An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru

by Ralph Bauer

  It is difficult to determine with certainty who is responsible for these contradictions and ambiguities in Titu Cusi’s account. On the one hand, it would not have been inconceivable for Titu Cusi to change traditional Inca rules of succession in his text in order to make a case for his own legitimacy. Even though Titu Cusi stressed the rules of birth (albeit not purely the traditional Inca rules) in his narrative, the Spanish envoy Diego Rodríguez de Figueroa reported that on another occasion Titu Cusi had explained to him that birthright was not ultimately of primary importance to his claim to legitimacy as ruler and that his legitimacy was based rather on merit and pragmatics: “he was in possession and was recognised by the other Incas; they all obeyed him, and if he had not the right they would not obey him” (quoted in Hemming, 300). Indeed, previous disputes regarding succession were reportedly settled by displays of strength and valor rather than strictly birthright. Thus, the ninth ruler, Inca Yupanqui (1438–1471, according to the traditional scheme of succession) had usurped the throne from his father, Pachacuti, before the latter’s death after the son had successfully defended Cuzco against the invading Chanca while the father had abandoned the capital (see Rostworowski, 22–28). Moreover, the privilege accorded to the offspring of an Inca ruler and his own sister and the implications for succession resulting from this seem to have been a rather new innovation (or renovation) in Inca culture. In other words, changes in kinship practices had happened in Inca culture relatively recently before the arrival of the Spaniards and must not, therefore, necessarily and exclusively be ascribed to European colonialism.

  Yet, it is possible that Titu Cusi’s pragmatist arguments were a more or less realistic reflection of the historical impact of the cataclysmic events just before and during the Conquest upon Inca logic of succession. As Julien points out (42–47), the combined impacts of the pre-Hispanic civil war in Peru (in which Huascar and scores of his descent group died), European diseases (killing both Huayna Capac and his heir), as well as Atahuallpa’s murder by the Spaniards left a tremendous stress on the traditional Inca logic of succession resumed by Huayna Capac’s father. This situation was further aggravated when the Spanish conquerors, in search of wives, seized on the female Inca nobility. Titu Cusi’s unforgettable account of Gonzalo Pizarro’s demand that he be given Manco Inca’s sister-wife, Cura Oclo, as a wife and Manco Inca’s attempt to deceive Pizarro by giving him another woman, Ynguill, in her stead is a good illustration of this (see p. 96). Despite Manco Inca’s ingenuity here, he ultimately failed to protect both Inca noblewomen against the Spanish suitors. As Titu Cusi relates, Cura Oclo did fall into the hands of Gonzalo Pizarro, was abused by the Spaniards, and tried to resist their advances by “covering her body with stinking and filthy things” before being murdered in Spanish custody (p. 124; also Hemming, 183). Ynguill, as Julien points out, may have been Francisca Ynguill, who became the wife of Juan Pizarro (305, n. 13). Although it appears that both of Titu Cusi’s brothers, Saire Topa and Topa Amaru, had more legitimacy for rulership than he did, ultimately even the claim to legitimacy of their common father, Manco Inca, was weak by traditional logic of succession. In pre-Hispanic times, Manco Inca might have settled such a controversy as Atahuallpa (and some of his predecessors) had done—by wiping out the panaca of any competitor for succession. The Spanish invasion, however, not only changed the balance of power but also brought the introduction of alphabetic writing to Andean historiographic practices; therefore, such a “new beginning” of history became more difficult to orchestrate. Ultimately then, the fact that Titu Cusi’s account appears to be particularly at odds with other surviving versions based on different panaca traditions may be explained by the dwindling power of this penultimate Inca compared to that still commanded by his grandfather, who was the last undisputed ruler to consolidate his power over the entire Tahuantinsuyu.

