Francisco Pizarro is possibly one of the best known but least understood figures of world history. In 1530, at the age of fifty-four, he set out on his successful and bloody conquest of Peru, thus changing the future of a continent and its peoples forever. It was a long way from his humble beginnings as an illiterate, illegitimate pig-herder. Within these pages Stuart Stirling tells the story of adversity and tragedy which was the life of Francisco Pizarro.By the standards of the t...

Stuart Stirling tells the history of the Inca princesses and of their conquistador lovers and descendants. The story begins with the early days of Pizarro's conquest at Cajamarca in the 1530s, when the emperor Atahualpa gifted his young sister wife Quispe Sis Huaylas to Pizarro. This was the beginning of the distribution and rape of the princesses among the conquistadors - a practice which was in many ways a distillation of the tragedy of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The detai...

Establishing Francisco Pizarro 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.

Stuart Stirling tells the history of the Inca princesses and of their conquistador lovers and descendants. The detailed human stories of the princesses bring to life the world of the Incas and their conquerors and shed new light on the darker corners of colonial history.

The Inca civilization of Peru was one of the gratest of the ancient civilizations of the Americas. Famous for their massive temples and fortresses built from huge blocks of stone and decorated with sheets of pure gold, the Incas also developed a system of government, capable of holding a vast area of territory together, and an extensive system of roads, connecting administrative centres, which acted as a means of colonization. Their religion of human sacrifice, worshipping Inti, the Sun Go...

The epic story of the fall of the Inca Empire to Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in the aftermath of a bloody civil war, and the recent discovery of the lost guerrilla capital of the Incas, Vilcabamba, by three American explorers.In 1532, the fifty-four-year-old Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro led a force of 167 men, including his four brothers, to the shores of Peru. Unbeknownst to the Spaniards, the Inca rulers of Peru had just fought a bloody civil...

For hundreds of years, the history of the conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztecs has been told in the words of the Spanish victors. Miguel León-Portilla has long been at the forefront of expanding that history to include the voices of indigenous peoples. In this new and updated edition of his classic The Broken Spears, León-Portilla has included accounts from native Aztec descendants across the centuries. These texts bear witness to the extraordinary vitality of an oral t...

This enthralling study which examines the impact of the Spaniards upon the Aztec and Inca worlds is dominated by the personalities involved, in particular Cortes and Montezuma. Their confrontation in the Aztec lake-city of Tenochtitlan is a moving drama of human conflict revealing the dilemma and the enigma of the Indians. It is a story of battles and voyages, full of strange episodes – Cortes burning his ships, Pizarro drawing a line with his sword, saying "Gentlemen, this line represents...

In the sixteenth century the King of Spain issued his soldiers with a three-pronged mission: to find gold, spread the word of Christianity and claim new territories for Spain. The Conquistadors, as they became known, set off into the world to do just that, and nothing was to stand in their way. Some say that the discovery of the New World is the greatest event in history. Others, that it amounted to the bloodiest massacre of all time. Conquistadors follows the Spanish explorers as they unl...

The Spanish conquest of the Americas in the 16th century was one of the most important and cataclysmic events in history. Spanish expeditions endured incredible hardships in order to open up the lands of the 'New World', and few stories in history can match these for drama and endurance.In Conquistadors, Michael Wood follows in the footsteps of some of the greatest of the Spanish adventurers travelling from the forests of Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, the deserts of North Mex...

A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world“The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill Cervantes applies. . . . [He] conveys complex arguments in delightfully simple language, and most importantly knows how to tell a good story...

Drawing on newly discovered sources and writing with brilliance, drama, and profound historical insight, Hugh Thomas presents an engrossing narrative of one of the most significant events of Western history.Ringing with the fury of two great empires locked in an epic battle, Conquest captures in extraordinary detail the Mexican and Spanish civilizations and offers unprecedented in-depth portraits of the legendary opponents, Montezuma and Cortés. Conquest i...