Don Pero Niño (c. 1378 – 1453)
Most of what we know about Don Pero Niño comes from the mid-fifteenth century chronicle El Victorial. As a historical source, the chronicle is far from impartial. Written by Gutierre Diaz de Gamez—the man who was Pero Niño’s standard-bearer for almost 50 years—it portrays the Spanish privateer much in the mould of the great chivalric knight (and the previous man on this list) William Marshal, with its lengthy list of Pero Niño’s chivalric feats. But exaggerated or not, it tells us the story of a man who totally dedicated his life to warfare, and bore the scars to prove it.
Pero Niño was raised in the Spanish Royal Household and had his first experience of battle aged just 15. Over the course of his long career, he would fight against the Portuguese, the North African Muslims, and—for the most part—the English, carrying out constant raids along the south coast of England and Jersey. Although one of his weapons of choice was the crossbow, when not at sea, he would often show off his talents with the lance as a formidable jouster, earning such celebrity status that he managed to successfully woo the widow of a recently deceased admiral of France.
Even for the standards of the time, Don Pero Niño was as hard as nails. In 1403, while skirmishing near Tunis, he was wounded in the leg. His comrades carried him back to their ships, but he outright refused to abandon the expedition. The choice nearly cost him his life: by the time he and his men made it back to Spain his wound had began to fester. Carrying a high fever, Don Pero Niño was slipping in and out of consciousness, and the surgeons accepted that there was only one way they might save him: by amputating his leg.
Don Pero Niño, however, refused. Instead, he asked that they cauterized the wound, singing the flesh with a white-hot iron. The surgeon agreed, but at the last moment refused to perform the procedure, not wanting to inflict the degree of pain they knew it would cause. But Pero Niño, by now a master of inflicting and sustaining physical pain, grabbed the iron from him and applied it to himself, rubbing it up and down the length of his leg. He spent the later years of his life (apart from the brief interlude of being exiled) serving the Spanish monarchy, and died at a remarkably old age for a knight who had lived so rashly.