  On the other hand, there can be no doubt that some of the ambiguities with regard to Andean and Spanish cultural concepts crept into the text only with fray Marcos García’s translation. Especially some of the glosses over native Andean cultural concepts are unequivocally the marks of his interventions and impositions. One example is the account of Atahuallpa’s sensitive reaction toward Vicente de Valverde’s fateful presentation of the breviary as the result of the Inca’s lingering annoyance with the Spaniards’ disregard for his offer of a ceremonial drink. Marcos García translates Titu Cusi’s Quechua account like this: “My uncle, still offended by the wasting of the chicha (which is how we call our drink) took the letter (or whatever it was) and threw it down” (p. 60–61). Although this passage seems to reflect upon the Inca principle of reciprocity (see Classen, 1–2, 59–60), it is noteworthy that chicha was not a Quechua word but was imported by the Spanish from the Caribbean. This suggests that fray Marcos García is falsely representing Titu Cusi’s use of the first person plural (“we”) here.31 It is difficult to decide whether these misrepresentations of Andean culture result from Marcos García’s imperfect grasp of Quechua or from his deliberate manipulations, possibly intended to lend his translation an air of authenticity.

  Only slightly more ambiguous in regard to agency is the use of various Christian and Andean religious concepts in this text—concepts such as “God” (Dios), “Viracocha,” “Devil” (demonio), and “supai.” It is doubtful, for example, that the cultural gloss on supai—“which is to say the Devil in our language” (p. 76)—can be attributed to Titu Cusi. The word in pre-colonial Quechua simply meant “a supernatural being that could be both malignant and benevolent.” Domingo Santo Tomás’s 1560 dictionary still translates çupay as “demonio, bueno o malo” (99), thus bearing testimony to the incommensurability of Christian and Andean religious concepts by allowing for the idea of a “demonio, bueno.” In pre-Christian Quechua the word appears to have meant something more value neutral, perhaps better translated as “mountain spirit.”32 In light of Titu Cusi’s noted tolerance of Christianity and reluctance to give up native Andean huacas, its use in the Manichean sense of evil here suggests the imprint of Marcos García’s monotheistic missionary jargon on this text.

  A final example of ambiguous agency in this text is Titu Cusi’s account of the miraculous appearance of an equestrian knight, recognizable to Spanish readers as Santiago, patron saint of Spain, in support of the Spanish siege of Cuzco. Is this a Native tradition repeated by Titu Cusi or a liberty taken by the Spanish translator or the mestizo scribe?33 It is difficult to decide for this early text, but it is worth mentioning that by the early seventeenth century this story apparently had become part of native Andean memories, for it was repeated and illustrated by Guaman Poma de Ayala (see Illustration 7). To be sure, Guaman Poma’s version must also be taken with a grain of salt, because he was not, as mentioned above, considered to be a member of the Inca nobility (being connected to it only through his mother’s lineage) and tended to portray Inca religion from the perspective of a Christian convert (even though he praised the civic accomplishments of the Inca state). In any case, Marcos García’s translation of Titu Cusi’s oral version of this story might well present an early manifestation of the hybridization of various European and Andean traditions of the history of the Conquest from which Guaman Poma could draw roughly half a century later.

