. Here he wrote his memoirs until he died from natural causes in 1546. He left his son, Hasan Pasha, as his successor as ruler of Algiers.
He had seized and enslaved as many as 50,000 people from the Italian and Spanish coasts, and was famou
s for his savage cruelty. For the Ottomans, Barbarossa was a remarkable admiral. Christians saw him as a merciless pirate, perhaps the most terrifying that ever lived.
THE BORGIAS: POPE ALEXANDER VI AND HIS CHILDREN CESARE & LUCREZIA
1431–1503, 1475–1507 & 1480–1519
Lucrezia was wanton in imagination, godless by nature, ambitious and designing … she carried the head of a Raphael Madonna and concealed the heart of a Messalina.
Alexandre Dumas, Celebrated Crimes (1843)
Rodrigo Borgia, great-nephew of Pope Calixtus III, was a ruthless master of intrigue and power, an expertise that made him and his children legendary for debauch and murder. A cardinal at twenty-five, he had served as vice chancellor of the Holy See during the reigns of four popes, amassing a vast fortune in the process. By the time it was his turn to be pope, Borgia had the cash to buy the papacy with four mule loads of bullion. Whatever his sins, he was clever, witty, charming, experienced and conscientious in his attendance of the Curia and seductive both in politics and the bedroom: “women were attracted to him like iron to a magnet,” commented a witness. Two years after his election as pope—he called himself Alexander VI—Rome was attacked and seized by King Charles VIII of France but the pope managed to win over the French king, who soon marched on to Naples. Once the French had returned to their homeland, Alexander VI set about the full enjoyment of his papacy: he had already managed to install his eldest son Giovanni as duke of Gandia but in June 1497 the twenty-year-old vanished, only to be found in the Tiber with his throat cut and nine stab wounds. Alexander was heartbroken but he did not pursue the case because the chief suspect was his younger son Cesare, already a cardinal.
In 1498, Cesare persuaded his father to release him from his cardinalate and appoint him papal military commander. Now a layman again, Cesare had ambitions in France and as the architect of his father’s new pro-French policies, he was rewarded with the French dukedom of Valentinois and allowed to marry the sister of the king of Navarre. The new Duke Cesare set about murdering or overthrowing all the rival lords in Italy who stood in the way of Borgia power. In the process Alexander and Cesare restored papal political power. But Cesare was hated: “every night,” wrote an ambassador in Rome, “four or five men are discovered assassinated, bishops and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the Duke.” By now Cesare Borgia was literally decaying, riddled and raddled by syphilis that was eating away his face so that he only appeared in public with a sinister gold mask.
For all his notoriety, Cesare Borgia was in his way utterly exceptional: he was tireless, scarcely slept and lived in a state of demented and boundless activity. Fearless and uninhibited, he also possessed his father’s charm and intelligence. Cesare fathered at least eleven bastards and his orgies, often attended by his father and sister, were magnificent and brazen: at one famed banquet, the papal master of ceremonies recorded how “fifty decent prostitutes in attendance, who danced naked” got onto their hands and knees to play a game of picking up chestnuts that were spread around the floor. “Finally prizes were offered—silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats—for those men who could perform the act most frequently with the prostitutes.” The orgy was not just attended by pope and duke but also Cesare’s sister Lucrezia Borgia.
Lucrezia became infamous throughout Renaissance Italy for her corruption, carnality and viciousness. Her monstrosity was probably exaggerated, but contemporaries regarded her as the embodiment of evil, and whispered that she wore a hollow ring from which she would discreetly pour poison into the wine of all those who stood in her way.
Lucrezia, a pretty, captivating child, grew into a great beauty. She was described by a contemporary as “of middle height and graceful of form … her hair is golden, her eyes gray, her mouth rather large, the teeth brilliantly white, her bosom smooth and white and admirably proportioned.” Her father Pope Alexander arranged for the eighteen-year-old Lucrezia to marry Giovanni Sforza, lord of Pesaro, in order to build an alliance with the Sforzas—a powerful Milanese family—against the Aragonese of Naples.
