Diego García de Paredes y Torres (March 30, 1468 - February 15, 1533), best known by the Red Baron of the "Extremaduran Samson" or the "Spanish Hercules", was a Spanish soldier, commander and duelist, known in the European folklore of the 15th and 16th centuries as the World's Best Warrior. Separating myth from reality in his long and motley military career was already impossible back at his own day, but he would go surely into history as a terror of the battlefields, a soldier of borderline superhuman strength and violence who was an One-Man Tercio in his own right. He was a primitive Memetic Badass in European literature, being mentioned by Miguel de Cervantes himself in Don Quixote and by many chroniclers of the Spanish Golden Age.
A Military Brat born in Extremadura, a Spanish land that would give birth to many conquistadores, Diego stood out for his athleticism and martial talent since his very childhood, although he also learned to read and write, which wasn't that usual back then. Possibly after an early participation in the capture of Granada, Diego jumped to Italy as a mercenary, joining the Vatican guard through family connections, and was eventually ascended to the Papal bodyguard of Pope Alexander VI when they witnessed angry García beat up a whole squad of fellow guards with a playing rod named barra castellana. Unfortunately for him, after four years of highly regarded service during the Italian Wars, the Vatican kicked him out for another incident (neither the first nor the last), as he dueled a nobleman and beheaded him despite the latter's pleas. García returned to his mercenary ways until being eventually drafted to the Spanish army commanded by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, whom he had fought along in his Italian campaigns.
García's career as a Spanish soldier had a dazzling beginning at the take of the Ottoman stronghold of Cephalonia, where he protagonized such a massacre of Turks by his hand alone that when they managed to corner him, they took him alive as a Worthy Opponent, only for him to break out of his cell and keep wreaking havoc until the victory. The feat made him famous among the Christians, to the point the Vatican cleared up his service record, but it would only be the prologue for his service under the Great Captain in the 1501-1503 expedition against the French. In a famous instance, when his proposition to go all out against the French in the Garigliano river was rejected by the cautious Fernández, an offended García placed himself strategically in a bridge, challenged the enemy camp and started cutting down all the French soldiers that came to him, eventually attracting his countrymen to the skirmish and finishing the insanity with hundreds of French corpses behind them. Fernández would reprimand him by his recklessness, but few could question the results of his approach.
Prior to the expulsion of the French army from Italy, García had also participated in the famous 1503 Challenge of Barletta, an event in which the French, led by the legendary Pierre Terrail de Bayard (the original Knight in Shining Armor, who oddly enough, would have his own bridge-defending anecdote in the Garigliano), rode up to the walls of the Spanish headquarters and goaded them to a 11 vs. 11 Combat by Champion. The Spanish Hercules was wounded at the time, but upon being required to fight, he promptly came and led his peers to a sound thrashing of the French, who were forced to cover behind their dead horses and fight for the draw for five long hours. The judges proposed to call a draw, but Fernández would want none of it and when his lance and sword broke, he started pelting his opponents with the field's heavy milestones, making them flee in panic. By this point of his life, unsurprisingly, the French had their own nickname for Diego: Le Grand Diable.
Upon their return to Spain, García was rewarded with the Marquisate of Colonnetta, but it was taken from him afterwards for his Undying Loyalty to Fernández, who had lost the favor of King Ferdinand II; it's said Diego burst in the royal chapel and issued an open challenge for the Great Captain's honor without receiving an answer. Disgruntled, García went rogue and became a pirate for some time, but he later found out King Ferdinand was issuing pardons for Christian knights to participate in the 1050s invasions of Africa. Once more, Paredes' battlefield feats refloated his career, with Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, hiring him as a maestre de campo. After a series of battles for the Christian kingdoms in Africa and Italy, García was so famous that Pope Julius II appointed him colonel of his Catholic League, and he eventually returned to Spain's service when Maximilian's grandson Charles V inherited the kingdom. He worked as a bodyguard for the new king, participating in his campaigns against the Ottoman Empire.
True to his roots, he had a bit of a Dashing Hispanic side as well, although in his own way. In a famous anecdote, he was flirting with a lady through her window, and upon finding the iron grill cumbersome during the process, he casually ripped it off. However, in order to protect her privacy, he then went ripping off all the window grills of the street so nobody would know Diego García had been courting specifically her.
For all his career, having survived up to 30 battles of all kinds and supposedly achieved 300 victories in singles duels to death, García would die himself of an unusually silly death in Bolonia, falling off his horse while playing with some young soldiers in his spare time (it's said he lampshaded it with his last breath). He left a son, also named Diego García de Paredes, who would serve under Francisco Pizarro in the Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire and became one of governors that took down the rebellious Lope de Aguirre.
In fiction
Comic Book- Diego García de Paredes: El Sansón Extremeño by Gol, Pedro Camello and Lola Aragón tells his story.
- He appears in Bud Spencer's Soldier of Fortune, played ironically by French actor Jacques Herlin, as the second-in-command of a Suspiciously Similar Substitute of the Great Captain. This version of him is an unassuming veteran without any particular ability.
- Bernal Díaz del Castillo's The True History of the Conquest of Mexico includes a reference to him.
- He's mentioned several times in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote.
- García received his own novel in Florencio Moreno Godino's La Cruz de Plata: Memorias de Diego Garcia de Paredes.
- He also appears as a secondary character in Massimo D'Azeglio's Italian historical novel Ettore Fieramosca.
- Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's Novelas Cortas has a tale of a descendant of García de Paredes.
- He is a character in Juan Granados' 2006 novel El Gran Capitán, where he appears as a force of nature who is also completely insane.
- García narrates the prologue of José Calvo Poyato's novel El Gran Capitán, which is framed as an extract from his memories, and appears further as a character.
