The racist attitudes of the colonists were even more apparent with regard to the mestizos. The princess’s eldest son Juan had been born in Cuzco in 1536 and had been raised by her, together with her two other sons from her marriage to Bustinza. Though recognised by his father Serra de Leguizamón, he would never be legitimised by him. It was a fate he shared with his cousin and childhood companion Garcilaso de la Vega, both of whom by blood were Inca princes and in turn hidalgos in Spain – a racial and social ambiguity which would constrain them all their lives. ‘The children of Spaniards and Indians are called mestizos,’ Garcilaso wrote in his old age, ‘which is to say we are of mixed race, and is a term invented by the early Spaniards who had children by Indians; and as it was a name given us by our fathers I was proud to call myself as such … though now in the Indies it is regarded as a term of inferiority.’45
Pedro de Cieza de León recorded that he knew of encomenderos who had fathered some fifteen children by Indian women. As mestizos the princess’s children were deprived of the legal rights of even the humblest colonist, based on the premise that their divided loyalty represented a potential political threat, a situation reflected in a decree issued at Valladolid in 1549 by the emperor which prohibited mestizos from holding public office, and also denied them the right to inherit their father’s encomiendas or carry arms. Their exclusion from the wealth of the colony would also be apparent in its social hierarchy and racism – a prejudice from which Garcilaso suffered at the hands of his father’s Spanish wife, who reduced his Inca mother to the role of virtual servant before she eventually married an obscure immigrant.
There is, however, little evidence in the various testimonials of the conquistadores to suggest that they regarded their mestizo children with anything other than affection, as is evident in the will of Alonso de Mesa, all of whose children were mestizos. Though maintaining their Spanish identity, the surviving veterans of Cajamarca after years of cohabitating with their Indian women were themselves by then as Indian as their mestizo children, speaking with fluency both quéchua and aimára, the principal languages of their tributary vassals, and participating in many of the native customs.
Judging by the various petitions made to the Crown by the mestizos and their Inca relatives it would be the conquistadores, rather than the colony’s missionaries or officials, who would testify on their behalf. On two occasions Serra de Leguizamón testified in petitions to King Philip II. ‘I know and well understand,’ he declared in one of the petitions on behalf of Doña Beatriz’s niece María, one of the Emperor Manco’s daughters, ‘that the royal person of the King Don Felipe, our lord, is a Christian king and prince … and the merits of the said Manco Inca at the time of the conquest are known to this witness when we made much of this realm’s discovery … and being, as I am, informed of the poverty of his daughter Doña María Coya who has not sufficient income to sustain her … I ask you grant her your benevolence, as it is something she deserves and in which Your Majesty will be well served.’46 On behalf of Atahualpa’s two sons, Francisco and Diego, he declared that should the king award them an encomienda with which to support themselves, ‘it would be a just and saintly thing’.47
Other than her three sons the princess’s immediate family consisted of two daughters of her half-brother Manco, Usezino and Ancacica, whom she had sheltered and brought up as her own children after his flight from Cuzco. The conquistadore Francisco de Illescas, a frequent visitor to her mansion, recalled that apart from the two young princesses various other relatives of hers were also lodged there.
In October 1555 when the Emperor Charles V announced his abdication in the great hall of the palace at Brussels, bestowing the crown of Spain and of the Indies on his son Philip II, the Princess Doña Beatriz was thirty-five years old. One of the last decrees the emperor had signed before travelling to his self-imposed exile in Extremadura had authorised the appointment of a viceroy for his Peruvian territories. At the time of the marqués of Cañete’s arrival at Lima, in 1556, bringing with him one of the largest retinues of officials and attendants ever seen, the only nominal resistance that existed to Spain’s sovereignty of her colony was in the Andean region of Vilcabamba – by then virtually an independent Inca kingdom. Since the Emperor Manco’s death, his 23-year-old son Sayri Túpac had ruled the remnants of his army of warriors from his fortified mountain enclave, and had repeatedly refused to negotiate a peace settlement with the Spaniards. The presence of his warriors in the vicinity of Cuzco had led to a number of attacks on travellers on the roads from the city to Lima.
