Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, was dead. He was sixty-five years old. What was shameful, as the chronicler Agustín de Zárate records, was the behaviour of his officials and closest friends who, almost to a man, fled. Only his sister-in-law Inés Muñoz, incensed by the murder of her own husband, had the courage to confront his killers and demand that she be allowed to give him a Christian burial. Having already taken his children to the safety of the convent of La Merced, she stood her ground amid the abuse of the throng of people who had by then filled the city’s main square, numbering in all it was recorded some two hundred Spaniards who shouted their allegiance to Almagro’s son.

  Not one of his old comrades dared raise a sword in his name; not Nicolás de Ribera, the old man, who had accompanied him on the island of Gallo, and who like all the other encomenderos of the city owed their honours and fortunes to him; nor Pedro de Alconchel, his loyal trumpeter at Cajamarca, who had walked behind him from Trujillo to Seville; not even his former servant Ampuero who had married his Indian mistress, and whom he had rewarded with riches and an encomienda, and who it was said was one of the men who abandoned him to his death, jumping from the window of his house.

  Most of the Spaniards thronging the square had wanted to hang his bloodied corpse from a gibbet in the centre of the Plaza, but a semblance of charity prevailed to allow his sister-in-law to bury him. Accompanied by Juan de Barbarán, a shopkeeper in the city, she once more entered his house, and finding his body almost stripped of its clothes she washed it and dressed it as hurriedly as she could before asking two of her African slaves to help her carry it to the cathedral. Covering his body with a white sheet, they carried it into the square and through the multitude of men who were cursing and yelling at them, demanding to lynch his corpse. But again his sister-in-law confronted them, and would not allow them to touch him, abusing them for their cowardice, and with only Juan de Barbarán and the two Africans to support her they once more made their way across the square and into the cathedral church, where that night they buried him.

  For fourteen months the former Inca empire and Spanish colony of New Castile would be torn apart by civil war. Within the hour of Pizarro’s killing, Diego de Almagro’s son was proclaimed by his supporters ruler of Peru. The repercussions were immediate and bloody. Antonio Pizado, Pizarro’s secretary, who had also abandoned his master by making his escape, was discovered hiding under the bed of the Royal Treasurer Alonso de Riquelme. Confronted by the rebels, Riquelme had taken them up to his bedroom and, though in a loud voice denying any knowledge of his whereabouts, gestured with his eyes at the spot where the unfortunate secretary was hiding.11 No mercy was shown Pizado by Almagro’s followers for they tortured him brutally in their attempts to discover the whereabouts of Pizarro’s personal treasure. Placed naked on a donkey, he was paraded through the square of Lima before being hanged. Fear and terror reigned over the city as the new caudillo’s supporters looted Pizarro’s house and any other household that would deny them loyalty.

  One of the few who managed to make his escape from the city was the Friar Bishop Valverde, veteran of Cajamarca. Valverde was in his early forties at the time and had recently returned from Spain, where he had been awarded the bishopric of Cuzco and primacy of the colony’s Church. A native of the westerly Spanish township of Oropesa, where his father had been a servant of its ruling family of Toledo, in his later years he had led a determined campaign to alleviate the plight of the encomenderos’ Indians even though he was himself an encomendero of Lima. He had also in his letters advised the Crown on a number of issues concerning the colony’s administration, which in effect because of their liberal viewpoint had undermined Pizarro’s authority. As the historian James Lockhart observes in his profile of Valverde, his suggestions to the Crown for the subdivision of the colony into governmental districts ‘anticipated the modern boundaries of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador’.12

  Having returned to Peru at the height of the elder Almagro’s rebellion Valverde had attempted as best he could to act as a mediator between the two former partners, but without success. His presence in Lima after the Battle of Salinas had done little to alleviate the hardship of Almagro’s son, who despised his inability to persuade Hernando Pizarro to save his father’s life. Nor was the young mestizo much impressed by the large family retinue the Dominican had brought back with him from Spain, including a brother and a sister, who were rewarded with encomiendas that had once belonged to his father’s fallen soldiers.

