An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru

by Ralph Bauer

  3. Titu Cusi reports that they “digen que vienen por el viento.” Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s Ynstrucción del Ynga Diego de Castro Titu Cussi Yupanqui (In “De las relaciones del tiempo de la visita. Relación del gobierno y sucesión de los Ingas,” Biblioteca del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Manuscrito L. I. 5, folio 141 (64).

  4. On the background of Pizarro and the other men in his band, see James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca: Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), especially 135–156; also Rafael Varón Gabai, Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers: The Illusion of Power in Sixteenth-century Peru, Trans. Javier Flores Espinoza (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 3–35.

  5. For more details on this struggle for the royal tassel, see Rostworowski, History of the Inca Realm, 110–134; also John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 28–35.

  6. For a more detailed account of these events, see Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, 23–70; also Karen Spalding, Huarochirí, An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 106–135.

  7. For a discussion of these complex Hispano-Andean alliances that were instrumental in the Spanish conquest, see Steve Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); also Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, Destrucción del imperio de los incas: la rivalidad política y señorial de los curacazgos andinos (Lima, Ediciones Retablo de Papel, 1973).

  8. See Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, 89–229; also Andrien, Andean Worlds, 41–43.

  9. For a detailed account of the neo-Inca state, see Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, 256–346; also George Kubler, “The Neo-Inca State (1537–1572),” The Hispanic American Historical Review 27:2 (1947): 189– 200.

  10. For more detailed accounts of the civil wars, see James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 137–140; also Andrien, Andean Worlds, 43–49; and Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, 227–272.

  11. Edmundo Guillén Guillén (Versión inca de la conquista [Lima: Editorial Milla Batres, 1974], 11), has surmised that Saire Topa was poisoned; however, the circumstances of his death have not been definitively established.

  12. For a good recent account of Juan Santos Atahuallpa’s rebellion, see Hanne Veber, “Ashánika Messianism,” Current Anthropology 44:2 (April 2003): 183–211; on Andean resistance more generally, see Andrien, Andean Worlds, 193–232.

  13. For a more comprehensive discussion of Native appropriations of European sign systems for the purpose of resistance, see Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, La apropiación del signo: Tres cronistas indígenas del Perú (Tempe: Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1988), and ibid., “Writing as Resistance: Peruvian History and the Relación of Titu Cussi Yupanqui,” in R. Adorno, ed., From Oral to Written Expression. For a more general account of Incan versions of the conquest, see Guillén Guillén, Versión inca de la conquista, and ibid., “Titu Cussi Yupanqui y su tiempo, El estado imperial inca y su trágico final: 1572.” Historia y Cultura no. 13–14 (Lima: Museo Nacional de Historia, 1981): 61–99.

  14. Although southern Peruvian Quechua had served as the administrative lingua franca of Tahuantinsuyu, the Incas had never enforced linguistic standardization or uniformity. As a result, the Spaniards upon their arrival in Peru found a bewildering linguistic diversity—José de Acosta claims that there were more than 700 languages in the Inca realm (see Andrien, Andean Worlds, 117)—and promoted a standardized version of southern Peruvian Quechua as a lengua general (lingua franca) for the purpose of catechization and instruction (see Sabine DedenbachSalazar and Lindsey Crickmay, eds. La lengua de la cristianización en Latinoamérica: Catequización e instrucción en lenguas amerindias/The Language of Christianization in Latin America: Catechisation and Instruction in Amerindian Languages [Markt Schwaben: Saurwein, 1999]).

  15. For historical accounts of this movement, see Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples, 50–55; Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 175–81; and Andrien, Andean Worlds, 168–171.

  16. For an account of Ortiz’s martyrdom, see also the account given by Doña Angelina Llacsa, one of the Inca’s wives, published as an appendix to Urteaga’s edition of Titu Cusi’s account (Relación de la Conquista del Perú y hechos del Inca Manco II, ed. Horacio H. Urteaga, Collección de Libros y Documentos relativos a la Historia del Perú, t. II [Lima: Imprenta y Librería San Martí y Compañía, 1916], 133–137.

