Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  As the only absentee Peruvian encomendero his vast landholdings and income from his silver mine at Porco would have guaranteed him the honours he so much craved in his homeland, had it not been for his involvement in Almagro’s death. By then several of Almagro’s followers, among them Diego de Alvarado, had managed to reach Spain and had denounced him before the Council of the Indies. In the eyes of the Spanish Crown, the killing of Almagro without proper trial had been as illegal as that of Atahualpa. Nor did Pizarro possess the legal mandate to order such an execution himself, especially as Almagro had been confirmed by the Emperor Charles V as governor of New Toledo. Hernando was well versed in the laws of Spain and fully conscious of the inquisition he would face. In hindsight one can only judge the motive for his killing of Almagro in the light of the vast wealth he had accumulated in his governorship of New Toledo.

  No other veteran of Pizarro’s conquest, not even Soto or Pizarro himself, acquired the fortune Hernando took back with him to Spain, and which over the years would increase yet further, supplemented by the revenues from his encomiendas and his silver mine at Porco in the Charcas, by then regarded as the richest region in the colony. Neither was he averse to other forms of commerce, becoming in absentia one of the wealthiest merchants in Cuzco, importing slaves and numerous goods and items from Seville and the Isthmus, which his agents sold at enormous profit. A letter of the period records that he imported into Cuzco from Panama ‘176 bottles of wine; 60 shirts of Holland lace; 26 pairs of velvet hose; 710 pairs of shoes and slippers; 18 spectacles; 15 pairs of leather gloves from Córdoba; 80 hats; 12 habit cloaks of the Order of Santiago; 80 hats; 6 jars of anchovies; and 386 packs of playing cards’.6

  Hernando had been the pivotal figure of the conquest, as talented as a commander as he was odious in his manner, and whose sense of superiority even stretched to the impertinence he at times showed his elder brother, reminding him that in their family he alone was its legitimate head. As he once informed the Cabildo of Cuzco, he regarded every single one of its members as no better than peasants, which in fact most of them were, but which did little to endear them to him. As his hidalgo father’s only heir, and though only possessing a small estate near his native Trujillo, his conception of himself was far removed from that of Pizarro, who in spite of all the honours and titles conferred on him would always be treated by the nobility of their homeland with derision for his humble upbringing. It was a disdain of which Pizarro had been well aware when he returned to Trujillo in search of volunteers, and which was clearly illustrated by his inability to find any of the town’s nobility or councillors – let alone Hernando – prepared to vouch for his paternity in his testimonial for his entry into the Order of Santiago.

  It was a fate shared by most of the conquistadores of lowly rank once their fortunes had been dissipated. The best-known example was the conquistadore chronicler Diego de Trujillo, who spent some ten years in his native town where his attempt to gain even a minor civic honour in its Cabildo was denied him, and who eventually returned to Peru, where as a veteran of Cajamarca he was able to secure a life and respect he could never have enjoyed in his homeland. Mindful of the constraints imposed by his own peasant background, not even Gonzalo Pizarro ever seriously considered returning to Spain, and when he once made such a suggestion to his brother Hernando he was wisely advised to remain where he was.

  Hernando knew, however, that he would have to face the charges levelled against him in Spain, and his decision to leave Peru was reluctantly accepted by his brother. Pedro Pizarro, who witnessed his kinsman’s departure from Cuzco, recalls his final words and the warning he gave Pizarro, who had escorted him for almost a league from the city. Embracing his brother, Hernando said to him in a voice he intended to be heard by all the escort of conquistadores and encomenderos who had accompanied them:

  My Lord, I take my leave of you now for Spain. The only safeguard that exists for us, other than in God, is in your person: and this I tell you, for the men of Chile are still free of any shame … do not allow even ten of them to be gathered together within fifty leagues of your presence: for they will kill you … and nothing will be left of your memory.7

  Embracing his brother once more, he turned and rode away, followed by his caravan of Indian porters, pack mules and llamas, stretching far into the distance. The two brothers would never meet again.

