The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  The Spanish conquerors recorded what they observed of the old societies with much attention to detail. The greatest of these writers was the Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, in Mexico. By recalling the voices of the Indians themselves to tell of what used to happen, he interpreted the old world that had already passed away. Relations of Montezuma, such as Ixtlilxochitl, also wrote accounts of great interest; and in Peru, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, second son of Manco Inca and an ebullient administrator of his reserves, made a historical record of a similar sort for the Augustinian missionaries.

  Even before the arrival of Cortés at Veracruz and of Pizarro at Tumbes, there were similar expressions of anxiety in both Peru and New Spain about the future. Peruvians, for example, were said to have heard prophecies of an ex-king that the empire would be overcome by bearded people who would preach the virtues of a new religion. But this seems to have been a late-sixteenth-century tale. Some news of the fate of Central America under the brutality of Pedrarias may have filtered down to Peru before 1530, just as some information about the Spanish actions in the West Indies reached Mexico before 1519. The Peruvians had also suffered from one or two Western diseases, such as bubonic plague, before 1530, though they were unaware of their provenance. They had a legend that predicted cataclysm: a pachakuti, a turning over of time and space, such as, according to a convenient myth, had occurred four times before the 1530s.

  Both the Inca and the Mexica used stones in fighting, and both employed slings, which could accurately fling a stone the size of an apple some hundred yards. Both used battle-axes with bronze or stone blades, which were sometimes effective in war, though they were less than efficient against the Spanish steel swords. Some Peruvians had throwing sticks shaped like Mexican atlatls, and both societies had bows and arrows. These weapons had been used in the campaigns to create the Inca and Aztec empires. The Spaniards admired at Tumbes the Peruvians’ “long arrows, spears and clubs.”4

  There were, of course, differences between these two indigenous societies. The most important one was that ancient Peru had no commercial life, while Mexico enjoyed a lively one: Mexican merchants also played an important part in informing the rulers, the “Emperors,” about other places, as if they were secret agents. A related difference was that there was no private landholding in Peru. The peasants farmed elaborate, productive, and even beautiful terraces, but they were held in common. Never was there a more pervasive government than that of the Incas. Personal liberty was practically nonexistent. Blind obedience and unquestioning self-abnegation had forever to be accorded. But if much was demanded of the subject, much was done for him. Marxists have talked of “Inca communism,” and they may have been correct thus to designate the Peruvian social structure, in which almost everything was supervised by officials.5 Aztec society was much less controlled. Montezuma’s remark about the necessity of dealing harshly with his people if they were going to be ruled effectively is well known.6

  Mexico had no domestic animals. Peru, on the contrary, had the guinea pig, the alpaca, and the llama, which the Spaniards thought were large sheep. The Inca used them to carry light loads—up to fifty or sixty pounds, actually—but also to convey their wool and meat. They were the heart of the Inca economy, and herds were carefully bred to ensure that they were always there. Alpaca wool was invaluable. They could last several days without drinking. Otherwise, both communities employed men as runners and porters. Both used wooden rollers to assist the movement of great stones or lumps of masonry, especially the Peruvians.

  Another difference was that the Peruvians had sails on their rafts and canoes, which the Mexica and Mesoamerican people, such as the Maya, do not seem to have had. The Peruvians used the sea as a means for trade more than the Mexica did. Yet a high percentage of Andeans (perhaps two-thirds of the population) lived at heights over nine thousand feet.

  The Mexica had remarkable artistic achievements to their credit: for example, their painting, poetry, and sculpture, monumental and tiny, relief and in the round. In these matters, the Peruvians were more limited, and no pre-Hispanic poetry is known from Peru.7 Both societies prized gold and silver jewels, but the Peruvians had more of them. Both had a process for creating metals of quality out of ore. But the Peruvians created more elaborate gold ornaments than the Mexica did.

  The Inca built magnificent roads and suspension bridges, far superior to anything then found in ancient Mexico—or, thought the Sevillano chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León, in old Europe.8 There was an elaborate network of storehouses, which held food, arms, and clothing, on the roads. Along these roads, the state’s llama and human porters traveled incessantly.

