by Marie Arana
Even as these rituals were taking place, Huayna Capac’s servants observed a marked decline in their old master. The plague was not only cankering his flesh, it had taken a firm hold on his mind. The Lord Inca was hallucinating, seeing tiny apparitions who spoke to him, claimed to have come for him, and were calling him away. Quickly, his servants sent two teams of chasquis to the oracle at the Temple of Pachacamac to ask what should be done to save him. The shamans in that faraway shrine to the creator consulted with the god of the underworld, Supay, who answered that the Inca should be taken from his bed immediately and put out in the full light of the great Sun.
The Lord Inca was being carried out to absorb the healing powers of the all powerful Sun, when the orejones decided that they would ignore the unfavorable kalpas, solve the question of succession at once, and give the crown to Ninan Cuyochi, who was lodging close by. When they found the young prince in his chambers, however, they were horrified to see that he was laid out, ravaged by the disfiguring disease, lifeless. Hastening to inform Huayna Capac that there was no choice now but to give the throne to Huascar, the orejones arrived too late once again. Moments after the old Inca had been carried into the harsh light of day, he breathed his last.
So it was that the empire reeled from one catastrophe to another, from a series of wars that had purposefully butchered thousands to a plague that mindlessly devoured the rest. Now, adding to the chaos, came a struggle for succession between two bitterly contending factions: Huascar’s Cuzco, and Quito under Huayna Capac’s surviving warrior son, Atahualpa. Some historians say that the Lord Inca had every intention of installing two successors—that he deliberately set out to divide his kingdom north and south, understanding that it had grown unwieldy. Others say that these were decisions made at the spur of the moment, possibly under psychotic delusions, and that Huayna Capac was not the discerning, visionary leader that his father or grandfather had been.
Whatever the case, there is no question that the death of the Twelfth Inca marked a distinct end to an era. The empire was split, the seeds of discord sown. It was almost as if Tahuantinsuyu itself felt the air whistling out of the grand, inflated bubble it had become. The Lord Inca’s heart was gouged from his breast and buried in Quito, and his embalmed body was carried to Cuzco with great pomp, the flustered orejones insisting he was still alive. It isn’t known exactly when the people understood that their leader was dead. Only the closest and most loyal members of the elite knew, and they guarded that secret as long as they could, waiting for a clear leader to emerge. When the cortege finally arrived in Cuzco after many months of travel, his mummy was taken from its ornate litter and placed alongside those of his ancestors in the glittering halls of Coricancha, Temple of the Sun. Four thousand family members, concubines, and servants were sacrificed in solemn rituals to ensure that Huayna Capac had all the vassals he needed to serve him in the next world. The Twelfth Inca came to be as adored in death as he had been in life, celebrated in lavish ceremonies alongside his idol Guaraquinga—a giant, solid gold statue that he had commissioned during the pinnacle of his rule. They scarcely knew it at the time, but the people of Tahuantinsuyu were mourning their last true emperor. Grief stricken, thronging the capital’s great plaza, they surged into the colossal Temple of the Sun to offer their prayers and lamentations.
CUZCO
Peru, 2010
There it was. The face of the sun, wrought from a slab of pure gold.
—El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, 1605
Almost five centuries later, Juan Ochochoque, Leonor Gonzáles’s ailing husband, too, made his tortured way from the gold mines of La Rinconada to the Temple of the Sun to offer prayers and lamentations. Suffering from acute mercury and cyanide poisoning after the collapse of his mine shaft, his legs were swollen, his breathing labored, his skin ulcerated, his mind unstable. He traveled with his youngest daughter on a bone-rattling bus trip from the foot of Mount Ananea to the walls of the once mighty Coricancha, now stripped of all precious metals and dwarfed by the great church that squats on top.