  Regarding the hybridity of Titu Cusi’s account of the conquest of Tahuantinsuyu, a final word is in order also about Martín de Pando, Titu Cusi’s mestizo secretary who transcribed Marcos García’s Spanish dictation into manuscript form. He had arrived, along with Juan de Betanzos, at Vilcabamba in 1560 as part of an embassy sent by the corregidor (royal administrator) of Cuzco, Juan Polo de Ondegardo, in order to assure the Vilcabamba rebels that the deceased Saire Topa had died a natural death. After the embassy’s mission had been completed, Titu Cusi, aware of the advantages of having a person knowledgeable of European culture at Vilcabamba, persuaded the mestizo to stay. Pando accepted the invitation, serving Titu Cusi as secretary, confidant, and advisor for the rest of his life. Titu Cusi seems
to have appreciated his company a great deal, frequently practicing European-style fencing with him and using Pando’s writing skills in his correspondence with Spanish authorities. Because Pando stayed, continuously as far as we can tell, at Vilcabamba from 1560 until his death in 1571, it is uncertain whether he would have seen a copy of either the first bilingual Spanish/Quechua dictionary or the first grammar of the Quechua language, both of which had been completed by the Dominican clergyman Domingo de Santo Tomás in Peru and printed in Valladolid by the royal printer Francisco Fernández de Cordoba in 1560 (see Illustration 8). A comparison of Pando’s transcriptions of Quechua words and Santo Tomás’s dictionary is inconclusive as to the question of whether he transcribed Quechua words simply as they seemed to him grapho-phonemically most accurate or whether he consulted Santo Tomás’s first attempt at a standardized orthography of the Quechua language in European alphabet. The evidence suggesting the former seems to preponderate. Some of his transcriptions basically correspond with Santo Tomás’s dictionary, such as yllapa, Viracocha, and macho, but others do not, such as his transcription of supai (p. 76) compared to Santo Tomás’s çupay (Lexicon, 279). Also, Pando’s orthography is not always internally consistent—which at the least suggests that Pando was not consistently using Santo Tomás’s works during the transcription process even if he owned or had seen copies. For example, he spells the plural form of the Quechua word for “knife” as tomës in one place but tumës in another (see p. 61 and p. 62). Similarly inconsistent are his renderings of grammatical forms, such as the plural of Quechua nouns. Some of these forms follow Spanish, not Quechua, rules. For example, the manuscript represents the plural of yllapa (thunderclap) as yllapas. At other times, however, Pando transcribes forms that appear to be Hispanized spellings following Quechua grammatical forms, such as Apocona (Lords; Apu means “lord” and the suffix -kuna signifies the plural form, but rendered Appó and -cona by Santo Tomás’s Lexicon and Gramática). However, these Quechua plural forms are inconsistent in the manuscript and, at times, hybridized with Spanish plural forms; for instance, in Pando’s transcription yanaconas (p. 121) (yana-cona-s: yana means “dedicated servant” and the suffix -kuna [or -cona] signifies plural in Quechua but -s is apparently derived from Castilian vernacular grammar). A full-scale analysis of these hybridized linguistic forms is not appropriate here. A future first step in this direction may lie in definitively establishing which forms can plausibly be ascribed to Pando and which ones to Marcos García. Those attributable to the mestizo Martín de Pando may well point toward the heteroglossia pervading the still unstandardized pigeon culture of which he was born, a culture in which Old World and New World linguae francae and vernaculars mixed, fused, and hybridized to make new standards in future generations.

  7. St. James the Great, Apostle of Christ, intervenes in the war for Cuzco. From Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. By kind permission of the Royal Library at Copenhagen (GKS 2232 4to)

  A Note on Quechua Terms and Orthography

  Regarding the translation of indigenous concepts and orthography in the present introduction and edition, I have chosen to use a European concept throughout in order to convey an Andean concept in cases where a European concept is semantically broad enough. For example, when I use the term “Inca Empire” interchangeably with “Tahuantinsuyu,” I do so in the broadest sense of “empire” as a polity that territorially expanded beyond its original ethnic boundaries, recognizing the important differences between the Andean geographically expansive polity and what Europeans would associate with the term “empire.” In other cases, I have used European concepts provisionally and in quotation marks until an explanation of the Andean concept was in order. An example of this would be the European concept of “queen” and the (not identical) Andean concept of coya. As far as my orthographic rendering of Andean names that commonly occur in historical and literary scholarship, I have, after some wavering, finally chosen to go with the Hispanized version rather than the grapho-phonemically more precise spelling representing the velar/postvelar contrasts that was standardized by the Peruvian Ministry of Education during the 1970s and since has been used in some recent anthropological and historical scholarship (see, for example, D’Altroy). This decision was made purely on pragmatic grounds, as most of the scholars cited in this introduction still used Hispanized orthography and, therefore, it would have been unnecessarily confusing and complicated to represent two systems of spelling in this Introduction or to change the spellings of my modern secondary sources.

  8. Frontispiece of Domingo Santo Tomás’s Lexicon o Vocabulario (1560). Library of Congress, Rare Book Room

  For the same reason, I have used Hispanized orthography in the translation of the text when rendering common Quechua names and words that have already been solidified in modern scholarship. Thus, I write “Inca” rather than “Inka,” “Atahuallpa” rather than “Atawallpa,” “Huascar” rather than “Wasqar,” “huacas” rather than “wakas,” “coya” rather than “qoya,” and so on. In my rendering of Quechua words that do not commonly occur in modern scholarship (such as tomëe), however, I attempt to decipher the original manuscript rather than previous Spanish editions. In these cases, I also note Santo Tomás’s first “standardized” sixteenth-century orthography as well as modern (meaning post-1970s) official orthography, citing the Diccionario Quechua-Español-Quechua by the Academia Mayor de la lengua Quechua and Laura Ladrón de Guevara Cuadro’s Diccionario Quechua-Ingles-Español. Español-Quechua-Ingles. Quechua-Ingles-Español. In references to primary and secondary sources, I have used English translations when adequate ones were available.

