Though at times historically unreliable in anything that would veer from his projection of an heroic and almost utopian Inca society – denying, for example, the existence of human sacrifice – his history, nevertheless, presents an epic account of a people, their religion and customs, portrayed in a literary style unequalled by any of Peru’s numerous chroniclers with the exception of Cieza de León and Gutiérrez de Santa Clara.
Much of what Garcilaso wrote was based on the stories and legends he had heard as a child from his mother’s relatives, and from what he had observed during his adolescence. As he records in his history, many of the veterans of Cajamarca were known to him, from whom he would have been given first-hand accounts of the Conquest. He also relied on the existing published histories and an unpublished manuscript in Latin by the Jesuit mestizo Blas Valera.
After writing a literary work of translation from Italian, entitled Los Tres Diálagos de Amor, in 1605, and a genealogical essay of his father’s family, Garcilaso wrote a history of the conquest of Florida by Pizarro’s cavalry commander, Hernando de Soto. Four years later he published the first part of his history of Peru, seven years before his death at Córdoba at the age of seventy-seven. Bequeathing the little he possessed to endow a chapel dedicated to the Holy Souls of Purgatory in the city’s cathedral mosque where he would be buried, he left his African slave Marina de Córdoba an annuity of fifty ducats and a mandate for her freedom.7 Ignorant of the universal fame the history of his mother’s people would bring him, little would Garcilaso have imagined that some three and a half centuries after his death his remains would be brought back to the city of his birth by his sovereign’s descendant King Juan Carlos of Spain to be buried in state at Cuzco’s church of el Triunfo. His mother Doña Isabel, defrauded by the Spanish peasant husband she had later married, was to die a virtual pauper.
Each of the more prominent conquistadores had taken Inca princesses for their mistresses, who were regarded not only as booty but as trophies because of the prestige of their royal lineage. Most of the daughters of the Emperor Huayna Cápac in their own right held the feudal allegiance of lands and Indians given them by their father at their birth, which in many cases were associated with the encomiendas awarded by Pizarro to his captains. Most of their names are unknown. Both Gonzalo and Juan Pizarro are recorded as having fathered children whose mothers were Inca princesses. Juan Pizarro refused to recognise his daughter; Gonzalo, on the other hand, doted on his son Franciscuito, whom Gasca exiled to Spain.
Every single conquistadore, even the humblest foot soldier at Cajamarca, acquired an Indian mistress and servant. Some had even marched with several women accompanying them. Imitating the feudal rights of the Inca lords, as encomenderos they took possession of any women in their lands. Brought up in a world of Catholic puritanism, where men were publicly beaten for committing adultery, the Conquest represented for many a sexual paradise of unlimited promiscuity. For their Indian concubines it represented little more than abandonment and eventual humiliation at the hands of the Spanish wives their lovers later imported, from either Spain or the well-established colonies of the Isthmus and Caribbean, where Creole women, born in the Indies but of Spanish parentage, were in abundance and in search of their own financial conquests.
The early years of the Conquest when the veterans of Cajamarca had lived openly with their Indian mistresses had given way to a semblance of moral conformity imposed on the colony by successive missionaries and by the Crown itself, which publicly criticised the failure of the by then middle-aged conquistadores to marry and set an example to colonists and Indians alike: something to which they had previously turned a blind eye during Pizarro’s governorship.
The general aversion of the conquistadores to wed their Indian concubines led to a gold rush of women fortune hunters from Spain and from the Isthmus, more than willing to trade their youth and white skin for the fortunes of the gout-ridden and battle-scarred soldiers, many of whom were disfigured by syphilis and the facial warts from which the elder Almagro, among others, was recorded to have suffered. The influx of women, from the noblest families of the Peninsula to the humblest prostitutes, would lay the foundations for the future Creole aristocracy of the colony. It would also deprive the mestizo children of the conquistadores of any legal right to their elderly fathers’ fortunes, for they would inevitably be seen by their young Spanish stepmothers as a threat to their own children. It was a cycle from which few of the conquistadores would be immune, as in the case of Lucas Martínez Vegazo who in his old age, having discarded his Inca mistress of long standing, married a Creole young enough to be his granddaughter, who would eventually inherit his encomienda.
