Pedro de Heredia, a son of Pedro de Heredia and Inés Fernandez, is a descendant of a rich family of noble lineage.

The chronicler Juan de Castellanos tells that even in his early years, he showed an adventurous and quarrelsome character.

In his youth, Pedro de Heredia had been involved in an altercation with six men who tried to kill him in a dark alley in Madrid.

The fight had left him with a disfigured nose that required the intervention of a doctor from the Spanish Crown.

In retaliation, Heredia had hunted down three of his attackers and killed them before fleeing to the New World to evade justice, leaving behind his wife and children.

Heredia had traveled to the West Indies with his brother Alonso de Heredia and settled in Santo Domingo, the capital of the island of Hispaniola, where he eventually inherited a sugar mill and an estate in Azua Province.

Then came news of the death of the governor of Santa Marta, Rodrigo de Bastidas, and the Royal Audiencia of Santo Domingo decided to send Pedro de Vadillo as interim governor of the province and Pedro de Heredia as his lieutenant.

In 1527, Vadillo and Heredia had landed in Santa Marta with two hundred men and soon became involved in disputes with Rodrigo Alvarez Palomino, a former lieutenant of Bastidas, which were resolved when the latter was drowned in the river that bears his name.

Vadillo had served as interim governor of Santa Marta but returned to Santo Domingo to face a residencia (an administrative and judicial tribunal).

In the meantime, Heredia continues in office until 1528, gaining extensive experience in his dealings with the Indians.

He accumulates a considerable booty from exchanges of mirrors, bells and other trinkets with the natives, then returns to Santo Domingo and sails back to Spain.

Francisco Pizarro and his brothers Gonzalo, Juan, and Hernando, attracted by the news of a rich and fabulous kingdom, had left the impoverished Extremadura, like many migrants after them.

In 1529, Francisco had Pizarro obtained permission from the Spanish Monarchy to conquer the land they called Peru.

According to historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Peru is neither a Quechuan nor a Caribbean word, but Indo-Hispanic or hybrid.

Pizarro’s Spanish army, following a long and difficult journey from Panama throughout which many had fallen to disease and other hazards, had docked at the Inca city of Tumbes in April.

Here, some gold, silver, and emeralds are procured and dispatched to Almagro, who had stayed in Panama to gather more recruits.

Sebastián de Belalcázar had soon arrived with thirty men.

Born Sebastián Moyano in the province of Córdoba, Spain, in either 1479 or 1480, he had taken the name Belalcázar after the name of the castle-town near to his birthplace in Córdoba.

According to various sources, he may have left for the New World with Christopher Columbus as early as 1498, but Juan de Castellanos will write that he killed a mule in 1507 and fled to Spain for the West Indies due to fear of punishment, and as a chance to escape the poverty in which he lived.

An encomendero in Panama in 1522, he had entered Nicaragua with Francisco Hernández de Córdoba in 1524 during the conquest of Nicaragua, and had become the first mayor of the city of León in Nicaragua.

He remained there until 1527, when he left for Honduras as a result of internal disputes among the Spanish governors.

Briefly returning to León, he then sailed to the coast of Peru, where he unites with Pizarro’s expedition.

Received with quiet hostility by Incas who had perhaps been alerted to the acts of pillage and plunder committed on the fringes of the Empire by the invaders, the Spaniards, deeming it unsafe to remain in Tumbes, relocate their camp to …

…the nearby island of Puna in preparation for an assault on the Inca city.

Initially, the Spanish occupation of the island proceeds without bloodshed.

The natives of Puna are a warrior people who, reluctantly bowing before the might of the Inca Empire, had intermittently accepted the status of tributary state, though periods of friction and even open warfare had frequently erupted with the Incas out on the mainland.

The path to war is first triggered by Pizarro's native interpreters, who warn him, perhaps falsely, that several Punian chiefs have gathered to plan an insurrection.

Pizarro has the chiefs captured, interrogated, and, apparently satisfied with their guilt, delivered to their traditional enemies at Tumbes where they are duly massacred by the Incas.

According to Spanish sources, the warrior class of Puná, maddened with rage, immediately rush to arms and storm the Spanish camp, charging in the thousands.

It seems that the diminutive Spanish force will surely be overwhelmed and scattered, but what the Spaniards lack in numbers they make up for in armaments and discipline.

As the natives approach, many are met head on with deadly rows of lowered pikes, the use of which the Spanish had long mastered in the great wars of Italy and Flanders.

Other Punians, charging in confused masses, are cut down and slaughtered in vast numbers by the concerted volleys of orderly musketeers.

At length, Hernando Pizarro, sensing the enemy falter, musters his cavaliers to his standard and spurs his horse into a charge.

The Spanish cavalry slices through the native ranks with devastating effect.

Within minutes, the Punians are in full rout.