While reading 'Motherland' by Argentinian author Marcello Gullo Omodeo where he defends the Spanish conquests of America against what’s known as the Black Legend created by Imperialist opponents such as England and France, I came across an interesting story of the first mixed-race princess called Francisca Pizzaro Yupanqui (1534-1598).
According to Omodeo, miscegenation (marriage of different races) was encouraged by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon who financed the conquest of South America mainly to spread Christianity in the continent.
A royal document authored in October of 1514 guaranteed liberty to both Spanish and Indigenous to marry freely without any race barriers. This was how Spanish Marques Francisco Pizzaro — the conquistador who conquered Peru in 1532 — married Incan princess Quispe Sisa — later baptised as Inés Huaylas Yupanqui — the stepsister of the last Incan Emperor Atahualpa.
Pizzaro was forty-eight at the time while his wife was only eighteen. Their daughter Francisca was the first mixed-race child to be born in Peru in 1534 followed by her brother Gonzalo a year later.
However, the marriage didn’t last and Inés remarried again to another Spanish conquistador called Francisco de Ampuero with whom she had three other children.
As for Francisca and her brother who got separated from their mother at a very young age — four and three respectively — their father entrusted his half-brother Francisco Martín Alcantara and his wife Inés Muñoz to educate them according to Spanish customs. Their education included Spanish literacy along with dance and music.
Tragically, when Francisca was seven, she witnessed the assassination of her father on the hand of his associate Diego de Almagro in 1541. The children had to escape through the window and hide from the assassins with the help of their aunt Inés who sheltered them in a convent and later moved them to Lima, till the capture and execution of Almagro in 1542.
Two years later, young Gonzalo died of ill-health which made Francisca the sole heiress to her father’s vast inheritance. This was when her uncle Gonzalo Pizzaro came into the picture with his own agenda: to be the guardian of his twelve-year-old niece and marry her later to create an independent state based on her inheritance and her Incan royal blood. However, his plan was crushed by the Spanish Crown who ordered his beheading in 1548 and shipped Francisca to Spain, to avoid future uprises fuelled by her heritage.
Francisca was reunited with her father’s family and a year later joined her uncle Hernando who was serving a sentence of twenty years of confinement in the comfort of his castle in Valladolid after being accused of killing Almagro and another conquistador.
Nevertheless, Hernando succeeded where his brother Gonzalo failed: to marry Francisca and conserve their family’s wealth. Despite the huge age gap between them, the couple lived happily and had five children from which four died in her lifetime.
Hernando died in 1580 and after three years, Francisca re-married again from the brother of her daughter-in-law. He was a broke aristocrat called Pedro Arias Portocarrero and was eighteen years her junior.
Curiously, the marriage lasted till the death of Francisca in 1598. Through Pedro, Francisca was introduced to the royal court in Madrid where the couple lived lavishly and ended up bankrupt and living out their final days in Extremadura.
Francisca’s legacy includes being a philanthropist who financed the construction of a cathedral in Lima and the Conquest Palace in Extremadura. She was the first Peruvian to arrive in Spain and never left. Instead, she led a life that was rich and tragic in equal measure.
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