By the mid-sixteenth century even marriage brokers were well established in Seville. One such lady advertised her trade in a leaflet with the following words: ‘Whoever would like to buy a licence to go to the Indies, may go to the gate of San Juan … and in that street ask for Francisca Brava, and she will sell it to them there.’8 From the earliest days of the Conquest, when Hernando de Soto had brought with him his lover and probable prostitute Juana Hernández, the riches of Peru had attracted Spanish women. Some, such as the Morisca slave Beatriz de Salcedo, who belonged to a Crown official whom she accompanied to Cajamarca and later married, became rich beyond her dreams, eventually inheriting his encomienda. Others were simple Spanish peasant women with few pretensions, such as Pizarro’s sister-in-law Inés Muñoz, who brought up his children, and María Calderón, whom Carbajal ordered to be strangled for criticising Gonzalo Pizarro and then hung by her feet from her bedroom window. A few were members of the higher nobility, such as Doña Ana de Velasco, a granddaughter of the Duke of Frías, who felt affronted at having to give up her stool at Mass to the plebeian though prominent widow of a con-quistador, and who persuaded her husband the marshal Alonso de Alvarado to hire two brigands to disfigure the woman and cut off her hair.9
Overlooking the Plaza de las Nazarenas in Cuzco stands the convent of that name, known also as the House of the Serpents because of the two large sculpted serpents supporting the coat of arms of its façade, and part of which building is now the Hotel Monasterio del Cuzco. Though converted in the late seventeenth century into the convent church of the Nazarenas Order, much of its façade, patios and structure remain as they would have appeared when the conquistadore Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and his family lived there. The mansion had been built some ten years after the Conquest on the foundations of an Inca palace. The Jesuit chronicler Bernabé Cobo recorded that several huaca stones formed part of its masonry and were venerated by the Incas of the city as magical and sacred shrines. Based on the conquistadore’s various wills and his testimonials to the Crown and other family papers, a picture can be pieced together not only of the Hispanic society of Cuzco, but of the lifestyle of a colonial grandee.
On the morning in 1561 when the conquistadore had led the procession of family mourners from his mansion to the convent church of Santo Domingo for the burial of his Spanish wife Doña Lucía he was forty-six years old. His young wife had been the daughter of the elderly conquistadore Gómez de Mazuelas, who in the fifteen years of their marriage had borne him two daughters and five sons. Sixteen years old at the time of their marriage, she had brought her husband a dowry of 20,000 pesos of gold.
Their marriage had taken place at Cuzco, possibly towards the end of 1546. A staunch supporter of Gonzalo Pizarro, Mazuelas however had managed to evade any censureship after Gasca’s victory and was rewarded by the Crown with the office of alderman of Cuzco.10 That it was a marriage of convenience is confirmed in the letter Mazuelas wrote to Gonzalo Pizarro, dated 27 February 1547:
My illustrious lord, by other letters I have sent you and which you have not answered, I have already informed your excellency of the events that have taken place here [in Cuzco]. In this letter I will only touch on what has wasted me away, with the little I possess, which is ever at your excellency’s disposal and service … as your excellency is by now aware, Ma
nsio Serra de Leguizamón, encomendero of this city, married my daughter, who I would have imagined would have best served your excellency in this city or in the domain of his encomienda, and if he be there, and that be the case, I breathe freely in accepting his departure … however, as I know him to be so obsessed with this business of his gambling, I believe he has gone to that city [of Lima] which offers him greater opportunity to be among people of that persuasion; yet not content in merely gambling what he possesses and what he does not possess, he has sold the dwelling of his mansion in this city, which has caused us all here a great deal of trouble, and being informed of this, my daughter, his wife, has petitioned the justices of this city for the tribute he receives from his Indians … the justices, nevertheless, have informed me that your excellency has ordered that the tribute be sent to Lima. If your excellency has no need for it in expenditure for your service, I beg it be sent to his wife, even if it be only for her food and sustenance. And this I beg as your servant, for other than it being just, I will also receive some mercy. Our lord, most illustrious excellency, may health and prosperity be yours, whose illustrious hands I kiss …11
