Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  Little is known about Almagro’s private life. His will shows him to have fathered his mestizo son Diego and also a daughter called Doña Isabel, whose mother was Mencia, an Andean Indian woman.18 Some believed Almagro had been a foundling, abandoned on the steps of a church in his native Castilian township in La Mancha; others boasted of a more romantic, noble lineage. Like Pizarro, however, he was a product of the Indies, an Indies vaquiano – son of a whore – as Hernando Pizarro had called him (‘¡Dámele vaquiano y dártelo el bellaco!’ ‘Give me an old Indies man and I’ll give you a thieving son of a whore!’); illiterate and uncouth, yet with the same capacities and dogged character of any of Ernest Hemingway’s Castilian peasant mountain fighters depicted in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  Possibly the most revealing portrait of both men was left by Agustín de Zárate in his history Descubrimiento y Conquista del Perú, much of which was based on the recollections of the conquistadore Nicolás de Ribera, the ‘old man’, in whose house he stayed in Lima.

  They were both bold and brave men, capable of enduring great hardships. They were very similar in their personal tastes and particularly in their domestic life. Neither of them was married, though both lived to be old men. The marqués, who was the younger of the two, died at the age of 65. Both were soldiers, though the Adelantado Don Diego de Almagro enjoyed the pursuit of commerce when his military services were not required.

  Both men embarked on the conquest of Peru at a late age, and both suffered much. The marqués was however more often at risk than the Adelantado, and the dangers he underwent were much greater. He under-took the larger share of the discovery, while the Adelantado remained in Panama sending him the necessary supplies. Both were courageous, and their courage made them ambitious, though at the same time they were very down to earth and human, and on friendly and equal terms with their men.

  They were also generous to their men, though the Adelantado would trumpet his generosity, whereas the marqués would get annoyed if his be known, and which he would endeavour to conceal. He once learnt by accident that one of his soldier’s horses had died. And before going down to the pelota court of his house where he expected to find him, he put an ingot of gold weighing five hundred pesos under his coat, intending to hand it to him. But not finding him there he took part in a game that was just being arranged, and played without taking off his coat, so that no one should see the ingot. He was unable to bring it out for three hours, until the man arrived. Then he quietly called him into a room and said to him that he would rather have given him three such ingots than suffer the discomfort he had had to endure. The marqués never gave anything except in person and made sure that no one would know of it. For this reason the Adelantado was considered the more generous of the two. Yet by reason of their joint ownership of their expedition’s wealth, neither gave anything of which the other did not supply half …

  Although the marqués governed more peacefully and for a longer time, Don Diego was the more ambitious and conscious of his command and authority. Both were very conservative, and so attached to what was old that they rarely gave up the dress fashions of their youth, especially the marqués who normally wore a high-waisted coat of black cloth that fell to his ankles, white deerskin shoes, a white hat and a sword with an old-fashioned hilt. And when, on certain Feast Days, he was persuaded by his servants to wear the sable cloak the Marqués del Valle [Hernán Cortés] had sent him from Mexico, he would take it off after returning from Mass, and remain wearing simply his doublet with a towel round his neck so that he could wipe the sweat off his face, for in peacetime he spent much of the day playing either bowls or pelota.

  Both men possessed great physical strength. The marqués demonstrated this especially in his addiction to these games in which few young men could tire him out. He was much more given to games of all kinds than the Adelantado; so much so that sometimes he would play bowls all day and did not care with whom he played. Even if it were a sailor or a miller, he would not allow him to fetch him the bowl or pay him other courtesies befitting his rank. Seldom did his affairs of government induce him to leave his game, especially when he was losing. Only if there were some new Indian disturbance, for he was very quick on such occasions, would he put on his shoulder armour and run through the city with lance and shield, making straight for where the trouble was to be found without waiting for his men, who usually caught up with him later, running at full speed.