  On All Saints’ Day 1541, Valverde made his escape from Lima by ship in the company of his family and several other of Pizarro’s followers who had managed to bribe their way to freedom. At Túmbez, the travellers disembarked before once more heading to Guayaquil, where Valverde’s brother held one of the principal encomiendas. There, in the estuary of the city’s harbour they were attacked by Indians from the island of Puná and butchered to death. With his bloody killing, it was as though the ghost of Atahualpa had returned to haunt the Spaniards, who had already taken the lives of Almagro and Pizarro, all three of whom had conspired in the emperor’s death.

  The rebellion spread throughout the settlements, forcing many of the encomenderos of Cuzco and Lima to flee to the coast or to the northern Andes where loyalist contingents would later muster to await the arrival of the licentiate Vaca de Castro, who would assume the governorship of the colony. Mansio Serra de Leguizamón recalled:

  I left Cuzco for the coast, in order to take a caravel in search of the licentiate Vaca de Castro, accompanied by eight friends, all well armed, mounted and provisioned; and because Almagro, the younger, had been informed that I had gone in search of the licentiate, he took from me my house in Cuzco and my Indians; and I and my friends were captured by García de Alvarado, his captain, who dispossessed us of our arms, horses and Negro slaves, all of which were worth some eight thousand pesos of gold, and having robbed us and hung one of our companions he brought us to Cuzco as his prisoners.13

  Serra de Leguizamón and his companions were taken prisoner in the Cuntisuyo by a rebel squadron of Almagro’s commander García de Alvarado, who had executed in Arequipa’s main square their comrade Francisco de Montenegro, whom he hanged. As befell other Pizarro loyalists, Serra de Leguizamón’s partially built mansion in Cuzco and his encomienda of Alca were looted and stripped of all their possessions, and in his case appropriated by Martín de Bilbao, one of Pizarro’s assassins. Others, who at the time were on various expeditions of conquest, such as Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, were to remain ignorant of the rebellion and of Pizarro’s death.

  The 49-year-old licentiate Don Cristóbal Vaca de Castro, a former judge of Valladolid appointed by the Crown to inspect the colony, had himself only learnt of Pizarro’s killing at Popayán after making a lengthy detour and suffering a severe illness. On reaching Quito he sent despatches to all the principal municipalities and settlements, calling for Almagro’s surrender and offering the rebel army which had assembled in strength at Lima and at Cuzco a pardon if they laid down their arms. It was an offer that was ignored not only by Almagro, but by the majority of the cabildos, many of whose officials had requisitioned the encomiendas in their regions. However, it was several months before he could assemble an army, of under a thousand men, many of them from the Isthmus, to march south and relieve Lima.

  For eleven months the city of Cuzco remained in the hands of Almagro and his captains, supported by the Indian auxiliaries of the Inca Paullu, who once more sided with a rebel army. Weapons of every kind, coat armour and gunpowder were manufactured in the city’s armouries, most of whose smiths were Greeks and employed by their fellow countryman Pedro de Candía, one of the few disaffected veterans of Cajamarca who had thrown in his lot with the rebels.

  In the first days of September 1542, the rebel army left Cuzco on its march north to the central Andean settlement at Huamanga. Like many other conquistadores, Alonso de Mesa, who had also managed to flee Cuzco before its capture, fearing he would be kille
d in the coming battle, dictated his will shortly before the rebel army reached the mountain ridge of Chupas. Among his various bequests he ordered that in the event of his death his gaming debts owed him be repaid by various individuals, and among the possessions he listed and which he took with him to the battle were ‘a dark brown stallion, and one which is black called Gaspar, and a black mare called Fernanda, together with my arms and my spurs’.14

  On the mountain ridge of Chupas, the two armies met in an encounter that was as bloody as that of Salinas; it was described in part by the conquistadore Lucas Martínez Vegazo and several other encomenderos of Arequipa in a letter to the Emperor Charles V:

