Battle of Las Salinas (1538): Pizarro against Almagro

The Battle of Las Salinas was fought on 6 April 1538 near Cusco, the old Inca capital in the Andes of present-day Peru. It was not a battle between Spaniards and Inca forces but between two factions of the conquistadors themselves: the followers of Francisco Pizarro and those of his former partner Diego de Almagro. The Pizarros won decisively, and Almagro’s execution three months later turned a dispute over spoils into a long and bloody feud.

Background: a partnership that broke apart

Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro had organised the expeditions to Peru together from Panama in the 1520s. Pizarro, however, travelled to Spain in 1528–1529 and returned as governor with most of the honours, while Almagro received a lesser title. That imbalance was never forgiven. After the capture of the Inca ruler Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, Pizarro’s men took the largest share of the ransom, because Almagro’s reinforcements had arrived too late.

In 1534 the Spanish Crown tried to settle matters by dividing the territory. Pizarro received New Castile in the north, and Almagro was granted New Toledo, stretching south of Pizarro’s lands. The boundary was measured in leagues along the coast, and no one could say with confidence on which side Cusco lay. Each side claimed the rich city.

Almagro then led an expedition into Chile in 1535–1537, which brought hardship and no gold. When he came back north in early 1537, Cusco was emerging from the great Inca rising led by Manco Inca, described in our article on the Siege of Cusco. In April 1537 Almagro seized the city and imprisoned two of Pizarro’s brothers, Hernando and Gonzalo.

The road to war

The conflict escalated quickly. On 12 July 1537, at the Battle of Abancay, Almagro’s army defeated a Pizarrist force under Alonso de Alvarado that had been sent to relieve Cusco. Gonzalo Pizarro later escaped from captivity.

Francisco Pizarro, based in his new coastal capital of Lima, opened negotiations. A meeting with Almagro at Mala, south of Lima, in November 1537 achieved little, but a friar named Francisco de Bobadilla was accepted as arbitrator. His ruling favoured Pizarro. Almagro was persuaded to release Hernando Pizarro, supposedly on condition that he leave Peru. Instead Hernando took command of a Pizarrist army and marched into the highlands towards Cusco.

What happened at Las Salinas

The two armies met on the plain of Las Salinas, named after salt pans a few kilometres from Cusco. Contemporary figures vary, but each side probably fielded several hundred Spaniards, with the Pizarrists having the advantage in numbers and, crucially, in firearms. Hernando Pizarro’s arquebusiers reportedly used shot linked by wire, which caused heavy damage to the Almagrist pikemen and cavalry.

Almagro, then in his early sixties and seriously ill, could not command in person and watched from a nearby hill. Rodrigo Orgóñez, his experienced field commander, led the Almagrist army. The fighting lasted only a short time. Orgóñez was wounded and, after yielding, was killed, and a number of other Almagrists were also put to death after they had stopped resisting. The victors then sacked Cusco and seized the property of the defeated.

Indigenous auxiliaries fought on both sides, and Inca observers reportedly watched the Spaniards destroy each other from the surrounding hills. Their role and losses are poorly recorded in the Spanish sources.

The execution of Almagro

Almagro was captured and held in Cusco. Hernando Pizarro opened a trial against him on charges including rebellion and making war on the king’s governor. Almagro was condemned to death. On 8 July 1538 he was garrotted in his cell, and his body was then publicly beheaded in the main square of Cusco. He was probably about 60–65 years old; his exact birth date is unknown.

The execution of a royal governor without the king’s authority shocked many Spaniards. When Hernando Pizarro returned to Spain in 1539 to defend the family’s conduct, he was arrested and spent about twenty years confined, mostly in the castle of La Mota at Medina del Campo.

Key people

• Hernando Pizarro, Francisco’s brother and the victorious commander, later imprisoned in Spain.
• Diego de Almagro, co-leader of the conquest of Peru and governor of New Toledo.
• Rodrigo Orgóñez, Almagro’s field commander, killed at the end of the battle.
• Gonzalo Pizarro, who fought for his brother and later led his own rebellion in the 1540s.
• Pedro de Valdivia, who served on the Pizarrist side and soon led the Spanish expedition into Chile.

Consequences

Las Salinas gave the Pizarros control of Cusco and of almost all Spanish Peru, but it created a dangerous group of embittered losers. The surviving Almagrists, known as “the men of Chile”, were impoverished and excluded from rewards. Their loyalty passed to Almagro’s mestizo son, also called Diego de Almagro and known as “the Lad” (el Mozo).

On 26 June 1541 a group of these men killed Francisco Pizarro in his house in Lima, as told in our article on the assassination of Francisco Pizarro. The young Almagro was in turn defeated at Chupas in September 1542 and executed. The Crown, alarmed by the chaos, sent royal officials and then the New Laws of 1542, which provoked a further revolt.

Timeline

• 1534: The Crown divides Peru into New Castile (Pizarro) and New Toledo (Almagro).
• 1535–1537: Almagro’s expedition to Chile.
• 1537, April: Almagro seizes Cusco and imprisons Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro.
• 1537, 12 July: Almagro defeats Alonso de Alvarado at Abancay.
• 1537, November: Talks at Mala; Hernando Pizarro is later released.
• 1538, 6 April: Battle of Las Salinas; Pizarrist victory.
• 1538, 8 July: Almagro is executed in Cusco.
• 1541, 26 June: Almagrists assassinate Francisco Pizarro in Lima.

Why it matters

Las Salinas showed that the conquest of the Inca Empire had produced not a stable colony but a scramble for power among armed adventurers. The feud it sharpened led directly to the murder of Peru’s conqueror and to years of civil war, and it pushed the Spanish Crown to take firmer control over its new American territories.