The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  And now, sometime in March or April 1533, as the Andes were beginning to enter into winter, General Quisquis found himself gazing at the three foreign emissaries, seated comfortably on litters borne by native porters who stood with downcast eyes before him. The visitors wore strange clothes, the general saw, had hair growing from their faces—so unlike his own smooth-skinned people—and even though their skin had browned under the fierce Andean sun, Quisquis could see patches when they moved that were white in color, hidden beneath their ragged and dirty clothes. The foreigners also each wore a long piece of metal at their waist, which Quisquis no doubt presumed was some kind of mace or club, although it looked thin and flimsy. The visitors spoke a barbarian tongue, for they replied in an unintelligible manner when spoken to and understood nothing of the empire’s lingua franca, runasimi, or apparently of any other native language. As such they were nearly impossible to communicate with. Wrote the native chronicler Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala:

  To our Indian eyes, the Spaniards looked as if they were shrouded like corpses. Their faces were covered with wool, leaving only the eyes visible, and the caps that they wore resembled little red pots on top of their heads. Sometimes they also decorated their heads with plumes. Their swords appeared very long, since they had to be carried with the points turned in a backward direction. They were all dressed alike and talked together like brothers and ate at the same table.

  The victorious Inca general himself was a spectacle that equally impressed the Spaniards: he wore resplendent clothing, consisting of a tunic, or unqu, decorated with black and white squares creating a chessboard-like effect, and he wore a mantle hanging from his shoulders made of the finest alpaca wool. The general’s tunic reached to his knees and below it he wore colored knee and ankle fringes. Hanging from his neck Quisquis wore a golden disc, given to him by the emperor Atahualpa for bravery, while twin golden bracelets encircled his wrists. Sandals made from leather, cotton, and alpaca covered the general’s feet, each overlain with a miniature golden mask.

  General Quisquis’s grave black eyes appeared quick and intelligent; he also had a proud face and possessed the long earlobes with inserted golden plugs of the Inca blood nobility, whom the Incas called pakoyok. The Spaniards undoubtedly noticed that not only was General Quisquis’s voice commanding but that his attendants and lower officers obeyed him immediately. Not surprisingly, the proud Inca general gave the three Spaniards a cold reception. How does one behave, after all, toward foreign invaders who have just seized the leader of your country? Still, with direct orders from Atahualpa, there was little the veteran general could do.

  “He didn’t like the Christians, although he marveled greatly at them,” wrote the notary Cristóbal de Mena. “This [Inca] captain told them not to ask him for much gold and that if they refused to release the chief [Atahualpa], then he himself would go to rescue him.” General Quisquis, no doubt suppressing his own desire to immediately seize and kill the foreigners, was now forced to swallow his pride as he allowed the Spaniards to enter the Incas’ most sacred temple—the Qoricancha, the temple of the sun. Doing so was akin to the cardinal secretary of state allowing three thieves to enter and sack St. Peter’s Cathedral. The Qoricancha was the holiest temple in the Inca Empire. Not open to the public, it was visited only by specialized priests and by the reclusive temple virgins, or mamacuna. All who entered were required to remove their shoes and to perform numerous forms of religious observances and ablutions.

  The two sailors and the notary, oblivious to Inca culture and concerned only with immediate plunder, entered the temple in their shabby leather boots and pushed past the stunned temple priests. They soon discovered that the Qoricancha was lined both inside and out with banded sheets of gold. Cristóbal de Mena described what happened next: “The Christians went to the buildings and with no aid from the Indians (who refused to help, saying that it was a temple of the sun and they would die) the Christians decided to strip the ornaments away … with some copper crowbars. And so they did.” With native crowbars, much grunting, and no doubt planting their boots when necessary against the sacred walls, the three Spaniards began prying off the golden sheets, piling them up outside like so much scrap metal before a group of horrified onlookers and angry priests. “The greater part of this consisted of plates like the boards of a box, three or four palmos (two to two-and-a-half feet) in length,” wrote the chronicler Xerez. “They had removed these from the walls of the buildings and they had holes in them as if they had been nailed.” Each plate weighed about four and a half pounds, which meant that every plate in monetary terms was enough to buy a caravel, or was worth the equivalent of nine years of wages for either of the two sailors carrying them. Eventually, the Spaniards assembled a pile of some seven hundred golden plates, each rudely ripped from the empire’s holiest of walls.

