For a considerable time prior to entering the monastery, the emperor had stayed as a guest in the vicinity, at Jarandilla, the fortified castle home of the count of Oropesa, one of whose servants had been the father of Pizarro’s missionary friar at Cajamarca, the Dominican Vicente de Valverde.
Two years later the most powerful monarch Europe had ever seen was dead, achieving in his lifetime the maintenance of his vast empire inherited from his Burgundian and Habsburg father and his Castilian grandmother, Queen Isabella, who had bestowed on him Spain’s colonies of the New World. Among those attending the emperor at his deathbed were the count of Oropesa and his younger brother, Don Francisco de Toledo, who ten years later King Philip II would appoint Viceroy of Peru. It would be he, more than anyone, who would bring to fruition Pizarro’s legacy: laying the administrative and social foundations that would remain virtually unchanged until the nineteenth century War of Independence, and the agrarian reforms in Peru and Bolivia almost a hundred years later.
His governorship of New Castile would also mark the end of the Inca dynasty, relegating its descendants to little more than caciques of their former subject tribes or to the obscurity of an Andean peasantry, some of whose descendants can be seen to this day taking their herds of llamas and produce into Cuzco’s great central square, where their last sovereign was killed at the hands of Toledo.
At the time of Don Francisco de Toledo’s arrival at Lima in 1571, the Emperor Charles V had been dead for thirteen years; Cervantes was twenty-four years old, and the young Cretan painter Domenico Theotocopoulos, known as El Greco, the Greek, had as yet to reach Spain from Italy; neither had the great monastery palace of the Escorial been completed, being already eight years under construction.
Toledo, a celibate, was aged fifty-four and a monk of the Military Order of Alcántara. He proved to be one of the foremost colonial administrators of the Indies, and in turn possibly the most ruthless in his treatment of the remnants of the Inca royal family, initiating a genocide that would see their descendants exiled or die from sheer poverty. His purpose was the reform of the colony’s bureaucracy which had suffered from the nepotism and scandals of his predecessors as viceroy, the marqués of Cañete and the count of Nieva, both of whom had died at Lima: the former as a result of a stroke after being refused an extension to his governorship, and the latter from a head wound after falling from the balcony of his mistress’s mansion.
The reforms Toledo implemented in the twelve years of his governorship affected not only the administration of the colony, but the reorganisation of its Indian labour. Two other factors that left a lasting influence on the colony were his establishment of the Inquisition at Lima, and the arrival of the Jesuit Order, which was to dominate the future intellectual life of Peru, and which would be responsible for much of the rare humanity shown the Andean people in their evangelisation.
The colony Toledo had come to govern was a land still virtually unexplored, varying in climate and terrain, from its mountain enclave of Cuzco to its eastern forests of the Antisuyo, to as far south as the Bolivian altiplano and the pampas of Argentina, whose city of Mendoza had been colonised by settlers from Chile, bringing with them the vines that would later found the great vineyards in the foothills of the Andes. In the sub-tropical valleys vast crops of coca were produced, together with fruit and tobacco – known in Spain as the ‘Holy Plant’ because of its reputed medicinal properties. In the great plains and on mountain terraces maize and potatoes, then unknown in Europe, were grown. From the rivers, lakes and Pacific coast, all types of fish were also brought into the markets at Cuzco and other settlements. Though llama meat, guinea pig and maize were the staple diet of the early settlers, within twenty years of the Conquest almost every European crop, livestock and working animal had been imported into Peru. It was a wealth that would transform the encomiendas into farmland and their Spanish masters into landed and mostly absentee aristocrats.
From the earliest days of the Conquest African slaves from the Isthmus had formed part of the colony’s labour force, mainly in the sub-tropical valleys of the Andes and coastal regions of Lima, Guayaquil and Cartagena. Their ownership was widespread, and many were purchased solely for domestic service. Nor was their ownership confined to encomenderos, for it was also common among merchants and the religious Orders. A number of freed Negroes are recorded as having later found employment as blacksmiths, tailors and carpenters in Lima and Cuzco. The social structure of Peru, like that of the other colonies of the Indies, had been inherited from Spain, and varied only in the pre-eminence accorded its conquistadores and encomenderos. In every walk of life the language and culture of its settlers were central to the maintenance of its conquest, influencing many of its surviving Inca lords and caciques to imitate their conquerors in dress and customs. Since few Indians learned to speak Castilian, they became dependent on their interpreters in matters of law, which only led to their exploitation. Education was virtually restricted to creoles and mestizos and was the responsibility of the religious Orders, as in the case of the Dominican foundation of the University of San Marcos at Lima in 1551.
