Diego de Almagro

Overview

Diego de Almagro was a Spanish conquistador whose dispute with Francisco Pizarro over Cusco ended in defeat at Las Salinas and execution by Hernando Pizarro in 1538.

Current Profile

649. The Fall of the Incas: The Last Emperor (Part 6) presents Almagro as initially strong but strategically exposed. He controls Cusco and holds Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro, yet releases or loses both advantages, abandons arbitration, and marches toward a coast whose supply and communication networks favor Pizarro.

Illness leaves Rodrigo Orgóñez in command at Las Salinas. Defeat makes Almagro a prisoner in the same tower where he had confined Hernando; after roughly ten weeks, Hernando refuses an appeal to Charles V and orders his garroting and beheading. The execution creates a revenge constituency around Almagro’s son and extends factional war beyond Almagro’s death.

Key Characteristics

• Conquistador claimant to Cusco within the New Toledo-New Castile jurisdictional dispute.
• Initially advantaged by control of Cusco and Pizarro family prisoners.
• Strategically weakened by prisoner releases, failed arbitration, illness, and coastal isolation.
• Defeated at Las Salinas while Rodrigo Orgóñez commanded his army.
• Executed without receiving the royal appeal he requested.
• Posthumous center of an Almagrist faction led by his son.

Evidence

• Contested authority: 649. The Fall of the Incas: The Last Emperor (Part 6) places Almagro between Manco’s resistance and Pizarro’s Lima network.
• Lost leverage: 649. The Fall of the Incas: The Last Emperor (Part 6) identifies Gonzalo’s escape, the failed arbitration, and Hernando’s release as three decisive errors.
• Defeat and execution: 649. The Fall of the Incas: The Last Emperor (Part 6) narrates Las Salinas, imprisonment, trial, garroting, and beheading.
• Factional afterlife: 649. The Fall of the Incas: The Last Emperor (Part 6) follows Diego de Almagro the Younger from Pizarro’s assassination to defeat and execution at Chupas.

Qualifications

The page uses one episode’s compressed causal account. It does not settle the legal merits of the territorial dispute, the arbitrator’s independence, Almagro’s intentions in releasing Hernando, precise troop strengths, or full responsibility for the feud. Describing tactical errors does not imply that his execution was lawful or politically stabilizing.

What Changed

• Established Almagro’s loss of prisoner, arbitral, and geographic leverage before Las Salinas.
• Connected his execution to the next generation’s revenge politics.

Relationships

• Francisco Pizarro - former partner and principal rival in the struggle over Cusco.
• Conquistador Civil War in Peru - conflict prolonged by Almagro’s execution and his son’s revenge faction.
• Manco Inca - nearby resistance leader whom Almagro’s forces pursued from Cusco.
• Spanish Conquest of Peru - conquest that fractured into competing Spanish jurisdictions and armies.
• Indigenous Alliances in Spanish Conquest - coalition structure used by both Spanish factions.
• Charles V - monarch to whom Almagro sought to appeal before execution.