On 26 April 1538, by the date the historian William H. Prescott gives, Spanish soldiers fought each other on the plain of Las Salinas, just outside Cuzco, the old Inca capital. Hernando Pizarro, brother of the governor Francisco Pizarro, defeated the army of Diego de Almagro, Francisco's former partner in the conquest of Peru. Almagro was captured and later executed, and the feud led in 1541 to the murder of Francisco Pizarro himself. Some sources date the battle to 6 April.
Partners turned rivals
Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro had been partners in the conquest of the Inca empire, but they fell out over the spoils and over power. The Spanish crown gave each of them a governorship, and La Tercera, following the Chilean historian Diego Barros Arana, explains that the boundary between the two was never clearly fixed, so both men claimed Cuzco. Almagro led an expedition to Chile and came back disappointed by the poverty of the country.1
On his return he found an Inca rising under way and Cuzco under siege. He put down the rising, took the city and imprisoned Pizarro's brothers, among them Hernando. He later let Hernando go. In Prescott's account, when the Pizarrist army approached, Almagro's captain Rodrigo Orgóñez told him it was too late to negotiate: having freed Hernando, nothing remained but to fight him.2
The battle
Hernando Pizarro marched on Cuzco with an army of veterans and newcomers, and Almagro, too ill to command, handed the field to Orgóñez. Prescott describes Orgóñez taking up a position at Las Salinas, named for pits used to extract salt, less than a league from the city, behind a marsh and a small stream. He puts Almagro's force at about 500 men, more than half of them mounted, with six small cannon, against about 700 under Hernando, whose strength lay in a corps of arquebusiers.3
In Prescott's account the Pizarrist infantry, led by Gonzalo Pizarro and Pedro de Valdivia, crossed the stream under fire, and the arquebusiers then broke up Orgóñez's pikemen while Hernando led his cavalry across. Orgóñez was wounded, taken and killed after he had surrendered, and Almagro's men fled toward Cuzco. Almagro, who had watched from a litter on a nearby height, was captured. Prescott says the fighting lasted less than two hours and puts the dead at not less than 150, mostly Almagro's men, while noting that one participant spoke of 200. Crowds of Indigenous onlookers, he writes, watched from the surrounding heights.4
Execution and revenge
Hernando Pizarro had Almagro tried and sentenced to death. He was executed in his cell with the garrote, and La Tercera dates his death to 8 July 1538. Even his age is uncertain. Almagro was a foundling, Prescott notes, and he guessed him to be near seventy; Britannica gives his birth year as 1475, and La Tercera calls him 63 at the time of the battle. Britannica's biography of Francisco Pizarro records what followed: Almagro's former followers gathered around his son in Lima, and on 26 June 1541, fearing they would be eliminated, they attacked the governor's palace and killed Pizarro. Prescott called Las Salinas the first civil war between the conquerors, and Britannica describes Almagro's defeat as the first of several internecine wars between the Spanish captains in Peru.5
Which date?
The date is uncertain. Prescott, writing in 1847 from the Spanish chronicles, gives 26 April 1538. La Tercera, following Barros Arana, gives 6 April 1538. Either way the date is in the Julian calendar, which Spain and its empire used until 1582. The armies were small, but as Prescott put it, the stake was the possession of an empire.6
