They were both from a rough, low-class neighborhood, the Extremadura—the absolute outlaw-outback of Spain. Hard, mountainous desert. Not like the cosmopolitan Genoa of Columbus. Don't know that much about Pizarro, but Cortes was probably the only man who could have brought down the Aztecs—the predator people of Mexico who had finished their merciless conquest of Mexico only a half-century before he arrived—and the other Indians loved him for it.
Once Cortes won (and he nearly didn't), he fought like crazy to bring down the corrupt carpetbaggers who arrived from Spain to exploit the Indians. Cortes suffered brutally at the hands of those liars and thieves until, back in Spain, he was finally vindicated.
He was a rough man with his faults, but Cortes was self-disciplined, serious about his faith, and utterly heroic for what he achieved. Such as saving 10 million or more people from the cannibal empire he confronted when he landed, and bringing them to Christ. Mexicans love their periodic socialist revolutionaries, but to this day, they proudly retain Cortes's language and his faith.
Thank you for this. I need to read more history.
Unfortunately for this theory of the saving Spanish, the population of what is now Mexico declined by at least 90% in the century after the Spanish showed up.
To be fair, most of this was due to the merging of the Old and New World disease eco-systems, something nobody at the time had a clue was happening or how to prevent.
But the Spanish colonists, with Cortes mostly an honorable exception, mercilessly oppressed the Indians. Read Las Casas if you don't want to take your history from a modern, possibly liberal historian.