One of Cañete’s first acts was to write to Doña Beatriz asking her help to persuade her nephew Sayri Túpac to receive his envoys. The delegation that subsequently left Cuzco for Vilcabamba, and which also included the princess’s husband Diego Hernández, the chronicler Betanzos and two Dominican friars, was led by her 21-year-old son Juan Serra de Leguizamón, as two of Sayri Túpac’s warriors record:
… as I was at the time with Sayri Túpac Inca in the Andes [Vilcabamba] and at war, I saw the Friar Melchor [de los Reyes] and another friar companion of his, and also Juan de Betanzos, and that they went to where the Inca was, but he did not wish Betanzos or any other person enter where he was, and so the friars went ahead alone, and Betanzos returned [to Cuzco] – Chasca, Indian.
As warrior in the service of the Inca Sayri Túpac, in his company I saw Juan Serra enter, as he was his first cousin the Inca received him well, and also out of respect to his mother Doña Beatriz Yupanqui, his aunt. And also entered there the Friar Melchor. And I heard Juan Serra say to Sayri Túpac that if he left the viceroy the marqués of Cañete would give him many Indians and houses for his people and many clothes and other goods, so that he would be content; and all this Juan Serra told him many times and in my presence, and I also heard him say the same to his warrior chiefs. I further witnessed Juan Serra take part in the treaty and discussions with Sayri Túpac, and the Inca sent him him twice to the lord marqués about his leaving, and Juan Serra came two times to see the Inca, bringing with him payment and presents – Inca Paucar Yupanqui.48
Though in his history the chronicler Betanzos claimed the credit for the negotiations with Sayri Túpac, in fact he had been turned away by his captains, as Juan Serra de Leguizamón’s testimonial shows. In October 1557, leaving behind his younger full-blooded brother Túpac Amaru and his half-brother Titu Cusi Yupanqui to guard his mountain realm, the Inca finally began his progress from Vilcabamba accompanied by his daughter and young sister-wife Cusi Huarcay (Doña María) and several hundred of his warriors. The caravan of litters that would take him and his family to the valley of Andahuaylas was escorted by his cousin on horseback and by Hernández. Ordering his cousin Juan to ride ahead to Lima to inform the Viceroy of his arrival, in January 1558 Sayri Túpac entered the capital of the viceroyalty, at whose gates he was met by the cabildo of the city. Cañete received him with honour as an equal, seating him by his side in the audience chamber of his palace.
Garcilaso de la Vega recorded that on the night of a banquet given by the Archbishop of Lima, in which Sayri Túpac was presented with the documents awarding him a pardon and the grant of his encomiendas of Indians, he had observed in quéchua that he had traded what had once been the empire of Tahuantinsuyo for the equivalent of a thread of the cloth that covered the dining table. The encomiendas awarded him and his descendants in perpetuity included much of the Yucay valley, which had once formed part of the lands of his grandfather the Emperor Huayna Cápac’s panaca of Tumibamba, and which Pizarro had appropriated for himself.
Sayrí Túpac’s transformation into a Castilian encomendero would be completed on his later arrival in the ancient capital of his ancestors with his baptism and Christian marriage to his sister, for which a special dispensation from Rome would eventually be secured by King Philip II. Conveyed in a litter in accordance with Inca custom, he made a tour of the little that by then remained of the monuments of the city in the company of his cousin, to whom, the
conquistadore Juan de Pancorbo recalled, ‘he showed great love’.49 Thousands of his subjects from across the former Inca empire made pilgrimages to the city to do him homage during his stay at his aunt Doña Beatriz’s mansion. Among the relatives who came to render him homage was the nineteen-year-old Garcilaso de la Vega. Before his departure to his encomienda in the Yucay he gave his cousin Juan sole legal right to administer his lands and wealth, and also dictated a will, witnessed by Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and Diego Hernández, in which he left Juan 1,000 pesos of gold in gratitude ‘for the work he has done for me and for his service to me’.50 The heir to his considerable fortune he named as his only child and daughter who had been baptised with him, and who had been christened Doña Beatriz Clara in honour of his aunt.