  Both showed such skill and courage in the Indian wars that neither would have hesitated to attack a hundred of the enemy unaided. They both had very good judgement and knowledge in military matters and in their respective governments, considering that not only were they uneducated but unable to read or even sign their names, which was a great disadvantage for them. The marqués so trusted his friends and servants that on all the orders he dictated, both in matters of government and in conferring encomiendas of Indians, he signed by drawing two lines, between which his secretary Antonio Pizado wrote the name Francisco Pizarro. Both men could offer the excuse with which Ovid defended Romulus for being a bad astrologer: that he knew more about arms than letters, though he had great difficulty in conquering his neighbours.19

  Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire would never have been possible without Almagro. His participation and collaboration in their initial voyages of discovery had been a crucial factor in Pizarro’s obtaining the Crown’s Capitulación in Toledo in 1529. Few men would have reacted with the generosity of spirit he eventually demonstrated by accepting a subordinate command, regardless of their commercial partnership. The provision of men, arms and ships from as far afield as Nicaragua, and the enticement of Panama’s merchants to invest in the Peruvian conquest was virtually due to his efforts. Nor would Pizarro’s small expeditionary army have survived at Cajamarca without the timely arrival of Almagro’s reinforcements, which as many of the conquistadores recorded was to guarantee the outcome of the conquest.

  The relationship between the two men – of some fifteen years standing, in which they had worked side by side in Panama as slavers, merging their business interests and encomienda plantations in order to finance their early expeditions of discovery – had always been dominated by Pizarro, whose introverted and forceful character at times, as at their last meeting at Mala, left Almagro lost for words. It is more than likely that Pizarro would never have accepted the sole command of the conquest had it not been made clear to him that the Crown would never consider a dual command. But the affection Almagro undoubtedly felt for Pizarro and the loyalty he showed him was never to survive the interference of their followers, for which they would both pay with their lives, nor was it ever fully reciprocated.

  In his will which he dictated before his execution – ‘being as I am imprisoned in this cell, manacled and chained against all reason and justice’, Almagro finally sought his revenge on his old companion-in-arms by making the Emperor Charles V his heir – an act he knew would bring about the severest scrutiny of the Pizarros and so reveal their abuse of the Crown’s treasury – and begging him to grant his son Diego his governorship of New Toledo.20 He also set down that he possessed a million gold pesos from the partnership he had held with Pizarro. Among his bequests was a payment for a horse which the chronicler Friar Cristóbal de Molina, the Chilean, had loaned him during his conquest of Chile, and monies to endow a chapel to be erected in his name in his native township of Almagro in La Mancha of Castile. Further, he left a considerable amount of money to the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries at Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, proof that he had spent some time there after his arrival in the Indies. He also freed a certain Margarita, an African slave who had served him during his campaign in Quito, ‘for the love she has shown me’.21

  Other details of his will leave a bizarre and varied image of his wealth and possessions: ‘an old shirt and some tablecloths and napkins and a scarlet bed-cover … a black velvet coat lined with ermine … six women slaves from Nicaragua … the houses tha
t once belonged to Hernando de Soto in the main square [the palace of Amarucancha] and his other lands … 2,000 silver marks held by Gómez de Mazuelas … 74 pigs … a gold bowl, a gold salt cellar, a gold jug and a gold goblet, which are worth 2,600 pesos.’

  Though Hernando Pizarro and his young brother Gonzalo attended Almagro’s funeral dressed in mourning black, few believed that it marked an end to the retribution they had sought. Neither did many of Almagro’s imprisoned followers accept that Pizarro, who had delayed his journey to Cuzco at Jauja, was not conscious of Hernando’s decision to execute their leader without any proper trial on the simple pretext of his rebellion.

  Pizarro’s eventual return to the city was both theatrical and revealing: no longer was he dressed in the simple plain armour he had worn for most of his campaigns, but in a richly gilded breastplate, led by trumpeters and an escort of his veteran conquistadores, who had ridden out of the city to greet him. Neither did he make any excuses for Hernando’s behaviour. An observer records that when Hernando had sent him a messenger at Jauja asking him what to do with Almagro, he had responded: ‘act so that he shall give us no further trouble.’22

  Shortly before he received his brother’s message, Pizarro had interviewed Almagro’s 22-year-old mestizo son whom Alonso de Alvarado was taking prisoner to Lima; he had promised him that he would never consent to his father’s execution.23

  There was nothing magnanimous in Pizarro’s behaviour. His sole intent was to defend the colony he had founded, and not even his past friendship for a man who was possibly the only sincere friend he ever had would sway him from such a course.

