five bars of gold, three large and two of medium size, marked and stamped … in silver a large decorated urn and a small one, a serving dish and two jugs, thirteen small plates and two jars, three spoons, a chamber pot, three salt cellars, a candelabra, a figure of the Saviour, all in silver … a tapestry, trunks, chairs, tables, beds, linen, a jewel case, a Negress, a horse, a coat of chain mail, a sword, a helmet of steel.23
Another item provides for a further restitution to be made to the Indians of his encomienda at Alca:
… at the time of Cajamarca and of the distribution of treasures among the conquistadores, I, as one of them, was awarded 2,000 pesos of gold, and in the distribution in Cuzco, some 8,000 pesos of gold, more or less. And I was given the figure of the sun which was of gold and kept by the Incas in the House of the Sun which is now the convent of Santo Domingo and where they practised their idolatry, which I believe was worth some 2,000 pesos; all of which being some 12,000 pesos of gold. And I wish my executors to record this sum for the peace of my conscience and pay this exact sum from my estate.24
Finally, he mentions his eldest and illegitimate mestizo son whose mother he had known in the early years of the Conquest and who was a princess of Cuzco: ‘I declare that in the time of my youth I had a natural son Don Juan Serra de Leguizamón, now deceased, whose mother was Doña Beatriz Manco Cápac, youngest daughter of Huayna Cápac, once king of these realms, and that I provided for his marriage and household.25
The few records to survive of the Coya Quispiquipi, who after her baptism was known to the Spaniards as Doña Beatriz Manco Cápac, show her to have been one of the most remarkable if not tragic figures of the conquered Inca dynasty. The only description left of her is by the chronicler Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, who describes her as very beautiful.26 As a young girl she had suffered the loss of her father the Emperor Huayna Cápac, and at the age of nine had witnessed the killings of both her mother, the Coya Rahua Ocllo, and her brother the Emperor Huáscar at the hands of Atahualpa’s warrior chiefs.
She was born in the northern city of Surampalli, capital of the Cañari people (the site of the present-day Ecuadorian city of Cuenca), which her father later named after his panaca of Tumibamba. ‘It is known that she was born in the lodgings at Surampalli,’ recalled the Inca Pastac, ‘and that she is the daughter of Huayna Cápac; for I witnessed her birth, because of which great feasting was ordered, being as she was the daughter of so great a lord and king, the feasting lasting for ten days and ten nights.’27 At her birth, as was the Inca custom, she was given for her guardian and protector one of her father’s most powerful warrior chiefs, the cacique Cariapasa, lord of the Lupaca nation, whose lands lay on the northern and western shores of Lake Titicaca.28
Together with her only surviving full sister, Marca Chimbo, she had been spared by Atahualpa’s general Quisquis because of her youth, and, as the chronicler Juan Díez de Betanzos recorded, because she ‘had known no man’.29 Nothing is known of the role of her guardian Cariapasa during her captivity, and it seems likely that, like so many of her father’s old warrior chiefs, he had sided with Atahualpa’s rebel army. The conquistadore Juan de Pancorbo recalled having first seen the princess ‘a few days after the capture of Cuzco’, when she would have been perhaps only twelve years old.30 The presbyter Sánchez de Olave also mentions having seen her after the fall of the city, remarking that she was one of the women attending her half-brother, the newly crowned Emperor Manco.31
It is more than likely that she only became the conquistadore Mansio Serra de Leguizamón’s lover some two years later, by which time her half-brother Manco was a prisoner of the Spaniards. Possibly it was then that he took her from the emperor’s harem and made her his mistress. Pancorbo also recalled that a short while later the young princess ‘informed her master, in whose house she lived, and who was Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, about the rebellion her brother had planned, and he informed Hernando Pizarro’.32
For almost fourteen months during the siege of Cuzco the princess stayed with her lover in the fortified Inca palace in the city, where the 200 Spaniards and their Indian auxiliaries had barricaded themselves. The subsequent retreat of Manco’s forces into the Andes, and the seizure of Cuzco by the Adelantado Diego de Almagro and his imprisonment of Pizarro’s brothers and supporters, among them the 22-year-old Serra de Leguizamón, left the princess, who was carrying his child, at the mercy of his captors.