  17. This is the interpretation that John Hemming gives of these continuous overtures of goodwill that remained, however, without concrete result for the Spaniards (Hemming, Conquest of the Incas, 338– 339).

  18. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, writing in the early seventeenth century, claimed that the land and labor granted to Saire Topa in exchange for his return to Cuzco—a grant that included substantial parts of Huayna Capac’s estate and that Titu Cusi’s son stood to inherit in a marriage to Beatriz—had already been divided up among the Spanish citizens of Cuzco at the time the grant was made. For more on the fate of Huayna Capac’s estate, see Susan Niles, The Shape of Inca History: Narrative and Architecture in an Andean Empire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 121–153.

  19. For a discussion of the Andean oral traditions surrounding this scene, see Regina Harrison, Signs, Songs, and Memory in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989); also Jesús Lara, La poesía quechua (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979), 92; and Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530–1570, trans. Ben and Siân Reynolds (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977), 35. On Andean oral traditions more generally see also Margot Beyersdorff, and Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz, eds., Andean Oral Traditions: Discourse and Literature/Tradiciones Orales Andinas: Discurso y Literatura (Bonn: Bonner Amerikanistische Studien, 1994).

  20. Because of the multiple and culturally diverse agencies involved in the production of this text, Alessandra Luiselli has written of the “mestizo discursivity” of Titu Cusi’s text (“Introducción,” in Instrucción del Inca don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, ed. Alessandra Luiselli [Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001], 17); on the question of translation, see also Gustavo Verdesio, “Traducción y contrato en la obra de Titu Cusi Yupanqui,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXXII (1995): 403–412.

  21. Andrien, Andean Worlds, 106. On cultural contact and conflict in colonial Peru, see also Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Peru (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

  22. See Roberto González Echevarría, “Humanismo, Retórica y las Crónicas de la Conquista,” in Isla a su Vuelo Fugitiva. Ensayos Criticos sobre Literatura Hispanoamericana (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, S. A. 1983), 9–26; also ibid., Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  23. Walter Mignolo, “El Métatexto Historiográfico y la Historiografía Indiana,” MLN 96:2 (1981): 389; see also ibid., “Cartas, crónicas y relaciones del descubrimiento y la conquista, in Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana; época colonial, ed. Luis Iñigo Madrigal (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1982), 57–116.

  24. For a discussion of this controversy, see Catherine Julien, Reading Inca History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 6–9.

  25. See Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “El Inka Titu Cusi Yupanqui y su entrevista con el oidor Matienzo (1565)” Mercurio Peruano 66 (1941): 4.

  26. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, “History of the Incas,” in Sir Clements Markham, ed., History of the Incas by Sarmiento de Gamboa and The Execution of the Inca Tupac Amaru by Captain Baltasar de Ocampo, trans. and ed. by Sir Clements Markham (London: Hakluyt Soc
iety, 1907), 193. This is repeated during the early seventeenth century by Baltasar de Ocampo, who wrote that Titu Cusi was not “the natural and legitimate Lord of that land (he being a bastard) having no right” (Ocampo, 213).

  27. See Luis Millones, “Introducción,” Ynstrucción del Ynga Don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupangui, edición facsímil de Luis Millones (Lima, Ediciones El Virrey, 1985), 7. For an extended discussion of these historical inaccuracies, see Carlos Romero, “Biografía de Tito Cusi Yupanqui,” in Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Relación de la Conquista del Perú y hechos del Inca Manco II, ed. Horacio H. Urteaga, Collección de Libros y Documentos relativos a la Historia del Perú, t. II (Lima: Imprenta y Librería San Martí y Compañía, 1916), xxii–xxiv.

  28. For a more detailed discussion of this kinship logic, see D’Altroy, Incas, 89–103; Niles, Shape of Inca History, 1–27; also Julien, Reading Inca History, 23–48.

