A further slur on Pizarro’s reputation took the form of a continual litany of complaints aired by the returning veterans loyal to Almagro, many of whom had given evidence against Pizarro for appropriating the Crown’s share of the Cajamarca and Cuzco booty, and who were only too willing to purvey any slander against him, whether based on some element of truth or simply invented. It was a time for settling scores, for favours to be called in and vent given to long-standing grievances; when the future of the men of Cajamarca and of their leader was being questioned by official and missionary, whether in the silence of some distant Andalucian monastery or within the council chamber of a Crown lawyer in Valladolid. Their fate rested on their answers.
Pizarro had by then become a problem for the Spanish Crown, who saw his role as virtually spent. Though his death would be mourned in Spain it would be welcomed by a pragmatic and equally evolving colonial administration, freed from the constraints of his shadow and the self-interest of his conquistadores whose prosperity he had always protected, and whose hatred of the Crown’s officials would later manifest itself in open rebellion.
In the year 1541, the City of the Kings at Lima represented the almost intransigent sovereignty of Peru’s conquistadores. The city – then no more than a small coastal town, lying in a plain beside the Rimac River – was Pizarro’s creation and greatest love. He had helped both with its planning and design, lending his hand in its building whenever he had the time, and in particular assisting with the mills he had constructed on his allotment of land by its river. Its buildings were so close to the river that ‘a good marksman could drop a small stone into the water from its main square’.1
Four half-finished churches dominated its skyline. The small cathedral church in the Plaza Mayor, its main square, overlooked the daily market of Indian stalls and vendors, who assembled there every morning, bringing with them their produce of fruit, llama meat and fish from the surrounding farmlands and nearby port of Callao. The monasteries of Santo Domingo, San Francisco and La Merced were also visible from the square, their whitewashed brick towers and stone cloisters only partially assembled, as were the taverns and brothels of Indian and African women frequented by the Spaniards. The streets were of dried earth and their smell of sewage and horse dung soon cleared with the sea breeze.
Most of its principal houses faced the Plaza Mayor, though none was yet adorned with the elaborate façades and arched patios their owners would commission in the coming years from the immigrant architects and masons of Seville, who would transform Lima into an Andalucian city. A dense cloud of sea mist, known as the garúa, hung over its buildings for most of the year, and only on the outskirts of the city on higher ground, where its orchards and farmlands were situated, could its sky be seen with clarity.
Its streets are straight and all lead into its central square, from where the outlying countryside can be seen at either end. The climate is temperate and [it] is a very pleasant place to live, for neither the heat nor the cold is oppressive at any time in the year … it has now five hundred households, but covers a much larger space than a Spanish city of fifteen hundred, because the streets and square are very wide and each house occupies a plot eighty foot in frontage and twice as deep. The houses cannot be built of more than one storey since there is no timber in the land suitable for flooring, and none that does not rot within years. Nevertheless, the houses are very luxurious and imposing, and have many rooms. The walls are built of mud brick five feet thick, and the floors are formed on raised earth platforms, so that the windows looking out on to the street may be high above the ground. The staircases are in the open courtyard, and lead to terraces that serve as corridors or ante-chambers from which the rooms are entered. The roofing is of rough joists on which is hung a ceiling of painted canvas, or else of coloured mats like those made at Almería, which also covers the joists. On top of all this boughs are laid. The rooms are very high and cool, and as such well shaded from the sun.2
Pizarro’s house was situated at the northern end of the Plaza Mayor and was by far the most imposing of the city’s private buildings, though its decoration and adornments would possibly have been sparse in keeping with his character. It comprised two patios and a stable for his horses and mules, from which a small garden and orchard led down to the banks of the river. Nothing is known about the interior of the house other than that its rooms opened out into the main patio, and that the second patio was reached by an elevated stone staircase. To one side of the house, which was of two floors, ran a wooden balcony from which, according to the chronicler Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, the city’s small port could be seen in the distance.3
A man of simple tastes, Pizarro exhibited none of the ostentation of most of his veteran conquistadores, dressing habitually in a long black coat. Still physically strong even in old age, his only distraction other than gambling and playing bowls was working the allotment of land and orchard he had planted with lemons and oranges, the seeds of which had been brought from Seville. Like most of the men of Cajamarca he lived with his Indian women, preferring their company to that of Spanish women – a preference he had in common with many former slavers, as is evident in the bequests they made in their wills. But unlike most of his veterans, the actual extent of the huge fortune he had accumulated during his career in both booty and revenues is almost impossible to ascertain, other than in the value of his encomiendas, which included the entire Yucay valley near Cuzco, and his mines in the Charcas.
