The Wrath of God: Lope De Aguirre, Revolutionary of the Americas

In 1560, General Pedro de Ursúa led an expedition through the Amazon in search of El Dorado. Three months later, Ursúa was murdered. His replacement, Fernando de Guzmán, was also murdered. Emerging from the chaos was the Biscayan Lope de Aguirre, who turned away from El Dorado and led his men to Peru to overthrow the royal forces and declare independence from the Spanish Crown. When Aguirre was finally killed, the aftermath was astonishing: hundreds dead, entire towns depopulated, and a nascent revolution quashed.Deliberately provocative, Evan Balkan's The Wrath of God examines Aguirre, a symbol of Basque fury and rampage, arguing that Aguirre's historical representation as a one-dimensional madman deserves revisiting. Indeed, Aguirre may be the Americas' first true revolutionary, a view shared by Simón Bolívar, among others. 2011 marks the 450th anniversary of one of the most extraordinary and least known events in the history of the Americas, and Balkan's work offers a timely investigation into the revolutionary's life and controversial methods.

“A well-contextualised biography of the explorer Lope de Aguirre, based on major chronicles dealing with sixteenth-century Peru and the Amazon. While not glossing Aguirre’s brutality and paranoia, the author also presents a somewhat more rational, if brutal, prototype of the American revolutionary, revolting against colonial tyranny and elite abuses of commoners. He succeeds well in revising the image of the protagonist away from being nothing more than a wild madman. The interpretation is fresh and fills a significant historiographical void.” —Richard Slatta, professor of history, North Carolina State University, coauthor of Simón Bolívar’s Quest for Glory