  29. Not surprisingly, Titu Cusi’s claim that Atahuallpa’s and Huascar’s mothers were commoners is contradicted by chronicles that drew from other oral traditions. Thus, Betanzos, whose wife, Angelina Yupanqui, had formerly been Atahuallpa’s sister-wife, claimed that Atahuallpa’s mother was Pallacoca, a “noble lady of Cuzco” of the “lineage of Inca Yupanque” and thus a descendant of Manco Capac (Juan de Betanzos, Narrative of the Incas, trans. and ed. by Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan from the Palma de Mallorca manuscript [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996], 178). Sarmiento de Gamboa, however, claimed that Atahuallpa’s mother was Tocto Coca, who was Huayna Capac’s “cousin” and “of the lineage of Inca Yupanqui” (“History of the Incas,” 169). Although Betanzos makes a claim for Atahuallpa’s legitimacy, Sarmiento calls Atahuallpa “illegitimate” because Huascar was the son of Araua Ocllo, Huayna Capac’s “sister” (160).

  30. Generally, Europeans often did not understand the difference between the European concept of queen and the Andean concept of coya. Domingo de Santo Tomás’s dictionary, for example, defines coya as “reyna, o emperatriz, muger de emperador o de rey” (Lexicon o vocabulario de la lengua general del Peru [1560], edición facsimilar por Raúl Porras Barrenechea [Lima: Edición del instituto de Historia, 1951], 266). A woman’s status as coya, however, depended not on her being the “wife” or a ruler but rather, as pointed out above, on her claim to descent from Manco Capac by her paternal line.

  31. I am obliged to the anonymous reader for the University of Colorado Press for this observation.

  32. On the meaning of this word in Quechua, see Pierre Duviols, “Camaquen, Upani: un concept animiste des anciens peruviens,” Amerikanistische Studien I, Festschrift für Hermann Trimborn anlässlich seines 75, Geburtstages = Estudios americanistas I, Libro jubilar en homenaje a Hermann Trimborn con motivo de su septuagésimo-quinto aniversario / Hartmann, Roswith, éd; Oberem, Udo, Éd (Collectanea instituti Anthropos, 20) (St. Augustin: Haus Völker und Kultures, Anthropos-Institut, 1978), 132–144; also ibid., “La destrucción de las religiones andinas: conquista y colonia.” Historia general, 9 (México: Universidad nacional autónoma de México. UNAM, Instituto de investigaciones históricas), 441–459. On the changes in Andean religious concepts resulting from European conquest and colonialism more general, see also Arthur Demarest, Viracocha: The Nature and Antiquity of the Andean High God (Cambridge, MA, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1991); Willem F.H. Adeelar, “A grammatical category for manifestations of the supernatural in early colonial Quechua,” in Language in the Andes, ed. Peter Cole, Gabriella Hermon, and Mario Daniel Martín (Newark: University of Delaware, 1994), 116–125; and Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar, “La terminología cristiana en textos quechuas de instrucción religiosa en el siglo XVI, in Latin American Indian Literatures: Messages and Meanings, ed. Mary Preuss (Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 1997), 195–209; and ibid., “. . . luego no puedes negar que ay Dios Criador del mundo, pues tus Incas con no ser Christianos lo alcanzaron a sauer, y lo llamaron Pachacamac,” La lengua de la cristianización en los Sermones de los misterios de nuestra santa fe catolica de Fernando de Avendaño (1649), in La lengua de la cristianización en Latinoamérica: Catequización e instrucción en lenguas amerindias/The Language of Christianization in Latin America: Catechisation and Instruction in Amerindian Languages, Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar and Lindsey Crickmay, eds. (Markt Schwaben: Saurwein, 1999), 223–248.

  33. Luiselli (“Introducción,” 82, n. 39) suggests that this may have to be attributed to Marcos García.

  Translation of Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s Account7

  The Inca Don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui’s Instruction to the very illustrious Señor licentiate Lope García de Castro, formerly Governor of this kingdom of Peru, concerning the affairs in which the latter is authorized by power of attorney to negotiate with His Majesty on the former’s behalf.

  As I, Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, grandson of Huayna Capac1 and son of Manco Inca Yupanqui,2 the natural lords that used to rule these kingdoms and provinces of Peru, have received many graces and favors from the very illustrious Señor licentiate Lope García de Castro, formerly governor of these kingdoms by the grace of His Majesty, King Don Philip, our lord; and as Your Excellency are a person of great valor and piety who are about to leave these kingdoms for those of Spain, it seems to me that I couldn’t have a person with better credentials and disposition to serve as an advocate on my behalf before His Majesty regarding certain affairs of utmost importance to me and my sons and descendants. As I put great confidence in Your Excellency, I do not hesitate to entrust all my affairs to your hands. Furthermore, as Your Excellency has always shown me such great favors in all things, I hope that I may find your support also in this very important matter.

