Peter Alvarado

Detail of the Glasgow Manuscript representing Pedro de Alvarado leading the Tlaxcalteca warriors in the War of Cuzcatlán.

Pedro de Alvarado y Contreras "Tonatiuh" (Badajoz, Extremadura, Kingdom of Castile, 1485 - Guadalajara, Kingdom of New Galicia, Viceroyalty of New Spain, 4 December July 1541), I Adelantado, Governor and Captain General of the Kingdom of Guatemala, Knight of the Order of Santiago, was a Spanish conquistador who participated in the conquest of Cuba, in the exploration by Juan de Grijalva of the Gulf of Mexico and the coasts of Yucatan, and in the conquest of the Mexica tlatoanato directed by Hernán Cortés, as well as in the conquest of the Mayan area in a large part of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador), which could also have been of Peru, if it were not for his resignation in favor of Diego de Almagro. He was known by the nickname Tonatiuh, which means the Sun in the Mexica language.

Origin and family

Born in Badajoz, Extremadura, c. 1485, coming from a family belonging to the old Castilian nobility of arms, being the son of Pedro Gómez de Alvarado and Messia de Sandoval, general on the border with Portugal, maestresala of King Enrique IV, mayor of Montánchez, thirteenth knight of the Order of Santiago and his commander in Lobón, Puebla, Montijo and Cubillana, and his wife Leonor de Contreras y Carvajal, daughter of Gonzalo de Contreras y Carvajal and his wife Isabel de Trejo y Ulloa (daughter of the VII lords of Grimaldo, Almogrague and La Corchuera).

His paternal grandfather, the Cantabrian Juan de Alvarado y Dávila-Bracamonte, mayor of Alburquerque, knight and commander of Hornachos in the Order of Santiago, was in turn the son of Garcí Sánchez de Alvarado or " del Varado", lord of the Casa Fuerte del Varado in Secadura, corregidor of Córdoba in the times of Juan II of Castilla, remembered as one of the knights who entered with Fernán Álvarez de Toledo to take over the Vega de Granada in 1435, and his wife, Leonor de Bracamonte, born in the Bracamonte Palace, for being the daughter of its builders, the Marshal of Castilla Don Álvaro Dávila, lord of Peñaranda and Fuente el Sol, chief waiter of the Infante Fernando de Aragón, and his wife Juana de Bracamonte y Mendoza, daughter of the famous Robert de Bracquemont, called in Spain "mosen Rubí de Bracamonte", admiral of France, captain of the pontifical guard of the anti-pope Benedict XIII, and of his first wife Inés de Mendoza y Ayala (in turn daughter of Pedro González de Mendoza, IX Lord of the House of Mendoza, of Hita, Buitrago, Regent and Captain General of the Kingdom of Castile, Majordomo of King Enrique II of Castile, tutor of Prince Don Juan, and his wife Aldonza de Ayala, sister of the poet Pero López de Ayala, Chancellor of Castile).

Some of his siblings played an equally important role in the Spanish conquest of America, including Jorge de Alvarado who was married to Luisa de Estada (alleged granddaughter of King Ferdinand the Catholic), Gómez de Alvarado y Contreras, Gonzalo de Alvarado, among others.

Arrival to America and conquest of Cuba (1509-1511)

In 1512, at the age of 27, he landed in Hispaniola, together with his brothers Gonzalo, Jorge, Gómez, Hernando and Juan, who arrived on the island as part of the entourage of Viceroy Diego Colón, Christopher Columbus' eldest son. A year later, under the orders of his relative Diego Velázquez, he participated in the conquest of Cuba.

Grijalva Expedition (1518)

In 1518 he accompanied Juan de Grijalva as captain of a ship on his exploration trip along the coasts of Yucatán and the Gulf of Mexico, during which the discovery of Cozumel took place. He was the first to navigate the Papaloapan River, which is why the population near the mouth of the river was baptized with the name "Alvarado".

Conquest of Mexico (1519-1521)

Several Alvarado brothers joined Cortés in the port of Trinidad, when he began his voyage, among them Jorge, Gonzalo and Gómez, and Juan, Pedro was the first captain of Hernán Cortés during the conquest of Mexico.

