Diego de Almagro and the Spanish Civil War in Peru

Diego de Almagro (c. 1475–1538) was a Spanish soldier who, in partnership with Francisco Pizarro and the priest Hernando de Luque, organized the three Pacific expeditions of 1524–1532 that led to the conquest of the Inca Empire. After the execution of Atahualpa in 1533, Almagro played a major role in the Spanish administration of Peru, leading the expedition to Chile in 1535–1537 and then fighting a Spanish civil war against the Pizarro faction that ended with his defeat and execution in 1538. The civil war, which engaged both Spanish factions and their respective indigenous allies, was one of the most violent episodes in the early history of the Spanish conquest, and it had important consequences for the consolidation of Spanish rule in the Andes. The death of Almagro, in turn, set off a further cycle of Spanish violence that ended only with the assassination of Francisco Pizarro in 1541 and the intervention of the Spanish crown in the form of the viceroyalty of Peru in 1542.

The partnership with Pizarro

The empresa of the 1520s

Almagro and Pizarro had known each other in Panamá in the early 1520s, and they had joined with Hernando de Luque to form a formal empresa — a private company for the conquest and settlement of new lands — in 1524. The three partners signed a series of agreements in 1524, 1526, and 1529, regulating their respective contributions and their respective shares in the proceeds. Pizarro, who was the leader of the field expeditions, contributed his labor and his military experience. Almagro contributed some capital, a small number of recruits, and his services as a leader of the second expedition. Luque, an ecclesiastic, contributed most of the capital and provided the ecclesiastical sponsorship. The agreements specified that Luque would receive one-third of the proceeds and that the remaining two-thirds would be divided between Pizarro and Almagro.

The partnership was strained almost from the beginning by disagreements over the division of the spoils and over the boundary between the partners’ jurisdictions. The first expedition, in 1524, was a failure: the Spanish made only limited progress down the coast of present-day Ecuador, and Almagro lost an eye in a skirmish. The second expedition, in 1526, was more successful: the pilot Bartolomé Ruiz reached Tumbes and reported the existence of a rich kingdom to the south. The third expedition, which set out in early 1531, was the expedition that conquered Peru, and it was led by Pizarro in the field. Almagro remained in Panamá to organize the supply of the expedition and to recruit new participants, and he did not arrive in Peru until 1533, after the capture of Atahualpa and the gathering of the ransom.

The 1529 capitulación

The formal capitulación — the contract between the Spanish crown and the partners — was issued on 26 July 1529 by Queen Juana and her son Charles V. The capitulación granted Pizarro the right to conquer and govern the lands south of a defined point on the Pacific coast, in exchange for a one-fifth share of the proceeds for the royal fifth, and gave Pizarro the title of governor and captain-general. Almagro received a subordinate grant, with the title of adelantado, and the right to conquer the lands beyond the southern limit of Pizarro’s grant. The boundary between the two grants was not precisely defined, and the resulting ambiguity would become a major source of conflict in the 1530s. The capitulación was negotiated by Pizarro in Spain, and Almagro, who had remained in Panamá, felt that he had been poorly treated by the agreement. The resentment would surface in the years after the conquest.

The terms of the 1529 capitulación were revised in 1534, after the conquest of Cusco, in a second capitulación issued by Charles V. The new agreement gave Almagro the right to conquer the lands south of Pizarro’s grant, with the title of governor of New Toledo, and gave him an encomienda of indigenous people in the southern provinces. The new agreement was, in effect, a recognition that the Inca Empire extended much further south than the Spanish had initially thought, and that the partnership would have to be reorganized to reflect this. The new agreement did not, however, resolve the underlying tension between the two partners, and the question of the boundary between their respective jurisdictions would continue to generate conflict.

The expedition to Chile, 1535–1537

The departure from Peru

In 1535, Pizarro founded the city of Lima on the Pacific coast as the new capital of the Spanish holdings in Peru, and the following year Almagro set out to conquer Chile. The expedition, which numbered perhaps 500 Spanish soldiers and a large indigenous auxiliary force, was organized with the approval of Pizarro, who saw it as a means of resolving the dispute over the boundary between the two jurisdictions. The expedition was, in effect, a test of strength between the two partners, and both Pizarro and Almagro recognized that the outcome of the expedition would determine the balance of power between them.

The expedition set out from Cusco in 1535, with Almagro as its leader, and from there pushed south into the highlands of modern Bolivia and northern Argentina. The Spanish crossed the Andes by the pass of San Juan, in the province of Huarochiri, and from there entered the basin of the Maule River in modern central Chile. The expedition was marked by fierce indigenous resistance, by extreme hardship, and by the hostility of the local climate. The indigenous peoples of northern Chile, in particular the Promaucae and the Mapuche, fought a sustained guerrilla war against the Spanish, and the Spanish were unable to establish a permanent foothold in the region.

