Pizarro
Page 22
In 1543, at a ceremony in the principal church of Cuzco, imitating the pomp and ritual of the Castilian court, the licentiate presided at his baptism. Paullu, for whom Vaca de Castro stood as godfather, was given the name and title of Don Cristóbal. It was an occasion, however, that would be marred by his gift to the Spanish governor of the mummy of his father the Emperor Huayna Cápac and which, to the consternation of the Inca royal family, the licentiate later exhibited privately in one of the city’s mansions, charging the Indians of Cuzco for the privilege of viewing it. Only the intervention of the Dominican Tomás de San Martín, who threatened to excommunicate him, led the licentiate to order the mummy’s removal, though he refused to surrender the gold he had obtained.22
Another of the Crown’s recommendations to Vaca de Castro had been to obtain a record of Inca history. From a series of interviews conducted at Quito and Cuzco with the quipucamayoc, the official readers of the quipu records, a report was compiled of the Inca dynasties and of their history, most of which has been lost. The testimonies of the quipucamayoc at Cuzco were gathered by Pedro de Escalante, an Indian interpreter, and by the encomendero Francisco de Villacastín, whom Garcilaso de la Vega recorded as missing two front teeth, the result of a stone having been thrown at him by a monkey. Villacastín was accompanied by the clerk and future chronicler the Spaniard Juan Diéz de Betanzos, who made a living as an interpreter. Much of the surviving evidence given by the four quipucamayoc interviewed at Cuzco was influenced by their dependence on the Inca Paullu, whose intention to discredit any rival claims to his leadership is more than evident in his pretence to have been the only legitimate heir to the Inca throne, and by his stating – quite falsely – that the other members of his family had ‘already received enough to eat from the guardians of this realm’.23
Equally important to the reforms the Crown wished to implement was an accord with the fugitive Emperor Manco, who was offered a rich encomienda by Vaca de Castro in exchange for his fealty. The interview of his emissaries with Manco was recorded in a letter he sent to the Spanish emperor, in which he describes the velvet brocade he sent Manco and the parrots he received from him in return. The Inca Don Martín Napti Yupanqui recalled the failure of the mission: ‘In the presence of this witness the said governor Vaca de Castro sent from this city many Indians and orejones and other Indian servants with messages to the Inca Manco so that he would leave in peace with his people, but this he refused to do.’24
Two years later Manco was dead, murdered by an Almagrist rebel whom he had given shelter at Vitcos, near Vilcabamba. He was twenty-eight years old: a sad and often ignored figure in the history and tragedy of the Conquest.
Though Vaca de Castro would prove to be the first in a long line of colonial administrators who were to regard their office as a means of enriching themselves and the coterie of relatives each brought with them to Peru, in the two years of his administration he was to oversee the greatest economic prosperity the colony had ever witnessed. This was due principally to the mining of gold and silver in the Charcas region of Bolivia, and an increase in trade with the Isthmus.
It was a period that also witnessed Pizarro’s intended expansion into the northern Argentine region of Tucumán. In a testimonial the conquistadore Alonso Rodríguez records his participation in the expedition: ‘In Cuzco the licentiate awarded the right of conquest of the lands of the Juries and of the Rio de la Plata to the captains Diego de Rojas, Felipe Gutiérrez and Nicolás de Heredia, in which Bernabé Picón, encomendero of Cuzco, accompanied them; and I among them, taking our arms, horses, mules and slaves in the discovery and conquest of those lands of some three years, and in which Diego de Rojas was killed by an arrow wound.’25
The final year of Vaca de Castro’s governorship was, however, dominated by the news that reached Peru of a decree promulgated by the Crown in the city of Barcelona, known as the New Laws, which governed the treatment of the natives of the Indies. Its author in part was Bartolomé de las Casas. Though excluding from its statutes African and Moorish slaves, its purpose was the reform of the encomienda system of tributary labour and the introduction of a legal framework to protect the Indians from the abuses inflicted on them by the colonists. It prohibited their labour as slaves and granted them the right of judicial redress to the Crown. It also denied the encomenderos’ heirs the right of succession to their encomiendas. The decree, moreover, entitled the Crown to obtain the entire tribute of the encomiendas at the expense of their encomenderos, who were only to be allowed a small share of their revenues in the form of a life pension, a move that potentially more than doubled the Crown’s income. In the most contentious article of its statutes with regard to Peru, all encomenderos who had taken part in the Battle of Salinas, whether under the banner of the Crown or in the ranks of the elder Almagro’s rebel army, were to forfeit their encomiendas: a ruling which not only demonstrated the Crown’s censure of the elder Almagro’s rebellion and of his execution without royal approval, but which in effect would have left every veteran of the Conquest ruined.
