The end of the mystery
What to do when the only histories are ghost stories
In the fall of 1540, a platoon of 20 Spanish soldiers marched through New Mexico’s Glorieta Pass and into an Indigenous settlement called Cicuyé, or Pecos Pueblo, 15 miles southeast of present-day Santa Fe. As part of a larger column of troops led by the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the men had already waged a horrific campaign of mass murder, rape, torture and enslavement across much of the Rio Grande Valley, but they arrived in Cicuyé as invited guests, and were welcomed with a feast that lasted several days. Eventually, Coronado’s men were presented with one of the village’s captives, about whom little is known apart from the nickname the Spaniards gave him: El Turco, or the Turk.
A half century earlier, Christopher Columbus and other explorers in the Spanish crown’s service had gone in search of the New World in large part because of the Ottomans…