• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Europeans and Indians had been mixing since Colón touched down at Hispaniola. Most of the colonists on the island were young, single men; in a census of Hispaniola in 1514, only a third of its encomenderos were married. Of these, a third were married to Taino women. Fernando and Isabel encouraged such intercultural coupling, though they believed it should lead to Christian marriage. Christian marriage, perhaps surprisingly, was also the goal of some natives: by marrying their daughters to Spaniards in a Christian ceremony, elite Indians could reinforce their status. For many Spaniards, though, a Taino ceremony was more useful than a Christian wedding—only through marrying a native woman could a low-ranking Spaniard gain access to the goods and workers controlled by high-status Indians. As a result, many of the Spaniards whom the clergy viewed as living in sin thought of themselves as married.

A hybrid society was coming into existence, first in the Caribbean, then everywhere else in the Americas. The mixing began at the top—Cortés was an example. Like many members of the first generation of conquistadors, Cortés came from Extremadura, a poor, mountainous area controlled by powerful families who had been marrying into each other for generations. His distant cousin was Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of the Inka empire—Pizarro’s great-uncle was married to Cortés’s aunt. When the intertwined conquistador families married into the equally intertwined families of noble native societies, they produced the kind of baroque, multibranched family trees that wake up genealogists at 3:00 a.m.—Cortés’s relations with the Mexica (Tenochtitlan’s people) were prototypical.

Cortés was only the beginning. Like his Extremaduran cousin, Pizarro set up shop with a noble native woman: Quispe Cusi, the sister or half sister of Atawallpa, the Inka emperor whom Pizarro overthrew. Quispe Cusi bore Pizarro two children, Francisca and Gonzalo, whom he asked the king to legitimize by royal decree. Pizarro often said that Quispe Cusi was his wife, but he didn’t actually marry her. Nor did he let this “marriage” interfere with his liaisons with two other royal Inka sisters, one of whom bore him another two children. An illegitimate child himself, Pizarro did not turn his back on his half-Inka offspring. Francisca, his daughter by Quispe Cusi, became his principal heir. (Her brother Gonzalo died at the age of nine.)

AMERICAN IMPERIAL FAMILIES OF THE 15TH AND 16TH CENTURY

To bolster the legitimacy of their rule, conquistadors often married into or took consorts from the elite of the peoples they conquered, Cortés and Pizarro being among the leading examples. They created a generation of mixed-culture children who became some of the new colonies’ most powerful citizens. Because many of the conquistadors were from Extremadura, a mountainous region dominated by a few interrelated families, they were often as tightly related as Indian nobility. The result was a multicultural family web unlike any other.

Click here to view a larger image of this entire chart.

The conqueror came to Peru with three brothers. One took an Inka princess as a mistress. Another took an actual Inka queen—he stole the wife of the puppet emperor whom Francisco Pizarro had installed after killing Atawallpa. The remaining Pizarro brother, Hernando, was the only one to return to Spain alive. The wary Carlos V put him under house arrest—Hernando, after all, had a history of impulsively overthrowing kings. Besides, he had murdered a lot of Spaniards in battles over the spoils of Peru. When the king died, his successor, Felipe (Philip) II, continued the imprisonment. Altogether Hernando was confined for twenty-one years. “His confinement was gentle enough,” John Hemming observed in The Conquest of the Incas (1970), his marvelous account of the Pizarro brothers’ assault on Peru. “He was in the same prison and apartments that had harbored [French] King Francis I after his capture