The conquest of Peru by an obscure adventurer is one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the New World. Until he was nearly 50 years old, Francisco Pizzaro, serving as a minor Spanish official on the Isthmus of Panama, had nothing to show for his years of toil and peril but a small holding of land. Little more than a decade later, he had conquered the fabulously wealthy empire of the Incas and had bestowed on Spain the richest of its American possessions. He also founded the city of Lima, now the capital of Peru.
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