  The rebels began their advance across the mountain ridge to almost a league in distance of our troops as their horsemen scouts rode out to inspect our positions. The governor [Vaca de Castro] then ordered one of his captains and fifty harquebusiers to move forward and take possession of the nearest ridge, and also another captain with an equal number of lancers, which they succeeded in doing; seeing this, our enemies, who were still some three quarters of a league distant from us, began to move in search of a position to engage us, and this they did, placing their artillery in line and their squadrons of cavalry who were some two hundred and thirty horse, accompanied by some fifty foot soldiers; their infantry consisted of two hundred harquebusiers and a hundred and fifty pikemen, all so well armed that not even troops from Milan could match them in their armour and weapons; their artillery consisted of six guns, of ten and twelve feet in length, and capable of shooting a ball the size of an orange; they also had six other smaller guns and great quantities of munitions and powder … the governor then ordered our advance, and we marched to within reach of their harquebusiers’ shot, advancing further still, till we engaged them with our lances, pikes and swords in a battle that lasted for almost an entire hour; and never was witnessed such a cruel and brutal fighting, in which neither brother, relative nor friend, spared each other’s lives.15

  Pizarro’s former comrade the Greek Pedro de Candía, who had commanded the rebel artillery and had been reluctant to fire on the loyalist army, was within the hour lanced to death by Almagro. It was a betrayal that had effectively cost the rebels their victory, even though they had been urged to continue fighting by their young leader who promised them the Indian women of the loyalist captains for their booty. As at Salinas, the Inca Paullu and his auxiliaries, seeing the battle going in the loyalists’ favour, changed allegiance and Paullu turned on his former allies, slaughtering them without mercy. As night fell the dead and wounded could be counted in their hundreds, their bodies stripped of their clothing by the Indians as booty and left to be mauled by the packs of mastiffs.

  Among the dead were Vaca de Castro’s commander Alvarez Holguín and the rebel captain Martín de Bilbao, who before the battle had harangued the loyalists by boasting he had killed Pizarro. Almagro’s commander Juan Balsa had managed to flee, only to be captured by his own Indian retainers who beat him to death. Commenting on the battle the chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León stated of his countrymen: ‘Though their wars were long, and of great occurrence, never before in the history of the world did a people of a nation so cruelly pursue them, ignoring death and their own lives in order to avenge their passions and hatred for one another.’16

  The ghosts of Pizarro and Almagro hung over each of the slain and wounded, for it was their disagreements, incited by men such as Hernando Pizarro, Pizado and the Adelantado’s landless followers, that had caused such grief and turmoil in so short a period of the colony’s history.

  Diego de Almagro fled south to the Yucay valley, but was eventually captured and brought to Cuzco where Vaca de Castro ordered his execution in the city’s main square. Honouring his last request, his headless body was taken to Cuzco’s convent of La Merced where it was buried beside his father, the head placed at the feet as the mark of a traitor.

  The colony, whose governorship Vaca de Castro had assumed, was a prime example in its organisation of the abuses inflicted on the conquered Inca people: a legacy of Pizarro and his conquistadores that the Crown was determined to eradicate. Even the lowliest Spanish immigrant was able to rent Indians for his personal service from an encomendero, and they were treated little better than slaves. In several of the pen-and-ink sketches he made for his chronicle, the Indian Poma de Ayala depicted the poorer Spaniards carried on the backs of their Indian servants, and the encomenderos on throne chairs, as had been the custom of the Inca emperors. Though responsible for the appalling treatment of the Indians by authorising their bondage, the Spanish Crown had always envisaged that their welfare would have been supervised by the missionary Orders in charge of their conversion.