It was a far cry from the colony Pizarro had nurtured and for which so many of his companions had shed their blood, and in which his name by now was seldom spoken by the newly appointed Viceroy and his officials as their galleons slipped out of Seville’s port of San Lúcar de Barrameda.
NINE
The Most Magnificent Lord Gonzalo
He was well built and tall, and with a good presence about him, dark and with a long full black beard.
Pedro de Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, Las Guerras Civiles del Perú
On 10 January 1544, the official chosen to introduce the Native reforms to the colony, known as the New Laws, arrived in the Isthmus of Panama. Don Blasco Núñez Vela, Knight of Santiago and a former inspector of Castile’s garrison, appointed by the Crown as the first viceroy of Peru, was accompanied by four judges and a large retinue of his relatives and clerical administrators. Among the family friends whom he had brought with him from his native city of Ávila were five brothers of St Teresa of Ávila, one of whom, Antonio de Cepeda y Ahumada, would settle in Quito. Also accompanying the judges commissioned to establish the colony’s Audiencia (Royal Chancery Court of Justice) was a thirty-year-old accountant and future historian, Agustín de Zárate, employed by the Council of the Indies to make an inventory of the Crown’s revenue and treasury in the colony.
An elderly and fastidious man, who at times appeared almost comical in the pomp and ritual he demanded from his attendants, from the very outset of his journey across the Isthmus from the Atlantic port of Nombre de Dios to its Pacific capital at Panama, the Viceroy had proceeded to antagonise almost every colonist he met in the mosquito- and swamp-ridden plantations he visited, apprising them of his reforms and insisting on the most rigid protocol in both dress and ceremonial. He even deprived his encomendero hosts, in whose houses he and his large retinue stayed, of their Indian servants and African slaves as part of the proposed reforms to abolish unpaid Indian labour, and which within a year would have virtually destroyed the Isthmus’s entire economy, based as it was on slavery and the free plantation labour of its encomiendas. By the time his entourage had reached the Peruvian mainland in Ecuador, the news of his reforms had not only preceded him but had raised an outcry in almost every sector of the colony, from poor and rich alike, each of whom depended entirely for their livelihood on Indian labour.
However naïve the intention, Spain’s proposed colonial reform was far in advance of its time in terms of innovation and liberalism, and was something no other European power would even envisage for its colonies for several centuries to come. Its calamitous consequences, not only for the colonists but for the Crown itself, were due almost entirely to the cantankerous and dictatorial attitude of the Viceroy, who denied any form of concession or arbitration. Neither did his state entry into Lima bode well for his reputation nor recommend him to its encomendero oligarchy, whose vast wealth and social pretensions he openly ridiculed, describing those of them w
ho claimed hidalgo rank to have been little more than ‘tailors and cobblers’.1
Peru’s Governor, Vaca de Castro, who had been replaced by the Viceroy, had voiced his misgivings concerning the reforms, but his opinion had counted for little. Not even the sight of Lima’s Spanish women, hurling abuse and banging their saucepans outside his palace, had made the slightest impression on the Viceroy. Within weeks he ordered the arrest of Vaca de Castro on a charge of sedition and corruption, and had him imprisoned on one of the small galleons in Lima’s port. Shortly afterwards Pizarro’s young daughter Doña Francisca was also imprisoned on the same vessel. Paranoia and a growing fear of being murdered led to a number of bizarre confrontations between the colony’s new ruler and his four judges of his Audiencia, culminating in the arrest of the Crown official Illán Suárez, whose loyalty he had also questioned, and whom in a heated argument he knifed to death with his dagger: an event of both comic and tragic proportions.
