The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  Some of the Spaniards began gathering wood while others began stacking it in preparation for a fire around Atahualpa’s feet. The Dominican friar, Valverde, meanwhile, spoke to the emperor through one of the interpreters. “[He instructed him in] the things of our Christian faith, telling him that God had wished him to die for the sins that he had committed in the world and that he should repent of them, and that God would pardon him if he did.”

  It is impossible to know what Atahualpa actually understood of the friar’s message. Did Atahualpa think that the god these Christians kept talking about would “pardon” him from being killed if Atahualpa agreed to worship him? Or did he fully understand that the “pardon” being offered was a very limited one that would only allow Atahualpa to select between two different forms of death? In any case, here he was, lord of the four suyus, now bound to a stake while bearded men babbling in an unintelligible tongue were obviously preparing to set him on fire. Atahualpa had done everything these invaders had asked for, and now an unfriendly man in a dark robe was threatening him with death by fire if he didn’t accept the invaders’ one and only god, whom the Spaniards called Dios.

  The Spaniards, no doubt, were equally uncomprehending of the fact that there was nothing an Inca feared more than having his physical body destroyed—whether through burning or through some other physical process that made the body disappear. The Incas believed that access to the after-world could only be guaranteed if, after death, the body were kept intact, with the Inca emperors actually going so far as to have their bodies mummified and carefully tended to by subsequent generations. The thought of being burned at the stake was thus a double threat: not only would one’s last moments be very painful, but one would also forfeit the enjoyment of a pleasant afterlife.*

  Atahualpa’s chief concern for the moment seemed to be less about himself, however, and more about his two small sons. He had left them in Quito nearly a year earlier, when he had begun to make his way south in order to take over his brother’s throne and thus to unify the empire. Friar Valverde, prevented by his religion from marrying, impatiently told Atahualpa to forget about his wives and children and to concentrate on accepting the Spaniards’ Christian god instead. What was at stake here was the emperor’s soul, the friar insisted, although exactly how the translator tried to convey this concept—or even how much the native translator understood of the friar’s religion—is debatable. To Atahualpa, no doubt the Christians’ god seemed to be a very jealous one. The friar, however, continued to insist that Atahualpa would burn for eternity if he did not reject his own gods and worship only theirs.

  Atahualpa—dressed in a richly woven tunic and mantle—continued to plead the case of his small children, however. At one point he even requested that Francisco Pizarro take responsibility for them himself.

  Atahualpa said that he was entrusting his children to the Governor … [but] the friar … advised him to forget his wives and children and to die like a Christian, and that if he wanted to become one, that he [must] receive the holy baptismal water. But Atahualpa wept greatly and continued to insist that his children be cared for, indicating their heights with his hand and making it clear through his gestures … that they were small and that he was leaving them [unprotected] in Quito. [Yet] the Father continued to try and induce him to convert to Christianity and to forget his children, [telling him] that Governor [Pizarro] would look after them and would treat them as his own.

  Apparently reassured by the friar’s promises, Atahualpa finally agreed to convert—whether to save his children, save himself from a fiery end, or to guarantee himself access to the Inca afterlife, is unknown. Friar Valverde—the same man who eight months earlier had commanded Atahualpa to obey the Spaniards’ Christian god, or else face the Spaniards’ wrath—quickly baptized the emperor with water.

  As the sky began turning red from the setting sun, several Spaniards fastened around Atahualpa’s neck a garrote—a loop of rope attached to a stick that could be turned like a wheel, thus tightening the loop until the blood supply through the carotid arteries was cut off to the brain. As the friar began intoning the last rites—Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—one of the Spaniards began to twist the stick, the rope slowly tightening around Atahualpa’s neck—I will fear no evil, for thou art with me—until the emperor’s eyes began to bulge and the solitary vein on his forehead rose distended and illumed by the final rays of the sun—and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. Wrote the notary Pedro Sancho de la Hoz:

  With these last words, and with the Spaniards who surrounded him saying a credo for his soul, he [Atahualpa] was quickly strangled. May God receive him in heaven, for he died repenting of his sins and in the true faith of a Christian. After he had been strangled in this way and the sentence executed, some fire was thrown on to him to burn part of his clothing and flesh. That night (because he died late in the afternoon) his body was left in the square so that everyone could learn of his death.

