Don diego de vargas biography books

Diego José de Vargas Zapata Luján Ponce de León y Contreras was born in Madrid in 1643 to Alonso de Vargas and María Margarita Contreras y Arráiz. His was an illustrious family, though not among the monarch’s inner circle.

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Each of his ancestors in the Vargas line, for four generations before him, had been knights of the prestigious Order of Santiago. The family’s monetary fortunes, while not pinched by any means, were also not spectacularly lavish, and his father had incurred considerable debt.

In an effort to extinguish that debt, Alonso de Vargas sailed for the Americas in 1650, following the death of his wife, Diego’s mother, to take an imperial post in Guatemala.

Alonso re-married and was able to move up in the colonial administration, but he died at age 43, having never returned to Spain.

A year earlier, Diego had married Beatriz Pimentel de Prado Vélez de Olazábal, almost exactly his age, the daughter of neighbors of the Vargas estate at Torrelaguna, north