Francisco de Illescas, one of Almagro’s prisoners, stated that in July 1537 he was present at the birth of the princess’s son Juan, though it is more than likely that by then Doña Beatriz had been seized as booty by any one of Almagro’s captains.33 The subsequent defeat of Almagro at the Battle of Salinas by Hernando Pizarro brought the release of her son’s father after almost a year of captivity, chained with the other leading Pizarrist prisoners in the subterranean chambers of the Inca fortress of Sacsahuaman. But his release brought her little consolation: it was probably the humiliation he must have felt at her enforced concubinage that led him to abandon her.
The city in which the seventeen-year-old princess was forced to find a home for herself and her young son was entirely in the hands of its conquerors, its great palaces and temples contemptuously converted into their stables and living quarters; here they kept their numerous Indian mistresses, many of them daughters of the caciques of their encomiendas. Not even the former temples in the city were open to Doña Beatriz as a shelter, serving as they did as storehouses or chapels. The next recorded mention of the princess, some years later, was made by the priest Luis Morales in a letter to the Spanish emperor:
There are many princesses, especially in the city of Cuzco, daughters of Huayna Cápac, whom many a fine hidalgo would marry, for some demand them; though for lack of their dowries they refuse to betroth them, especially as all of them previously possessed dowries and much land that was left them by their father. Your Majesty: I beg that you decree they be given dowries and lands so that they may live decently and marry, and so they will be secure to live honestly and in the service of God. And that Pedro de Bustinza, a poor hidalgo and citizen of Cuzco, who has married a daughter of Huayna Cápac, who is called Doña Beatriz, who by the Grace of God has children, and who live in great poverty, be given an encomienda so that they may be able to sustain themselves, and, in so doing, render God great service, and by which much joy will be given to the natives.34
The Basque Pedro de Bustinza was a minor treasury official who had come to Peru in the train of Hernando Pizarro on his return to the colony and who had fought in the defence of Cuzco. The marriage probably took place some two years after the princess’s abandonment by Serra de Leguizamón, and it was probably then that she was baptised and given the Christian name of Doña Beatriz. In response to Morales’ letter the Emperor Charles V granted Doña Beatriz the encomienda of Urcos, lying to the south-east of Cuzco in the ancestral lands of her mother, the Coya Rahua Ocllo, part of which had previously belonged to Hernando Pizarro. The award was to alter dramatically the lives of the couple and of their children, her five-year-old son Juan, and her two younger sons by Bustinza, Pedro and Martín.
The rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro in the years 1544 to 1548 was to bring even greater prosperity to the princess and her husband, who was one of Gonzalo’s most loyal supporters. He was also one of the witnesses upon whom Cuzco’s rebel cabildo initially called to justify the rebellion, testifying in a petition to the Crown that Gonzalo’s army had been raised solely to defend the city from attack by the Emperor Manco:
It is known to me that Manco Inca, natural lord of these realms, has rebelled against His Majesty and that he has publicly declared that he intends to bring his warriors to this city of Cuzco and to seize it. I know of this because I am married with a lady who is a daughter of Huayna Cápac, once natural lord of these realms and sister of Manco Inca, and that since the day Gonzalo Pizarro and his men left the city, which is a month, more or less, each single day, my wife, who is greatly frightened,
has implored me that we leave the city with our belongings, for she fears that Manco Inca will come here with many of his warriors and take her prisoner, and kill every single Spaniard … and through another messenger sent by a sister of my wife, she has learnt that the Inca has stated that he is not angry with her: for she is his sister whom he most loves … but still she wishes to flee the city … for there are few of us left here and no more than 20 horses.35
Another witness stated that ‘Manco Inca has sworn by the sun and by the moon, and by the earth, that within a few days he will stand in the main square of Cuzco, and that his sisters, who are in this city and married to Spaniards, have also informed me of this, and they have each begged me to implore their husbands to leave the city for Arequipa, for if the Inca finds them he will kill them, for they had once been his women.’36 However, Manco was never to besiege Cuzco again. Whatever the differences Doña Beatriz may have had with her half-brother, she demonstrated her love for him by looking after two of his daughters, the Princesses Usezino and Ancaica, whom he had left behind in Cuzco after fleeing the city eight years previously.37