  “He died on Saturday,” wrote another notary, “at the same hour that he was taken prisoner and defeated [eight months earlier]. Some said it was for his sins that he died on the [same] day [Saturday] and hour that he was seized.”

  So ended the life of Atahualpa, the thirty-one-year-old lord of the Incas, the first Inca emperor in over a hundred years who not only had failed to expand his ancestors’ empire, but had instead presided over the beginning of its collapse. For the second time in less than a decade, beginning with Huayna Capac’s death by smallpox, the Inca Empire was suddenly without a ruler. Governors, administrators, generals, and accountants still busied themselves with their daily tasks—but there was now no one to give them orders. From this moment forward the Inca Empire was essentially paralyzed, like an immense giant stumbling forward, incapable of defending itself against the small band of invaders who, like parasites, had burrowed deeply into the Inca body politic and were continuing to wreak their havoc.

  As Atahualpa’s body lay crumpled and smoking and native onlookers prostrated themselves moaning on the ground, the Spaniards, meanwhile, prepared to defend themselves against the imminent onslaught of an attack. Pizarro ordered the entire Spanish camp to ready itself and ordered fifty horsemen to patrol the city. That night, neither Pizarro nor his captains slept, periodically visiting with the night watches and readying everyone for battle. As on the eve of Atahualpa’s capture almost a year earlier, the bearded intruders were tense and on edge. Would dawn bring them face-to-face with hundreds of thousands of Inca warriors? And if so, how many of the Spaniards among them would live to finish the day?

  Eventually, the dense star clusters overhead began to dim while in the east the first pale rim of dawn began to emerge. The Spaniards who were already awake now woke their comrades as all strained to listen, fully expecting to hear the dull thud and clank of the approaching native infantry. Slowly, with each minute stretching into what must have seemed like an eternity, the sky brightened until finally the first rays of the sun appeared, the long, shaftlike yellow fingers touching the thatched roofs of the houses and then flooding the green valley with light. As the sun rose further, however, still no attack came. Scouts sent out on horseback returned without having sighted an army, at least not in the vicinity. The question no doubt on everyone’s mind was: what had become of the advancing native army? Why did it not appear and attack? Had the information they received been false—or had it been true?

  Reprieved for the moment from the immediate necessity to fight, the Spaniards now found themselves confronted with a more mundane problem: what to do with Atahualpa’s body. All agreed that they couldn’t just leave an Inca emperor lying on the square as they had previously done with thousands of Atahualpa’s slaughtered native soldiers. Atahualpa had been revered as a god, after all, and the natives continued to prostrate themselves on the square, greatly distraught over his death. Pizarro finally decided that the sooner they disposed of Atahualpa’s corpse, the quicker the memory of him would fade. Aft
er a brief ceremony, Atahualpa’s stiff, blackened body was interred in a hastily dug hole.

  A few days after Atahualpa’s burial, Spanish sentries sighted Hernando de Soto and his horsemen galloping toward camp. Unaware of what had transpired in their absence and assuming that Atahualpa was still alive, Soto rode back in a flourish and dismounted in the square. He immediately hurried off in search of Pizarro, no doubt glancing curiously at the stake impaled in the ground and at the charred wood nearby.

  Soto must have wondered at the somber mood in the camp and at finding Pizarro wearing “a large felt hat on his head [as if ] for mourning.” Presumably looking about in vain for Atahualpa, Soto quickly informed Pizarro that he and his men had found “no native warriors in the countryside, but [rather that] everyone was at peace…. For that reason, seeing that it was a trick, an obvious lie and a palpable falsehood, they [had] returned to Cajamarca.”

  Pizarro’s mournful reaction to the good news caught Soto completely by surprise. “I now see that I have been deceived,” Pizarro quietly said. The normally taciturn Pizarro—tall, graying, with a sparse beard and looking like Don Quixote if Don Quixote were the kind of man who murdered other men for their gold—suddenly appeared shaken and had “eyes wet with tears.” Pizarro told Soto that they had garroted Atahualpa a few days earlier, after new reports had arrived of an approaching Inca army. Obviously, Pizarro said, the information had been false.

