Juan Pizarro and Gonzalo Pizarro were most resentful of Almagro because they disliked him…. Almagro’s friends coaxed him, telling him to look out for himself; the King had made him lord, so he should truly be one, and he should immediately send for those decrees that were coming and take possession of what the King had designated as his governance.
Concluded Cieza de León: “From then on there were two factions: one bound to the Pizarros and another to the Almagros.”
Disagreements over who would control Cuzco and its surrounding area came to a head roughly a month after Almagro’s arrival. One day in March, 1535, fearing that Almagro might try to seize the capital as his own, the two Pizarro brothers and their supporters carried several cannons into their palace on the main square, barricaded it, and then “scandalously emerged onto the plaza, ready to begin a great altercation.” Their behavior so incensed Hernando de Soto—a longtime supporter of Almagro—that he and Juan Pizarro quickly came to blows. According to Juan’s cousin, Pedro,
Juan Pizarro and Soto had words [while mounted on their horses] … whereupon Juan Pizarro seized a lance and thrust it at Soto who, had he not been on a fast horse, would have been brought down by the lance thrusts. Juan Pizarro chased after him until they reached the place where Almagro was staying [on Cuzco’s square], and if Almagro’s men had not saved him, he [Juan] would have slain him, for Juan Pizarro was a very brave and strong-willed man…. When Almagro and his men saw Soto enter [the square] fleeing and with Juan right behind him, they seized their weapons … and went after Juan Pizarro. Thus, men from both sides gathered on the square, brandishing their weapons.
Only through the intervention of a newly arrived royal official, Antonio Téllez de Guzmán, were the two Spanish factions ultimately prevented from killing each other. “Had the Christians fought one another the Indians would have attacked those who survived,” Guzmán later wrote the king. As Cieza de León described it: “All of them were so frenzied and full of envy of each other that it was a wonder that they did not all kill each other…. These were the first passions in this land between the Almagros and the Pizarros, or brought about on their behalf.”
Two months later, after hearing reports of near civil war in the capital, Francisco Pizarro hurriedly went to Cuzco. Anxious to defuse the situation, yet with the precise details of the king’s division of the Inca Empire still not having arrived, Pizarro decided to try to negotiate a solution with his former partner. Both Pizarro and Almagro were by now aware that they had conquered only perhaps two thirds of the Inca Empire. Sidestepping the incendiary issue of to whom Cuzco belonged, Pizarro soon agreed to help Almagro finance a massive expedition of exploration and conquest to the south. The southern portion of the Inca Empire would clearly lie within Almagro’s future governorship. Pizarro therefore hoped that by helping to finance its conquest he would rid himself of his increasingly troublesome partner and would simultaneously defuse the current political crisis in Cuzco. With any luck, there would be enough gold, silver, and peasants in the south to satisfy both Almagro and also his hundreds of ambitious new conquistadors.
Anxious to begin exploring his future governorship, Almagro agreed to the proposal. It was certainly possible that wealthy Inca cities, peasants, and fertile lands existed to the south, yet the Spaniards knew little about the region. What Almagro now needed to do was select his own second-in-command, someone whom he could rely upon during the expedition and whose loyalty would be to Almagro—and not to Pizarro.
Thirty-four-year-old Hernando de Soto was quick to apply for the position, offering to pay Almagro a fantastic sum of gold and silver for the privilege. Such positions didn’t grow on trees, after all, and although Soto was now very wealthy, he, too, was ambitious to govern a kingdom of his own. Perhaps he might find another native empire further to the south or to the east. Who knew? As second-in-command, Soto would be in an excellent position to petition the king for a governorship. Almagro declined Soto’s offer, however, choosing instead a man named Rodrigo Orgóñez, who had proven his loyalty to Almagro during the last five years.
Manco Inca, meanwhile, faced his own set of problems, which had only been heightened by the struggle among the Spaniards for control of Cuzco. Because the Spaniards openly flaunted their control of the city, Manco’s prestige was slowly being undermined. Even worse, within the Machiavellian world of Inca politics, rumors were now circulating in Cuzco that some of Manco’s relatives coveted the young emperor’s throne.
