Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  During one of the many forays the horsemen made into the square and that had prevented the Incas setting fire to the thatched roof of the fortress tower of Suntur Huasi, some of the besieged men and women, prompted by fear and invoking the intercession of God for their deliverance, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin – an event commemorated years later by the construction on its site of Cuzco’s church of the Triunfo. Another miraculous apparition, known as the Miracle of Santiago, which the beleaguered garrison claimed had been seen at the height of the siege, and which would also later be represented in the religious iconography of the colony, was the apparition of Santiago, Spain’s patron saint, an event chronicled by the Friar Martín de Murúa:

  I wish to refer to what I have heard told by Spaniards and Indians, who swear to the truth of what they say, and who recall that in the most difficult time of the fighting a Spaniard appeared mounted on a white horse and killing many Indians, and many of the Spaniards believed him to have been Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, one of the leading conquistadores of Cuzco; yet later, when they inquired about this they discovered that he had not been fighting there, but in another part of the city, even though there was no other among the Spaniards who possessed a white horse other than he. It was understood by many that it had been the Apostle Santiago, patron and defender of Spain, who had appeared there.26

  The Emperor Manco had established his principal encampment overlooking the city on a hill known to the Quéchua as the Speckled Hawk, in the massive stone fortress temple of Sacsahuaman, from where with impunity he commanded the daily assault. The fortress, comprising three great stone defensive towers ringed by a wall whose foundation stones were some 12 feet in height, guarded Cuzco’s northern approach. Pedro Pizarro compares one of the warriors defending the highest tower of the fortress to a lion armed with a shield, battleaxe and Spanish sword, and wearing a captured steel helmet. Diego Camacho, one of the seventy soldiers attempting to scale the fortress walls, recalled that ‘for some days we had the fortress besieged and one night Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and a few others volunteered to gain entry through a small opening they had seen, and thus they entered, and all the others after them, and we captured the surrounding area to the fortress at great peril and much fighting, and that night Juan Pizarro was killed. Hernando Pizarro, who had remained in the city, then came up and we held to the siege until the fortress was captured: scaling its walls with ladders.’27 Lucas Martínez Vegazo recorded that twelve conquistadores climbed up into the fortress ‘killing and wounding the natives and shouting “Spain! Spain!”’28 It was said that the slaughter had been so intense that for days hundreds of condors could be seen swooping down on the fortress’s bloody walls to eat the flesh of its dead warriors.

  The capture of Sacsahuaman would form part of the folklore and legends of the Indies, symbolised by the coat of arms awarded Cuzco by the Cardinal of Seville: ‘A castle of gold in a field of red, in recognition that the said city and its fortress were conquered by force of arms in the royal service; and for a border eight condors in a field of gold, which are large birds like vultures of the province of Peru, in recognition that at the time the city was won they flew down to eat the flesh of the dead.’29

  The fall of the great fortress, whose giant stone foundations can still be seen above Cuzco, marked a turning point in the siege of the city. Their victory had gained Hernando Pizarro’s weary and half-starved soldiers a period of respite, though it had been marred by the death from his wounds of his brother Juan a few days after the siege. On his deathbed Juan bequeathed his right to the Temple of Coricancha to the Dominican Order in return for their prayers for his soul.

  In the days that followed several sorties were ordered into the surrounding countryside to forage for food and llamas, before Hernando Pizarro himself led a squadron of horse into the northern valley of Ollantaytambo. Lying beyond what is known as the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Ollantaytambo and its river of Urubamba are dominated by the surrounding mountains. In the farthest reaches of that valley lie the ruins of its giant stone-terraced fortress and there Manco had positioned the bulk of his army. The small squadron of horse finally entered the valley and slowly made their way up towards the fortress, the massive walls of which were manned by archers from the Amazon subject tribes. Diego Camacho recalled the failure of the expedition:

  This witness and seventy horsemen went to the said province and fortress, which we attacked on the day of our arrival. The Indian warriors, having ventured out of the fortress, a great battle took place till that night, in which many Spaniards were killed and wounded; and abandoning our encampment and tents we were forced to flee to Cuzco that very night, losing everything we had taken with us; for had we remained till morning not one of us would have returned alive because of the great numbers of warriors and the ruggedness of the land.30

  Their retreat from the valley was the precursor to a further siege of the city, and though its garrison by now had accumulated sufficient supplies of food to last for some time, it would be several months before one of the two armies marching to its relief would reach the vicinity of Cuzco.

  SIX

  The Death of Almagro

  Diego de Almagro died at the age of seventy-three: a man of small stature and ugly, marked even more so after the loss of his eye, of a cheerful disposition and courageous.

  Antonio de Herrera, Historia General

  When news first reached Pizarro at Lima of the siege of Cuzco and of the events that had precipitated it, he was filled with anger and dismay at the behaviour of his brothers, conscious that his settlers could well be massacred in revenge. Four relief columns of cavalry were sent by him to Cuzco, including a squadron of Indian auxiliaries under the command of one of Manco’s half-brothers. But each failed to penetrate the roads and bridges the Inca emperor had fortified leading to Cuzco, bringing only further reports of the plight of Hernando Pizarro and his men, who faced hunger and disease, and a lengthy siege.

