Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  Toledo’s prolonged stay in Cuzco had also decided him on dealing once and for all with the remnants of the Inca rebel dynasty, an intention to which Sarmiento de Gamboa had possibly alluded in his conversations with Raleigh. Though few in number, since the death of the Inca Sayri Túpac the rebel warriors had maintained a defiant independence under the successive rule of his brothers Titu Cusi and Túpac Amaru. The failure of his negotiations led Toledo to order a military campaign against Vilcabamba.

  By April 1572, the largest army ever seen at Cuzco since the defeat of Gonzalo Pizarro was mustered on the outskirts of the city. Its command was given to Martín Hurtado de Arbieto and Juan Alvárez Maldonado. Toledo also appointed as captains his nephew Jerónimo de Figueroa and the captain of his personal guard Martín de Lóyola, a great-nephew of St Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit Order. Each of Cuzco’s encomenderos, in lieu of their feudal obligation to the Crown, was obliged to accompany the expedition with a contingent of their Indians warriors. Several thousand Cañari and Chachapoya Indians were also assembled under their caciques as auxiliaries. Toledo also ordered the conquistadores Alonso de Mesa, Hernando de Solano and Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, who had entered Vilcabamba some forty years previously, to accompany the expedition as advisors. A total of 250 Spaniards in full armour rode out of the city to a fanfare of trumpets and the beating of drums.

  The Inca Prince Túpac Amaru and his small army of warriors abandoned Vilcabamba and attempted to flee to the Amazon, seeking refuge with its Manarí Indians, who were his allies. Eventually, he was captured by his mestizo cousins Juan Balsa and Martín de Bustinza, who had acted as scouts and as captains of the Indian militias. Brought into the presence of Lóyola, together with his women and children, he was bound and taken as his prisoner to the Spanish encampment.

  … leaving a garrison of 50 soldiers we marched to Cuzco with the Inca Túpac Amaru and his chieftains who were prisoners. On reaching the archway of Carmenca, which is the entrance to the city of Cuzco, the commander Juan Alvárez Maldonado, as adjutant, chained Túpac Amaru and his captains together. The Inca was dressed in a mantle and doublet of crimson velvet. His shoes were made of wool of the country, of several colours. The crown or headdress called mascapaicha was on his head with a fringe over his forehead, this being the royal insignia of the Inca … and thus they proceeded in triumph directly to the palace where the Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo then lived. It formed the houses of de Silva y Guzman and Juan de Pancorbo … in line of order the commander marched there in triumph and presented his prisoners to the Viceroy.12

  Several eyewitnesses record that it was Lóyola who led the Inca prince who was chained by the neck, and who struck him brutally because he refused to take his headdress off in obeisance to the Viceroy as they passed his balcony. Imprisoned in what had once been the palace of Paullu Inca, Túpac Amaru awaited his fate as the city’s missionaries attempted to convert him to Christianity.

  At the end of two or three days, after being taught and catechised, Túpac Amaru was baptised. This was done by friars of Our Lady of Merced … the Inca was taken from the fortress through the public streets of the city with a guard of 400 Cañaris armed with lances … he was accompanied by the priests Alonso de Barzana, of the Company of Jesus, and by Father Molina, one on either side of him … they walked along with him, instructing him and saying things to him of much consolation to the soul, until they reached the scaffold, which was erected in the centre of the great square, facing the cathedral …

  The open spaces, roofs, and windows in the parishes of Carmenca and San Cristóbal were so crowded with spectators that if an orange had been thrown down it could not have reached the ground anywhere, so closely were the people packed. As the executioner, who was a Cañari Indian, brought out his knife with which he was to behead the Inca, an extraordinary occurrence took place. The whole crowd of natives raised such a cry of grief that it seemed as if the Day of Judgement had come, and all those of Spanish race did not fail to show their feelings by shedding tears of grief and pain. When the Inca beheld the scene, he only raised his right hand on high and let it fall. With a lordly mind he alone remained calm, and all the noise was followed by a silence so profound that no living soul moved, either among those who were in the square or among those at a distance.