It was a crime which even in a city that had witnessed so much bloodshed in its few years both stunned and horrified its inhabitants, not only because of its cowardice but also because it had been carried out by the Viceroy himself. Imprisoned by his own soldiers and judges, he was eventually allowed to leave for Spain. Disembarking on the equatorial coast he however made his way inland to Quito, where over the coming months he raised an army in defence of what remained of his governorship.
The fate of the licentiate Vaca de Castro would be no less ignominious. Freed from captivity, he returned to Spain and faced trial on charges of embezzlement and of appropriating funds from the sale of encomiendas – charges he would vehemently deny, pleading poverty and penury which his correspondence with his wife in Spain during the years of his governorship did little to substantiate: ‘all I have sent you and will also send you, you must treat with great secrecy, even among the servants, for the less the king knows, the more reward he will show me … and not a straw must be purchased in my name, so that it is known that neither you nor I possess a single marevidí.’2
For over a year he was imprisoned at the royal fortress of Simancas, and then lived under house arrest in the township of Pinto, south of Madrid, before being exonerated of all charges. This was far removed from the anarchy and rebellion that had taken hold of the colony he had left behind, and of a governorship to which his heirs, among them his son Don Pedro Vaca de Castro, the future Archbishop of Seville, would owe their fortune.
Shortly before the flight of the Viceroy Núñez Vela from Lima, an elderly and portly hooded figure could be seen slowly making his way on muleback across the arid landscape of the Cuntisuyo towards Cuzco. Francisco López Gascón, a native of the Basque fishing port of St Jean de Luz, who as a young man had studied for the priesthood in Castile and adopted the name of his former patron Cardinal Bernardino de Carbajal, had been on the point of returning to the Isthmus, and had been unable to find a ship at Arequipa.3 Several years previously he had arrived in the colony from Mexico accompanied by a Portuguese woman, owning, as he was fond of boasting, ‘only the few coins he had owed a tavern in Seville’.4 Highly regarded for his military skills, having served in the Italian wars at Ravenna and Pavia, in Peru he had commanded Vaca de Castro’s infantry at the Battle of Chupas. Exhausted by his long journey, he entered Cuzco with little more than what he possessed in his baggage and a reputation for brutality that would within the year pervade Peru.
The object of the elderly soldier’s journey was to answer the summons he had received from Pizarro’s youngest brother Gonzalo, who at the head of an armed company from Charcas had two months before proclaimed himself, at Cuzco, Procurator General of Peru and the representative of the colony’s encomenderos in their protest against the New Laws. Ever since he had returned to Quito barefoot and in rags a few years previously, after his disastrous expedition to the Amazon, and where he had learnt of his brother’s murder, Gonzalo had witnessed the gradual dismemberment of his family’s influence. The principal instigator of this loss of power was the Castilian Vaca de Castro, who had little sympathy for the Extremaduran clique of Pizarro’s supporters who for a decade had controlled most of the colony’s offices and disposal of encomienda awards. Deprived of his governorship of Quito which his brother had awarded him, Gonzalo had been forced to retire to his encomiendas in the Charcas, and had even considered returning to Spain; a plan from which his brother Hernando, who had already begun his lengthy imprisonment in the castle of La Mota at Medina del Campo for his part in Almagro’s killing, dissuaded him so that he could look after their family’s interests in the colony.
At the time Gonzalo was probably thirty years old.5 Neither greatly intelligent nor particularly articulate, nor able to read or write, he was, however, a handsome man prone to dress in either a simple soldier’s garb or, on special occasions, in all the finery of an Elizabethan grandee, bejewelled with earrings, velvet and silk, his coat armour and helmet decorated in gold and studded with emeralds. Renowned for his promiscuity, he took as partners both Indian and Spanish women. He was physically strong and quite fearless, as he demonstrated in his expedition to the Amazon. Agustín de Zárate, who had known him, wrote that he was also ‘a fine horseman and musketeer, and though of little culture he spoke well, though very coarsely’.6 His popularity as Pizarro’s political heir was unrivalled by any other conquistadore. Ambitious and exalted by his sense of self-importance, his rebellion would sooner or later have manifested itself irrespective of the flattery of his followers or of the dire threat posed to his fellow encomenderos by the Crown’s censure and reforms. It was a confrontation that was inevitable, and which would determine the future ruler of the colony – conquistadore or Crown official.