Each of the handful of conquistadores called to testify in Cuzco some thirty years later, on behalf of his daughter and his brother Hernando, record that he had been forced to spend all his personal wealth in the defence of the colony at the time of the Emperor Manco’s sieges of Lima and Cuzco, a vast outlay for which the Crown had never reimbursed him.4 However true or false their testimony, much of which was inspired by loyalty to his memory and the financial inducements his brother Hernando undoubtedly showered on his elderly comrades-in-arms, his supposed poverty at the time of his death borders on fiction. Apart from his original encomiendas, in his award of a marquisate in October 1537 he had also been granted 20,000 Indian vassals, the revenues of whose tribute he had enjoyed for a number of years.5 (Pizarro never gave a territorial title to his marquisate.) What is evident is that after his death his fortune in gold and silver, most of which had been buried, was either discovered by his assassins or remains concealed in some undisclosed tapado, the name given by the colonists to the wall niches or burial sites where they hid their personal wealth.
For several years Pizarro had lived with the young Inca Princess Quispe Sisa, who after her baptism at Jauja was known as Doña Inés, and whom Atahualpa had gifted him at Cajamarca. She was the mother of his daughter Francisca who had been born at Jauja, and of his son and heir Gonzalo, whom he had named after his father, born a year later. Nothing is recorded of their life together, though it would have been no different to any other relationship between a conquistadore and his Indian woman, who other than sharing his bed was treated as little more than a servant, and who as various testimonials record referred to their Spanish lovers simply as their ‘masters’, however exalted their own native rank.6
Doña Inés’s demanding and jealous temperament is, however, recalled by Pedro Pizarro, who describes her role during the siege of Lima in the killing of one of her half-sisters, Azarpay, the widow of Pizarro’s unfortunate puppet Emperor Túpac Huallpa:
At Lima the marqués ordered the killing of another Indian woman, a sister-wife of Atahualpa. After Atahualpa’s death she came from Cajamarca to Jauja with Túpac Huallpa, her brother, and after his death, His Majesty’s treasurer Navarro asked the marqués that she be given to him, believing as he did that she knew of the whereabouts of great amounts of treasure; and which she may well have known about, being as she was one of the principal women of this realm, and revered by the natives as such. And made aware of Navarro’s intention, one night she made her escape and returned to Cajamarca. Some time later, wh
en the Indian rebellion had broken out, a certain Verdugo went to Cajamarca with several other Spaniards, and learning of the presence in the town of this lady he made her his prisoner, and brought her with him to Lima and gave her to the marqués; and it was while the marqués had her in his house that the Indians besieged the city; and one of the woman’s sisters, who belonged to the marqués and was called Doña Inés, being envious of the woman because she was of a more exalted rank, told the marqués that her sister had called the Indians to besiege the city, and that if he did not kill her they would never lift the siege. And without a single thought he ordered her to be garrotted and killed.7
Irrespective of his admiration for his elderly kinsman to whom he owed all his honours and wealth, Pedro Pizarro leaves a damning indictment of him, referring also to his killing of the Emperor Manco’s sister-wife the Coya Cura Ocllo, with the words: ‘I have wished to record these events regarding these two ladies, who were killed with such little consideration, let alone that they were women, and with no fault of their own.’
Pizarro, however, either from remorse or simple boredom, soon after discarded Doña Inés for another of her relatives, forcing one of his Spanish servants, Francisco de Ampuero, to marry her. It was an order with which the young and ambitious Riojano hidalgo willingly agreed in the hope of ingratiating himself with his master: a union that would see him become not only an encomendero of the city, but in time one of its principal officials. Pizarro separated his mestizo children from their mother in order to bring them up as Spaniards – something that would become common practice among the conquistadores – and placed them in the care of his sister-in-law Inés Muñoz, the wife of his half-brother Francisco Martín de Alcántara, who kept house for him and whose own home was nearby.
Inés Muñoz was a hard-working peasant who had accompanied her husband to the colony from the Isthmus a year after the capture of Cuzco, and who had lost her own two children in the passage from Spain to Nombre de Dios. Though most likely illiterate she nevertheless supervised a comprehensive schooling for her nephews, hiring tutors and governesses from the Isthmus and from Seville, and raising them as best she could in the manner of the nobility of her homeland. The Inca princess’s role as a mother would end for ever, and though she would have had access to her children, her influence on them would in time become non-existent, as is made evident by her daughter Francisca’s wills in which her name is barely mentioned with any affection.
Pizarro’s sexual inclinations soon after turned to another Inca princess, Cuxirimay, later known as Doña Angelina, who had possibly also lived in his household as a semi-servant since he took her into his care at Cajamarca, where she had served her cousin Atahualpa as his favourite wife. Regarded as one of the most beautiful of the princesses in the emperor’s harem, she had been raped by the Indian translator Felipillo, and at Atahualpa’s death had tried to kill herself. Her relationship as Pizarro’s mistress must have started well before he discarded Doña Inés; for at his meeting with Almagro at Mala he had angrily accused him of holding her prisoner, which possibly implies she had been captured in Cuzco. Their first child Francisco was born in 1539 and their second son Juan was born a year later. Both children were living with Pizarro and their mother at the time of his murder.