  The Inca then spoke with a self-possession unlike one about to die. He said that now his course was run, and that he merited his death. He besought and charged all present who had children, on no account to curse them for any bad conduct, but only to chastise them. For when he was a child, having angered his mother, she had put a curse on him by saying that he would end by being put to death and would not die a natural death; and it had come about. The priests Carrera and Fernández rebuked him, saying that his fate was the will of God …

  It was then the Bishop of Popayán, the Provincial of the Order of Merced, the Prior of the Order of San Agustín, the Prior of Santo Domingo, the Provincial of San Francisco, the Rector of the Company of Jesus, all went to the Viceroy. They went down on their knees and besought him to show mercy and spare the life of the Inca. They urged he should be sent to Spain to be judged by the king in person. But no prayers could prevail with the Viceroy.

  Juan de Soto, chief officer of the court, was sent on horseback with a pole to clear the way, galloping furiously and riding down all kinds of people. He ordered the Inca’s head to be cut off at once in the name of the Viceroy … the executioner then came forward and, taking the hair in his left hand, he severed the head with a knife at one blow, and held it high for all to see. As the head was severed the bells of the cathedral began to ring, and were followed by those of all the monasteries and parish churches in the city … when the head was cut off it was put on a pole and set up on the same scaffold in the great square … there it became each day more beautiful … and the Indians came by night to worship the head of their Inca …13

  The Inca Túpac Amaru was twenty-eight years old. As he had walked to meet his death through the streets of Cuzco a Spaniard recalled that his sister the Princess Doña María, who was witnessing the spectacle from the window of a house, cried out to him: ‘Where are they taking you, my brother, prince and sole king of Tahuantinsuyo?’14 A Mercedarian friar recalled that several nights after the execution Mansio Serra de Leguizamón’s grandson, Juan-Pablo, having woken at dawn, gazed out from his bedroom window and witnessed the thousands of Indians kneeling as they worshipped the bloodied features of his cousin. It was a macabre and humiliating end to a dynasty which had attempted to maintain the remnants of its sovereignty.15

  In 1581 Francisco de Toledo sailed from Lima’s port of Callao for Spain. He was sixty-six years old. In the ten years of his government he had succeeded in setting in train a rigid and far-reaching policy that would be implemented for several generations, stemming the power of the encomenderos, and placing a great number of the colony’s Indians in reservations, and awarding them legal rights.

  His subsequent attempt after the execution of Túpac Amaru to eradicate the Inca royal family by exile and imprisonment was impeded by King Philip II, who had little sympathy for his methods and the cruelty he demonstrated. The king had been well informed of the opposition to Toledo’s action and of the problems it had created among an already volatile and oppressed Indian populace, whose daily genocide was witnessed at Potosí. At his arrival at Lisbon, where Philip had temporarily based his government after his annexation of Portugal to the Castilian Crown, Toledo was met with indifference by his royal master, who refused him the mastership of the Order of Alcántara as a reward for a governorship that had marked the end of Peru’s rebellions, and which had in effect consolidated Pizarro’s Conquest and legacy.

  Six years after the killing of the Inca Túpac Amaru at Cuzco, Hernando Pizarro, the nemesis of most of Pizarro’s problems during the Conquest and of his murder, died in their native town of Trujillo in Extremadura. For eighteen years he had been held captive in the castle of La Mota at Medina del Campo for ins
tigating the execution of Diego de Almagro. Almost blind and grotesque looking, as his portrait sculpture in Trujillo’s cemetery shows, Hernando nevertheless possessed remarkable charm and a semblance of culture, for all the sadistic cruelty he had displayed throughout the Conquest.

  At the age of fifty-one he married at La Mota his eighteen-year-old niece Doña Francisca, Pizarro’s daughter by the Inca Princess Doña Inés, heiress to his name and fortune. A beautiful and well-educated young woman, for nine years she shared her elderly and blind husband’s imprisonment, giving birth to two sons and a daughter, ignoring as best she could the presence in the town’s convent of Santa Clara of her husband’s mistress, who for nine years had previously occupied her bed and also given birth to a son and a daughter.