The Dominicans, who had dominated the colony’s religious life since the earliest days of the Conquest, saw their influence further enhanced by the establishment of the Inquisition. At the first auto-da-fé at Lima in the winter of 1573, among the Holy Office’s victims was the incongruous-sounding Frenchman Mateo Salade.3 Eight years later the English corsairs John Oxenham, Thomas Gerard and the Irishman John Butler were paraded as penitent heretics in the same square.4 Three future saints of the Catholic Church would make their ministry at Lima: the Spaniard Toribio de Mogrovejo, a former professor of law at the University of Salamanca, was appointed Archbishop of Lima in 1580; Martín de Porres, the son of an hidalgo and a freed Negress, born at Lima in 1579; and the creole Isabel de Flores, who would be known as Santa Rosa de Lima and who had also been born in the viceregal capital, in 1586.
The development of the colony had also seen its wealth become increasingly dependent on its mining industry: its silver mines discovered in the Bolivian region of the Charcas had attracted many new immigrants to its mining settlement and city of Potosí. In the chronicles of the Indies the city symbolised the untold wealth of the New World; so significant was it that even the great sixteenth-century Jesuit explorer Mateo Ricci illustrated it in his map of the world commissioned by the emperors of China.
Potosí’s fame derived from a mountain lying in the foothills of the Andes known as the Cerro Rico, the rich mountain, because of the abundance of its silver. It was discovered in 1545 at the time of Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion by a yanacona named Hualpa, the son of a cacique from the Cuzco region, who would end his days in bondage to a succession of Spanish overseers.
In 1572, by the time of the viceroy Toledo’s visit to the city founded at the foot of the mountain, its inhabitants were to number some one hundred and twenty thousand Spaniards, Indians and mestizos – by far the largest population of any city in the Americas and greater than most of the capitals of Europe. The Emperor Charles V had awarded the city the title of ‘Imperial’ and his own coat of arms; his son Philip II later added to the royal arms the motto: ‘For the powerful emperor, for the wise king, this lofty mountain of silver will conquer the world.’
Men and women from every region of Spain crossed the cordillera in search of Potosí’s windswept and desolate location. Some eighty churches were built in the city. Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, who had failed to secure an appointment as corregidor of the neighbouring city of La Paz, described Potosí as ‘a sanctuary for bandits, a safeguard for assassins, a cloak and mask for card sharpers, the aspiration of courtesans, the common disappointment of many, and the special remedy of a few’.5 By the end of the century it possessed thirty-six gambling houses, where some eight hundred professional gamblers and prostitutes plied their trade. The chronicler Bartolomé Arzáns de Orúa y Vela, who recorded Potosí’s celebrations to mark the feast of Corpus
Christi, described how its Spanish miners would lavish their new-found wealth on ‘fountains spouting the finest European wines, the men with chains of gold around their necks, and their dark-skinned mestizo women wearing slippers tied with strings of silk and pearls, their hair adorned with rubies and precious stones’. And as a final demonstration of their allegiance to their Christian faith ‘they would cover the streets with bars of solid silver, from one end to another’.6
Goods of every type were to be found in Potosí’s markets: ‘embroidery of silk, gold and silver from France, tapestries and mirrors from Flanders, religious paintings from Rome, crystal and glass from Venice, vanilla and cocoa from the Caribbean islands and pearls from Panama’.7 Portuguese traders also plied their wares – illicit merchandise transported across the selvas and cordillera of the Andes from their port at Rio de Janeiro. There they named the beaches in honour of Potosí’s Virgin of Copacabana, whose reliquary was situated on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, her gilded Indian features almost hidden by the jewelled offerings of her penitents, who came in their thousands to offer thanks or beg her for good fortune. Describing another of Potosí’s religious festivals the chronicler Arzáns wrote that the city’s nobility, numbering thirty counts of Castile, ‘were to form themselves into bands of men and women, wearing their costumes, with jewels and plumes and waving flags, and just to wrench these flags from one another they knifed and killed each other, leaving more than a hundred dead, men and women’. The Sevillian Domingo de Santo Tomás, the future bishop of its province of Las Charcas, was to refer to Potosí’s great mountain in his interview with the Council of the Indies as ‘a mouth of hell consuming thousands of innocent Indians’.8
The viceroy Toledo assigned 95,000 Indians to the Cerro Rico’s mines to labour as mitimae, working for one year, from sunset to sunrise. For every ten Indians only seven were to survive in what became a rabbit warren of human suffering, consoled solely by their addiction to coca, their labour leaving the young miners with the broken and haggard features of old men. Their addiction to coca also established an industry for the narcotic’s transportation and sale from the Andean sub-tropical valleys of the Yungas, near the city of La Paz which acted as a staging post for the mines, and from the rich harvests of the Cuzco region.