The eldest of their children was Doña María, born at Cuzco in the closing years of Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion, and who at the age of eleven had been placed in the city’s Franciscan convent of Santa Clara, originally located in the same square as her parents’ mansion, then known as Santa Clara la vieja. It was the first such institution founded in Peru in 1550, and was established at Cuzco seven years later in the houses which had belonged to the conquistadore Alonso Díaz, principally for the daughters of impoverished veterans of the conquest. Under its first abbess, Doña Francisca Ortíz, it numbered twenty-four nuns of Spanish parentage, twelve mestizas and forty creole girl students who were educated until they were of marriageable age. Among the founding nuns were the daughters and granddaughters of the conquistadores Bernabé Picón and Francisco de Villafuerte.12
In defiance of her parents Doña María chose to enter the convent’s novitiate. It was an action which led to a lengthy dispute between her father and the nuns, to whom he was eventually forced to donate a dowry of jewels and vestments, valued at 2,000 pesos of gold, together with 700 cattle for the convent’s farms.13 His refusal to give any further donations on behalf of his daughter may explain the wording of much of the Franciscan chronicler Diego de Mendoza’s account of the young novice:
… among the glories of this life was Sister María de Leguizamón, one of the twenty-four founding nuns of this convent, daughter of the valorous conquistadore Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and of his wife Doña Lucía, citizens of Cuzco, who were well known in this realm for their nobility and wealth, who at the age of eleven left the home of her parents, and fleeing from there, and from the vanities of the world, entered the convent of Santa Clara … and from where not all the influence of her parents would make her leave; neither by enticements nor promises; till they disinherited her, denying her their refuge and her maintenance … yet at so tender an age she commended herself to God … and the more her parents denied her vocation the more she accepted her spiritual sisters as her family … bringing her from the confusion and captivity of Babylon to the doors of Sion.14
Taking the name of Sister María de la Visitacion, Doña María was to become one of the most prominent figures in Cuzco, devoting much of her life to the care of Indians in the native hospital of the city, and eventually being elected abbess of Santa Clara. In his history Friar Mendoza refers to her many demonstrations of sanctity and mortifications. At her death, at the age of sixty, he recalls that a choir of angels was heard singing Vespers in the chapel of the convent, and that some days later she appeared to one of the nuns. The friar writes that four years after her death, when the convent was transferred to its present site, her coffin was opened and her body found to be incorrupted, adding that in order to place her remains in a smaller coffin to be taken for burial in their new church the nuns broke her legs, and that ‘blood flowed freely from the wounds’.
Hardly any records survive of Serra de Leguizamón’s other children. His son Jerónimo also entered the religious life in the monastery of Santo Domingo at Cuzco, built on the foundations of the Inca temple of Coricancha. The licentiate Cepeda sent a letter to King Philip II from the city of La Plata, dated 14 February 1585, enclosing a missive from the Jesuit Alonso de Barzana: ‘In order to comply with my office in approving the native speech of the Indians among the clergy who reside within this bishopric of Charcas, I can testify that the Reverend Father Jerónimo de Leguizamón, curate of the parish of San Pedro de Potosí, speaks with great propriety the quéchua language.’15 Ten years later Jerónimo was elected prior of the monastery of Santo Domingo in Huamanga.