  As the memory of men is frail and weak, it would be impossible to remember everything accurately with regard to all our great and important affairs unless we avail ourselves of writing to assist us in our purposes. Therefore, it is necessary for me, being as brief as possible, to call to mind a few important issues. I hope that Your Excellency may favor me by bringing these concerns, which I will momentarily detail, to the attention of His Majesty on my behalf. These are the following.

  First, that Your Excellency, upon your safe arrival in Spain, may do me the favor of enlightening His Majesty the King, our lord Don Philip under whose protection I have placed myself, about my identity and the hardships I suffer in these jungles as a result of His Majesty’s and His vassals’ having taken possession of this land, which belonged to my ancestors. Perhaps His Excellency could begin by giving a testimony about who and whose son I am, so that His Majesty is entirely clear on the reasons why I am entitled to compensation.

  I suppose that it is common knowledge by now, given the accounts of many people, who the ancient and legitimate lords of this country were, from where and under what circumstances they came; therefore, there is no need to be detained by explanations. But I would greatly appreciate it if Your Excellency could do me the honor of informing His Majesty that I am the one legitimate son, meaning the eldest and firstborn, among the many sons whom my father Manco Inca Yupanqui left behind.3 He entrusted me to take care of them and to look after them as I would of myself. This is what I have been doing from the day he died up to this very day; and this is what I am doing now and what I will continue to do as long as God keeps me alive, because it is right that sons do what their fathers have ordered them to do, especially during their last days. His Majesty should also be informed that my father, Manco Inca Yupanqui, as the son of Huayna Capac and grandson of Topa Inca Yupanqui,4 and thus the descendant of their ancestors in a direct line, was the highest ruler of all these kingdoms of Peru. As such, he was designated by his father Huayna Capac and, after the latter’s death, recognized and respected by everyone throughout the land, as I, too, was then, am now, and have been ever since my father’s death.5 Furthermore, I would be much obliged if Your Excellency could explain to His Majesty the reasons why I am now in such dire straits in these jungles where my father left me after
the Spaniards ruined and then murdered him.

  Moreover, His Majesty should be made aware of the things that are explained in more detail below with regard to the manner and times in which the Spaniards intruded into these lands of Peru and of the way they treated my father while he was still alive before they killed him in this land, which is now mine. The account is as follows.

  The Account of how the Spaniards intruded into Peru and of the Things that Manco Inca did when he lived among them

  At the time when the Spaniards first landed in this country of Peru and when they arrived at the city of Cajamarca, which is about 190 leagues from here,6 my father Manco Inca was residing in the city of Cuzco. There he governed with all the powers that had been bestowed upon him by his father Huayna Capac.7 He first learned of the Spaniards’ arrival from certain messengers who had been sent from there by one of his brothers by the name of Atahuallpa, who was older but a bastard,8 and by some Indians from the lowlands called Tallanas, who live on the coast of the South Sea, fifteen or twenty leagues from Cajamarca. They reported having observed that certain people had arrived in their land, people who were very different from us in custom and dress, and that they appeared to be Viracochas (this is the name that we used to apply to the creator of all things, calling him Teqsi Viracocha, which means “origin” and “originator of all things”).9 They named the people as such because they differed much from us in clothing and appearance and because they rode very large animals with silver feet (by which they meant the glittering horseshoes). Another reason for calling them so was that the Indians saw them alone talking to white cloths [paños blancos] as a person would speak to another, which is how the Indians perceived the reading of books and letters. Moreover, they called them Viracochas because of the stately appearance of their persons and because each was so different from the other, some having black beards and others red ones and, finally, because they saw them eat out of silver dishes und using yllapas,10 which is the word we use for “thunder” and by which they meant their “guns”; for they thought that the thunder they made came from the sky.