  SEVEN

  The Frontiers of New Castile

  My governorship has no frontier, it stretches even to Flanders.

  Francisco Pizarro

  The vastness of the colony Pizarro had founded, and the immense distances its early settlers and armies of conquistadores walked and rode across on horseback and mule, climbing through snow-bound mountain passes and traversing the bleak pampas of its southern highland country, can only be envisaged when set in the context of their endless hardship and remorseless endeavour. It was a route Pizarro had himself undertaken on various occasions, and which for the last time brought him to Cuzco, and for the first time had taken him to the lake of Titicaca and the ruined Bolivian city of Tiahuanacu, the ancient cradle of Inca civilisation.

  Even before Almagro’s execution, he had instructed his brother Hernando, by letter, to counter the inevitable discontent of Almagro’s partisans and the hundreds of landless veterans of Salinas by ordering several expeditions of exploration, with the promise of rewarding its pioneers with lands and Indians. He had even chided Diego de Alvarado, one of Almagro’s fallen captains, by telling him somewhat imperiously that his own mandate stretched as far as Flanders, and that only greed and not justice had been Almagro’s cause.1

  Among several expeditions Pizarro sanctioned was one to the Cotahuasi region of the western Cuntisuyo, under the command of Nicolás de Heredia, one of the future discoverers of northern Argentina, and Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, who, together with other Pizarro loyalists, had spent almost a year imprisoned by Almagro in the dungeons of the Inca fortress of Sacsahuaman. The expedition was typical of the conquest of the colony’s frontier regions, in which the conquistadores often took with them their private armies of Indian warriors from their existing encomiendas. Rodrigo López Bernal, one of the hundred Spaniards who served on the expedition, recalled that Serra de Leguizamón captained a company of his Indian warriors from his encomienda of Callanga and Catanga, one of the richest in Cuzco, and as a result was awarded the encomienda of Alca in the Cuntisuyo’s mountainous and arid region:

  … much was risked, for there were few of us Spaniards in comparison to the great number of Indians who attacked us and surrounded us in very mountainous terrain, making it impossible for us to reach a river [the Cotahuasi] for the water we needed to drink; and that night in the tambo of Alca, Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and the Indians in his service left our encampment in order to break the siege, entering the tambo from the high ground of a slope, passing their sentries and putting them to the sword so that they could not warn their warriors; and in this manner in the middle of the night they climbed to the upper villages where the great multitude of warriors were camped, and catching them asleep they killed many of them, and then gave the Spaniards who had remained below the signal to climb up and follow them.2

  Another such expedition had been initially led by Pizarro’s old comrade-in-arms the Greek Pedro de Candía, one of the celebrated men of the island of Gallo who had accompanied him to Trujillo, and who was also one of the wealthiest encomenderos of Cuzco. Candía took with him into the northern Andes of the Antisuyo some three hundred Spaniards and several thousand Indian warriors and porters in his search for an Indian city he believed possessed great quantities of gold, but which he was never to find. It was the first recorded mention of the fabled city of El Dorado for which the Spaniards would relentlessly search over the years, in both the eastern Andes and the northern Amazon. Various legends grew up surrounding its mythical location, one of which Sebastián de Belalcázar, Pizarro’s governor at Popayán, first came across in Colombia. It recounted the existence of a tribal chief who was said to cover his naked body with gold dust, which he would wash away by bathing in the waters of the lake of Guatavitá as an offering to his people’s gods. Candía, betrayed by his Indian informants and by his Mulatto lieutenant, who had attempted to involve him in a conspiracy against the Pizarros, was forced to abandon his expedition and return to Cuzco, where Hernando Pizarro relieved him of his command, souring for ever Candía’s former allegiance to the Pizarros.

