The naked and blood-stained figure of the elderly Extremaduran conquistadore, a veteran of the conquest of Nicaragua and who at Vilcabamba had saved Gonzalo’s life, would be the first sight the rebel army would have of the city. An eyewitness recorded their entry into Lima:
First entered the Captain Hernando Bachicao with 24 cannon, and which was pulled by over 4,000 Indians, and who also carried its munitions and other pieces of smaller artillery, such as muskets which his men fired when reaching the corners of each street, and which greatly frightened the populace. He brought with him some 50 harquebusiers as his personal guard, and a further 50 artillerymen, who also took part in the firing of the weapons, which caused deafening noise.
Then entered the Captain Diego de Gumiel, wearing a steel breastplate and a coat of chain mail, trailing his pike on the ground and holding it by its naked blade, and who was followed by 200 of his pikemen, their weapons sloped over their shoulders and dressed in chain mail. He was followed by the Captain Juan Vélez de Guevara with 150 harquebusiers, some of whom were in chain mail and others in very rich clothing. Behind this captain came the company of Pedro Cermeño, who wore a wild expression on his face, casting his eyes from side to side as if wishing to shoot someone, and who brought with him 180 harquebusiers.
Once the infantry had reached the main square it was the turn of the cavalry to make their entry, at the head of which rode Gonzalo Pizarro, fully armed and wearing a hat made of very fine silk with a long plume of different colours attached to a gold pendant and large emerald. He was wearing chain mail and a velvet and crimson tabard embroidered in gold thread, and on his belt a gold-handled sword. He rode a large and powerful Spanish roan called Villano. Hanging from his horse’s side was a broad sword. The stirrups, harness and his horse’s head visor were of silver. Behind him walked a page carrying his lance and his helmet, its visor open, its helm adorned with many plumes of different colours, its bars were of gold, and its helmet wreath studded with emeralds.
Behind Gonzalo Pizarro rode three of his captains and their standard bearers at the head of all the cavalry, riding in columns twelve abreast because of the width of the streets. At their front were Don Pedro Puertocarrero, Don Baltazar de Castilla and Pedro de Puelles, who carried the royal standard bearing the arms of His Majesty, quartered on either side in blue damask. To their right rode Antonio Altamarino with his banner displaying on one side the city of Cuzco and on the other the Lord Santiago, mounted on a white horse and sword in hand. To their left was held another banner, bearing the arms of the Pizarros, and, if I remember correctly, with the motto: For arms, these I won in virtue of he who gave them to me. On the other side of the banner was the figure of a man in armour, who on his breast wore the letters GP, for Gonzalo Pizarro. Following these captains was the entire cavalry of 650 horse, all well armed in chain mail and on fine mounts … till all finally entered the great square.9
The Indian handlers had positioned their cannon facing the city’s principal buildings, the infantry and cavalry forming their squadrons alongside, supported by harquebusiers. Flanked by Carbajal on his mule, Gonzalo was acclaimed Caudillo of Peru. One by one, the bishops of Lima, Quito and Cuzco acknowledged his authority, followed by the judges and Crown officials and the Mayor of Lima, Nicolás de Ribera, his brother’s oldest companion-in-arms. On the morning of 28 October 1544, the colony of New Castile severed its allegiance to its Viceroy, and in all but name to Spain: the first such action of any American colony.
It was not long before a new order was established in the city, the laws and administration of which were centred on Pizarro’s former palace where Gonzalo had made his headquarters. No one dared question the validity of his rule in the emperor’s name, and the handful of encomenderos who had fled from Cuzco had either sought his pardon or remained in hiding, such as Garcilaso de la Vega, who for four months lay hidden in the hollowed altar of the city’s monastery of Santo Domingo.