  On May 13, 1533, after an absence of nearly three months and a journey of more than 1,200 miles, the first of the three Spaniards arrived back in Cajamarca, still carried on a royal litter. The two Spaniards left behind eventually shepherded a vast procession of 178 loads of gold and silver, each load carried on a type of stretcher borne by four native porters; in all, more than a thousand porters labored northward plus llamas carrying provisions.

  Once they had arrived back in Cajamarca, the three travelers found Pizarro’s camp much changed. Diego de Almagro—Pizarro’s short, one-eyed, fifty-eight-year-old partner—had arrived a month earlier. Almagro had marched up into the Andes and had joined Pizarro with a force of 153 more men, including fifty new horses, leaving six ships behind.

  Almagro’s sudden arrival had apparently had the effect of crushing Atahualpa psychologically, as ever since his capture five months earlier the emperor had been waiting patiently for the Spaniards to depart. With the sudden near doubling of Pizarro’s forces and the arrival of so many fresh horses and men, the message was now as clear to him as was the information spread across the colored knots of an Inca quipu. Watching the newly arrived Spaniards greedily eyeing the roomful of gold and excitedly chatting among themselves, Atahualpa no doubt realized that he had been fooled. Far from being a small party of marauders preparing to leave with their plunder, the Spaniards now appeared to be readying themselves for a full-scale invasion of his empire.

  Trying to confirm Pizarro’s true intentions, Atahualpa and one of his chiefs asked Pizarro at one point a leading question: how were the peasants in Tawantinsuyu going to be divided among the Spaniards, they asked. When Pizarro said without thinking that every Spaniard was going to be granted a native chief, which meant that every Spaniard was going to control an entire native community, Atahualpa’s plans for assuming the Inca throne were suddenly dashed, just as unexpectedly as an unforeseen attack in a game of chess. One of the inherent challenges of chess, Atahualpa knew, was trying to divine the intentions of one’s opponent while simultaneously trying to mask one’s own. In this regard, Pizarro had clearly succeeded while Atahualpa had just as clearly failed.

  Atahualpa no doubt also realized that if his present circumstances in Cajamarca were like one big game of chess, then this was probably his last game; he surely felt the sensation of being trapped in a sudden checkmate. Now, not only did Atahualpa not have even a proverbial pawn to protect him, but he was further hemmed in by forces more powerful than before the game had begun. Atahualpa must have also realized that all of the sacred gold and all of the sacred silver objects he had been so diligently collecting probably weren’t going to amount to much more than a silver vase full of llama piss, for all the good they were going to do him. For the first time, Atahualpa must have realized that he was destined for precisely the same end as his brother Huascar.

  “When Almagro and these men arrived,” recalled Pedro Pizarro, “Atahualpa became anxious and … [feared] that he was going to die.” Upon hearing Francisco Pizarro’s reply, in fact—that the leader of the foreign invaders intended to divide up the empire among his followers—Atahualpa is said to have simply uttered, “[Then] I
shall die.”

  6 REQUIEM FOR A KING

  “In 1531 another great villain [Francisco Pizarro] journeyed with a number of men to the kingdoms of Peru. He set out with every intention of imitating the strategy and tactics of his fellow-adventurers in other parts of the New World … but, as time went on, his cruelty came to outstrip even that of his predecessors, as he criminally murdered and plundered his way through the region, razing towns and cities to the ground and slaughtering and otherwise tormenting in the most barbaric fashion imaginable the people who lived there. Throughout the territory, his wickedness was on such a scale that nobody will ever really learn the full extent of it until all is revealed on the Day of Judgment.”

  BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS, THE DESTRUCTION OF THE INDIES, 1542

  “When they reached the Governor [Pizarro], they found him grief stricken, with a large felt hat on his head for mourning, and his eyes wet with tears.”