  Despatching messengers to the Isthmus and even to Spain, the conqueror of Peru awaited the inevitable siege of his own settlement, his vision of a Spanish empire in the Andes crumbling by the day. Only his Cañari and Huanca auxiliaries had gathered on the outskirts of Lima in defence of his capital, together with several thousand Huaylas warriors of the cacique Contarhuaco, the mother of his young Inca mistress, whose intervention would eventually save the city. Nothing, however, could subdue the panic or quieten the rumours that gripped the colony, nor prevent the daily exodus of those able to flee in the few available ships to the safety of the Isthmus, regardless of Pizarro’s threat to execute deserters. But Pizarro was not a man to be intimidated for long. He had known fear almost all his life, and it was the same fear he had experienced on the island of Gallo and at the first sight he had had of Atahualpa’s encampment at Cajamarca, when all he had striven for appeared to be lost.

  Sending a ship to Almagro in Chile and outriders to the small army commanded by the conquistadore Alonso de Alvarado in the northern Chachapoya province, and to Sebastián de Belalcázar at his settlement of Popayán in Colombia, Pizarro believed that given time he would be able to consolidate his forces and relieve Cuzco. The possibility of his achieving this, however, seemed far from certain. He no longer faced a bewildered native populace, suspicious of the magical attributes of the Spanish horsemen and of their weapons. Now the forces that confronted him comprised a determined nucleus of caciques and Inca lords bent on revenge for the abuse of their women and the maltreatment they had themselves suffered at the hands of men they had once believed to be gods, and whom they now considered little more than thieves and rapists.

  Some fifteen hundred Spaniards were at this point isolated in the settlements across a vast and contrasting landscape, from Cuzco to as far north as the equator, and at the mercy of almost a quarter of a million warriors.

  [M]any fled from Lima to Mexico and to Panama, taking their wives and possessions with them, and though they tried to persuade the marqué
s to do likewise, he would not consider such an action, preferring to die in His Majesty’s service than escape … [H]e then sent three ships he owned with the captains Juan Fernández, Juan de Barrio and Diego de Ayala to seek help, arms and horses from Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico, sending with his captains a great amount of gold for this purpose, and promising to reward those who responded to his call. At that time the marqués also sent his brother Francisco Martín de Alcántara to gather together the settlers on the northern coast. Furthermore, he commanded Juan de Páñes to collect from Panama a large quantity of money he had in that town, also for the defence of these realms …

  Many captains answered his call to arms, among them the captains Garcilaso de la Vega [father of the historian], Diego de Rojas and Gómez de Tordoya and Pedro de Lema, who was the eldest brother of the Governor of Santo Domingo, Francisco de Cháves, who brought many men with him, together with Pedro de los Ríos, brother of the Governor of Nicaragua, who came in his large galleon, with horses and arms …

  And to relieve the siege of Cuzco the marqués sent the captain Diego de Pizarro with 150 men who were killed by the Indians in the ravine at Parcos. By another road he sent Gonzalo de Tapia, his brother-in-law, with 80 horse, all of whom were also killed … and ignorant of their fate he sent a further column of 30 men under the captain Galte who were later besieged at Jauja, and who, according to Carabantes de Mazuelas, who managed to make his escape from the town, suffered a similar fate as its settlers, who were all killed.1

  Hernando Pizarro claimed that his brother expended 300,000 gold pesos of his own money in defence of his colony.

  For months on end Pizarro awaited the attack on Lima, ignorant of the fate of his brothers in Cuzco. Each of his relief expeditions had been beaten back by an army of Manco’s warriors under the command of his warrior chief Tey Yupanqui. According to the Friar Vicente de Valverde in a letter he wrote to the Emperor Charles V, Tey Yupanqui had sworn to ‘enter the city [Lima] and kill every single Spaniard and take their women and make them their wives, and breed a strong race of warriors, and that if he were to die in the assault each one of his chiefs would also die fighting’.2 Again, it was to the Spanish horsemen who faced the thousands of warriors on Lima’s plain that Lima owed its survival, once more proving that it was primarily Spanish horsemanship – something the Indians were never able to master on their captured horses – that was responsible for the success of Spain’s conquest. After the fighting Tey Yupanqui and forty of his warrior chiefs lay dead.