His mission was simple, and no different from what an ancestor might have undertaken in the 1500s at any of the sacred huacas. Juan went to solicit a blessing, reverse an ill wind. By then, he was desperate to save his life along with the lives of his wife and seven children, and he seemed to be out of options. There were few choices for a sick, indigent man perched on a glacial rock eighteen thousand feet up in a man-made wasteland. He had crouched in the mine shafts too long, bargained with the demon Supay too often. He had surrendered body and soul to the icy mountain range the canny Irish geologist Joseph Pentland had pointed to almost two hundred years before. The only thing Juan could see that might rescue him now was to take himself to the umbilical of the world: to Cuzco and its Temple of the Sun, where a high priest might lay hands on him and heal his suppurating wounds. Bartering all his savings—the flecks and chips of residual metal that miners call “seeds”—he bought two fares for a trip that would consist of four bus rides in one direction and four buses back, on seven hundred miles of rugged road.
Juan left Mount Ananea before daybreak on a frigid Friday morning in December 2008 and reached Cuzco with his ten-year-old daughter Senna just as the sun slipped over the white peaks of Vilcabamba, shrouding the city in darkness. With one hand on a cane and the other on Senna’s shoulder, he hobbled down Avenida El Sol to the Church of Santo Domingo, where the glorious Temple of the Sun had once stood. They reached the main entrance just as the last visitor was saying good night and the doors were swinging shut. Pleading with the priest at the threshold, Juan explained why he had come, but he was told that there would be no laying on of hands until Monday. For all of Juan’s supplications, the answer was unwavering. Finally, the holy man simply stopped speaking and quietly closed the door.
Juan could not have known it, but twenty feet below those immense doors were the stones that had once held the fabled, coruscating rooms through which Huayna Capac had once strode, honoring the ancient gods and reveling in the power of his empire. The Lord Inca had returned to those golden halls with his veins plump with embalming fluid, his afflicted skin masked by the tanning process. A few years later, his mummy was ferreted out of Cuzco, along with his giant idol, as word of the advancing “bearded ones” spread through the capital like waves of a brand-new plague.
Juan sat on the steps of the Church of Santo Domingo, weighing his options. He had no more money. He had bartered his last “seeds” on bus fare. Slowly, and with Senna’s help, he rose and hobbled back to the bus station. Within a week, he was dead.
As strange as it might seem, a slight but strong link binds the fate of Juan Ochochoque to that of Huayna Capac. That link is made of metal. Juan’s demise was a result of the ravages of a lifelong search for gold—a substance he would never own or use. Huayna Capac’s was the result of a disease brought upon him by conquerors who were after nothing so much as his sacred ore. Emperor and pauper, united by race and language—divided by caste, ambition, and five hundred years of history—both ended their time on earth as casualties of fortune; victims of an alien lust. That legacy of distant desires and a native’s inability to truly comprehend them would only intensify in the tumultuous centuries to come.
CHAPTER 3
METAL HUNGER
Inca: “Is this the gold you people eat?”
Spaniard: “We eat this gold.”
—Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, 1615
THE AWAKENING
In 1492, when Spain launched its flimsy bid for global power and sent Columbus to claim lands beyond the Pillars of Hercules—the edge of the known world—the indigenous empires that dominated the Americas were entering a fragile and volatile era. But they hardly knew it. Huayna Capac was young, ambitious, carefree, and had just taken the reins from his illustrious father. Montezuma II had yet to begin his rule and impose a stern corrective on the Triple Alliance. The two feisty Muísca rulers who would consolidate a gold-rich federation near Bogotá—and then d
ie defending it—were hardly born. Spain, too, was poised on the verge of a radical transformation, a total reversal of its hobbled, inchoate past; but it hardly knew this as well.
Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand V, Spain’s sovereigns at the time, had inherited a war-weary nation, a rude conglomeration of two kingdoms, cobbled together hastily as a result of their elopement twenty-three years before. Somehow, by dint of an iron will, deft politics, and a fierce commitment to Christianize the peninsula, they managed to consolidate Iberia’s fragmented loyalties against the last vestiges of Arab occupation. In 1492, after decades of grisly warfare, they won Granada and drove the Moors from the peninsula once and for all.