Only two of the conquistadore’s legitimate children married. His eldest son Mansio, heir to his encomienda of Alca, married Doña Francisca de Cabezuelas against his wishes, as he recorded in a letter in 1586, two years after his son’s death:
I wish to place as a matter of record to His Majesty the King and to the Mayors of this city of Cuzco, that my eldest son, Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, abandoned my house against my will and against all reason, being though a person of much quality and intelligence … and that the Archbishop of Lima seeing the disorder and inequality of the marriage my son proposed, imprisoned him for his own good, but on his release he went to the city of Arequipa and there married all the same.16
Whatever the reason, the conquistadore strongly disapproved of the marriage, and because of it he disinherited his son and spent years in litigation fighting the demands of his granddaughters, the eventual heirs to his encomienda. His younger son, Francisco, whom he had twice sent to Spain at the cost of 10,000 pesos of gold to seek a reward for his services from the king, would equally disappoint him by his marriage, for he chose to wed a young woman in Seville who could neither read nor write and whose claim to the Casa de la Contratación to hidalgo nobility was only verified by several illiterate witnesses, one of whom described her as ‘fair haired, with aquiline features and a mole on the right side of her face’.17 His youngest daughter, Doña Petronila, married the son of a wealthy encomendero. His will also mentions his illegitimate daughter Doña Paula, whose mother was Indian, who formed part of his household and to whom he left 2,000 pieces of eight.18
Garcilaso de la Vega, who was often a guest in Serra de Leguizamón’s mansion in Cuzco, writes that ‘… in later years the cabildo of Cuzco, seeing how ruined this son of theirs had become because of his gambling, in order to cure him of his addiction elected him mayor of the city for the term of a year: a service he performed with all care and diligence, for there was much of a gentleman about him, and for the whole of that year he never once touched a card.’19
Contrary to what Garcilaso wrote from the distance of his Spanish exile, a will made by Serra de Leguizamón several years later shows him to have continued his passion for gaming: ‘I owe Juan Gómez 800 pesos of silver’, the will, dated 1576, records his debts: ‘Agustín Alzazan 100 pesos of gold … Agustín López Gómez 150 pesos … 1,000 pesos Antonio Pereyra, the mayor, won from me at gaming … the licentiate Alonso Perez 4,000 pesos … 3,400 pesos I owe the said Diego de los Ríos from gaming, which he won from me’.20
The most revealing, if not contradictory, insight into Serra de Leguizamón’s character, and almost at variance with the energy and time he spent petitioning the Crown to compensate him for the loss of the original award of encomiendas Pizarro gave to the Inca Prince Paullu, is the penitent attitude he demonstrated in his later years towards his tributary Indians, and the restitution he would make them in both his wills. Though a number of conquistadores in their old age were to make similar restitutions for the share of booty and treasure they had obtained at Cajamarca and at Cuzco, there is little evidence to deny their sincerity, even if such sentiments were influenced by their impending deaths and the advice of their confessors.
Many made no such gestures. Neither did any of the later colonis
ts, responsible for far greater exploitation and ill treatment of the Indians of their encomiendas than had been the by then elderly conquistadores, a number of whom, like the trumpeter Pedro de Alconchel, who ran a boarding house in Lima, were virtually penniless. Nor was any such sentiment shared by the Crown officials of the colony: as in the case of the eight-year-old son of the judge Melchor Bravo de Saravia who was awarded an encomienda.
I [Serra de Leguizamón] declare that the produce and inheritance of Vizan [Alca] … belongs to the Indians of my encomienda because it was they who planted it, and they who built its hacienda, and because of which it is theirs and which they are to keep and own, as it was once their own … I declare that all the horse mares, goats, Castilian sheep, belong to the Indians of my encomienda … and this I return to them so that it be distributed among them … I declare that I have received [over the years] in tribute from my Indians of my encomienda some 50,000 pesos of gold, and it is what I owe them.21
Considering that the produce and livestock of his encomienda – virtually its entire wealth – should by right have been inherited by his children, his action, however late in his life, betrays an extraordinary sense of morality, something shared by few of his countrymen. His encomienda at Alca in the Cuntisuyo, bordering the Cotahuasi River, was 140 miles south-west of Cuzco, and north-west of the city of Arequipa, and contained 4,500 Aimára Indians.22
Serra de Leguizamón’s last will shows him still to have been a rich man at the time of his death despite all his years of gambling, and still the owner of his mansion at Cuzco and of various farms and estates within its vicinity at the mountain huaca of Huanacauri, held sacred to the Inca panacas of the city. Among the possessions he listed are
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