Conquest of Tlaxcala and marriage

He participated in the battle against the Tlaxcalans led mainly by Xicohténcatl. After a bloody resistance, the leader of the Tlaxcalan forces was forced to capitulate, strongly pressured by his namesake father, Xicohténcatl & # 34; the Old Man & # 34;, Tlatoani of Tizatlán. The capitulation, following the Mesoamerican custom, took place with the establishment of a new alliance, in which the double marriage between Pedro and Jorge de Alvarado was agreed, being the highest-ranking single captains, with two Tlaxcalan princesses, sisters of Xicohténcatl and daughters of the tlatoani "Xicohténcatl the old". Pedro married Tecuelhuetzin, who was baptized as Doña Luisa. His brother Jorge was married to Princess Xicot, who was baptized Doña Luisa. The marriages were made only by the indigenous rite, in a polygamous style, so that the brothers were free to marry other women without offending the parties. Pedro later contracted two successive marriages by the Catholic rite, during which Doña Luisa remained by her side until her death.

Advanced to Tenochtitlán

After the peace with Tlaxcala, he carried out an advance inspection together with Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia towards the surroundings of Tenochtitlán in order to observe and determine the best route; Vázquez de Tapia fell ill with fever on the way and Alvarado had to complete the mission, both returned to Cholula to inform Cortés of the details. It was then that the natives gave him the nickname Tonatiuh.

The Templo Mayor massacre

In 1520, in the absence of Cortés, who had gone to meet Pánfilo de Narváez, Pedro de Alvarado, who had remained in command, ordered the massacre in the courtyard of the Templo Mayor that preceded the defeat of the Spanish known as the Sad night. Recriminated by Cortés, who was forced to rush back to Tenochtitlan to help him, he alleged that the Aztecs were preparing human sacrifices for the Tóxcatl festival (fifth of the eighteen months of the Mexica calendar), breaking their promise not to do so, and that they had been warned that with the party a trap was being prepared to attack the Spaniards.

From the perspective of the Spaniards, Bernal Díaz del Castillo justifies the aggression against the Mexica nobility in the Templo Mayor, since according to what he had found out, the Mexicas had intended to assassinate Pedro de Alvarado, who, as has been said,, had been in charge of the Spanish troops in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The murder would be carried out in the context of the celebration of Tóxcatl. To this should be added the disgust of the Spaniards for the celebration of a rite considered pagan by them, which implied the removal of the effigy of the Virgin Mary and the Cross that the Spaniards had placed in the Temple of Huitzilopochtli, with the purpose of the indigenous celebration

Many sources agree that Alvarado ordered without prior notice that the dancers of the party be attacked, killing unarmed people. The Aztec testimonies collected by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún describe a cruel slaughter.^{[citation needed]} This fact provoked a strong reaction from the citizens, outraged and fearful of greater atrocities, and the conflict ended in a pitched battle with considerable losses for the Castilian troops.

Alvarado's jump

During the flight from Tenochtitlan, he is credited with having saved his life, despite being surrounded by enemies, jumping a channel leaning on his spear, stuck in the mud; the gesture has taken its name, "Salto de Alvarado", it was also the name of a central street in Mexico City (Puente de Alvarado) located in the area where the event occurred, currently called (Mexico- Tenochtitlan).

It could be cited as a precedent for the pole vault, as is done with Philipides for the marathon, but the jump most likely did not exist: the reference comes from Francisco López de Gómara, who was not an eyewitness, and is strongly denied emphatically by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wields forceful arguments: no witness would have noticed the jump, busy as they were in saving their lives; the depth of the water and the width of the saved channel rule out the feasibility of the acrobatics; and, finally, Bernal himself did not hear anyone mention the jump until long after the conquest, on the occasion of the publication of some laudatory libels for Alvarado.^{[citation required]}

However, the fact could have taken shape and been attributed to Pedro and on such occasion starting from a peculiar peculiarity of his own or one of his brothers, known by the rest of the troops who must have seen practicing your skill or playing it. As they are all family members from eastern Cantabria, where to this day the so-called pasiego jump is practiced, previously more common and used by both men and women from a very young age, the Alvarados must have learned it with their family in Extremadura or visiting relatives in Cantabria.

Conquest of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (1521-1527)

After the capture of Tenochtitlan in 1521, Cortés commissioned him for other expeditions further south, which allowed him to go down in history as the conqueror of Guatemala and El Salvador together with his brothers Jorge de Alvarado and Gonzalo de Alvarado and, although following Cortés, he also concluded the conquest in Honduras.

In 1524, Pedro de Alvarado ordered the foundation of the first colonial capital of Guatemala: Santiago de los Caballeros initially in Iximché (Tecpán), later refounded in 1527 in the Almolonga valley (today the San Miguel Escobar neighborhood in Ciudad Vieja, Sacatepéquez) after an indigenous revolt.

In 1525, he ordered Gonzalo de Alvarado to found a town with the name of San Salvador in the Señorío de Cuzcatlán, to dominate the natives of those lands. Both localities came to have so much preponderance in their respective jurisdictional provinces that they ended up becoming capitals of the republics of Guatemala and El Salvador, respectively; although none are in their original location today.