Some time after the Inca’s departure from Cuzco, Doña Beatriz was once more faced with the harrowing experience of witnessing the mummy of her father displayed for private viewing in the mansion of the city’s governor Juan Polo de Ondegardo. It was an event he proudly recorded several years later:
… being at the time in charge of the government of these provinces, some twelve or thirteen years ago, with much diligence and through various sources, I was able to discover the said bodies … some of them so well embalmed and so well maintained as at the time of their deaths; and four of them, which were those of Huayna Cápac and Amaru Topa Inca and Pachacuti Inca, and that of the mother of Huayna Cápac, who was called Mama Ocllo, and the others, I discovered in bronze cages that had been secretly buried; and also among them I discovered the ashes of Túpac Inca Yupanqui in a small earthen jar, wrapped in rich cloth and with his insignia; for it was this mummy, I had heard, Juan Pizarro burnt, believing that treasure had been buried with it.51
Though the governor Vaca de Castro at one time had the mummies in his possession, and shamelessly charged Indians to view them, nothing is known of what became of them till Ondegardo’s announcement of their discovery. It seems more than likely that their location had been revealed to him by the Inca Sayri Túpac on the advice of the Dominican Melchor de los Reyes, who had instructed him in his conversion to Christianity. Whatever the truth of the matter, they remained in near perfect condition in Ondegardo’s mansion until their removal to Lima on the instructions of Cañete, where they would eventually be buried in the grounds of the city’s hospital of San Andrés. With silent resignation the princess accepted the sacrilege. Her only consolation was the reward Cañete gave her for her collaboration, of the encomienda of Juliaca, on the northern shores of Lake Titicaca, the lands of which had formerly belonged to her guardian the cacique Cariapasa.
The role her son Juan had played in the negotiations with the Inca was also rewarded by Cañete, but only with the virtually insignificant encomienda at Písac in the Yucay, valued at less than 400 pesos of silver annually. It was a pitiful recognition of his services, and is clear evidence of the prevalent discrimination against his mestizo origin. All the witnesses to his testimonial record his poverty and dependence on his parents, among them the conquistadore Francisco de Villafuerte, who recalled that he had spent a period in jail at Cuzco for failing to pay a debt of 70 pesos of silver.52 He appears to have led the life of a virtual recluse at his small encomienda, which lay in one of the most beautiful Andean valleys below the Inca mountain ruins that had once been the summer retreat of his grandfather Huayna Cápac.
Till his death at the age of twenty-eight Juan Serra de Leguizamón remained Písac’s encomendero, living on the encomienda with his wife Doña María Ramírez, whom he had married at Lima at the time he had accompanied his cousin the Inca to the viceregal capital. Nothing is known of his bride’s family, nor whether she was Spanish or mestiza. Two children were born of the marriage: Don Juan-Pablo and Doña Bernardina. The small colonial township of Písac, built by Jesuit missionaries and by his son, and whose colourful Sunday market and Inca ruins are today one of the most popular tourist attractions near Cuzco, is all that remains of his legacy.
Shortly after the death of her son, the uncertainty and fears of the princess’s past life once more resurrected themselves in the guise of her elderly and by now corrupt Spanish husband and in the ensuing court case that would arise after his death, presided over by the then mayor of the city, the man she least wished to witness her humiliation (events recorded in a manuscript which the author discovered, together with Doña Beatriz’s will, at the Archivo General de la Nación at Lima).53
Only after the death of her husband did the princess learn that he had mortgaged all her property for the sum of 1,700 pesos of silver. She admitted the fact to the court, making her mark on several documents acknowledging her husband’s action, but claimed she had been deceived by him, and that at his death she had been forced to purchase her own mansion from his heirs, together with various other properties. It was then that the mayor, who was her old seducer Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, addressed her in her own language, telling her that the evidence against her was irrefutable. He had, however, he added, decided to deny any demand to auction her possessions until her appeal to the Crown had been heard.