  Soto, who like Pizarro had killed countless natives in personal combat, was deeply disappointed by Atahualpa’s death. Presumably this was both because of Atahualpa’s exalted rank—which the Spaniards in general respected—and also for the obvious bond that he had made with the friendly emperor. Along with Hernando Pizarro, Atahualpa had counted the handsome, dashing Soto as a supporter, or at least as someone with whom he could relate on a personal level. An emotional Soto quickly told Pizarro that it would have been much better to have sent Atahualpa to Spain, and that he himself would have gladly escorted him there. They had killed the emperor for no reason, no justifiable reason at all, Soto said. He then turned and exited the room.

  News of Atahualpa’s death slowly began to make its way northward from Peru, across the Isthmus of Panama and eventually via square-rigger ship to Spain. Meanwhile Pizarro, Almagro, and their roughly three hundred Spaniards readied themselves for the second major military campaign of the expedition. Pizarro’s plan was to begin a bold military thrust southward along the rugged spine of the Andes. No longer protected by a hostage emperor they could count upon to keep native armies at bay, however, they would now be forced to entrust their fates to their lances, to their swords, and to their solitary God. If capturing Atahualpa had been the equivalent of seizing the brain or command center of the empire, then Pizarro was now determined to fight his way southward in order to capture the empire’s heart: the legendary city of Cuzco. Pizarro knew that two Inca armies stood between himself and his goal, however. He also knew that another Inca army lurked somewhere to his rear. How those native armies and how their commanding generals would behave, no one could predict.

  With many of them no doubt making the sign of the cross, the cavalrymen with their long lances and the foot soldiers with their sheathed swords began to move out, leaving the town they had inhabited for nearly a year behind them, its wide square with its single forlorn stake slowly receding into the distance until, eventually, it was swallowed by their trail of dust.

  7 THE PUPPET KING

  “For a prince should have two fears: one, internal concerning his subjects; the other, external, concerning foreign powers.”

  NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, 1511

  FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS, PIZARRO AND HIS ROUGHLY three hundred conquistadors headed south, wending their way past snow-covered peaks, herds of llamas and alpacas tended by wide-eyed native boys wearing alpaca tunics, and occasionally clashing with local and mostly disorganized native resistance. The Spaniards by now had a larger retinue traveling with them: in addition to some native slaves from Nicaragua and a sprinkling of black slaves from Africa, they also enlisted the aid of numerous local natives, who led their pack trains of llamas, the latter loaded with tents, food, weapons, and with Atahualpa’s treasure of gold and silver.

  Before he and his Spaniards had left Cajamarca, however, Pizarro had decided to crown the eldest surviving brother of the emperor Huayna Capac, a royal prince called Tupac Huallpa. Pizarro hoped that by doing so he would be able to continue controlling the Inca aristocracy and hence the empire, much as he had done with Atahualpa. The new Inca emperor’s reign, however, was short-lived. Within two months, Tupac Huallpa sickened and died. A disappointed Pizarro had him buried in the town of Jauja, midway between Cajamarca and Cuzco. Once again, the Inca Empire was without a ruler.

  Pizarro and his Spaniards had nevertheless been able to gain a rough idea of the Incas’ current deployment of military forces before heading south. There were three Inca armies, Pizarro had been told: one in the north in what is now Ecuador with about thirty thousand soldiers and led by a general called Rumiñavi; another in what is now central Peru, with about 35,000 soldiers; and finally, General Quisquis’s army of occupation in Cuzco with some thirty thousand troops. Pizarro, however—even before leaving Cajamarca—had decapitated the central army by luring its general, Chalcuchima, to visit the imprisoned Atahualpa. After seizing Chalcuchima, Pizarro had decided to bring the Inca general along on his journey. Pizarro had grown suspicious, however, that the general might be trying to incite local natives to attack and thus had burned Chalcuchima at the stake. That meant that now there was only General Quisquis’s army standing between the Spaniards and their goal of capturing the capital of the Inca Empire.

  The seventeen-year-old puppet emperor Manco Inca’s coronation.

