![]() It took seven years for Ludena to assemble an international covey of scientific volunteers. There was a lot of corroborating to do, though, and no money to do it with. You can not only see, but almost feel, the fatal sword thrust. “The physical evidence entirely supports the historical record. ![]() It ‘locked on’ to the male skeleton exactly right,” said Garcia, the pathologist. They are sure that the man is Pizarro himself. The woman may have been a niece of the conquistador, who died around 1590. Investigators think that the children may have been Pizarro’s. With the aid of American researchers, the Peruvians eventually sorted them out: one man, one very old woman and two young children. Too many bones, alas-almost four complete skeletons. Next to the lead box lay a wooden crate of bones wrapped in velvet. They opened up an adjoining wall that they weren’t supposed to touch,” Ludena recalled.īeyond the wall lay a niche and a lead box with a rough inscription on the lid saying that it contained the skull of Francisco Pizarro. “They were sent into the cathedral crypt to do some remodeling. The impostor would still be there, except for four workmen whose caprice on June 18, 1977, started the modern Pizarro saga. When the Lima City Council decided to honor Pizarro on the 350th anniversary of his death in 1891, up came the mummy for public display in Pizarro’s chapel. “When visitors came and asked to see him, the caretaker showed them the mummy. “Over the centuries, Pizarro somehow got lost within the cathedral,” Ludena said. In 1945, in fact, a Peruvian doctor won the national prize for medicine for demonstrating scientifically that the mummy was that of Pizarro. But in the absence of any evidence to back up the 1661 document, however, nobody could prove the mummy was a fraud. Some people suspected that the mummy, which had been carefully salted in a half-successful attempt at preservation, was not Pizarro. No tour of the country was complete without a glimpse of what the guides called “Pizarro’s authentic shriveled remains in a glass coffin.” For almost a century, this mummy held unending fascination for both Peruvians and foreigners. ![]() The document attesting to that transfer did not turn up until 1935, and by then, the cathedral had another Pizarro on display-a well-preserved mummy in a glass-sided sarcophagus. ![]() His skeleton went into a wooden box wrapped in velvet. Pizarro’s skull was placed inside a lead box. In 1661, there was a watershed exhumation. In the next decades, Pizarro’s body was repeatedly shifted around as the church was expanded into one of the New World’s most beautiful cathedrals and fell victim to such vexations as earthquakes. He stayed there in a wooden coffin for about 85 years, according to a painstaking chronology assembled by Ludena. 21, 1544, and reinterred with honor under the main altar of the church. James and buried it that afternoon behind the church.Īfter his supporters carried off a counterrevolution, Pizarro’s body was exhumed on Jan. They dressed Pizarro in a white habit with a distinctive red cross of the Military Order of the Knights of St. The sword thrust to the throat finally killed him, as a procession of witnesses would later testify to Spanish courts trying his assassins.įearing that his killers would sever Pizarro’s head and impale it on a post in the plaza (as Pizarro regularly did to his enemies), friends spirited his body away. In the course of it, his skeleton suggests, Pizarro was wounded on the thumb of his sword hand and lost a piece of his right elbow, apparently warding off the blow of an ax. About a dozen assassins led by Diego de Almagro, whose father Pizarro had executed as a conspirator the year before-brandishing battle axes, swords, lances and crossbows- burst into the house as Pizarro was finishing his meal. ![]()
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