In 1527 he traveled to Spain and met with Carlos V. This is his moment of greatest glory, when he received from the emperor the appointments of governor, captain general and adelantado of Guatemala, more than Cortés of New Spain would ever achieve. However, on his return to America, in 1529, the governor of New Spain imprisoned him and prosecuted him; he was only able to free himself from captivity through the intervention of Cortés.

Despite the apocryphal historiographical importance of Pedro de Alvarado in the conquest of Central America, it is now well established (largely thanks to research derived from the restoration of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan) that the major role of said conquest In truth, his brother Jorge de Alvarado had it.

Intervention in the conquest of the Incas (1534)

News about the riches of the Incas and the conquest that Francisco Pizarro undertook reached the ears of Alvarado in Guatemala. He requested and obtained permission from the King of Spain to make discoveries and conquests in the lands of the Quito provinces of the Inca Empire that were outside the limits assigned to Francisco Pizarro.

Cannzo de Quauhquechollan, representing the campaign of his brother Jorge de Alvarado in charge of the quauhquecholteca warriors in the conquest of Guatemala

Portrait of the advance Pedro de Alvarado found in the General Archive of Indias, painted by Tomás Povedano (twentieth century)

He built his fleet in the South Pacific, where he founded the Port of Iztapa (in Guatemala). At the beginning of 1534 he set sail with a fleet made up of eight ships, in which 500 well-armed infantry, 227 horses and 2,000 indigenous people from Guatemala embarked. Bartolomé de las Casas, in his Brevísima Relación, recalls the death of Indians caused by these expeditions, both for forcing them to transport the materials with which the ships were built to the South Sea, and for the travel and work conditions.

On February 25, 1534, Alvarado landed in the bay of Caráquez; He then went to Charapotó, where he founded the Villa Hermosa de San Mateo de Charapotó; from there to Jipijapa, Paján and the Daule River. He returned to retreat towards the forests of Paján, where he stopped for some time. His forces advanced from the south to much higher than Chonana, and from the north they went down so far that they reached the territory of Nono, in the current province of Pichincha, a few kilometers from Quito.

From Nono, retracing many leagues, they returned to the swampy forests of Chimbo in the western region, where, reuniting the entire expedition, they began to ascend the Andes mountain range until reaching the heights of Ambato. As Alvarado was lost in the coastal provinces during the months of February, March and April, he suffered the inconvenience of the winter rains, when on the coast the plains and all the soil in general become flooded and impassable swamps; and leaving the inter-Andean plain, in August, he crossed the mountain range precisely at the time of the greatest winds and the strongest snowfall.

Pedro de Alvarado arrived at the plains of Ambato, currently in Ecuador, with a completely weak army, since it had been suffering for many months from the inclemencies of the coastal jungle, in which they got lost, because the indigenous guides who had detained the force managed to flee. For this reason, they were not in a position to confront Diego de Almagro and Sebastián de Belalcazár and preferred to reach a friendly arrangement on August 26, 1534, which consisted in which Pedro de Alvarado would receive compensation for the expenses he had incurred in so ill-fated expedition and, in exchange, Diego de Almagro and Gonzalo Pizarro got Pedro de Alvarado to give them the ships, horses and men who wanted to stay. Pedro de Alvarado eventually returned to Guatemala. Francisco López de Gómara, in his General History of the Indies, figures the compensation at one hundred thousand gold pesos, which were paid, keeping Almagro's word.

Poor reception in Ecuador-Quito

The minutes of the colonial council of San Francisco de Quito clearly reveal the poor reception and general discontent that Pedro de Alvarado caused in the conquering companies headed by Diego de Almagro and that were linked to the expeditions of the current territories of Ecuador continental or of the then Kingdom of Quito, in accordance with the provisions delivered by Francisco Pizarro as governor of New Castile. Here are some of the first original documents of the colonial council of Quito where the "opinions" that Marshal Diego de Almagro himself had to resort to to negotiate with Alvarado and not promote a demonstrated and unpopular reception that originated his stay in the northern lands of Peru, barely heard of their arrival from Guatemala.

Expedition project to the Moluccan Islands (1539-1540)

After Queen Juana I of Castile issued a royal decree in 1533 granting Francisco de Montejo the governorship of the territory from the Cupilco River in Tabasco to the Ulúa River in Hibueras, Montejo moved to Central America to carry out military campaigns against the Lencas, but Pedro de Alvarado had also been sent for the same purpose by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco. Due to the conflict of interests, in 1539 an exchange of the territory of Chiapas that belonged to Alvarado was made for the territory of Hibueras; Given this perspective, Montejo moved to Ciudad Real de Chiapa.