With access to the city’s treasury and the Crown’s revenues, Gonzalo was not only able to pay his troops, but to organise the administration of his government, appointing his closest friends and associates to govern its principal cities: Alonso de Toro at Cuzco, Francisco de Almendras at La Plata, Pedro de Fuentes and Lucas Martínez Vegazo at Arequipa. The appointments were popular and welcomed even by the clergy, who opted for the stability of the new regime many of them, including its four bishops, believed would eventually receive the Crown’s sanction in the light of the Viceroy’s enforced exile and flight. It was a premise, however, that was more fanciful than realistic, and which would have set a precedent throughout Spain’s colonies that would have been unacceptable to the emperor, who was himself then faced with the rebellions of his Lutheran subjects in Germany. Neither would the reprisals ordered by Gonzalo’s new governors against loyalists have been seen by the Crown as anything other than seditious and criminal, which in fact many of them were.
Alonso de Toro, one of the more sadistic of Gonzalo’s captains, who is recorded as having abused the elderly Almagro at his execution, quashed any further semblance of rebellion in Cuzco, which had briefly risen under the rich encomendero Diego Maldonado. Maldonado and his fellow conquistadore Alonso de Mesa had been arrested by the quéchua interpreter Francisco de Villacastín, who retook control of the city in Gonzalo’s name. Mesa was set on the rack and horribly tortured, his arms maimed for the rest of his life. Both prisoners were then ordered to Lima where they pleaded for their lives before Gonzalo. It was a scene that would be repeated for a number of the proud veterans of Cajamarca suspected of disloyalty; brave men now forced to grovel before Pizarro’s brother, humiliating themselves in exchange for their lives, addressing him as their ‘Most Magnificent Lord’.
Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, who had been one of the encomenderos who had fled from Gonzalo’s encampment at Jaquijahuana, was himself captured in the Cuntisuyo and brought in chains to Cuzco, where Toro ordered his torture. ‘At the time I was in the city of Cuzco,’ recalled his fellow conquistadore Luis Sánchez, ‘and I witnessed Alonso de Toro, lieutenant-governor of Gonzalo Pizarro, take Mansio Serra and do him great injury, and it was believed he would kill him for being his enemy.’10 He was to languish in irons in Cuzco’s jail for several months till he also finally obtained a pardon from Gonzalo.
It was, however, the northern region of the colony that had supported the Viceroy, and also the Isthmus which still remained in loyalist hands, which represented the last threat to Gonzalo. The governorship of Chile under Pedro de Valdivia was too remote and distant to cause him any worry. Three brigantines under the command of Hernando de Bachicao were sent to confront the small armada of loyalist ships that had fled from Lima to the northern coast and to Panama.
In a voyage worthy of any Caribbean buccaneer, the megalomaniac Bachicao, who insisted on being addressed by his mariners as ‘Count’ and ‘Admiral of the southern seas’, proceeded to sack every port on his way to Panama, capturing ship after ship. Entering the Isthmus’s Pacific port under cover of night he surprised its garrison and took possession of its entire fleet, comprising in all twenty-eight ships, galleons, brigantines and skiffs. The plunder lasted for weeks and secured for Gonzalo not only Panama but the Atlantic port of Nombre de Dios, sealing the only passage to Spain.
Within five months of Lima’s seizure, Gonzalo’s rebel army once more continued its march towards the northern equatorial coast in a campaign that would last for almost a year. On the outskirts of Quito at the mountain valley of Añaquito, accompanied by the conquistadore Sebastián de Belalcázar and all the principal encomenderos of Ecuador and Popayán whom he had recruited to his banner, the elderly Viceroy Núñez Vela made his final stand. Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, his cavalry of some one hundred and forty men were slaughtered by Gonzalo’s better trained and more experienced lancers. Among the loyalist dead was the cavalry captain Antonio de Cepeda y Ahumada, St Teresa of Ávila’s brother. The Viceroy, who had been in the thick of the fighting, and though fatally
wounded, was decapitated by one of the African slaves of Benito Suárez, the brother of the factor he had knifed to death in Lima, an act which brought about such a shameful and tragic end to his own life. Stripped of its clothing, his corpse was left among the dead of the battlefield, his blood-stained head carried in a basket strapped to Suárez’s horse, shaven of its beard and moustache which would be worn by Gonzalo’s captains to decorate their helmets on their triumphal entry into Quito.
