This book, by a Peruvian historian who has studied in England and taught both there and in the United States, is about the entrepreneurial organization created by Pizarro to manage and exploit the properties that he and his brothers acquired in the conquest of Peru. The first half of the book comprises a chronological account of the organization that Pizarro created with Diego de Almagro in Panama to carry out the conquest; its replacement during the 1530s with a family-based organization for the long-term exploitation of properties appropriated by the Pizarro brothers; the management of Francisco’s estate by guardians appointed for his children after his assassination in 1541; the consolidation of family properties in Peru as a result of the 1552 marriage in Spain of Francisco’s seventeen-year-old mestiza daughter, doña Francisca, to her uncle Hernando; and Hernando’s subsequent efforts to preserve and exploit the family estate through to the 1570s. The remainder of the book provides a more detailed examination of the properties acquired by the Pizarro brothers and the people, both Spanish and Indian, who worked for or were connected to the family management organization. Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers concludes with a brief account of the loss of the remaining properties and the subsequent history of the Pizarro family after 1570.
Varón has found some new or little-used documentary material (largely judicial and notarial records) in Spanish, Peruvian, and Bolivian archives. However, most of this material is concerned with the period after 1550, when the Pizarros were no longer in Peru, and contains only limited and fragmentary data on the local management of the family’s Peruvian properties. Thus we learn little new about the conquest or about Spanish economic activity in the period that immediately followed. The author has uncovered new information about Pizarro’s relatives in Trujillo and about the individuals recruited in Extremadura and sent out to help manage the family’s Peruvian affairs.
But Varón raises interesting points about the connections between the Pizarros and certain indigenous groups (particularly the Indians of Huaylas—one of whom became Francisco’s first Indian mistress—and those of the Lima valley). Varón also makes a useful contribution to our knowledge of the early colonial economy by bringing together available information on specific income-producing properties (encomiendas, mines, and coca fields) that the Pizarros acquired. For many, however, the most interesting part of the book will probably be its account of Hernando’s campaign to reorganize management of the family’s Peruvian properties from a Spanish jail and to preserve them from rival conquistadors and bureaucrats. In summary, though this well-written book does not greatly add to existing knowledge of the conquest itself, it is likely to become the authoritative account of the Pizarros and their economic activities; and for this reason it should become essential reading for students of sixteenth-century Peru.
