Martin de Porres was the unwanted child of a Spanish Grandee and a freed African slave. He was born in Lima, Peru scarcely forty years after the bloody destruction of the Inca Empire. He raised himself, for the most part, and became an apprentice to a barber-surgeon so the he would have a trade. At fifteen, he began his long relationship with the Dominican Order, first as a tertiary and then as a brother with vows.
