Diego de Almagro was born around 1475, most likely in the village of Almagro or in the nearby town of Malagon, in the region of Ciudad Real in Castile. His origins were humble in the most literal sense: he was the illegitimate son of Juan de Montenegro and Elvira Gutierrez, and because no father claimed him publicly, he was given the name of the village for his surname, a common practice for children of uncertain parentage in that era. To preserve the reputation of his mother, relatives spirited the infant to the nearby town of Bolanos de Calatrava, where he was raised by a woman named Sancha Lopez del Peral. He later moved to Aldea del Rey, and at four years old was taken to Almagro itself, where he was placed in the care of an uncle named Hernan Gutierrez.
The uncle's treatment was evidently harsh enough to be unbearable. At age fifteen, Almagro ran away, making his way to his mother's new household to explain what had happened and to announce that he intended to travel the world. She gave him bread and a few coins with words that mixed anguish with resignation, telling him to go and not give her more trouble, and asking God to help him in his adventure. He traveled to Seville, the great Atlantic port through which Spain's emerging empire was being supplied and extended, and apparently survived by whatever means presented themselves, including, according to some accounts, theft. He eventually attached himself to the household of Don Luis Gonzalez de Polanco, one of the four senior court magistrates and later a counselor to the Catholic Monarchs.
In Seville, Almagro's volatile temperament created serious legal trouble when he stabbed another servant in a dispute, inflicting injuries severe enough to warrant a criminal prosecution. Don Luis, using the substantial influence available to a man of his standing, arranged for Almagro to escape justice by departing for the New World. Pedro Arias Davila, who was leading an expedition sponsored by Ferdinand II of Aragon, was persuaded to take Almagro aboard one of his ships. The Casa de Contratacion, the royal agency that regulated Spanish imperial enterprise, required each man crossing the Atlantic to provide his own weapons, clothing, and farming tools, and Don Polanco supplied these necessities for his departing servant.
Almagro arrived in the New World on June 30, 1514, landing at the city of Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien in present-day Panama. It was there that he first encountered Francisco Pizarro, another future conquistador who would become the central figure of his subsequent career and, ultimately, his adversary. During the years immediately following his arrival, Almagro participated in various expeditions departing from Darien and eventually settled there, receiving an encomienda, building a house, and establishing himself through agriculture. He commanded his first independent conquest in November 1515, leading 260 men in founding the settlement of Villa del Acla, though illness forced him to hand command to Gaspar de Espinosa.
The expedition that Espinosa subsequently organized in December 1515, with 200 men including both Almagro and Pizarro, proved formative. During the fourteen months it lasted, Almagro, Pizarro, and a cleric named Hernando de Luque became close friends and began to conceive of a joint enterprise that would take them far beyond the established territories of Spanish control. Almagro also formed a friendship during this period with Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the man who had crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and first sighted the Pacific Ocean, which the Spanish called the Great South Sea. The ambition taking shape in Almagro's mind pointed south along that ocean's coast.
The partnership of Almagro, Pizarro, and de Luque eventually produced the expeditions that descended along the Pacific coast of South America and made contact with the Inca Empire, the largest political entity in the pre-Columbian Americas. Initial forays in the 1520s were extraordinarily difficult, involving starvation, disease, and fierce resistance, and Spanish authorities in Panama several times ordered the venture abandoned. The story of Pizarro's famous act of defiance, drawing a line on the ground and inviting those who would continue south rather than return to Panama to cross it, became one of the celebrated episodes of the conquest narrative.
Almagro played a complementary role to Pizarro throughout these years, serving as the crucial logistical and recruiting link back to Panama while Pizarro led forces along the coast. When the conquest of the Inca Empire accelerated after 1532 with the capture and execution of the Inca ruler Atahualpa, both men participated in the redistribution of its enormous wealth and the establishment of Spanish cities in former Inca territory. Almagro participated in laying the foundations of Quito in present-day Ecuador and Trujillo in present-day Peru as Spanish cities.
But the wealth and territory generated by conquest also generated conflict. The distribution of Cuzco, the former Inca capital, became the point of irreconcilable dispute between the two partners. To manage this tension temporarily, Almagro was assigned leadership of an expedition into Chile, the first Spanish military penetration of that territory. The expedition, launched from Peru around 1535, crossed the Atacama Desert and the Andes in conditions of extreme suffering, pushing as far south as present-day central Chile before returning to Peru without having found the wealth its sponsors had expected.
Back in Peru, the dispute with the Pizarro family erupted into open civil war. At the Battle of Las Salinas in April 1538, Almagro was defeated by the forces of Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro, captured, and held prisoner. Francisco Pizarro, despite whatever obligations the decades of partnership might have created, allowed his former partner to be tried and executed. Diego de Almagro was strangled and beheaded in July 1538, at approximately sixty-three years of age, the illegitimate child from Ciudad Real who had arrived in the New World at nearly forty and accumulated enough power to fight a civil war for the capital of a fallen empire. His son, known as Diego de Almagro the Younger, briefly seized Lima in 1541 after Francisco Pizarro's assassination before himself being defeated and executed, ending the Almagro line in the New World in blood as it had entered it.
