Early Life
Pizarro was born in Trujillo, in modern day Extremadura, Spain. His birth year is uncertain, but is placed sometime in the 1470s, possibly 1471. He was the illegitimate son of Gonzalo Pizarro Rodríguez de Aguilar (1446–1522) and Francisca González Mateos, a poor woman of Trujillo. His father was a colonel of infantry who served in Navarre and in the Italian campaigns under Cordoba. His mother married late in life and had a son Francisco Martín de Alcántara, who was at the conquest of Peru with his half-brother from its inception. Through his father, Francisco was a second cousin once removed to Hernán Cortés. Little attention was paid to Francisco's education and he grew up illiterate. On 10 November 1509, Pizarro sailed from Spain to the New World with Alonzo de Ojeda on an expedition to Urabí. He sailed to Cartagena and joined the fleet of Martin Fernández de Enciso in 1513.
Read more about this topic: Francisco Pizarro
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back—it is already so far.”
—Alice Meynell (1847–1922)