  The Peruvians had devised a decimal system of numbers to enable the accurate gathering of tribute. Inca decimal administrators were, at the time of the coming of the Spaniards, painstakingly taking over the business of collecting tribute from the old chiefs, who had calculated before with more-conventional methods.9

  The Inca capital of Cuzco was much smaller, less elaborate, and less grand than Tenochtitlan in New Spain–Mexico, but both cities boasted stone or stone-faced houses, as well as streets well washed by streams, with sewers. The main square at Cuzco had something in common with the Zócalo in the center of Tenochtitlan, though it was smaller. In the architectural use of stone, the Inca were, however, superior to the Mexica. The Inca did not have the arch, but they paid much attention to the exactness of the fitting of the joints between the huge stones. These essential elements in construction were maneuvered into place by teams of men using wooden levers.10 Throughout the age of the Inca, people depended on homemade chipped stone tools for scraping, chopping, cutting, and even drilling.

  Based on a straightforward worship of the sun, Inca religion was simpler than that of Mexico. Human sacrifices occurred but on a much lesser level than in ancient Mexico—the victims in Peru being usually beautiful boys and girls, often prisoners of war. Still, the death or investiture of a ruler could inspire the sacrifice of hundreds.11 Local deities survived conquest by the Inca. As in the empire of Montezuma, effigies of the gods of conquered tribes were taken to the capital almost as hostages for their peoples.

  In Peru, the dead were not left to rest but played a part. Pedro Pizarro, a cousin of the conquering band of Extremeño brothers, who had been brought up in Toledo, recalls how, when he arrived in Cuzco, the citizens took out the coffins of the dead into the main square and placed them in a row, according to their age. There the citizens sat, ate, and drank chicha. They made fires before the dead from dry wood, and in those combustions, they burned what in the past they had given to the dead. In front of the coffins, they placed large pitchers of gold, silver, or pottery, and these they filled with chicha. When these were full, they emptied them into a round vessel of stone in the middle of the square.12

  The priests in Peru, headed by Villac Umu, the high priest, often then produced a small covered bundle, which they assured observers was the sun itself. This was guarded by men with lances decorated with gold, “the arms of the Sun.” The precious object was placed on a bench in the plaza and offered feathers or cloaks. Then it was offered food, which was afterward burned. The ashes of the sun’s dinner were then thrown into a round stone trough shaped like a teat.

  Villac Umu was also the name for the supreme Inca deity. The word actually meant “foam of the sea.” Cieza de León, one of the most responsible of Spanish chroniclers, said that he thought that this Villac Umu was a tall white man, large of stature, with a white robe reaching to his feet. He had a belt, his hair was short, he carried something that looked like a breviary, and he wore a crown. The Indians explained that he traveled constantly till he came to the sea, where he spread his cloak, moved on it over the waves, and never appeared again. Atahualpa’s nephew pointed out that the Spaniards appeared from the same sea into which the creator god had disappeared. Perhaps it was the same sea where the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl had also vanished.

  The sun in old Peru had a palace covered with gold, whi
ch was guarded by two hundred women. Devoted to the deity, these ladies were supposed to be chaste, but Pedro Pizarro tells us that they often “involved themselves with the male servants and guardians of the Sun.” Nearby was a garden filled with golden representations of maize stalks, trees, fruit, and vegetables.

  The kingdom of old Peru was, like Mexico, the heir of many traditions and was made up of the coming together of many small entities. The Chavín culture had dominated central Peru in the time of the classical Greeks. In the north, there had been the Moche, much of whose pottery has survived, depicting as they do most of the facts of life including love and war. In the South, inland on the dry peninsula of Paracas, the Nazca were the most civilized of the Incas’ predecessors, being responsible for elaborate, interesting, and sophisticated textiles, much preserved in graves in the deserts there.

  About A.D. 100, an empire known as that of Tiahuanaco was established, beginning on the shores of the high inland Lake Titicaca. Other sophisticated urban societies had a brief hour of glory at Wari (or Huari) in the Ayacucho basin and at Tiwanaku, south of Lake Titicaca. There was also Chan Chan, a city of the Chimú renowned for its smiths.

