The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  In terms of defense, the Spaniards often protected themselves with steel helmets, armor, and chain mail. In addition, Spanish footmen carried escudos—wooden shields about two feet in diameter—while horsemen carried adargas—larger shields made from doubled-up hides stretched over a wooden frame. Even the Spaniards’ horses wore protection—thick cotton padding that made the powerful animals difficult to wound or kill. A mounted and armored Spanish knight, with a shield in one hand and a lance or a sword in the other, represented the height of European killing technology. Only a similarly armed knight, a soldier firing a harquebus at close range, or a knowledgeable European pike man on the ground stood a chance against a mounted attack.

  Atahualpa’s nephew Titu Cusi later described how he and his fellow natives viewed an attacking Spanish army, with their harquebuses firing invisible darts that miraculously killed their warriors at a distance, with their trumpets blaring, with the pounding of their horses’ hooves, and with the glint of their steel blades:

  They seemed like viracochas, which is the name we gave in ancient times to the creator of all things…. And they [the Incas] named those people whom they had seen in this way, in part because they were very different in clothing and appearance and also because they rode … giant animals, which had feet of silver, and they said this because of the shining of their horseshoes…. They called them viracochas because of their excellent appearance and because of the great differences there were among them: because some had black beards and others red ones, and because they saw them eat off of silver plates, and because they had Illapas—our name for thunder—and they said this to describe the harquebuses because they thought them to be thunder from heaven.

  Besides their armaments, the Spaniards possessed other advantages: they could communicate much more efficiently through writing, thus being able to send and receive complex information between their often divided forces; they had ships and access to an international trade network through which they could resupply themselves periodically with more weapons, horses, and men from afar; and they had the experience of having successfully battled Moorish knights, armed like themselves, on the Iberian peninsula for centuries.

  The Spaniards had also just spent more than thirty years conquering other native groups scattered throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, and different parts of the Americas, while Hernando Cortés had only recently conquered the Aztec Empire in Mexico. Pizarro had thus arrived knowing how, like Cortés, he might use native political divisions to his advantage and might incorporate native allies into his ranks. In addition, the Spaniards possessed two native interpreters they had trained in Spain and whom they could now rely upon to receive and transmit information.

  Another potent weapon in the Spaniards’ military arsenal was completely unpremeditated yet nevertheless was an extremely important one: a plague of what was probably European smallpox. The epidemic had arrived just prior to Pizarro’s third and final voyage to Peru and had not only killed the ruler of the Inca Empire, Huayna Capac, but had also set off the brutal and devastating civil war that had fractured the empire in two. Only five years earlier, during Pizarro’s second voyage, the Inca Empire had been united and strong. What Pizarro and his men found during their third voyage in 1532 was an empire that had been severely weakened both by disease and violent civil war.

  In contrast to Spanish armaments, which were based upon the mixture of carbon and iron to make steel, Inca armaments were based upon bronze, copper, and stone. The Spaniards, therefore, found in Peru what was technologically speaking a Bronze Age culture, similar to what they would have found in Egypt a thousand years before Christ—if the Egyptians had been without horses. Although the Incas mined copper, tin, gold, silver, and mercury ores, iron ore within the realm of Tawantinsuyu was unknown (the first commercial iron ore was actually not discovered in Peru until 1915). Thus, even had the Incas been granted hundreds of more years of development, it is unlikely that they would have ever entered what the Old World knew as the Iron Age and, without iron, they could have never entered the Age of Steel. Confronted by steel-armored invaders from across the seas, the Incas’ own stone and soft-metal weapons were simply no match.

  For the most part, Inca weapons were designed for hand-to-hand combat with other similarly armed foot soldiers and consisted of an assortment of clubs. The largest, which required two hands to operate, the Spaniards called a porra and consisted of a long wooden handle with a ball of copper or stone that had five or six protruding points. Designed to crack open human skulls, the clubs, however, were incapable of penetrating a Spanish steel helmet. Only a direct blow to the face of a Spaniard not wearing a visor could inflict a fatal blow. The Incas also used battle-axes—with blades of copper, bronze, or stone—in a similar fashion, but none was sharp enough to dismember an enemy’s limbs. While Spanish swords could slice through flesh and arteries like so much butter, Inca axes were designed to break bones and/or inflict contusions.

  In addition to their clubs, Inca troops also used lances with tips of copper or bronze or sharpened wooden points. They also used darts with wooden or bone tips that could be propelled with a hand thrower. One of their most dangerous weapons, from the Spaniards’ point of view, was the Inca sling—warak’a—made of wool or some other fiber. By twirling the sling rapidly with an egg-sized stone fitted in its center, a warrior could hurl a stone with such force and accuracy that it could snap a Spanish sword in two. Unless a Spaniard was not wearing a helmet, however, the hurled stones were almost never lethal.