  On Hernando’s departure for Spain, Pizarro himself left Cuzco for the Collasuyo and Lake Titicaca. Four months previously he had ordered the founding of another city in the former Andean township of Huamanga, midway between Cuzco and Lima, appointing twenty encomenderos. For some seventy days he rested his entourage and escort south of Titicaca in the highland valley of Chuquiabo under the snow-capped peaks of the Inca huaca mountain of the Illimani, where Bolivia’s city of Our Lady of the Peace, La Paz, would be founded nine years later. His journey to the Collasuyo would also determine his foundation in 1540 of the settlement of La Plata by the conquistadores Pedro Ansúrez de Camporredondo and Diego de Rojas, to secure both a hold on the Charcas territory and protect his family’s mining and landed interests in the region.

  An idea of the magnitude of Pizarro’s travels can be gained possibly only from the window of an aeroplane flying from Lima to Cuzco, and from Cuzco to La Paz, and then to Arequipa, a distance of several thousand miles which he covered on horseback and mule. He was accompanied on these journeys by his scrivener and secretary Antonio Pizado, to whom he dictated the various messages and orders he continually sent to the governors of his isolated and diverse settlements, always maintaining a personal interest in almost every aspect of their administration; which for an illiterate and totally uneducated man demonstrated an extraordinary talent for organisation and administration. Turning north-eastwards from Chuquiabo and the nearby ruins of Tiahuanacu on the southern edge of Lake Titicaca, his small caravan of retainers with its armed escort headed towards the coast where he planned to found a further settlement at the valley of Arequipa, which lies at the foot of the great Misti volcano, and whose agreeable climate and proximity to the Pacific made it an ideal location. However, on the road to Arequipa his immediate return to Cuzco was sought by its cabildo because news had been received of the Inca Emperor Manco’s desire to negotiate a peace settlement. Instead of continuing eastwards, therefore, he sent the conquistadore Garcí Manuel de Cavajal to reconnoitre his new settlement, which would be founded the following year.

  On numerous occasions Pizarro had attempted to reach an understanding with the Inca emperor but without any success. The resentment and hatred Manco felt towards Pizarro’s brothers because of the torture he had received at their hands would never desert him. Neither would he ever be able to forget the humiliation of seeing his sister-queen Cura Ocllo raped by Gonzalo Pizarro. Subsequently she had been forced to live in his mansion in Cuzco as one of his mistresses for almost two years, before she managed to make her escape from the city. The news Pizarro received in September 1539 had reached him some five months after he had ordered his brother Gonzalo to invade Manco’s retreat of Vilcabamba, a fortress town he had built in the sub-tropical Andean forests near Machu Picchu, north-east of Cuzco.

  In April 1539 Gonzalo had led an army of 300 men to Vilcabamba, among them all the principal encomenderos of Cuzco accompanied by their Indian levies, together with the Inca Paullu’s auxiliaries, and together numbering several thousand warriors. Four centuries later the road they took was retraced by Hiram Bingham in his search for the ruins of Vilcabamba when he inadvertently discovered Machu Picchu’s ruins. Led by his Indian scouts Gonzalo had taken his army deep into the mountain forest, where, because of the density of the undergrowth, his cavalrymen had had to abandon their horses. On two occasions they had been ambushed as they had made their way through the mountain ravines and along the rock face; at times so narrow was the path that they could only advance in single file.

  Pedro del Barco, who had commanded Gonzalo’s infantry, recorded that ‘the boulders and stones t
hey rolled down upon us impeded our advance, in which I found myself in great danger of being killed in order to aid a fellow Spaniard [Gonzalo], and who was in great need of assistance, and because of which two Spaniards were killed and I was wounded. And we retreated from the pass. But after a while we returned there and found the Inca [Manco] with his men regrouped, and his archers positioned well in the path’s defence, where we fought them.’8

  Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, one of the cavalry captains of the expedition, recorded that he was the first to lead his squadron into battle, capturing ‘the Inca’s woman [Cura Ocllo] and his warrior chief, who was called Cusi Rimache’.9 He also recalled that as the emperor made his escape across a river he shouted at Manco in quéchua telling him to surrender, but that the Inca emperor shouted back ‘that he was not such a coward as they thought him, and that his warriors had killed some two thousand Spaniards since and before his rising, and that he intended to kill them all’.10 Pedro Pizarro, who also took part in the expedition, recorded that for two months they searched in vain for the Inca Emperor. Titu Cusi Yupanqui, one of Manco’s sons, stated many years later in a testimonial to the Crown that on the expedition’s return to Cuzco it halted for a short while at the mountain hamlet of Pampaconas, where many of its soldiers attempted to rape Manco’s sister-queen Cura Ocllo, who defended herself by defiling her body with her excrement.11