None of this had been easy. The fair-skinned, red-haired Isabella, whose father had died when she was three and whose mother had been mentally unstable ever since, had endured a string of betrothals imposed on her by her older half brother, King Henry IV of Castile. Henry was known throughout Spain as El Impotente, an appellation that alluded as much to his lack of sexual prowess as his meager abilities to lead. His frankly libidinous second wife was known to have had numerous lovers among the rakes of Castile’s royal court and eventually produced a child, Juana la Beltraneja, whose shaky hereditary claims would bedevil Isabella’s path to the throne.
When Isabella was a girl of six, living with her unhinged mother in the gloomy castle to which King Henry had virtually exiled them, she had become betrothed to her second cousin Ferdinand, the five-year-old son of the king of Aragon. But within a few years, her wastrel brother king, who had frittered away Castile’s wealth and plunged the kingdom into ruinous debt, began to look around frantically for an alliance with a more prosperous, powerful entity, and saw Isabella’s hand as a possible medium. Henry ignored his father’s previous agreement with Aragon and casually offered Isabella to a series of moneyed noblemen in distant royal houses. By the time the girl was ten, he had wrenched her from her mother’s side, brought her to his court, and begun to cultivate her for just such a marriage. Some years later, when rebellion threatened to end his disastrous reign, he reneged on all agreements and—out of sheer desperation—promised her to one of the richest men in his court, Pedro Girón Acuña Pacheco, who owned a spectacular castle in Valladolid and had agreed to pay the royal treasury a vast sum of money. Young Isabella, a devout Catholic, prayed to be spared this degrading union; those prayers were answered when Don Pedro suddenly became ill and died on his way to consummate their wedding. Isabella was fifteen years old. Soon after, in 1469, she took advantage of that slender rupture of fate to elope with the heir presumptive to whom she had been engaged in the first place, young Ferdinand of Aragon.
When Isabella and Ferdinand mounted their thrones as king and queen of the united houses of Castile and Aragon, their newly wrought merger was in virtual ruin. The royal coffers were almost empty. Gold, which had been the fiduciary standard of Europe since the 1300s, was in alarmingly short supply. The production of silver, which was the coin of the realm and had been mined in Andalusia since 3000 BC, had all but trickled to a stop. Everywhere the new queen and king looked, there were debts to repay, battles to engage. Over the years, the Christian kingdoms of Iberia had gradually pushed back the Moors, who had swept in from northern Africa in the eighth century and occupied the peninsula for seven hundred years. Despite the bloody crusades of the Reconquista and the hundreds of battles that had consumed generations of Iberians, when Isabella and Ferdinand were handed the scepter, the Umayyad Caliphate still occupied the kingdom of Granada, a massive swath of land straddling southern Iberia. Between 1482 and 1491, King Ferdinand directed all his attention to an unremitting war with the Moors, a ferocious military campaign that won back Granada inch by inch and finally expelled the caliphate at long last on January 2, 1492.
Arabs had not been Iberia’s only masters. A long history of conquest had predated the Moors. The peninsula had been colonized by Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths. Every invasion had had its dose of political ambition, but overwhelmingly the aim of occupiers and conquerors had been to raid the region’s silver or gold—those glistening substances that coursed through Iberian waters, crazed the rock of Spain’s mining meccas, Río Tinto and Las Médulas, and had become the preferred hard currency of the Continent. At the close of the fourteenth century, seven-eighths of all gold imported by the Republic of Genoa, one of the largest purveyors of the metal, came from Iberia, and five-sixths of that, from Seville. Enslaved and humiliated for centuries, forced to mine their terrain for the enrichment of faraway potentates, the Iberians yearned for leaders who could turn history on its ear and end a millennium of exploitation. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand were those leaders. By 1475, they had become keen participants in regional European trade. By January 1492, they had defeated the Moors, demanded the forced conversion of Jews, established Spain by spirit if not by politics, and begun the furious enterprise of driving foreigners from the peninsula.