Belalcázar, who had remained loyal to the Viceroy however much he had disliked him and disagreed with his reforms, was taken prisoner but later freed by Gonzalo, and allowed to return to his governorship of Popayán. Gonzalo’s victory at Añaquito and his appointment of his fellow Extremaduran Pedro de Hinojosa as his governor of the isthmus and commander of the Pacific fleet would secure his dictatorship for almost four years. The only opposition he would meet had arisen some time before the battle in the city of La Plata with the murder of his governor Almendras at the hands of the encomendero Diego de Centeno, who had raised the royal banner.
Francisco de Carbajal was ordered to put down the insurrection. Entering Lima with only twelve horsemen, within days he had equipped a force of some two hundred colonists, each aware of the reputation of the elderly soldier, renowned not only for his brutality but for his caustic wit. On one occasion Carbajal, coming across a new recruit he had sarcastically addressed as ‘Your Grace’, asked the man his name, and being told that it was ‘Hurtado’ (stealing), had commented: ‘Not worth finding, let alone stealing.’11 On taking prisoner a loyalist encomendero, who pretended not to know why he was to be hanged, he had said to him: ‘I perceive you wish to establish a pedigree for your martyrdom, so that you can point to it as an heirloom for your descendants? So be it, and now, adíos.’12 After hanging four other prisoners, raising his eyes to heaven, he quipped: ‘Let us pray to God with all our hearts he be content with these few crumbs we offer him.’13 His bizarre appearance only added to a reputation of sadism and cruelty which would earn him the name ‘The Devil of the Andes’:
instead of a cloak he always wore a purple Moorish burnoose with a hood … and on his head a hat of black taffeta with a plain silk band adorned with black and white chicken feathers. This ornament he told his soldiers he wore to set an example to them, for one of the things he most exhorted them to do was to wear such apparel on their helmets, for he claimed it was the mark of a true soldier and would distinguish him from the frivolity of the plumes worn by an encomendero.14
His cruelty was legendary. At Quito before his departure south he had suspected Diego Maldonado of once more betraying Gonzalo by distributing a letter vilifying him. ‘And though Diego Maldonado denied any knowledge of such a letter, he ordered him stripped naked and placed on a donkey … and which was a pitiful sight, being as he was an old man and very thin boned, and without any complexion … and he cried out many times “Lord God! By Your Passion and in the name of the Mother of God! Do not torture me! Let me die here on this donkey! Cut my head off! but do not torture me!” … and then [Carbajal] commanded he be tortured by putting water in his mouth and nose.’15
For several months Carbajal pursued Diego de Centeno’s loyalist forces across southern Peru and the Bolivian highlands, from La Plata to Cuzco, and across to Arequipa, never once however being able to capture his quarry. Whether sleeping in abandoned churches in the pampa, or in tents among the hardened cavalry units he had recruited and trained, the old soldier was relentless in his attrition of the few remaining loyalists who had evaded his summary executions. Amassing a vast amount of wealth from the newly discovered mines at Potosí and Charcas, and the mansions and haciendas he freely looted, Carbajal brought a reign of terror across the Andes which would be remembered for years to come. Most, if not all, of the leading encomenderos who were not in Gonzalo’s northern army served under his black banner, emblazoned with a red saltire.
No single colonist he suspected of disloyalty to Gonzalo was free of his brutality. At Charcas he had ordered the killing of the conquistadores Nicolás de Heredia and Lope de Mendoza, who had returned from their expedition of discovery of northern Argentina, sending their bloodied heads in saddlebags to Arequipa, where he ordered they be placed in its central square as a warning to any dissenters.
Diego de Centeno, who was one of the principal owners of the newly discovered mine of the Cerro Rico at Potosí, was soon left virtually abandoned by his small company of men, too frightened and too exhausted to continue fleeing from their stubborn pursuer, and for almost a year he remained hidden in a cave accompanied by one of his Indian caciques. It was the last rebellion Gonzalo had to face before his victorious return to Lima, which his army entered, trailing on the ground the bloody and dirt-trodden standards of its former viceroy. The entire land was at his feet. At his court minstrels sang and he dined publicly, his captains acting as cup-bearers and chamberlains.