  On his return to Cuzco, after meeting the expedition, Pizarro brought Cura Ocllo with him to the township of Ollantay in the Yucay valley, from where he sent Manco gifts in the hope of negotiating a peace. Incensed that his messengers, an African and two Indians, had been killed, he ordered what would be one of the most pitiful and brutal acts recorded of his person. The coya was stripped of her clothes and tied to a stake and whipped by his Cañari auxiliaries, who then shot her to death with their arrows. Her mutilated body was then placed in a canoe and let loose to float down the Yucay river. In Cuzco he implemented a further reprisal by callously burning a number of Inca lords and caciques who had come to the city to lay down their arms, among them the Villaoma: acts that would forever taint his name with ignominy in the eyes of a by now defeated and almost defenceless people.

  At the time of the Vilcabamba campaign there were possibly some 4,000 Spaniards living within Pizarro’s governorship of settlements and encomiendas, 200 of whom were women. There were 274 encomiendas recorded in the various regions of the colony: 86 at Cuzco; 22 at Huamanga; 34 at Huánuco; 37 at Arequipa; 45 at Lima; 45 at Trujillo; and 5 at Chachapoyas.12 According to a census for the year 1540, all told there were 1,550,000 tributary Indians.

  The colony’s missionary Orders of Dominicans and Mercedarians, who may have numbered no more than a hundred throughout the various settlements, would however over time acquire some of the largest encomiendas in Peru. Only later would the Franciscan Order, which held a small mission in the Quito region, and the Augustinian Order establish themselves in Cuzco and in the southern provinces of the Collasuyo. The end of Inca resistance was also to increase the colony’s appeal to a large number of immigrants from both the Isthmus and Spain, who would come to populate the settlements at Arequipa, La Plata and Huamanga: they would comprise mostly peasant farmers and Basque and Sevillian merchants, attracted by the 200 per cent profit on the goods they imported. Artisans and architects were also among the new arrivals, who with the aid of Indian craftsmen began transforming the former Inca palaces of Cuzco into the monasteries, churches and mansion houses of its conquistadores, their Inca foundations visible beneath their sombre walls and façades reminiscent of Toledo.

  The Indian chronicler Poma de Ayala described Cuzco’s encomenderos as wearing ‘thick doublets, flat scarlet hats with plumes, tight-fitting breeches, and short capes with long sleeves’.13 It was a far cry from the morrión helmets and armour they now donned only for their expeditions, or the virtual rags which was all that most of them had possessed when they left Panama only a decade previously. Their ear lobes, clothes and armour encrusted with precious stones, the veterans of Cajamarca presented an extraordinary and exotic spectacle to the Isthmian arrivals, as did the rich livery of their horses and African slaves, and the escorts on their travels – their Indian caciques and warriors from their encomiendas. The horses they rode were mostly of part Arab stock from Andalucía, small in stature, hardy and intelligent, and comparable to the wild North American palomino the Spaniards had taken there. Their mules, which were favoured by many of the conquistadores because of their strength and ability to carry heavy armour, were imported from as far afield as the island of Mallorca, reputed to have bred the finest such animals.

  Pizarro further extended the frontiers of his colony by authorising the conquest of Chile under the Extremaduran hidalgo Pedro de Valdivia, whose expedition he had initially sanctioned during his prolonged stay in the valley of Chuquiabo, in April 1539. A small settlement had also been established from Spain at Our Lady of Buenos Aires, the future capital of Argentina, whose inhabitants would later be transferred across the Río de la Plata to the small colony at Asunción.