  The Manuscript and Previous Editions

  The manuscript of Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s Instrucción is today preserved in the Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo del Escorial. Some time after its arrival there, it was bound as one section in a volume of several manuscripts and subtitled “De las relaciones del tiempo de la visita. Relación del gobierno y sucesión de los Ingas.” Its pages were apparently numbered by the person who bound it, for its first page corresponds to page 130 in that volume. In my page references to the manuscript, I cite the pagination applied in this volume.

  The text has been published in numerous Spanish editions during the twentieth century in the wake of growing interest in Amerindian perspectives on the European conquest of America. In some respects it shares a common editorial history with other texts by colonial Latin American Indians, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1615) or Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui (1613) (see Bauer 2001). Like Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, it was forgotten for more than three centuries. Parts of the text were first published in 1877 by Marcos Jiménez de la Espada as an appendix to his edition of Pedro Cieza de León’s Guerra de Quito. A first complete edition was published in Lima in 1916 under the title Relación de la conquista del Perú y hechos del Inca Manco II by Horacio H. Urteaga with a biography of Titu Cusi by Carlos Romero. Urteaga’s transcription was republished in Lima with a new introduction and notes by Francisco Carillo in 1973. In 1985 Luis Millones published in Lima a new transcription that retained—more closely than Urteaga’s—the orthographic particularities of the original and indicated the page breaks of the manuscript. Similarly, Liliana Regalado de Hurtado’s 1992 edition with a new transcription retained the orthographic characteristics of the manuscript and added a glossary of Quechua terms appearing in the text, as well as onomastic and toponymic indexes. In 1988 María del Carmen Martín Rubio published the first (peninsular) Spanish edition of the text, and in 2001 Alessandra Luiselli published the first Mexican edition, which substantially normalized and modernized the sixteenth-century orthography for the modern reader. There have also been several translations into other languages of Titu Cusi’s Instrucción. Hidefuji Someda prepared a Japanese translation, Martin Lienhard a German translation, and John H. Parry and Robert Keith translated some short excerpts into English in their collection titled New Iberian World (1984
).

  In preparing this full-length English translation, I have consulted the extant published editions as well as the original manuscript. I was able to inspect the manuscript at the Royal Library of the Escorial in winter 2002–2003 and also to obtain a photocopy of the microfilm copy housed at the Library of the Royal Palace in Madrid by kind permission and assistance of the library staff there. As the manuscript is at times difficult to decipher, it is not surprising to find occasional discrepancies among the existing Spanish transcriptions of the text, which I duly note. In my translation, I have made an effort to strike a balance between remaining as close to the original as possible while rendering it in idiomatic English. I have preserved the paragraph breaks (which are indicated in the manuscript as lines drawn from the last word of a line to the margin) but have frequently broken up long sentences, more common in Spanish than in English, into smaller syntactic units. Although perhaps not always successful, I have taken pains to find current English idioms to capture the sense of the Spanish original as closely as possible. It is my hope in presenting this translation to the public that it will be found useful for scholars, teachers, and students of colonial (Latin) American and Native American history, culture, and literature.

  Notes

  1. Since completing the manuscript, it has come to my attention that Catherine Julien has also completed a full-length translation of Titu Cusi’s text, which is forthcoming. The two translations have evolved independently from on another, and I would like to thank Catherine Julien for bringing her forthcoming translation to my attention.

  2. On Inca expansionism, see María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca Realm, trans. Harry B. Iceland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12–134; also Terence D’Altroy, The Incas (Malden, MA, and Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 109–262; John Murra, El Mundo Andino: población, medio ambiente y economía (Lima: Pontifica Universidad Católica del Perú, 2002), 41–82; and Kenneth Andrien, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532–1825 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 14–39. On the circumstances of Huayna Capac’s death, see Michael Moseley, The Incas and Their Ancestors (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 7–11.