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Today's Featured Biography
Francisco Pizarro
 The old Spanish province of Estremadura, though distant from the sea, shut in by mountain-chains, furnished numerous adventurers for the expeditions of discovery, conquest, and plunder that followed Columbus to the New World; two of whom achieved astonishing renown. One was the conqueror of Mexico; the other, the conqueror of Peru.
Of the early life of Francisco Pizarro not much is known with certainty. He was born about the year 1471; but even that date is a matter of conjecture, so little care was had of the coming into the world of the actor who was to play so stirring a part in it. The family from which he inherited his name must have been one of some note in its day. His kinsman and great rival in fame, Cortes, was a Pizarro on his mother's side.
Francisco was the second of four brothers, all of whom were men of ability and valor, and all of whom fought in the Peruvian wars. Their father was Colonel Gonzalo Pizarro, concerning whom little is known, save that he was a soldier of Spain, and that he served creditably in Italy and Navarre.
The mother of Francisco was Francisca Gonzales, a woman of low condition, from whom he seems to have received hardly more parental care than from his father, by whom he was utterly neglected. The story told by Gomara, and quoted by Prescott, that, abandoned as a foundling, he was nursed by a sow, though as mythical as that of Romulus and the wolf, which probably suggested it, indicates nevertheless the degradation of his childhood...
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