  Very little is known of the Church’s early role in the Conquest, principally because it was not politic for any chronicler openly to criticise its missionaries, and because most of the history of its evangelisation was written by its members. Like all institutions, among its sinners were also its saints, principally the Dominicans Bartolomé de las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomás, a future bishop of La Plata and author of a dictionary of quéchua published at Valladolid in 1560, who had represented the rights of the Indian caciques at court in their failed attempt to purchase their freedom. During the years of conquest the Council of the Indies had been kept informed of the state of Indian affairs. Several testimonies are to be found in the Archives of the Indies of Indians protesting to their local missionaries at their maltreatment at the hands of their encomenderos. One such appeal was presented to Bishop Valverde in Cuzco by an Indian who had taken the name of Juan de Vegines, and whom he later ordered to be freed from his bondage, ‘who complained to his Grace of the treatment he had received from his master the encomendero Alonso de Luque, who whipped him repeatedly and kept him tied by a chain, and gave him little to eat …’.17 There was little in fact Valverde or the few missionaries who opposed such treatment could do, other than to appeal to the Crown.

  It was in this atmosphere of reform, purveyed in the Spanish court and in the Council of the Indies, that the licentiate, a native of León and knight of Santiago, had been ordered to Peru with a mandate not only to implement changes to the existing laws governing Indian welfare, but to drastically curtail the power of the encomenderos. Sooner rather than later, however, the implications of his mandate became apparent to the victorious encomenderos of Chupas when he refused to award them any further land grants of Indians, an act which they viewed as a direct threat to the feudal privileges they had won by the sword. Moreover, his corrupt nature was to manifest itself in the various awards he made to merchants, from whom it was later claimed that he had received bribes, and to the religious Orders. In a letter to the Spanish court Martel Santoyo stated: ‘All the monasteries of the Dominicans and Mercederians hold encomiendas. Not one of them has doctrined or converted one single Indian. They attempt to extract from them [their encomiendas] what they can, working them to the utmost; with this and their collections of charity they enrich themselves. A bad example. It would be better that those who come are diligent in their morals and doctrines.’18

  Irrespective of his own moral failings, and ignoring the more overt abuse of the encomienda Indians which he had been charged to eradicate, Vaca de Castro would nevertheless be responsible for alleviating the poverty into which the Inca royal family had fallen, and which had been specifically condemned by the Council of the Indies. Several years earlier Bishop Valverde, referring to the poverty and degradation of the women of Inca nobility, many of whom had been forced into prostitution by their plight, wrote to the emperor: ‘Your Majesty has the obligation to grant them the means to eat, for they wander this city [Cuzco] abandoned, which is a great shame to witness: and what I feel is that the women, after being instructed, will become Christians, for there will be no lack of men who would wish to marry them if Your Majesty were to reward them …’19 Another letter, written by the priest Luis de Morales in 1540, records: ‘There are many who have nothing to eat and who
die of hunger, and who, from house to house, beg for food in the name of God and of his Holy Mother.’20

  It was a degradation from which only the Inca Prince Paullu would be immune, whom Pizarro shortly before the Vilcabamba campaign had awarded one of the largest encomiendas in Cuzco, including Mansio Serra de Leguizamón’s rich fiefdom of Catanga and Callanga. Then aged twenty-four, Paullu was a year older than his half-brother Manco. Exempt from sharing the tribute required of their former subject tribes, the Inca lords of Cuzco by now represented an almost pathetic spectacle in the ceremonies held by Paullu in the palace of Colcampata, which Almagro had gifted him. His treatment by the city’s encomenderos was little better than that of his relatives: ‘Paullu Inca, lord and natural brother of Atahualpa, sons of Huayna Cápac, is a man of little caution unlike the Spaniards, and each day they cheat him, and take from him what he owns, either by force or deception, obliging him to sign documents and papers he can neither read nor understand … and Your Majesty should see he be not maltreated, so that such maltreatment be not witnessed by his caciques who visit him to render him homage.’21

  Paullu appealed to the Crown for justice, informing the Council of the Indies of his wish to become a Christian and relating his past service in a testimonial he made at Cuzco. The Council not only upheld his title to an encomienda, but prohibited any Spaniard from entering his palace at Cuzco without his permission. The royal decree was also to award him a coat-of-arms and the rank of hidalgo – an honour that would later influence his adoption of Spanish court dress, though he would never learn to speak Castilian.