On the morning of Sunday 26 July 1541, the witness Isabel de Ovalle recorded that after hearing Mass in the cathedral she was making her way home when she saw seven men, among them Juan Balsa and Martín de Bilbao, walking from the direction of the Bishop’s house, with their swords unsheathed and shouting ‘Long live the King! Death to traitors!’ and heading towards the marqués’s house.8
For several weeks rumours had been rife of an impending revolt to be led by the followers of Almagro’s mestizo son Diego, kept under virtual house arrest in the city with several of his father’s old retainers. Pizarro had at first ignored the rumours, for though he had stripped the 24-year-old Almagro of all his father’s possessions, he had been considerate in his treatment of him, regardless of his role in his father’s rebellion. Some chroniclers record the poverty in which Diego de Almagro had been forced to live in the two years since his arrival at Lima after the Battle of Salinas, describing how he and his companions were even forced to share one cloak between them. But as the Peruvian historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea pointed out in his formidable though unfinished biography of Pizarro, Diego and his followers were nevertheless sufficiently wealthy at the time to purchase large quantities of arms, and to finance the organisation of a populist insurrection not only in Lima but in several other cities in the colony.9
Although Pizarro is credited with attempting to effect a reconciliation with the more prominent among Almagro’s supporters by offering them encomiendas, which they refused to accept, he would not reconsider his decision with regard to Diego de Almagro. Nor did the public spectacle, encouraged by the marqués’s adherents, of parading through the city’s streets on certain feast days a life-size effigy of the Adelantado on a donkey serve to promote harmony. Moreover, the insolent and often imperious behaviour of Pizarro’s secretary Antonio Pizado, a man equally hated by the veteran conquistadores, could hardly lead to anything other than further umbrage and discord. As in the case of his brother Hernando, Pizarro appeared almost beguiled by his secretary, who handled all his correspondence and influenced much of his administration.
The supporters of Almagro, however, were consoled in the knowledge that the justification for their championing of the Adelantado was being examined by the Council of the Indies in Spain, and that his killing would be investigated by the royal licentiate Vaca de Castro on his arrival in Peru. The delay of the licentiate in reaching the South American mainland, due to various mishaps on his journey from the Isthmus, had however only fanned the flames of an already highly charged situation among Diego de Almagro’s followers, who spoke of little other than killing Pizarro as their only means of obtaining justice. It was a decision born out of desperation bordering on stupidity and taken by the more ruthless conspirators in the name of Almagro’s son, among them Juan Balsa, the Adelantado’s former treasurer and one of the executors of his will. For any of them to imagine that such an act would ever be pardoned by the licentiate or by the Crown, in hindsight appears unbelievable and can only be explained by their uncontrollable hatred and loathing for Pizarro.
In order to bring an end to the rumours, Pizarro called for Juan de Herrada, considered to be one of the principal conspirators. Meeting Herrada alone in the orchard of his house, Pizarro asked him whether there was any truth in what he had heard. And when he was assured by Herrada that there was none, he cut a bunch of small oranges from one of his trees and gave them to him as a present. Herrada kissed his hand and departed.
Sunday 26 July marked the eighth anniversary of the killing of Atahualpa at Cajamarca; it was a day Pizarro had always regarded as ominous, even though it was also the day on which he had been granted by the Empress Isabella at Toledo the Capitulación for his conquest. At ten o’clock that morning, after seeing his two young children and their Indian mother Doña Angelina, he had welcomed in the main patio of his house his two lieutenants Juan Velázquez and Francisco de Cháves, who were accompanied by his secretary Pizado. Mass was said in the small chapel at the back of the building by a Biscayan priest, a man Pizarro neither cared for nor trusted, but whose habit it was to make himself available to perform that simple duty. It is reported that after the Mass the priest warned him to take care of himself, but it is more likely that he said nothing to him at all, taking the silver peso always left for him and departing.
So they came to the marqués’s house, leaving one of them at the door whose sword was blooded after killing a llama in the forecourt, shouting ‘The tyrant is dead!’ Some people, thinking this to be true, ran to their homes. Juan de Herrada climbed the staircase with his men. Warned by some Indians who were standing by the gates of the house, the marqués ordered Francisco de Cháves to close and guard the door of the main hall while he went t
o arm himself. But Cháves was so taken aback he went out on to the staircase without shutting the door. One of the conspirators thrust their sword into him, and feeling the wound and blood he asked ‘Will you also kill me?’ Then all the others attacked and stabbed him. And leaving him dead they rushed forward up the stairs towards the marqués’s ante-chamber. A number of Spaniards who were there fled, jumping out of the windows into the garden below, among them Velázquez, who held the baton of his office as mayor between his teeth as he lowered himself down from one of the windows.
The marqués was meanwhile arming himself in his chamber with the help of his brother Francisco Martín. Two other men and two pages, Juan de Vargas, the son of Gómez de Tordoya, and Escandon were also there. Seeing his enemies so close at hand, and unable to do up the straps of his cuirass, he ran to the door with his sword and shield. Here he and his companions defended themselves with such courage that for a while they kept the men from breaking in …
The intruders fought equally hard and killed Francisco Martín, though one of the marqués’s pages immediately took up his position … they then fell on the marqués with such fury that he was too exhausted to wield his sword any more. And so they finished him off with a thrust to the throat … as he fell he cried out for a confessor. But his words failed him, and with his blood he made the sign of the Cross on the floor where he lay.10
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