  Another weapon the Inca armies sometimes used, although sparingly, was the bow and arrow. Because only natives from the eastern jungles knew how to use such weapons, however, bows and arrows could only be used by incorporating into the Inca army natives from the Antisuyu, or Amazon region of the empire. Amazonian natives were few in comparison to the average peasant conscript from the highlands, however. Bows and arrows therefore had limited use—and were also unable to penetrate steel armor.

  Despite their much greater number of troops, the Incas operated under a variety of other disadvantages: they possessed no writing, only their quipus, which allowed them to send less information back and forth than did the Spaniards. They also had little knowledge of the world beyond their frontiers; the Incas were thus unaware of the Spanish conquests of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, nor did they know anything about the history of Europe or the rest of the world. Another disadvantage the Incas labored under was that while native warriors sometimes used copper breast or back plates, they generally wore only cotton armor, which protected them adequately against the weapons of other native armies but did little to protect them from the Spaniards’ deadly lances and swords. Finally, of course, the Incas had no horses; they were thus constantly faced with having somehow to defend themselves against a charging group of massive, alien animals ridden by armored Spaniards who almost always had the advantage of striking downward from above.

  Thus it was that on November 14, 1533, Captains Juan Pizarro and Hernando de Soto and their forty fully armored cavalry found themselves approaching the outskirts of the Incas’ capital of Cuzco. The road to the city was blocked by the combined forces of the central and southern armies, however, which had somehow managed to join with each other. Completely outnumbered, the Spaniards nevertheless decided immediately to attack—a tactic that they by now relied upon almost instinctively. Whenever in danger, the Spaniards’ natural reflex was to charge directly at whatever they perceived to be their largest threat. It was a strategy that thus far in the Andes had brought repeated success.

  The native warriors, “in the greatest numbers … came out against us with an enormous shout and much determination,” wrote Miguel de Estete. With their backs against the city and the experienced General Quisquis in charge, the northern army fought fiercely, driving the Spaniards back in an onslaught of sling-fired stones, arrows, and battering mace clubs. “They killed three of our horses, including my own, and that had cost me 1,600 castellanos,”
wrote the notary Juan Ruiz de Arce, “and they wounded many Christians.”*

  Protected by their armor and fighting from their mobile platforms, however, the Spaniards exacted a tremendous toll; hundreds of natives fell that day in fighting that continued until late in the afternoon with human limbs and no doubt even heads lying on the ground after having been severed with sharpened steel. The Spaniards, by comparison, with stones and mace heads bouncing off their steel armor, no doubt received wounds, but they didn’t suffer a single mortality; fighting on fairly level ground, they were able to rely alternately upon the battering ram effect of their horses and also upon their horses’ greater speed. If one Spaniard were in trouble, others on horseback would charge toward him. If the Spaniards needed to escape a difficult situation, then they spurred their horses and were able to outrun even the fastest of native warriors. Late that day, Francisco Pizarro and the rest of his troops arrived, but only after the Spanish cavalry force and Quisquis’s troops had ceased their fighting. With darkness now falling, the Inca and Spanish forces camped within sight of each other, the native campfires illuminating a nearby hillside. Wrote Sancho de la Hoz:

  [The Spaniards] set up their camp on a plain and the Indians stayed an harquebus-shot away on a slope until midnight, [continuously] shouting. The Spaniards spent all night with their horses saddled and bridled. The next day, at the crack of dawn, the Governor organized the foot soldiers and the cavalry, and he headed off on the road to Cuzco in good order … having been warned and believing that the enemy would come to attack them on the road.

  “We began marching towards the city,” wrote Ruiz de Arce, now forced to walk after the loss of his horse, “with a lot of fear, thinking that the Indians were waiting for us at its entrance. And so we … entered the city, which [no longer] had defenders.” Apparently realizing that on level ground his native troops, although numerous, were no match for the mounted Spaniards, General Quisquis had decided to save his army to fight another day. Just after midnight, Quisquis had given the order for his troops to retreat and to give up the fight for Cuzco. They did so quietly, leaving their campfires lit behind them to fool the Spaniards into thinking that they were still there. The next day, at around noon, the Spaniards marched victoriously into the city. “The Governor and his troops entered that great city of Cuzco,” wrote Sancho de la Hoz, “without any other resistance or battle on Friday, at the hour of high Mass, on the fifteenth day of the month of November of the year of the birth of our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, 1533.”

  As the Spaniards marched and rode cautiously in full battle order, the city’s inhabitants turned out onto the stone paved streets to watch them. It had only been that morning that the surprised citizens had learned that the northern army from Quito, which had occupied the city for the last year, had suddenly melted away and was now nowhere to be found. The citizens already knew, of course, that Atahualpa—the emperor whose generals had seized the capital and had killed their ruler, Huascar—was dead and had been executed by the same group of foreigners who were now entering their city. More than a few of them were surprised, however, to see Manco Inca, the young prince who most of them had not seen in a year, walking with the strange bearded men and surrounded by giant animals that made guttural noises and that none of the city’s inhabitants had ever seen before. Manco was obviously very much alive and through his behavior and speech the young prince made it known that the foreigners were friendly, not dangerous, and that they were to be treated as honored guests. For the weary inhabitants of Cuzco, the sudden disappearance of the hated northern army came as a relief. The question no doubt uppermost in their minds now, however, was—who were these strangers and why had they come?