By lamplight and working with pickaxes, day and night, at any one time some four and a half thousand Indians mined the silver which was then taken by mule pack and llamas to the city’s Casa de la Moneda for minting. In a room with a stone floor and cedar wood beams, mules pulled the giant wheels that stretched the stream of molten metal through cylinders into bars and coins, one fifth of which was put aside for the Crown and transported to the Pacific harbour of Arica. The treasure was then taken by small barques to Lima’s port of Callao, from where it was transported on caravels that would sail the fifteen days to Panama. There it was again carried by hundreds of mules, this time across the Isthmus to the Atlantic port of Nombre de Dios, from where the galleons sailed to Havana to await the treasure fleets from Mexico, before finally crossing the Atlantic to the Andalucian port of San Lúcar de Barrameda.
By the end of the eighteenth century the great mountain was exhausted of its silver: its city and convents, where nuns had once prayed for the souls of their governors, left barren and deserted, its churches and palaces carved with lotus flowers, devils and mermaids, emblems of the moon and of the sun, of winged angels and sad-eyed Indian Madonnas, the sole remnants of its former glory.
Fourteen months after his arrival at Lima the viceroy Toledo left his capital on a tour of inspection of his colony that would last for almost five years. After a sojourn at Huamanga, the present-day city of Ayacucho, he travelled south to Cuzco where he was met on the outskirts of the city by a delegation of its officials, among them the city’s six surviving conquistadores: Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, Diego de Trujillo, Alonso de Mesa, Pedro Alonso Carrasco, Hernando de Solano and Juan de Pancorbo, who made him a gift of a roan stallion, its leather saddle trimmed in gold. The reception given him was as lavish as the city had accorded Gonzalo Pizarro almost a quarter of a century previously, after his victory at Huarina. Lodged in the mansion of Juan de Pancorbo, and then in that of the encomendero Diego de Silva, Toledo watched the processions of Spaniards and Inca nobles that passed his balcony to honour him. For several days he was fêted with cane and bull fights arranged by the encomenderos, in which several of Pizarro’s elderly conquistadores took part.
The festivities and honours shown him would, however, do little to deter him from his planned reforms of the city’s cabildo and its ruling hierarchy of encomenderos. Within the week he ordered its aldermen to elect a landless soldier as one of its mayors. Though the cabildo’s members had agreed among themselves to vote against the election, they eventually succumbed to Toledo’s command once he ordered his personal guard to enter their chamber and threaten them with exile to Chile. His action was repeated throughout the colony, and brought to an end the political monopoly and judicial power the encomenderos had enjoyed in the cities and regions of their landholdings. Like the priest-governor Pedro de la Gasca, Toledo earned both the antagonism as well as the grudging respect of the colony’s grandees, conscious of their inability to manipulate a government they had always held as an extension of their own privileged status. From ordering the acquisition of new premises for Cuzco’s jail, to the widening of its central square, his reforms were greeted with approval by the city’s settlers. Toledo also demanded funds from the city’s cabildo for the rebuilding of Cuzco’s cathedral which he ordered should take six years to complete, but which in effect took eighty-two years, and is regarded by the art historian Harold Wethey as ‘the finest church of the western hemisphere’.9 His nomination of Juan Polo de Ondegardo, a former governor of La Plata, as Cuzco’s governor was also characteristic of the appointments he made, of men who were lawyers by profession yet who were also experienced administrators, and of an intellectual calibre almost unknown among their predecessors.