Gonzalo’s rebellion was not only to bring Huayna Cápac’s daughter financial security and prestige but also notoriety. It is the chronicler Gutiérrez de Santa Clara who records that at the time Alonso de Toro, Gonzalo’s notorious and feared henchman, was governor of Cuzco, she became Toro’s mistress. Bustinza was in no position to object, possibly fearing for his life. The bizarre situation was even further complicated when Toro captured Serra de Leguizamón in the Cuntisuyo and had him tortured and imprisoned in Cuzco, threatening to kill him. It was a spectacle the princess may well have relished in revenge for her abandonment, but it is more than likely she saved her former lover’s life for the sake of their son, persuading Toro not to behead him as he had intended. Gutiérrez de Santa Clara records that, at the time, Alonso de Toro was in fact married to a young Spanish woman, whose parents also lived in his mansion in Cuzco:
This Alonso de Toro gave his wife a terrible life even though he had only been married for one year, not for any fault of hers, but because of an Indian woman, whom he kept in his house as his concubine, and who was called in her language Cápac, and in Spanish Beatriz. This Indian was from the great province of Cuzco and one of the leading women of the land, called palla or coya, which means a great lady, and who was descended from the Incas, and whom he loved greatly, and with whom he had lived for some time before he had married … and many times he told his wife he would rather see her dead … and on many occasions his mother-in-law intervened on behalf of her daughter.38
The chronicler records that after a while Toro’s father-in-law attempted to throw Doña Beatriz out of the mansion, and this so incensed Toro that he struck the old man several times, and that as a result his father-in-law in desperation struck him down with a dagger, killing him. He adds that Doña Beatriz fled the city and that she was held as ‘a great witch’.
Whether the princess was an adept at witchcraft or not will never be known, but shortly afterwards she is recorded as once more living with Bustinza, who after Gonzalo’s victory at the Battle of Huarina was appointed by him Mayor of Cuzco. Bustinza’s fate was no less bloody. Betrayed by the princess’s cousin Cayo Inca and captured by loyalists while raising Indian auxiliaries from her lands, he was taken to the President Pedro de la Gasca’s encampment at Jauja, where he was garrotted.
Now twenty-seven and a widow with three sons, Doña Beatriz’s future, like that of so many other wives and mistresses of the Gonzalist rebels, depended on the outcome of the ensuing Battle of Jaquijahuana. The news of Gonzalo’s beheading was brought to her at Cuzco. She awaited her fate with a mixture of patience and defiance, as her nephew Garcilaso de la Vega recorded:
The wife of Pedro de Bustinza, who was a daughter of Huayna Cápac, and whose Indians of her encomienda had belonged to her and not to her husband, the governors gave in marriage to a fine soldier of good character called Diego Hernández, who it was said – more from malice than truth – in his youth had been a tailor. And when this was known to the princess she refused to marry him, saying that it was not right that a daughter of Huayna Cápac should be married to a tailor; and though the Bishop of Cuzco begged her to reconsider and the Captain Centeno and other personages tried to persuade her, none were able to do so. It was then they called upon Don Cristóbal Paullu, her brother, who on visiting her, took her aside to a corner of a room, and told her that it was not in their interest that she refuse the marriage, for it would only bring hardship to the royal family and the Spaniards would regard them as their enemies and never more offer them their friendship. She then agreed to accept her brother’s command, though not in very good faith, and thus she went before the Bishop and the altar. And being asked by an interpreter if she would accept to be the wife of the soldier, she replied in her language: ‘ichach munani, íchach manamuni’, which means, ‘perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t’. And so was concluded the betrothal, which was celebrated in the house of Diego de los Ríos, encomendero of Cuzco.39