His naïve belief, however, that the governorship he had won by force of arms he could eventually retain as a servant of the Crown was not shared by Carbajal, who was well aware of the fate of Gonzalo’s brother Hernando, who was still languishing in prison in Spain for ordering Almagro’s execution:
My lord, when a viceroy is killed in a pitched battle and his head is struck off and placed on a gibbet, and the battle was against the royal standard, and where there have been as many deaths and as much looting, there is no pardon to be hoped for, and no compromise to be made; even though your lordship makes ample excuses and proves himself more innocent than a suckling babe. Nor can you trust in words or promises, nor whatever assurances be given you, unless, that is, you declare yourself king; and seize the government yourself without waiting for another to offer it to you, and place the crown on your head: allocating whatever land is unoccupied among your friends and adherents; creating them dukes and marquéses and counts, such as there are in all the countries of the world, so that they will defend your lordship in order to defend their own estates; … and pay no heed if it is said that you are a traitor to the king of Spain: you are not, for as the saying goes, no king is a traitor … I beg your lordship to consider carefully my words, and of what I have said about ruling the empire in perpetuity, so that all those who live here will follow you. Finally, I urge you again to crown yourself king … die a king. I repeat, and not a vassal … for whosoever accepts servitude can merit no better.16
At the time none of the rebel encomenderos and conquistadores envisaged that the Crown had either the means or the will to send an armada and army into battle halfway across the world to reassert its authority. Nor did they believe that the Crown would be able successfully to mobilise reinforcements for such an operation from its settlements in Mexico and Guatemala without the support of the rebel-held Isthmus and of its Pacific fleet. Nor did it seem plausible that such a task force, unfamiliar with the equatorial and Andean terrain, would have survived a campaign against an army equally well armed and supplied with munitions and gunpowder manufactured in the colony. Moreover, they were aware that their appropriation of almost two years’ of the Crown’s revenue of silver bullion had left Spain’s already precarious financial resources in no position to pay for an armada. It had also taken almost a year for the news of the rebellion to reach Spain; there the Council of Castile, devoid of military and financial resources, was forced to seek a negotiated settlement.
Towards the end of the year 1546, a small and frail bearded priest was to arrive in the Atlantic port of Nombre de Dios. A former official of the Inquisition, he had been responsible for the defence of Valencia against the corsairs of the Turkish admiral Barbarossa, who had ravaged the Balearic islands of Mallorca and Menorca, and in his role as a Crown official had successfully suppressed the threat of insurrection by the city’s Morisco population. The arrival of Don Pedro de la Gasca had been of little significance to the rebel commander of the port in which his small squadron of caravels had berthed. Nor had the news of his appointment by the Crown as administrator of Peru, with the t
itle of president of the Audiencia of Lima, caused any alarm to the rebel governor of Panama, Pedro de Hinojosa. Forwarding a letter from the Emperor Charles V, who had been in Germany at the time the news of the rebellion had been received in Spain, Gasca wrote to Gonzalo informing him also of the decision of the Council of the Indies to repeal the New Laws, and offering him and his supporters a full pardon: pledges that were at first met with polite silence, and later with evasion by Gonzalo.
Faced with the humiliation of his virtual isolation, and unable to communicate with any of the encomenderos of Peru without the help of Hinojosa’s fleet, over the weeks Gasca kept up a continuous barrage of correspondence with the rebel leaders of the Isthmus, varying from appeals to their loyalty to threats and simple bribery. It was a campaign the middle-aged priest waged from his writing desk in the quarters he had been given in the port, and which would within time bring about the defection of Hinojosa whom he promised to award one of the richest encomiendas in Peru. The defection secured for Gasca not only the Isthmus, but the surrender of the Pacific fleet. It also enabled him for the first time to communicate with the rebel encomenderos.
In the coming months, with the same quiet determination he had used to secure the allegiance of Panama’s rebels, he levied an army of invasion, not only from the Isthmus but also from the Caribbean islands. Its ultimate success, however, he knew depended on his ability to appeal to the feudal loyalty of Peru’s encomenderos as much as to their purses, promising them future awards of Indians and guaranteeing them their lands. What followed was an endless and secret correspondence, smuggled by his caravels into Peru. Carbajal, who had executed a number of encomenderos for being found in possession of Gasca’s correspondence, himself wrote to the priest:
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