The wedding, which took place at the Vatican, was a lavish affair, at which a scandalous play about pimps and mistresses was performed. Lucrezia spent two years in Pesaro, but was unhappy and returned to Rome. The Borgias, who already had a formidable reputation, suspected Giovanni of spying for Milan; when he visited his wife in Rome he became terrified when Lucrezia suddenly began to smile and show him signs of affection. Fearing for his life, he fled Rome in disguise. The alliance between Rome and Milan was no longer of use to the Borgias, who were now attempting to court Naples. Pope Alexander demanded that the Sforzas agree to a divorce, but the only legal way to do this was to force Giovanni to make a false confession that he was impotent and had therefore never consummated the marriage. Humiliated, he hit back with the allegation that Alexander had undermined the marriage in order that he could pursue a sexual interest in his own daughter.
In the midst of the divorce proceedings, Lucrezia—still claiming to be a virgin—retired to the Roman convent of San Sisto, where she was visited by a messenger from her father, the handsome courtier Pedro Calderon, with whom she soon began an affair. Within a year, a mysterious baby boy appeared among the Borgia clan, and shortly afterward Calderon was found floating in the River Tiber, apparently murdered on the orders of a jealous Cesare. The historian Potigliotto speculated that either Cesare or Alexander had sired the boy.
In 1498, having had her claim to virginity upheld by the divorce court, Lucrezia was offered to the seventeen-year-old Alfonso, duke of Bisceglie, an illegitimate son of Alfonso II of Naples. However, it wasn’t long before the Borgias fell out with Naples and moved closer to the French king, Louis XII. Lucrezia’s young husband fled Rome in fear of his life, and when his bride convinced him to return, he was savagely attacked on the steps of St. Peter’s in Rome. It is possible that Lucrezia was complicit in the assault, although contemporaries believed that she genuinely loved her second husband, pointing out that she tended to his wounds and nursed him back to health. But the court of the Borgias was not a safe place to convalesce, and, on Cesare’s orders, a month after the original attack, Alfonso was strangled while he lay in bed.
Lucrezia was said to be distraught at her young husband’s death. Nonetheless, she soon resumed her part in Borgia power politics. In 1501, the year after Alfonso’s murder, she married Alfonso d’Este, son of Ercole I, Duke of Ferrara.
In 1503, Alexander VI died of fever, at age seventy-two. His reputation is deserved but he was also successful in changing the papacy, improving its finances, administration and diplomatic influence. Cesare was left exposed. He was exiled to Spain where he was killed in battle at age thirty-one. His motto was “Caesar or nothing.” In the end, it was nothing.
Lucrezia became a respected patron of the arts and literature in Ferrara, where she became duchess in 1505, while still finding time to have an affair with her bisexual brother-in-law and the humanist poet Pietro Bembo. She died in childbirth at the age of thirty-nine.
MAGELLAN
1480–1521
… the whole earth hangs in the air … a thing so strange and seeming so far against nature and reason … which is yet now found true by experience of them that have in less than two years sailed the world round about.
Thomas More, Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), referring to Magellan’s 1519 voyage
Ferdinand Magellan was a fearless and determined sailor who achieved what Columbus had attempted: he sailed westward from Europe and reached the East Indies, thus making the first recorded crossing of the Pacific Ocean. Although Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines, one ship from his fleet of five, after experiencing appalling hardships, finally returned to Spain—becoming the first to complete a circumnavigation of the entire globe.
Born to a noble Portuguese family, Magellan grew up around the royal court. In 1495 he entered the service of King Manuel I, “the Fortunate,” and enlisted as a volunteer on the fir
st voyage to India planned by the Portuguese viceroy Francisco D’Almeida.
Magellan took part in a series of expeditions to the east, as Portugal sought to expand its trade routes and bring valuable spices back to Europe, becoming involved in skirmishes en route and achieving promotion to captain. In 1512 he returned to Portugal. He helped to take the Moroccan city of Azamor but was wounded during the fighting and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Even worse, he was accused of trading with the Moors and subsequently fell from favor with King Manuel.
It was clear that Magellan’s career in the service of the Portuguese crown was over. In 1513 he renounced his nationality and went to Spain. He proposed to Charles V that he could reach the Spice Islands of the east via the western passage that had eluded Christopher Columbus some twenty years earlier. With the aid of advances in navigation, diligent consultation with an astronomer and the sheer guts to suggest traveling at a latitude of up to 75° S, Magellan was in a good position to trump Columbus. So in September 1519, with five ships and 270 men, he embarked on his historic voyage.