It was an order, however, that would not prevent her forcible eviction several months later from her mansion on the instructions of Serra de Leguizamón’s successor as mayor, which saw all her worldly goods and possessions taken from her mansion by the city’s bailiffs. Even her appeal to her neighbour the alderman de los Ríos, in whose house she had been married to Hernández so many years before, fell on deaf ears. A royal decree of King Philip II, dated 20 August 1570, reached the Viceroy only after all her belongings had been auctioned off:
Don Felipe, by the Grace of God, king of Castile, León and of the Indies. Be it known to all and sundry that Miguel Ruiz, advocate in the name of Doña Beatriz Manco Cápac, daughter of Huayna Cápac, once lord of these realms of Peru, to whom by royal warrant the encomiendas of Urcos and Juliaca were awarded, in the petition presented to us, stated that she was in dire need of sustenance, and that each day her creditors sold her farmlands and belongings, extracting the revenues from her Indians, and taking possession of her house; and that not only because she is the daughter of Huayna Cápac, but as an encomendera she asks and begs of us our royal decree: that no single individual, under any circumstance, or in lieu of any debt, be entitled to take possession of her house, not of one single slave or slave woman of hers, nor of the revenues of her encomiendas, and that what has been taken from her be repossessed … including whatever clothes and other belongings of hers.54
The royal decree arrived too late. In the year 1571 the Princess Doña Beatriz was dead. Thousands of her people accompanied her wooden coffin to the monastery of Santo Domingo, where she was buried next to her son Juan on the site where the Inca temple of Coricancha had once stood, and where as a child she had been venerated as the daughter of a living god. Her life, possibly more than that of any other woman in the history of Pizarro’s colony, symbolises the vicissitudes of fortune and tragedy, and the ultimate fate that awaited her conquered people.
ELEVEN
The Legacy of Pizarro
I order that my body be buried in the cathedral of this city of Los Reyes in its principal chapel I order be constructed, and that around my tomb be placed eight shields of my coat of arms, sculpted in gold …
Francisco Pizarro’s will
In the summer of 1849, a young Scots laird, researching a history he was planning to write on the last days of the life of the Emperor Charles V, recorded his visit to the monastery of Yuste in northern Extremadura. There, in September 1558, the sovereign of Spain and the Indies died, twenty-nine years after he had awarded Francisco Pizarro at Toledo the right of conquest of the Inca empire:
… in the course of a ride from Madrid to Lisbon, I paid a visit to the Vera of Plasencia. On the evening of the 4th June, halting near the gate of Oropesa to look back over the noble stretch of plain, richly wooded with olive and ilex, which lay behind, and beneath me, I fell into conversation with an aged priest of the town, w
ho sat enjoying the thyme-scented air at the base of a wayside cross. When he learned that I was going to Yuste, he said that he had been a monk there for several years of his life, but that he believed the convent was now in ruins, and scarce worth a visit. Having been lately reading, in the cathedral library of Toledo, the story of the emperor’s retirement, as told in the classic page of Siguença, I endeavoured to ascertain from this ancient Jeronymite, whether the traditions of his convent agreed with the narrative of the historian. The history of his order, however, had formed no part of the good friar’s reading. He knew, he said, that Charles V had taken the monastic vows in the convent of Yuste, but he did not know whether he had performed his own obsequies or not, nor did he recollect that any anecdotes or traditions respecting him existed among the fraternity.
Next day I struck off the great Badajoz road at Navalmoral, and taking a northern direction across the plain, soon entered the oak forest, which extends to the Vera of Plasencia. Here the track became very narrow and indistinct, and the difficulty of keeping it was so much increased by a storm of rain followed by mist, that nothing but the guidance of a friendly woodsman saved me from the inconveniences of a woodland bivouac. At sunset the clouds cleared away, and as the path led through open glades, or over citrus-covered knolls bare for wood, beautiful prospects opened across the Vera to the hills in whose forest-lap Yuste lay nestling unseen.1
It had been on the road to the monastery of Yuste in 1556 that the emperor, who had abdicated his throne in favour of his eldest son King Philip II, was greeted in the Extremaduran village of Palenzuela by the elderly Don Pedro de la Gasca, whom he had rewarded some years previously with the neighbouring bishopric of Plasencia for his great service in Peru. ‘He now waited on his benefactor with a magnificent supply of meat, game, and fruit, sufficient to feast the whole of his train.’2
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