Alvarado did not endure inactivity for a long time as governor of Guatemala and Honduras, before requesting and obtaining another exploration commission from the crown, this time to the elusive Spice Islands. He was preparing this expedition and wandering with his fleet through the Mexican Pacific when he was requested by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza y Pacheco, who wanted to participate in the enterprise. But first, he would give Alvarado a military order that would be his last: to quell the rebellion of Caxcan and Chichimeca Indians that had broken out in Nueva Galicia (in what is now the state of Jalisco, Mexico).

Death of Alvarado, represented in the Telleriano-Remensis Codex. Next to his head his name appears in (of the Nahuatl language: Tonatiuh‘Sol’).

War of the Mixtón and death in Nochistlán (1541)

Portrait of Pedro de Alvarado, XIX century

In this last military action, which is sometimes known as the Mixtón War, Alvarado was run over by the horse of an inexperienced companion who was fleeing the counterattack of the Chichimeca Indians, who were sheltered in the Mixtón Hill (cat) and They were commanded by Francisco Tenamaxtle, a baptized caxcán who had taken up arms. It happened in Nochistlán, in the south of what is now the state of Zacatecas, where it had already been granted the title of city with the name of Guadalajara, despite its current layout having moved in later times, returning to the old town its original name.

After a few days of agony, he died on July 4, 1541. His body was first buried in the church of Tiripetío, Michoacán, and moved in 1568 by his daughter, Leonor Alvarado Xicoténcatl, to a crypt in the cathedral of San José de Santiago de Guatemala (today Antigua Guatemala), along with his wife, Beatriz de la Cueva, called la sinventura, not without reason: he was widowed less than a year after succeeding his sister as wife de Alvarado, and then survived her husband by only another year.

The body of the conqueror and founder of the city is still in said church after the attempt to bury them in a monument erected in his memory failed due to popular pressure.

After the death of Pedro de Alvarado in the Mixtón war, when the governorship of Hibueras became vacant, the Royal Audience of the Confines asked Francisco de Montejo to hold office again in Hibueras, between 1542 and 1544. However, leaves the appointment and the governorships of Tabasco and Chiapas, presenting their respective judgments of residence.

Marriages and offspring

He contracted his first marriage in the city of Tlaxcala to Princess Tecuelhuetzin, later known as Doña Luisa Xicoténcatl, daughter of Xicohténcatl "el Viejo", tlatoani of Tizatlán, sister of the Prince Xicoténcatl and Princess Xicot, Jorge de Alvarado's first wife. His marriage was annulled by the Church, being the only one that would give him children, considered illegitimate within the Spanish legal framework, and therefore, unfit to succeed in the honors that his father received (as in overtaking).. However, they inherited his property and contracted important marriages in his time. These were:

• Pedro de Alvarado y Xicoténcatl
• Leonor de Alvarado y Xicoténcatl (1524), married in first marriage to Captain Pedro Portocarrero, a lieutenant in the conquest of Guatemala (without descendence), and in second marriage to the graduate Francisco de la Cueva and Villacreces, lieutenant of governor and general captain of Guatemala, knight and comener in the Order of Santiago (first of the following two wives of Pedro de Alvarado), with whom he procreated a broad descendence.
• Diego de Alvarado y Xicoténcatl (m. 1554)

Catastrophe of 1541 in which Beatriz de la Cueva died, an intern governor of Guatemala after the death of the advance.

After his ecclesiastical annulment, which unfortunately would lead to the illegitimacy of his only offspring, he married for the second time with his relative Francisca de la Cueva, lady of the Empress Isabel of Portugal, and daughter of Luis I de la Cueva, Lord of Solera, and Doña María Manrique de Benavides (whose mother Beatriz de Valencia y Bracamonte, was the first cousin of Juan de Alvarado y Bracamonte, grandfather of Pedro de Alvarado himself, as they were both grandchildren of Álvaro Dávila and Juana de Bracamonte), however, his life was short, dying after landing in Veracruz.

After the unexpected death of his wife, Alvarado obtained the respective papal dispensation, thanks to the intercession of Francisco de los Cobos, the emperor's secretary, to contract a next marriage with Beatriz de la Cueva, sister of his former wife Francisca, and like her, also a lady of the Empress Isabel of Portugal, who has gone down in history for the appointment of governor granted to her by the Guatemalan council upon learning of the death of the advanced Pedro de Alvarado in the Mixton. He held the position for only two days, since he would die in the company of his ladies-in-waiting in the chapel of the Royal Houses, as a result of the & # 34; avalanche & # 34; that devastated the city of Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala on September 11, 1541 and where around six hundred inhabitants of the city would die.

Ancestors