  For Pizarro and his men, their entry into the capital was a military triumph, the culmination of a long and difficult journey that had begun nearly three years earlier, when they had first set off from Panama. And although the Spaniards may not have been welcomed on this, their first day, with the Inca equivalent of rose petals, clearly their strategy of allying themselves with Huascar’s faction and of presenting themselves as liberators, not as occupiers, was so far paying dividends. The city’s inhabitants stood quietly in the streets, well dressed in colorfully patterned cotton or alpaca tunics and with sandals on their feet. None of them appeared to be carrying weapons. To their relief, the Spaniards found that not a single sword had to be unsheathed nor a single harquebus ball fired. For the rank-and-file conquistador, their unopposed march into the finest city any of them had ever seen in the New World seemed nothing short of miraculous. “The Spaniards who have taken part in this enterprise are amazed by what they have done,” wrote Sancho de la Hoz. “When they begin to think about it, they can’t imagine how they can still be alive or how they were able to survive such hardships and such long periods of hunger.” “We entered [the city] without meeting resistance,” wrote Miguel de Estete, “for the natives received us with goodwill.”

  In all, only six Spaniards had lost their lives on the six-hundred-mile, three-month-long journey from Cajamarca to Cuzco; by contrast, the Spaniards had probably killed several thousand native warriors.

  Seventeen-year-old Manco Inca, too, was happy. Ever since Cuzco had been captured by Atahualpa’s forces and Huascar seized and taken north as a prisoner, Manco had been in fear for his life. After most of his brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, and the rest of his family had been rounded up and exterminated, Manco, a fugitive, must have known that he, too, would probably suffer a similar fate. No one, therefore, could have been more surprised than Manco that his brother Atahualpa had been killed, that the powerful Quitan army had been suddenly expelled from Cuzco, or that this small but powerful band of foreigners had arrived and wanted to place him on the throne. Now, with these fierce, light-skinned viracochas by his side, Manco suddenly found himself plucked from relative obscurity and placed alongside the Spaniards at the very pinnacle of power. To Manco, the long black period of the Quitan occupation appeared finally to be over.

  Pizarro, meanwhile, was quick to consolidate his latest military triumph. Since General Quisquis’s army could still mount a counterattack, Pizarro ordered his troops to quarter themselves in the larger of Cuzco’s two main squares. He then commanded those with horses to keep their mounts ready at all times, day and night, in case of an Inca assault on the city. Not one to waste time, Pizarro also informed Manco the day after his arrival in Cuzco that the latter would soon become the new Inca emperor, for as Sancho de la Hoz described,

  he was a prudent and bright young man and was the most important [native] among those who were there at the time, and was the one to whom … by law belonged the kingdom. He [Pizarro] did this rapidly … so that the natives would not join the men of Quito, but would have a lord of their own to reverence and to obey and would not organize themselves into [rebellious] bands. And so he [Pizarro] commanded all the chiefs to obey him [Manco] as their lord and to do all that he should order them to do.

  Pizarro instinctively understood both power and politics; he therefore tried to forestall any local resistance to the Spaniards’ authority from developing by making it appear that he had granted full sovereignty to Manco, which of course Pizarro had no intention of doing. Well aware that the Spaniards were too few in number to control a vast empire and that they would need native allies, Pizarro urged Manco to quickly begin recruiting an army. With a native army they could control, the Spaniards would more easily be able to crush insurrections and would also be able to rid the country of Atahualpa’s two remaining armies. Manco was only too happy to oblige, as raising an army would not only increase his own power but would also allow him to exact vengeance on the hated General Quisquis, who had exterminated nearly his entire family.

  Manco soon departed from the capital in a campaign against General Quisquis, along with Hernando de Soto, fifty Spanish cavalry, and ten thousand native warriors. Together, the combined Spanish-Inca assault inflicted enough damage on Quisquis’s forces that both the g
eneral’s officers and peasant conscripts finally decided that they had had enough. Having been away from their homes now for nearly two years, the troops eventually forced their proud general to begin the long, thousand-mile retreat northward back to Quito.

  With General Quisquis on the run, Manco wasted little time in preparing for his coronation, first retiring to the mountains for the traditional three-day fast, and then returning to Cuzco for his crowning as emperor.

  Once the fast was over, he [Manco] emerged richly dressed and accompanied by a great crowd of people … and any place where he was to sit was decorated with very valuable cushions and with royal cloth [placed] beneath his feet…. On either side [sat] other chiefs, captains, provincial governors, and the lords of large realms…. No one was seated here who was not a person of quality.

  According to Xerez: “They then received him as their lord with great respect and kissed his hand and cheek and, turning their faces to the Sun, they gave thanks to it, holding their hands together and saying that it had given them a natural lord…. They then placed a richly-woven fringe on him, tied around his head … which almost reached the eyes and that is the equivalent of a crown among them.”*