  Eventually pardoned in exchange for his wife’s renunciation of much of her father’s wealth owed her by the Crown, Hernando was released from his incarceration, where he had lived in a manner befitting his own vast riches, with his servants and minstrels to entertain him. Finally Hernando returned to Trujillo. Honoured and respected by his fellow townsmen, he was a ghost-like figure. His only lasting memorial to the land he had helped conquer was the construction of the huge palace he and his young wife commissioned to be built in Trujillo’s main square, where their carved features and those of her parents are sculpted, bordering her father’s coat of arms awarded him by a grateful emperor. His fortune, which had made him one of the wealthiest men in Spain, was soon after dissipated by his wife’s second husband, a man much younger than her, and who was the great nephew of the Isthmian governor Arias Dávila, who had been foremost in attempting to prevent her father’s expedition of conquest. It was an irony that was not lost on the few surviving veterans of Panama.

  How does one summarise the life of Pizarro? Possibly the only way of making such an assessment, other than by reading the contemporary chroniclers, is to study the evidence of the conquistadores themselves and of the few Inca princes and nobility who recorded their testimonials and petitions to the Crown, few of which have ever been published, and which are to be found in the Archivo General de Indias, at Seville.

  What these testimonies demonstrate of the Conquest is the fear – if not the outright terror – Pizarro’s men experienced when first sighting the massed armies of Inca warriors at Cajamarca and at Cuzco, numbering tens of thousands of men. Equally, as in the case of the testimony of the Inca Prince Don Diego Cayo, they also show the sheer horror felt by his people on first seeing the bearded and white-skinned Spaniards with their canon, harquebuses and horses, something that can only be compared in terms of simple drama to a modern-day encounter with people from another planet.

  In none of these testimonies is Pizarro ever referred to with anything other than respect for his courage and leadership, even among his detractors. He is often simply called the ‘good Lord Governor’, or the ‘good man’. Even Almagro’s supporters could only accuse him of cheating the Crown of its full share of the Cajamarca and Cuzco treasure. His most vitriolic critic the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas, on hearing of his death, remarked that he had been loved by both Indians and Spaniards.16 His admirers, such as the hardened conquistadore Pedro de Valdivia, the founder of Chile, referred to him as his ‘lord and father’, and on being told of his murder wept like a child. To the Indians he was always the Apu, the Lord, a man they both feared and respected.

  None of these testimonies, however, penetrates any further than the general historical perspective, and it is possibly only Pizarro’s young page and kinsman Pedro who manages to scratch through the surface of Pizarro’s taciturn and solitary character. Perhaps it was his reserve and solitary nature – a reserve likely prompted by the stigma of his illegitimacy and a sense of social isolation – which, as was probably also the case with Lawrence of Arabia, inspired his attachment to other worlds and cultures, and an identity he eventually discovered in the land of his conquest.

  It is in his birthplace of Trujillo that his image is best conjured amid the alleyways of its winding cobbled streets. Here the few tourists to be seen are the occasional small groups of Peruvians led by a solitary guide to the house where he supposedly lived, or who can be seen gazing at the empty darkened shell of a palace built with the gold and silver of their homeland, or across the great colonnaded square where his bronze equestrian statue stands, defiant and silent. It is an image mirrored in the town’s poorer bars, where farm labourers, their hardy and expressionless faces burnt by sun and wind, drink their anis after their day’s work, some of them young men, and some of them virtually illiterate, and not dissimilar to the handful of veterans who followed him in the conquest of an empire.

  And what of Pizarro’s achievement in the context of world history? Pizarro was himself quite honest about his personal motive for his conquest. When pressed by a missionary to discourage the exploitation of Peru’s Indians and to encourage their evangelisation, he replied: ‘I did not come here for those reasons; I came here to take away their gold.’17 As a military commander and Indian fighter Pizarro had no equal. Nor can his achievement at consolidating his conquest in the founding of his colony be denied him. As a man he was an enigma.