  GONZALO FERNÁNDEZ DE OVIEDO Y VALDÉS, HISTORY OF THE INDIES, 1547

  “Politics have no relation to morals.”

  NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, 1511

  WHEN DIEGO DE ALMAGRO FINALLY ARRIVED WITH ADDItional men and supplies in Peru in 1533, like Pizarro he must have been surprised to have found the city of Tumbez lying in complete ruins. Traveling south along the coast, he and his men soon came upon the newly founded Spanish town of San Miguel, where Pizarro had left some eighty of the sick, young, or older conquistadors as citizens. Almagro learned from them that Pizarro was in the mountains and had somehow managed to capture the lord of what they believed was a powerful Indian empire. The natives were afraid to attack them, Almagro was told, because Pizarro held their lord prisoner. Almagro also learned that Pizarro was expecting his arrival and wanted Almagro to join him as quickly as possible.

  The execution of Atahualpa inca.

  By now, Almagro and Pizarro had been partners for at least fourteen years. Yet theirs had been a bumpy relationship as of late. When Pizarro had returned from Spain to Panama in 1529 with a royal license to conquer the Inca Empire—a realm that he was authorized to plunder for a distance of two hundred leagues, or seven hundred miles—he had also returned with the title of Governor of Peru. In addition, Pizarro had secured for himself the military title of Captain-General of Peru and had set in motion the process for being awarded the coveted Order of Santiago, a knighthood that would automatically pluck him from his lowly origins and deposit him securely among the elite of Spain.

  In contrast to his own multiple titles, Pizarro had brought back just a single title for his loyal partner, Almagro—that of the Mayor of Tumbez, an area that, all told, covered a span of perhaps a few square miles and that now lay in ruins. This was despite the fact that, during their previous voyage, Almagro had rescued Pizarro and his starving followers on the island of Gallo, off the coast of Colombia, and despite the fact that it had been Almagro who had raised funds to send Pizarro to Spain in the first place. Not surprisingly, Pizarro’s short, swarthy partner had been furious upon hearing the news that he had been completely shortchanged.

  Pizarro, however, still needed Almagro. He needed his organizational skills, he needed his ability to find and enlist fresh recruits, he needed his partner’s capacity to do the lion’s share of all the thousand and one things that outfitting an expedition of conquest in the New World required. Almagro, on the other hand, had clearly been outmaneuvered: it was Pizarro who had been granted permission to conquer Peru, not he. And even if he refused now to participate, there was nothing he could do to prevent Pizarro from leaving for Peru without him.

  After their long and intimate association, however, Pizarro knew his partner exceedingly well. He knew the man’s strengths, weaknesses, and vanities. Like himself, Almagro was illegitimate. He therefore no doubt had a deep-rooted need to prove himself. Pizarro also knew that Almagro wanted a partnership of equality, that he didn’t want to be treated as an inferior, and that he wanted respect. More than anything else, Almagro wanted a governorship, to be lord and master of his own realm.

  In a deft negotiation, Pizarro ultimately succeeded in assuring his angry partner that, although the king had granted Pizarro the governorship of Peru, he would nevertheless do everything in his power to encourage the king to grant Almagro a governorship outside the territory of his own. With enough titles and promises now to go around, Almagro finally agreed to bury the hatchet and resumed preparations for their expedition.

  Four years later, in April of 1533, when Diego de Almagro crested the final rise and rode with his men down into the city of Cajamarca, his partner, Francisco Pizarro, was there to meet them. The two leaders greeted each other warmly; it was easy, after all, to bury old animosities in light of the present exhilarating circumstances. Pizarro proudly introduced Almagro to a stunned Atahualpa, then led his old partner into the guarded chamber filled almost to Atahualpa’s white line with countless glistening objects of gold. The two men no doubt clapped each other on the back. That night, Pizarro ordered that extra llamas be slaughtered to feed Almagro’s men.

  Underneath the outward display of comradeship, however, tensions between the two partners remained. Even before Almagro had arrived, Pizarro had heard rumors that his partner might attempt to conquer Peru on his own. Almagro showed no sign of making such a move, however, nor were such rumors ever discussed. In truth, Pizarro always had and always would consider Almagro his sidekick, a clear subordinate. Despite their legal partnership, to Pizarro, Peru and the titles that came with conquering Peru were his, and his alone. He was willing to share a certain amount of wealth and power with Almagro, but Pizarro would never consider his squat, one-eyed partner his equal.