  The conquistadores’ obsession for acquiring gold was never to be sated. The Cuntisuyo and Antisuyo expeditions were followed by one which was led by Hernando Pizarro and his brother Gonzalo to the Collasuyo, in which Garcilaso de la Vega, the mestizo historian’s father, and the Extremaduran Pedro de Valdivia, the future founder of Chile, both served. The expedition was accompanied by thousands of warriors belonging to the Inca Prince Paullu, who at Salinas had abandoned Almagro, but who had been forgiven his treachery by Hernando in exchange for his support.

  On the northern shore of Lake Titicaca at Juliaca and at Puno the conquistadores had their first encounter with the warriors of the Lupaca nation, who had rebelled against both their Inca lords and their Spanish encomenderos. Further south, at the Desaguadero River on the lake’s southern shore, men and horses were forced to make their crossing of its waters ferried on pontoon bridges constructed from reeds and totora rafts. This route eventually took them to the lush and fertile valley of Bolivia’s future city of Cochabamba, where their forces engaged the remnants of the Emperor Manco’s southern armies. In the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid there is a manuscript compiled by the grandson of the Inca prince recording his grandfather’s service to the Spaniards:

  He brought with him more than 15,000 Indians, and reaching the Desaguadero River it was through his efforts that Hernando Pizarro and Gonzalo Pizarro and other Spaniards were not drowned, and had he wished to kill his Christian friends he could well have then done so … and he himself saved the life of Hernando Pizarro who was being taken by the current … and later in the province of Cochabamba where many Indian warriors attacked the royal encampment in a siege of some six months he fought on horseback … helping afterwards in the founding and settlement of the city of La Plata.3

  More than at any other time during the Conquest the Spaniards in the Collasuyo were able to make full use of their cavalry in the pampas and valleys of the Bolivian Altiplano, unimpeded by the tortuous mountain trails of the Andes. The slaughter of the Indians of Cochabamba, who had been led by Manco’s uncle the Inca Tiso, far exceeded the losses of any other Indian war. Not even at the fall of Sacsahuaman or at Jauja, which had been repeatedly attacked and reinforced by the Spaniards, were there so many fatalities. As at the plain of Cajamarca, it was the Spanish hors
e and lancers who dominated the field, slaughtering wave after wave of warriors who launched themselves in endless numbers against their encampment; it is one of the least known engagements in Pizarro’s conquest, but is described in great detail by the Friar Vicente de Valverde in his letter to the Emperor Charles V.4

  The expedition finally turned south to the Charcas region and the future settlement at Chuquisaca, later known as La Plata, the Silver City, because of its rich silver mines, and which is the present-day Bolivian capital of Sucre. It was a campaign that would establish Chuquisaca and its neighbouring mines of Porco as a Pizarro fiefdom. Most of the expedition’s captains were rewarded by Hernando in the name of Pizarro with encomiendas in the region and some, such as Pedro de Valdivia, were given mines. It would mark the founding of Bolivia as New Toledo – the name Almagro had chosen for his ill-fated governorship in memory of his native province.

  The expedition had also brought about the eventual defeat of the Lupaca nation, whose elderly cacique Cariapasa was forced to abandon his lands and flee to the coastal region of Tacna, where he was to spend his days as a baptised Christian, taking the name of Juan, in bondage to its encomendero Lucas Martínez Vegazo. It was a pitiful end to the life of one of the Emperor Huayna Cápac’s greatest warrior chiefs, who had fought with him in his conquest of his northern empire.

  Though Gonzalo Pizarro was to remain in the southern Collasuyo for some six months in all, organising the distribution of encomiendas and securing the family’s new possessions of mines and farmlands in both Cochabamba and Chuquisaca, his brother Hernando returned to Cuzco, the object of his crusade accomplished through the vast hoard of treasure in gold and silver his Indian porters brought with him. As Indian witnesses record, Hernando had left a trail of butchery and torture in the Altiplano unequalled by any other of the Spanish conquistadores, burning alive several hundred caciques alone.5 Unlike his brothers, he had no desire to remain in Peru, nor to live the life of a colonist encomendero. His sole purpose had been to enrich himself and to leave the colony as soon as he was able to do so, taking with him the wealth that would enable him to attain the dignity and lifestyle of a grandee in his native Trujillo.