Spain emerged from centuries of foreign domination with a crusading spirit, a passionate commitment to forge an exclusively Christian nation. It also emerged with all the rage and truculence necessary to achieve it. Diving into the business of expelling Arab potentates and Jewish moneylenders, Isabella and Ferdinand called for a brutal and fanatical purge that employed torture, set “infidels” against one another, raided homes and businesses alike, and filled the royal coffers with desperately needed funds. The Inquisition, as practiced by the Catholic Church in the twelfth century, had focused on heresy and depravity within the ranks of the faithful; now, in the fifteenth, it took a distinctly ethnic turn: it began persecuting Muslims and Jews. Especially harsh against conversos—converts to Catholicism—who all too often were suspected of secretly maintaining ties to their old religions, the Inquisition began setting converted Jews (Marranos) against Jews, and converted Muslims (Moriscos) against Muslims. The Emirate of Granada, with whom Castile and Aragon had sparred for years, was now progressively rent by civil divisions, and Ferdinand took advantage of that internal chaos to attack those contested lands.
By the time Granada surrendered to King Ferdinand on January 2, 1492, a hundred thousand Moors were dead; two hundred thousand more had emigrated; and, of the two hundred thousand that remained, most were subject to stern laws of conversion. The Jews, too, were given the choice to convert or leave, and by the time the Spanish Inquisition began in earnest—ushered in by a papal bull—more than half the Jewish population of Castile and Aragon had been forcibly expelled, and several thousand summarily executed. Open atrocities—burnings at the stake, autos-da-fé, the widespread confiscation of valuable possessions—all these took place in city squares, with royalty present and an almost festive air. Europeans visiting Spain at the time were appalled by the public acceptance of these executions. Less visible, perhaps, were the hurried efforts to hide one’s ancestral line, or prove a conversion, or integrate as fully as possible: the ancestors of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the famed Carmelite mystic, were Jews, as may have been those of the great master of Spanish letters Miguel de Cervantes. As irony would have it, the first inquisitor-general of Castile and Aragon, a Dominican priest named Tomás de Torquemada, had been born into a Jewish family and, fired by zeal that only radical conversion can bring, went on to prosecute chilling cruelties against his own people.
It was a nervous age, the anxiety such that it spurred Spain, as all Europe, toward a feral self-protection. For financial security. For gold. That hunger hardened into outright greed by the end of the fifteenth century, when it became clear that the production of this metal would not be enough, by any measure, to satisfy the gargantuan demands of the European economy. There were wars to prosecute, empires to build. Even Pope Pius II, a remarkably forthright pontiff who had written openly about his carnal appetites and the son he had sired, lamented the Church’s lack of funds: “The problem of money predominates,” he wrote, “and without it, as they commonly say, nothing can be done aright.” The new monarchs of Spain felt that ac
cursed greed for gold—auri sacra fames—keenly when their arch rival, King Afonso V of Portugal, sent fortune hunters to scour Africa for gold in the 1470s and established a vigorous trade at San Jorge de Mina, in what is now Ghana.
Queen Isabella, too, had sent her navies to trawl the west coast of Africa for riches, and, in 1478, as thirty-five of her caravels returned from the Gulf of Guinea weighed down with bullion, Portuguese ships intercepted them and seized all their cargo. The Battle of Guinea followed, a bitterly fought contest for the Atlantic waterways and the lucrative slave trade that accompanied them. Spain emerged victorious, at least on land: King Afonso surrendered to its “Catholic Monarchs,” giving Isabella the right to retain her dominion and consolidate an empire with Ferdinand. But Portugal was the clear winner at sea. Afonso was given unfettered access to a number of Atlantic strongholds and the wealth they represented: the mines at Guinea; the strategically located ports on the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde islands; control over large tracts of northern Africa; and more than 1,500 pounds of gold. All that the treaty left to Spain, as far as maritime possibility, was the Canary Islands, a cluster of parched, impoverished islands off the Barbary Coast. In other words, Spain’s navies had but one option if they wanted to expand their queen’s rule: they would need to brave a sea rife with pirates, make a fleet course south to the Canaries and then swing west, ever west, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It was certainly a logistical challenge. But the wider implication of the treaty was obvious: the world beyond Europe’s shores was for the taking. Conquerors had only to raid lands, colonize the darker races, and divide the map—brutally, if need be—into spheres of influence.