  The Incas emerged from the valley of Cuzco about the time of the establishment of Tiahuanaco, though to begin with, the idea that they might soon dominate the whole of Ecuador and Peru, as well as half of Chile, would have seemed as absurd as to suppose at the same time that the Castilians were about to conquer the Americas. Their descendants thought that the Inca had emerged from “the House of Windows” at the “Inn of Dawn.”

  The Incas gradually progressed up the valley of the river Urabamba, adding tribe after tribe to their roll of dependents, sometimes by arms, sometimes by diplomacy. About A.D. 1200, the third mythical Inca—the ruler was so called—carried the tribe’s authority beyond Lake Titicaca, with expeditions to the eastern forests as well as to the Pacific and beyond La Paz to include what is now Bolivia. Nazca and Arequipa came into Inca control in the early fifteenth century, and in the next hundred years, the seventh Inca, who took as an additional name that of the god Viracocha, defeated and absorbed the till then powerful Chanca at the battle of Xaquixaguana, a turning point in the history of the country. Then Pachacuti, “the best all-round genius produced by the native races of America” in the words of the archaeologist Sir Clements Markham, established in the early fifteenth century what seems to have deserved the name of empire, comprising much of the coastal plain and an important part of the Andes. Pachacuti’s four sons directed large tracts of well-farmed coastal valleys and imposing towns more impressive than anything that the Incas had up till then controlled (hence the kingdom was usually known as “the Four Parts Together,” or Tawantinsuyu). It was an entity of about eighty provinces. Pachacuti was the Ch’in emperor of the New World. His son Tupac Yupanqui added much of Ecuador to the Inca empire in the second half of the fifteenth century and conquered half of Chile.

  The last independent ruler of Peru was Huayna Capac, who reigned from 1498 till 1527 and who seems to have been inactive, being perhaps ill from syphilis.13 His power revolved round his skillful use of Quechua.14 He may have died from smallpox, a disease from the Old World that certainly seems to have killed his eldest son. Huayna’s weakness was that he left two sons: Huascar (Tita Cuso Hualpa), his son by his first wife, and Atahualpa, a son by his second wife, a princess of a northern tribe, the Carab Sapri. Huayna apparently considered dividing his large kingdom into two, leaving the northern part to Atahualpa, the southern to Huascar—a sensible policy, it might seem. But both sons wanted everything. Hence a civil war ensued, dividing both the Inca family and the honorary Inca nobility, though, about the time that the Spaniards arrived, Atahualpa had won. The family of the defeated Huascar had been cruelly killed, with Huascar himself forced to watch. When the Spaniards arrived, Atahualpa was going south on the main Inca highway on his way to be crowned in Cuzco.

  19

  Pizarro’s Preparations

  Yet surely Master More … wherever you have private property, and all men measure all things by money, there it is scarcely possible for a state to have justice or prosperity.

  SIR THOMAS MORE, Utopia, BOOK 1

  Pizarro spent a year in Panama preparing his expedition to Peru. He knew little of the politics of the place—far less, say, than a reader of the last chapter.

  In the end, he left without Almagro, his nominal partner who—fatally for himself—undertook to follow later. He had organized his endeavors in the Compañía del Levante, with Almagro, Hernando de Luque, and one or two others, such as Gaspar de Espinosa. Pizarro sailed with three ships and about 180 men—no women—and about thirty horses: “as many Spaniards and horses as his ships would hold.”1 The expedition had been financed by Pizarro himself and by Almagro. Hernando de Luque had a minor investment, but he was not a partner on the same level as the other two leaders.2 Pedro Pizarro said that those participating had to pay their own expenses, including money for their passage.3 There were other investors, for example the rich licenciado Gaspar de Espinosa, a native of Medina de Rioseco, the city of the royal family of Enríquez. The ships seem to have been stocked with food, water, and armaments by their masters. Pizarro was the captain-in-chief. His power was limited by royal officials appointed to ensure that the Crown received a fifth of all income or loot. But Pizarro was able to leave those government officials behind in reserve positions waiting for military success.4 He was, as it were, the commander of a company such as was often seen in those days.5

  Pizarro left Panamanian waters on December 25, 1530, without his first ship, which was captained by Cristóbal de Mena, a native of Ciudad Real, like Almagro, of whom he was a close friend. Mena had been an encomendero and a councillor in Granada in Nicaragua. Pizarro had paid for horses and several black African slaves for the expedition. His captain and pilot was his friend Bartolomé Ruiz de Estrada, who came from that nursery of good sailors, Moguer, on the Río Tinto. He also had worked for Almagro and had recruited men for the journey. The three boats were jointly owned by Hernando de Soto, Pizarro, and Hernán Ponce de León, but the most important men on the journey were members of the Pizarro family.