  With the arrival of Alonso de Alvarado from the Chachapoya, Pizarro had been able not only to fortify Lima but to send another relief force to Jauja and Cuzco under Alvarado, of ‘100 horsemen, 150 foot soldiers, among them 40 crossbowmen’.3 Due to his inability to communicate with his brothers, for almost a year Pizarro did not know whether they were alive or dead, or that his younger brother Juan had been killed in the assault on Cuzco’s fortress. Also unknown to him were the appalling losses suffered by Manco’s warriors in their defence of the Sacsahuaman, a fate which was to influence many of his caciques to abandon the city’s siege. Lack of sufficient maize and potatoes – the staple diet of the warriors – to feed their men, and fear for the safety of their distant homelands after so long a period of absence, had forced the caciques of the subject tribes to once more break their allegiance to their Inca overlords and defy their emperor, leading to a mass desertion. Unable to secure their obedience, Manco had been left no option but to retreat to the safety of the neighbouring Yucay valley, taking with him only several thousand warriors, mainly of his Quéchua tribe.

  In the event, it was the exhausted army of Diego de Almagro, that had found neither gold nor riches on its ill-fated expedition to Chile, which was the first to reach Cuzco, having marched across its desolate northern desert. Having left Cuzco with some five hundred men and several thousand Indian porters, many of whom, according to the Friar Valverde, they chained, at times making them carry the newly born foals of their mares in hammocks, Almagro’s once proud army were now no more than a dishevelled and half-starved array of men.4

  The historian Agustín de Zárate, who knew many of the survivors of the expedition, recorded that

  Don Diego de Almagro and his men underwent great hardships on their expedition to Chile, both from hunger and thirst, and in their battles with the Indians. Parts of the country were inhabited by men of very large stature who were fine bowmen and dressed in sealskins. But the Spaniards suffered worst from the extreme cold, both from cold winds and afterwards when they crossed the snow-bound cordillera. Here Ruy Díaz, who was following after Don Diego, lost several men and horses from frostbite. No clothes or armour were enough to keep out the icy wind that pierced and froze them. And the ground was so frozen that when Don Diego returned to Cuzco five months later he found in various places men who had died on the way to Chile, frozen hard on the rocks, together with the horses they were leading, and their bodies were as fresh and free from corruption as if they had only just died.

  The carcasses of these horses would provide the main food of Don Diego’s army on their return. In all these wild places where there was no snow there was a great shortage of water, which the Spaniards carried in llama bladder skins, each llama carrying the skins of dead llamas on its back filled with water. One of the characteristics of these llamas is that they can carry a load of fifty or sixty pounds, like camels, which they much resemble in build though they have no hump. The Spaniards have since used them as horses, for they can carry a man four or five leagues in a day. When they are tired and lie on the ground, they will not get up even if beaten or pulled; the only thing to do is to take off their load. If they grow tired when ridden and the rider urges them on, they will turn their heads and spit at him with very foul-smelling saliva.

  These animals are of great use and profit, for they have very fine wool, especially those they call alpaca, which have long fleeces. They require little food and can go for three or four days without drinking. Their flesh is as clean and as succulent as the fattest mutton of Castile … in one part of Chile there are many ostriches on the plains, and these were hunted in this manner: several horsemen would take up positions at various points and would chase the birds from one to another. No horse could keep up with them otherwise, for they ran very fast, taking great strides though they never leave the ground.

  There are many rivers on this coast that flow by day but are quite dry at night. This greatly surprises those who do not understand the reason: that by day the snow on the mountains is melted by the heat of the sun, and so the water runs, whereas at night it is frozen by the cold and so the flow ceases. Five hundred leagues down the coast, that is to say 30 degrees south of the Equator, there is rain and all the winds blow as in Spain. The whole of Chile is well populated and roughly divided into two parts, the plain and the mountain … the general line of the coast is from north to south from Lima southward through forty degrees. It is a very temperate country, and has both summer and winter, though at the opposite times to those of Spain. There is no star corresponding to our North Star; there is only a small white cloud which revolves in a day and a night around the place where the pole should lie, and which astronomers call the Antarctic pole …

  There is a great province between two rivers entirely populated by women, who will only allow men to come near them at the times most suitable for conception; and if they bear sons they send them to their fathers, if daughters they bring them up themselves … their queen is called Gavoimilla, which means in their language ‘golden sky’.5

  The historian Garcilaso de la Vega, who had also known veterans of the Chilean conquest, recorded the role played by Manco’s half-brother Paullu Inca in aiding Almagro’s retreat:

  Almagro informed him of his decision to return to Peru, and asked him his opinion about the route they should take; for he feared that they might face another danger as before, when scorning and ignoring the prince’s warning he and his entire army came near to perishing
if God’s mercy had not saved him … [W]hen Paullu had consulted his Indians about the roads, he informed Almagro of a coastal route, and how it had been closed since the wars between Huáscar and Atahualpa, and how the water springs and wells were filled with wind-blown sand since they had not been used for so long a time, and that they contained very little water, and what there was was too filthy to drink. He would, however, send his Indians ahead and remove the foul water, and according to their reports of the quantity of water they might find, the army could be sent forward in groups, and the groups increased in proportion to the amount of water available … as the water pools were six or seven leagues apart, skins were made to carry water between them so that the men might not suffer from too much thirst … Paullu then gave orders for the flaying of llamas needed for the water-skins, and while this was being done word was sent to the Spaniards to begin their advance.