The dowry she brought her husband, an elderly soldier of fortune and native of Talavera, who was probably twice her age, was substantial for an Indian. Other than her mansion at Cuzco, which had previously belonged to the conquistadore and Gonzalist rebel Vasco de Guevara and was situated behind that of Garcilaso de la Vega’s father, her encomienda of Urcos had an annual tribute of some four hundred male Indians and their families. She also possessed substantial holdings in the region of Cuzco, including several mills, estates and coca plantations.40 The Indian Mazma recalled: ‘I have seen the Indians of all the regions and nations show her their obedience and respect as daughter of the lord and king.’41
The total Andean population in the cordillera by then consisted of probably no more than 2 million Indians and some 8,000 colonists; 346 of the latter were encomenderos, but only four encomiendas were held by members of the Inca royal house.42 The plight of the colony’s bondaged tribesmen had remained unchanged since the early years of the Conquest, though their numbers had been drastically reduced by recurring outbreaks of smallpox and the harshness of their servitude as auxiliaries for the warring conquistadores, and in the mining of silver, as the encomendero Antonio de Ribera recorded in a report to the Council of the Indies:
It has been some fifteen years since the Marqués Don Francisco Pizarro ordered the counting of Indians of the encomiendas of the conquistadores, and which numbered one million and five hundred and fifty thousand Indians. And when Pedro de la Gasca was to make a similar inquiry in order to access the number of Indians to allocate and placate the complaints of the caciques who said they had not enough Indians to produce their tribute, it was discovered that in all the land there were no more than two hundred and forty three thousand Indians, as recorded by the testimonies that were made to the inspectors, I being one of them.43
The Inca lords, though not in bondage, were dispossessed of their lands and wealth. Over the years they had been forced to make a living as virtual servants to the settlers with only a few exceptions, chiefly the immediate members of the royal family, among them the Inca Paullu who was to die a year after Gasca’s victory at Jaquijahuana. Proud of his allegiance to his people’s conquerors, he was buried in all the finery of a Castilian hidalgo in the small chapel he had built adjoining his palace, leaving as the heir to his encomienda his twelve-year-old son Don Carlos Inca. The leadership of the royal house at Cuzco was assumed by Doña Beatriz, following also the death of her sister, Doña Juana. ‘In Cuzco where she resided,’ the chronicler Diego Fernández recorded, ‘there was no lord, male or female, greater than she.’44
The small court over which she presided at her mansion in Cuzco would have been Indian in appearance and custom, for neither she nor any of her close relatives ever learnt to speak Castilian. The Indian chronicler Poma de Ayala, in a series of pen-and-ink drawings, at the turn of the century portrayed the coyas and princesses dressed in full-length embroidered capes, adorned at
the neck with gold pendants, costumes also depicted in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonial paintings. Like other encomenderos, by then restricted by the Crown to residing in the cities from which their encomiendas were held, she would nevertheless have been obliged from time to time to make a tour of her lands and tributary Indians, travelling in a litter and accompanied on horseback by her husband Diego Hernández and her sons and yanacona servants. The administration of her encomienda would have been in the hands of Spanish stewards, landless colonists in general renowned for their cruelty and blatant dishonesty as foremen. In later years most were replaced by mestizos, although these were equally despised by the Indians of the encomiendas. The stewards were responsible for gathering the tribute and supervising the agricultural produce of the caciques which twice yearly – on the Feast of San Juan (24 June) and at Christmas – would be brought to the city of the encomienda’s jurisdiction for sale in its markets. Produce included coca, maize and potatoes, clothing and livestock (llamas, alpacas and vicuñas), together with whatever gold or silver had been mined in the tributary lands.
The princess’s marriage to an almost unknown conscript of Gasca’s army was indicative of the general reluctance of the more prominent conquistadores or Spaniards of hidalgo rank to marry Indians. Hernández, whom the chronicler Gutiérrez de Santa Clara records as having accompanied Carbajal as his tailor in the campaign of the Charcas, was possibly illiterate and of a very humble background. His marriage, which was authorised by Gasca, confirms that he played a more significant role in the civil war, and he may well have been one of the loyalist informers in the rebel encampment; for at Jaquijahuana he is not listed among the captains or principal commanders.
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