  Pedro de Oncas y Valdivia was the son of a Portuguese hidalgo and an Extremaduran noblewoman, whose name he adopted. He was forty-two years old when he left Cuzco in mid-January 1540 in the company of only twelve Spaniards and his mistress-servant, Inés Sánchez. A soldier for most of his life, he had served in Italy and had fought at the Battle of Pavia where the French king had been taken prisoner. All that is known of his early years was recorded by him in his memorial to the Emperor Charles V. He had arrived at Hispaniola two years after the killing of Atahualpa, where like most other colonists he made a living from the slave trade. Shortly afterwards he made his way to the island of Trinidad, and from there across to the settlement at Venezuela where he records he took part in the province’s conquest for almost a year. On his return to Hispaniola he learnt of Pizarro’s request for men to relieve the Emperor Manco’s siege of Cuzco, for which service Pizarro offered volunteers both pay and the prospect of encomiendas. Some four hundred Spanish volunteers sailed to the Isthmus, and from there to the Peruvian port of Callao. They arrived in time to form part of the army Pizarro had organised for the relief of Cuzco. The news of Almagro’s capture of Cuzco and his subsequent defeat of Alonso de Alvarado’s reinforcements had left Pizarro little option but to return to Lima, taking with him his Caribbean volunteers.

  It had, however, been Valdivia’s service under his brother Hernando in the conquest of the Collasuyo that had brought him to Pizarro’s attention, and which had led to his appointment. His planned expedition to Chile was the object of some ridicule and was derided by most of Cuzco’s encomenderos, few of whom wished to associate themselves with a venture that had been so disastrous for Almagro and his companions. Only a few merchants, among them the conquistadore Lucas Martínez Vegazo, whose vast encomienda lands were to the south of Arequipa, had any interest in provisioning one of Valdivia’s ships.

  By the time Valdivia had left Arequipa and Martínez Velasco’s encomienda of Tarapaca his small troop had quadrupled in number and had gathered some thousand Indian and African porters, before finally reaching the northern edge of the Atacama desert. Vast and daunting, it had proved the graveyard of many of Almagro’s men and Indian porters, the sight of whose mummified and frozen corpses Valdivia would meet as he made the same waterless crossing, losing a number of his men and horses. It was also at Atacama that Pedro Sancho de la Hoz, Pizarro’s secretary and chronicler, who after the capture of Cuzco had returned to Spain, made his entry into Valdivia’s camp, bringing with him his own nomination of the governorship of Chile which he had obtained from the Emperor Charles V. The difficulty of the dual nominations – caused by the Crown’s ignorance of Pizarro’s appointment of Valdivia – was only resolved after Sancho de la Hoz agreed to surrender his rights. He signed a contract promising to serve Valdivia as a simple soldier, a climb-down possibly due to the fact he had been caught attempting to murder him; an attempt the chronicler of Cuzco repeate
d several years later, and for which he was hanged as a common criminal.

  After the crossing of the Atacama, Valdivia entered the valley of Copiapó, which he named New Extremadura. For almost a year he undertook the defence of his settlement, founding his capital of Santiago further along the coast in 1541 – six months before he learnt of the dramatic events that had taken place in Lima that would change the course of the colony’s history.

  The success of Valdivia’s enterprise was soon followed by an equally hazardous expedition Pizarro ordered to explore the Amazon, which was led by his young brother Gonzalo, who, according to the evidence he gave on behalf of Pedro del Barco’s testimonial shortly before his departure from Cuzco, was twenty-five years old at the time. A detailed account of the expedition was left by Garcilaso de la Vega, who had known many of its survivors:

  [Francisco Pizarro] had heard that beyond Quito, and beyond the limits of the land ruled by the Incas, there was a vast and broad country where cinnamon was produced, and which was called La Canela, the land of cinnamon. He decided to send his brother Gonzalo to conquer the territory so that he might have as much land to govern as he himself governed. And after some consultation with his officials he appointed his brother governor of Quito, so that the citizens of that city would give him the assistance he needed for his expedition, and from where he would start his journey, as La Canela lies to the east of the city …

  He [Gonzalo] raised a further 100 soldiers, 340 in all, 140 horse and the rest on foot. He was accompanied by more than 4,000 Indians, carrying his arms and supplies, such as iron, axes, hatchets, ropes and cables, nails. He also took a herd of 4,000 llamas and pigs …