Another jurist who had accompanied Polo de Ondegardo to Cuzco was Juan de Matienzo, who for many years had also resided at La Plata, where he had been a member of its audiencia which had been established in 1559. Three other figures to have an equal influence on Toledo’s understanding of the history and culture of his colony were the cartographer and explorer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, the Jesuit José de Acosta, whom he would later meet at La Plata, and the Andalucian curate priest of Cuzco, Cristóbal de Molina. Acosta, who had been born into a converso family in Medina del Campo, was a theologian and naturalist who arrived in Peru in the wake of the first Jesuit mission in 1572, where he would spend fourteen years before eventually returning to Spain after visiting Mexico in 1586. Four years later he published Historia Moral y Natural de las Indias, regarded as one of the greatest naturalist accounts of the New World. He died at Salamanca in 1600.
Toledo’s interest in Inca history was in part influenced by his desire to justify Spain’s conquest, by proving that its dynasty was not the natural lords of its empire, which they had won and governed by force of arms: a premise he saw as a means of countering the condemnation levelled against Spain’s right of conquest. In his efforts to gather as much information as possible he commissioned the conquistadore Diego de Trujillo to dictate his memoir of the Conquest, and also Pedro Pizarro who resided at Arequipa.
However, it was the history he requested Sarmiento de Gamboa to compile that came to be regarded by modern scholars as possibly the most authoritative account of pre-Colombian Inca history. A native of Galicia, who four years previously had been the cartographer and commander of a naval expedition that had discovered the Solomon Islands of the western Pacific, Sarmiento de Gamboa had formerly lived in Mexico where he had been imprisoned for a brief period by the Inquisition on a charge of necromancy – a charge he would later face again after his arrival in Lima. Ignoring the charges, Toledo, who recognised his ability and scholarship, invited him to accompany him on his tour of inspection. The
history he commissioned him to write in Cuzco, and which was sent to King Philip II as part of the report he had prepared, was discovered by a German scholar in the library of Göttingen University in 1892.
Much of Sarmiento de Gamboa’s information was based on a series of inquiries conducted by Toledo at Cuzco and in the Yucay valley, and on the evidence of thirty-seven Inca lords of the city. His manuscript, accompanied by a series of cloth paintings of Inca genealogies also in his own hand, was read to the conquistadores Alonso de Mesa, Juan de Pancorbo, Pedro Alonso Carrasco and Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, who submitted a brief outline of their own understanding of the Inca dynasty.10 The conquistadores also added their names to a lengthy statement written by Cuzco’s governor Polo de Ondegardo, in which the practice of human sacrifice by the Incas is recorded, but which from its general tone sounds to have had more to do with its principal author’s desire to substantiate Toledo’s premise.11
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s varied life later saw him serving in the colony’s flotilla of ships in pursuit of Sir Francis Drake after his raid on the port of Callao, and later as governor of the settlement at the Straits of Magellan. On his return to Spain his ship was captured by English corsairs and he was taken prisoner to London where he was granted an audience with Queen Elizabeth I, with whom he recorded he conversed in Latin, and who, at the instigation of Sir Walter Raleigh, ordered his release. A great deal of the knowledge Raleigh acquired about Peru he obtained from Sarmiento de Gamboa, knowledge that would influence his search for the legendary kingdom of El Dorado and his exploration of Guyana, the name of which was a misspelling of the Emperor Huayna Cápac’s name.
The lost city which Raleigh searched for in vain may well have been the Emperor Manco’s fortress town of Vilcabamba; Sarmiento de Gamboa may somewhat maliciously have led him to believe that it was the fabled refuge of one of the Inca emperor’s sons. But it was not in the region of Guyana as de Gamboa well knew, but near Cuzco, for he himself had visited it during Toledo’s subsequent campaign in the area – and he knew too that it possessed no gold except what the Spaniards had captured. Other than a record of his appointment to a command of an escort of the Indies treasure fleet, nothing more is known of Sarmiento de Gamboa’s life, nor of the year or place of his death.
Pizarro Page 29