The return to Peru

The expedition returned to Peru in 1537, having failed to make a permanent conquest of Chile. The retreat was disastrous: the Spanish lost a large proportion of their men, and the indigenous auxiliary force was reduced to a fraction of its original size. The expedition had cost Almagro much of his political capital, and the failure of the expedition was widely blamed on him. Almagro, who had hoped to return to Peru as the conqueror of a new kingdom, returned instead as the leader of a defeated expedition, and his position vis-à-vis Pizarro was much weaker than it had been before.

The return of Almagro coincided with the outbreak of a general indigenous rebellion led by the puppet Sapa Inca, Manco Inca, who had escaped from Cusco and had withdrawn to the highland fortress of Ollantaytambo. The rebellion, which began in 1536, put the Spanish garrisons in Cusco, Lima, and the central highlands under serious threat, and the Spanish had to divert forces from other operations to suppress it. The rebellion was eventually suppressed, but only after a long siege of Cusco and the dispatch of a relief force under the Spanish captain Alonso de Alvarado. The rebellion set the stage for the Spanish civil war that broke out in 1538, and it illustrates the way in which the Spanish civil war and the indigenous resistance interacted.

The Spanish civil war, 1537–1542

The dispute over Cusco

The dispute between Pizarro and Almagro came to a head in 1537. The trigger was the question of which of the two partners had the right to control the city of Cusco, which the Pizarro faction had taken in 1533. The 1529 capitulación had placed Cusco in Pizarro’s jurisdiction, but the 1534 revision had given Almagro the right to conquer the lands to the south, and the southern boundary of Pizarro’s grant was not precisely defined. The Pizarro faction argued that Cusco was within Pizarro’s jurisdiction; the Almagro faction argued that Cusco was within Almagro’s jurisdiction. The dispute was, in effect, a struggle for the control of the former Inca capital and for the rich encomiendas that surrounded it.

The two factions met at the plain of Las Salinas, near Cusco, on 6 April 1538. The Pizarro faction, under the command of Hernando Pizarro and Sebastián de Benalcázar, won a decisive victory. The battle was a major engagement, in which both sides fought with Spanish infantry and cavalry and with indigenous auxiliaries, and the death toll on both sides was high. Almagro was captured in the battle, was tried by a Spanish military court, and was executed by strangulation in July 1538. The execution of Almagro was widely criticized, even by members of the Pizarro faction, and it set off a further cycle of Spanish violence.

The aftermath of the civil war

A son of Almagro, also named Diego and known as el Mozo (the Younger), was recognized as the leader of the almagrista faction, and in 1541 he led a group of his followers into the house of Francisco Pizarro in Lima and killed him in a hand-to-hand struggle. The assassination of Pizarro, in turn, was followed by a further conflict between the almagrista faction and the faction loyal to the Pizarro family, and the Spanish crown, in the form of the newly created viceroyalty of Peru, had to intervene to settle it. The first viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela, arrived in Peru in 1544 and attempted to enforce the New Laws of 1542, which had been issued by Charles V to limit the abuses of the encomienda system. The enforcement of the New Laws set off a further rebellion, led this time by Gonzalo Pizarro, a brother of Francisco, and the conflict was not resolved until 1548, when the Spanish crown defeated the encomendero rebellion at the battle of Jaquijahuana.

The Spanish civil war of 1537–1542 was, in effect, a war of succession within the Spanish conquest, fought out on Andean soil and with indigenous auxiliaries on both sides. The war illustrated the speed with which the Spanish conquest of Peru generated internal Spanish violence, and it had important consequences for the consolidation of Spanish rule in the Andes. The intervention of the Spanish crown in 1542, in the form of the viceroyalty of Peru, marked the end of the conquistador period and the beginning of the institutional consolidation of the colonial regime. The civil war also had consequences for the indigenous population, since the indigenous auxiliaries who fought on both sides suffered heavy casualties, and the disruption of the agricultural economy contributed to the demographic collapse of the Andean population.

The legacy of Almagro

The foundation of a Spanish lineage

The execution of Almagro did not, in the long run, destroy the Almagro lineage. A grandson of Almagro, also named Diego, was later given the title of Marquis of Atacama, and the family retained a significant role in the colonial society of Peru. The Almagro lineage, like the Pizarro lineage, became part of the Spanish aristocracy of the Andes, and the disputes between the two families continued to shape the politics of colonial Peru for several generations. The assassination of Pizarro in 1541, in turn, did not destroy the Pizarro lineage: a son of Francisco Pizarro, also named Francisco, was recognized as the heir, and the family retained its estates in the southern highlands.

The Spanish civil war of 1537–1542 is significant, in the longer history of the Andes, for the way in which it entangled the Spanish and the indigenous populations. The indigenous auxiliaries who fought on both sides of the war were drawn from groups that had been incorporated into the Inca Empire only recently and resentfully, and the war gave them an opportunity to fight the Spanish and the Inca at the same time. The war also had consequences for the Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba, since the Spanish civil war of 1538–1542 was fought out at the same time as the highland rebellion of Manco Inca, and the two conflicts interacted in complex ways. The legacy of the Spanish conquest, in short, is not just a matter of Spanish actions but of the interaction between Spanish and indigenous forces, and the Spanish civil war is an important part of that interaction.