  Of these, Hernando, then about thirty years of age, was the only legitimate brother, being twenty years younger than Francisco. Oviedo, who knew him, said that Hernando was “a heavy man, but tall of stature with thick lips and tongue, and the tip of his nose was fleshy and red.”6 His cousin, Pedro Pizarro, however, said that he was “a man of good stature, valiant, wise and brave, albeit a heavy man in the saddle.”7 Garcilaso, the chronicler, thought him “rough and ill-tempered.”8 Enríquez de Guzmán said that Hernando was a “bad Christian with no fear of God and less devotion to the King … a great and boastful talker.”9 Being legitimate, he inherited a large house in Trujillo and also the nearby village of La Zarza, some miles south of Trujillo, which long had been a Pizarro holding. Hernando had accompanied his father, Gonzalo Pizarro, in the war against France in Navarre and so had experience of courts and royal armies. He was one of two men on the expedition to Peru who had experience of war in Europe. (The other was the giant Cretan artilleryman Pedro de Candía.)10 Hernando’s education had also given him some knowledge of finance, which he would put to good effect during the next few years. He could be witty and was articulate. His letter of 1533 to the audiencia in Santo Domingo made him one of the best eyewitnesses of what occurred in Peru in those years.11 He was his brother Francisco’s chief confidant. He disliked Almagro, whom he now met in Panama for the first time and whom he called “the circumcised Moor.” The bad relations that developed between Francisco Pizarro and Almagro were worsened by these attitudes of Hernando Pizarro.

  The other Pizarro brothers with Francisco were in 1531 still too young to count for much. Yet it was obvious that Juan Pizarro, still in his twenties, was “affable, magnanimous, impetuous—and popular.”12 “The flower of all the Pizarros,” Ceiza, the chronicler, called him.13 He had been brought up by his aunt Estef
anía de Vargas, but he lived with the other Pizarros.

  Then there was Gonzalo Pizarro, a little younger than Juan, of whom he was a full brother. (Their mother had been María Alonso, probably a maid in the Pizarro house.) He loved hunting and was good at it; he was always graceful, was well proportioned with a striking face, and had a capacity for camaraderie, which enabled him to make friends easily. Garcilaso, the most imaginative, but not the most accurate, chronicler of those days, said of him that “his nature was so noble that he endeared himself to strangers” and that “he was full of nobility and virtue and … [so] was beloved and respected by everyone.” He was also a fine rider, a good shot with both arquebus and crossbow, and it was said that he was “the best lance who crossed to the new world.”14 Pedro Pizarro said of him that he was valiant with a good countenance and a fine beard but “knew little.”15 Gonzalo’s day, however, would come.

  In the early stages of Pizarro’s expedition, Pedro de Candía from Crete had a strong influence. Physically a giant, he had been in the Spanish army since 1510, as an artilleryman, a position for which the Greeks were then known. He had been one of Pizarro’s elite “thirteen” at Gallo Island. Pizarro had always liked him, often asking him to dine with him—an important test. He took Candía with him in 1528 to Spain, where his tales of Peru were too extravagant for comfort and Pizarro had to ask him to be quiet.

  The journey to Birú was long and drawn-out. The Spanish expeditionaries sailed south under Bartolomé Ruiz’s direction; their first port of call, thirteen days after leaving Panama, was the Bay of San Marcos, at the mouth of the river Esmeraldas. It was in the extreme north of the country which we now know as Ecuador, not Peru. The names had been given to the places by Bartolomé Ruiz, without much reflection, during Pizarro’s previous expedition. Men, matériel, and horses were all disembarked.