What had started as a protest against the Crown’s reforms would soon develop into an open rebellion, and Gonzalo, however much he feigned his unwillingness to lead, would command it with the same determination and authority as his dead brother, though with neither his caution nor his skill. His one goal was the revival of his family’s power and what he believed was their right to govern the land they had conquered by the sword. It would be a recurring theme in all his dealings and negotiations with the Crown.
The genie who would make such a goal possible was the elderly Carbajal, who stood bareheaded before him in his tent in the Cuzco valley of Jaquijahuana, where Gonzalo had assembled his army of encomenderos, and swore his undying allegiance to him. The chronicler Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, who left the most detailed and authoritative account of Gonzalo’s rebellion, recorded that Carbajal was eighty years old at the time, and though lame in one leg was one of the most physically strong of all the rebel captains, as his subsequent campaigns on horseback back and forth across the Andes attest. Zárate, who was nearly hanged by Carbajal because he suspected him of keeping a record of the events of the time, also confirms his age and describes him as of ‘medium height, thickset and of a ruddy complexion’.7 It was a partnership that would transform the colony in all but name into an independent sovereign state, and bring with it in equal measure economic prosperity and a barbarity the like of which its Native people had never before witnessed among their conquerors.
Gonzalo’s rebellion was nevertheless initially opposed by a small and clandestine group of Cuzco’s encomenderos, although they were equally hostile to the proposed reforms. Some twenty of the city’s most influential encomenderos, including Pedro del Barco, Gabriel de Rojas, Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and the historian Garcilaso de la Vega’s father, fled at night from his encampment to Arequipa’s port of Mollendo where they had hoped to find a ship that would take them to Lima; they arrived only to discover that the commanders and crews of its few remaining vessels, alarmed by the news of the impending uprising, had weighed anchor, leaving them no option but to disperse. Most of them made the long and arduous journey along the coast, where on their arrival at Lima they were met with the sight of the newly installed bells of its churches and monasteries being removed on the Viceroy’s orders to be used for the sme
lting of grapeshot.
Though their flight had initially caused many conquistadores assembled in the rebel encampment to waver in their allegiance, the future course of events was decided by the rank and file of Cuzco’s landless colonists. It was they who would form the backbone of the rebel army: merchants, artisans and former conscripts of the Almagrist wars, together with various members of the religious Orders whose communities would also be stripped of their encomiendas by the reforms. One friar declared publicly that if the decrees of the New Laws were carried out ‘they will leave my sisters and nieces with no future but the whorehouse’.8 It was a following that owed as much to the charismatic personality of their caudillo as to the fears they shared with the veteran conquistadores of losing their livelihood.
Gonzalo had also received the support of the Inca Prince Paullu, who agreed to supply him with 20,000 Indian porters for his army, 12,000 of whom would act as handlers of his cannon. The rebel army commanded by Carbajal finally began its long and difficult march north across the cordillera towards Lima. However, only on reaching the central Andes did Gonzalo learn of the arrest of the Viceroy by the judges of Lima, and of his departure from the capital. He was also informed of how his brother’s palace, which had become the viceregal residence, had been looted by the city’s soldiers, and that Lima was virtually in a state of anarchy and in the hands of its judges: the Castilian Diego Vásquez de Cepeda, the elderly Pedro Ortíz de Zárate and the Riojano Pablo Lisón de Tejada. The fourth judge, Juan Alvarez, who had accompanied his colleagues from Seville almost a year previously, had the responsibility of taking the imprisoned Viceroy to Spain to face trial, but at Túmbez had freed him, allowing him to make his escape to Quito and Popayán.
A sense of terror gripped Lima as further reports reached the city of Gonzalo’s progress across the cordillera, bringing with him one of the largest armies ever assembled by the colonists. Poised within easy reach of the city, Francisco de Carbajal, taking with him a hundred harquebusiers, entered Lima at night and demanded a signed decree from the judges confirming Gonzalo’s governorship of the colony. The following morning Carbajal led three of Cuzco’s fugitive encomenderos, naked and on donkeys, to the outskirts of the city where he hanged them from a tree, selecting the highest branch for the conquistadore Pedro del Barco because of his hidalgo rank, something which greatly amused him.