Peru

Even his birthplace is disputed between rival national historiographies, and one chronicler questions whether the standard story of his capture during the civil war happened at all.

Even his own bones were misidentified for nearly a century, and his most famous act of daring, the line drawn in the sand, rests on no independent confirmation at all.

1450

Disease and civil war had already gutted the empire before Pizarro's ambush; steel and horses finished what a smallpox epidemic and a succession war had already begun.

1438