  With Almagro’s arrival, there were now over three hundred Spaniards in Cajamarca and these belonged to two very obvious and distinct groups. Those who had participated in the capture of Atahualpa and in the slaughter on the square—168 of them—would forever more be known as the “Men of Cajamarca,” the mythical founders of Spanish Peru. They had the right to share in Atahualpa’s ransom and thus would soon become the equivalent of modern-day millionaires. The Spaniards who had just arrived with Almagro, on the other hand, even though they were now part of a force expected to subdue the rest of the empire, would receive only a token amount of Atahualpa’s treasure. That was because they had not participated in the conquest’s key event. According to Pedro Pizarro,

  Almagro … did not want … [the unequal division] to be that way, but rather that he and his companion [Pizarro] each take half [of everything], and that to the rest of the Spaniards they give a thousand or at most two thousand pesos each. In this [however] the Marquis behaved very Christianly, for he did not deprive anyone of what he merited. Since this distribution was made among all the Spaniards who entered Cajamarca [and who took part in] the capture of Atahualpa … nothing was given to those who came afterwards.

  One of those who came “afterwards” and who was given next to nothing was Pizarro’s own partner, Diego de Almagro.

  As the newcomers eyed the roomful of gold and watched as more gold and silver continued to arrive each day, they were naturally both jealous and also impatient to finish the ransom process. Only once the ransom had been collected and they left Cajamarca would they have the chance of seizing plunder for themselves. Meanwhile, the disconsolate Atahualpa observed the Spaniards with growing desperation.

  On June 13, 1533, two months after Almagro’s arrival, the two Spanish scouts who had stayed behind in Cuzco finally arrived, escorting a convoy of 223 llama loads of gold and silver. If each llama were carrying an average load of fifty pounds, then that convoy alone would have added more than eleven thousand pounds of precious metals to Atahualpa’s treasure.* One can only imagine how the second group of Spaniards must have reacted when they realized that not a bit of the newly arrived treasure would be theirs. Although they had traveled just as far as their companions and had endured their own assortment of dangers, they had arrived five months too late to partake in the ransom.r />
  Four days later, with tensions growing among the Spaniards and a roomful of gold on his hands, Pizarro ordered that the job of melting and assaying the gold begin. He also ordered that the silver, which had already been melted down, now be distributed. Eventually, during a four-month period, from March to July 1533, the Spaniards fed more than forty thousand pounds of sacred Inca gold and silver into the furnaces. Roughly half of the Spaniards watched this process with mounting joy while the other half watched with mounting envy. Pound after pound of the finest objects created by the empire’s craftsmen were fed into the fires—gold and silver statues, jewelry, platings, vessels, ornaments, and other works of art—all reduced to formless, red-hot puddles, then poured steaming into molds to make ingots. Today, Inca objects of gold and silver are a supreme rarity—the lion’s share having disappeared nearly five hundred years ago into the furnaces of Cajamarca.

  At long last, the moment Atahualpa’s captors had been waiting for arrived. As notaries watched the careful weighing process and busily wrote everything down before signing and stamping the documents with a flourish, each horseman stepped forward and received 180 pounds of silver and ninety pounds of 22½ karat gold—gold and silver pure enough to be melted down instantly into coins. If one calculates that a single pound of gold represented roughly two years of a common sailor’s salary, then ninety pounds of the dense yellow metal represented 180 years’ worth, not even counting the silver. And even though the foot soldiers received only half of this amount—ninety pounds of silver and forty-five pounds of gold—it was clear that all of the 168 Spaniards who had arrived with Pizarro in Cajamarca were now richer than they could ever have imagined. If expeditions of conquest were all about the search for an easy retirement, then Atahualpa’s captors had just won the richest lottery in the world. They could, if they so wanted, now pack up their scanty belongings and return to Spain—and would never have to work another day in their lives.