  For some historians Pizarro’s conquest was little more than an act of barbarity and vandalism: an opinion popularised in the eighteenth century in the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire, who initiated the myth of the ‘noble savage’, and in the twentieth by the French historian Louis Baudin who almost depicted the Incas as a totalitarian socialist society. There is a grain of truth in all such allegations.

  Equally, Pizarro was also regarded as their liberator by the caciques of the tribes the Incas had subjugated, as recorded in the words of the lord of the Lupaca nation of Titicaca in his address to his people in their bondage after the capture of Cuzco: ‘My brothers, we are no longer living in the time of the Inca, for each and every one of you can go home to your lands.’18

  A murderous freebooter, as described by the great narrative historian William Prescott? Or the Olympian hero portrayed by the much respected Peruvian scholar Raúl Porras Barrenechea? Probably neither. That he was one of the foremost explorers and military leaders of his age, whose name with that of Columbus and Cortés will for centuries haunt the history of Spanish America, yes.

  No truer words were spoken than by Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo, when after his capture at Jaquijahuana he informed the President Gasca that it had been Pizarro and his brothers who had conquered Peru. And no truer an illustration of the Crown’s indifference, if not contempt for its conquistadores is evidenced than in Gasca’s reply: ‘For this the emperor was both pleased to raise you and your brother from the dust.’ In a sense, it marked the beginning of Pizarro’s legacy and of the divisions that would grow in the coming years between the new order of colonists and their distant fatherland, and which would lead to their eventual independence by the liberators Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín three centuries later.

  And what of the language and culture Pizarro’s men brought with them? In terms of twentieth-century world literature alone there would have been no Pablo Neruda in Chile, no Gabriel García Márquez in Columbia, no Luis Borges in Argentina, no Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru; nor would the world have been enriched by the splendid colonial architecture of Arequipa, or the mestizo carvings of Potosí’s church of San Lorenzo, dedicated to the Archangel St Michael and adorned with his figure and that of the Inca sun and moon, which is possibly the finest colonial façade ever carved in the Americas.

  The conquest of any people is immoral. Sooner or later, any one of the European powers of the sixteenth century would have conquered and colonised the continent of South America; that it fell to Spain because of its early exploration of the Caribbean was purely incidental. Had Pizarro not led the conquest of the Inca empire another Spanish soldier of fortune would have eventually followed his example. Whether any other European nation or commander would have achieved such ends in less brutal a manner is open to question.

  In t
he first days of the year 1590, a few years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada that was to mark the end of Spain’s political hegemony, the last of Pizarro’s conquistadores died in the city of Cuzco. His will, addressed to his sovereign, King Philip II, offer an emotional insight into the reality of Pizarro’s legacy:

  I, the Captain Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, resident of this great city of Cuzco, capital of these kingdoms of Peru, and the first who entered it in the time of its conquest: being as I am, infirm and bedridden yet of sound mind, judgement and memory, and fearful of death as is natural, and which comes when one least expects it, authorise and let it be known that I make this my last will and testament of my own free volition, listing its legacies and codicils in the following order:

  Firstly, for the peace of my soul and before beginning my testament I declare that for many years now I have desired to address the Catholic Majesty of Don Felipe, our lord, knowing how Catholic and Most Christian he is, and zealous for the service of God, Our Lord, seeing that I took part in the name of the Crown in the discovery, conquest and settlement of these kingdoms when we deprived those who were the lords Incas, who had ruled them as their own.

  And it should be known to His Most Catholic Majesty that we found these realms in such order that there was not a thief, nor a vicious man, nor an adulteress, nor were there fallen women admitted among them, nor were they an immoral people, being content and honest in their labour. And that their lands, forests, mines, pastures, dwellings and all kinds of produce were regulated and distributed among them in such a manner that each person possessed his own property without any other seizing or occupying it. And that nor were law suits known in respect of such things, and that neither their wars, of which there were many, interfered with the commerce and agriculture of their people. All things, from the greatest to the smallest, had their place and order. And that the Incas were feared, obeyed and respected by their subjects as being very capable and skilled in their rule, as were their governors.