  In November 1533, as the Spaniards left the Inca town of Jaquijahuana, only a day’s march from Cuzco, they encountered a seventeen-year-old, boyish-looking native who wore a yellow tunic and who was accompanied by a group of Inca nobles. Pizarro’s interpreters soon learned that the young native was the son of the emperor Huayna Capac and thus was of royal descent. Pizarro also learned that the teenager’s name was Manco Inca and that, although he was the brother of both Atahualpa and Huascar, he was also one of the very few survivors of Huascar’s royal lineage. As Pizarro and his captains listened intently to their interpreter translating, the young prince explained how he had been living as a fugitive and had spent much of the previous year “fleeing constantly from Atahualpa’s men so that they would not kill him. He came so alone and abandoned that he looked like a common Indian.”

  Pizarro quickly realized that not only was Manco Inca a possible heir to the throne, but that the royal prince also belonged to the Incas’ Cuzco faction, precisely the faction that Pizarro wished to be perceived as allying himself with. Since Pizarro had already executed Atahualpa, nothing could be better than for him to arrive in Cuzco with a member of the same faction that had suffered under Atahualpa. Pizarro and his troops could thus position themselves as liberators, a perception that they hoped would forestall any native resistance from developing. The chronicler Pedro Sancho de la Hoz wrote:

  [Manco Inca] said to the Governor that he would help him all that he could in order to rid the land of all those from Quito [Atahualpa’s occupying army], for they were his enemies and they hated him…. [Manco] was the man to whom, by law, came all that province and whose chiefs all wanted for their lord. When he came to see Governor [Pizarro], he came by way of the mountains, avoiding the roads for fear of those from Quito. The Governor was happy to receive him and told him: “A lot of what you say pleases me, including your great desire to get rid of these men from Quito. You should know that I have come … for no other purpose than to prevent them from doing you harm and to free you from your slavery (to them). And you can be sure that I am not coming here for my own benefit … but knowing the injuries they were inflicting on you I wanted to come to rectify and undo them, as my lord the Emperor comma
nded me to do. You can thus be sure that I will do everything I can to help you and I will also (do the same to) liberate the people of Cuzco from this tyranny.” The Governor made these big promises to him [Manco Inca] in order to please him and so that he [Pizarro] might get news of how things were going [elsewhere in the empire]. That chief [Manco Inca] was marvelously satisfied, as were those who had come with him.

  Pizarro hoped that by allying himself with the young Inca prince he could fool the Cuzco faction into thinking that the Spaniards’ only interest was to place those who had recently been oppressed by Atahualpa back in power. Pizarro was also quick to realize that the seemingly naive young son of Huayna Capac might serve perfectly as a puppet king—one that could easily be controlled by the Spaniards.

  Before he could attempt to install Manco as the new emperor, however, Pizarro first had to capture Cuzco, which was still occupied by a large and hostile Inca army. General Quisquis intended to torch the city, Manco told the Spaniards, and to burn it to the ground rather than hand it over to the foreigners. In the distance, the Spaniards could already see smoke on the horizon: perhaps the destruction of Cuzco had already begun. Pizarro immediately ordered his twenty-three-year-old brother, Juan, and Hernando de Soto to lead forty horsemen to try to prevent the burning of the capital. While Pizarro and the rest of the horsemen, foot soldiers, auxiliary natives, and the supply train of llamas resumed their journey, Juan Pizarro, Soto, and their cavalry galloped off and disappeared over a rise.

  After eighteen months of conquest and despite another potentially large battle looming, Pizarro and his Spaniards were by now, however, quite confident. The attrition rates of native and Spanish troops had thus far been decidedly in the Spaniards’ favor. Beginning with the capture of Atahualpa, the Incas had lost more than eight thousand warriors, many high-ranking nobles, one of their three key generals, and of course their emperor. The Spaniards, by contrast, had thus far lost but a single African slave. Though relatively few in number, the Spaniards nevertheless possessed a number of advantages over the Incas in terms of military technology. Perhaps their greatest was their monopoly on horses—animals that could carry a fully armored Spaniard and still outrun the fastest native. The mobile tanks of the conquest, horses not only instilled fear in the natives but also provided a high platform from which the Spaniards could use their twelve-foot, metal-tipped lances or from which they could strike downward with their swords with brutal efficiency. Pizarro’s conquistadors also possessed gunpowder, a limited number of cannons, and an assortment of harquebuses.