Manco’s most likely challenger should theoretically have been his brother Paullu; the latter was about Manco’s age and had somehow miraculously escaped being exterminated by General Quisquis during the northern army’s occupation. From the moment that Pizarro had selected Manco to rule, however, Paullu had pledged complete loyalty to his brother. Manco had so few suspicions about Paullu, in fact, that while the young emperor had been off participating in military campaigns in the north, he had left Paullu in Cuzco as the de facto emperor. Paullu had immediately relinquished the position as soon as Manco had returned. Manco was suspicious, however, of his cousin, Pascac, and of another half-brother, Atoc-Sopa, the two of whom formed the nucleus of a potential group of rivals. As the days passed, rumors that Pascac was scheming to replace Manco with Atoc-Sopa continued to travel from cluster to cluster of Inca nobles in the streets and within the dark interiors of elite Inca homes. Not even a foreign occupation was enough to dampen the Incas’ tradition of dynastic political intrigue.
Aware that the rivalries among the Inca elites might cause instability in his new realm, Pizarro attempted to end the power struggle by bringing the two Inca sides together to negotiate. The attempt was unsuccessful, however, so much so that Manco privately asked Almagro to help rid himself of the rival Inca faction. The year before, Manco and Almagro had spent considerable time together while on military campaigns and had become friendly. Although busy preparing for his expedition to the south, Almagro agreed to help the young emperor. The more he helped Manco, the more indebted to him the emperor would be.
One night, a small group of Spanish assassins crept along the frigid alleyways of the high Andean city, the moon causing slivers of steel to glimmer in their hands. Almagro had sent the men to exterminate Manco’s half-brother Atoc-Sopa. Finding the latter’s home in the dark and creeping into his bedroom, they located the potential Inca prince and murdered him in his bed. The assassination of Atoc-Sopa, however, only intensified the rupture within Manco’s extended family, which now began to organize themselves along the same fault lines that divided the Spaniards. Manco and his brother Paullu allied themselves with Almagro; those of the Inca faction opposed to Manco, meanwhile, allied themselves with Pizarro.
Things continued to deteriorate to such an extent that one night Manco—fearing a reprisal for his brother’s murder—fled his house and hurried to Almagro’s palace, where he pleaded with the veteran conquistador to hide him in his bedroom. When the rival faction’s Spanish supporters learned that Manco had essentially abandoned his home, “a noisy group of them went to rob and loot his house, causing a lot of damage, without anyone being able to stop or prevent it.” Some said that Manco was so frightened of being assassinated that night that he literally crawled beneath Almagro’s bed and hid.
On July 2, 1535, Diego de Almagro departed Cuzco with 570 Spanish cavalry and foot soldiers and with twelve thousand Inca porters. His goal was to explore and conquer the southern portion of the Inca Empire, of which he was soon to become governor. In a gesture of friendship, Manco had provided not only the porters for the expedition but had also sent Paullu and his high priest, Villac Umu, to accompany Almagro as well; both apparently enjoyed wide support among the southern native chiefs. Governor Francisco Pizarro and many of the Spanish encomenderos gathered to see the expedition off on what many felt was a permanent parting of the ways. While the encomenderos stood on the wide square wearing elegant stockings and plumed hats, Almagro’s men wore pointed morion helmets, spare bits of armor, an
d carried carefully honed swords and lances. The two ex-partners wished each other well, then Almagro and his men marched out of the capital of the Incas, leaving behind the bowl-like city with the Inca fortress of Saqsaywaman squatting above it.
The departure of Almagro’s expedition immediately emptied Cuzco of the majority of its impoverished Spaniards, leaving only the native inhabitants and the mostly wealthy Spanish encomenderos. Not long afterward, Pizarro departed from Cuzco as well, determined to continue his project of founding Spanish cities along the coast. Peru was connected to Spain by sea, after all, and if Pizarro’s kingdom was going to continue exporting the raw materials of gold and silver in exchange for imported and manufactured goods from Spain, then it would need cities and ports. Besides, seaside settlements could be militarily reinforced by ship, if for some reason that should prove necessary. Cities located in the interior, on the other hand—such as Cuzco, Jauja, and Cajamarca—were both militarily and logistically isolated.
Cuzco’s former lieutenant governor, Hernando de Soto, now prepared to depart from Peru as well. Unsuccessful in his attempt to accompany Almagro’s expedition as second-in-command, Soto left Cuzco with a pack train carrying a fortune in gold and silver ingots, intent on finding passage on the next ship headed toward Spain. The dashing cavalry officer who had led the Spanish advance down the Andes would now leave Peru forever. Once in Spain, Soto would use his share of Inca treasure to win a royal license to conquer the little known land of Florida. Soto hoped to find and conquer an Indian empire there—similar to the ones Cortés and Pizarro had already discovered—and to rule over it as governor. Eight years later, however, after having wandered and fought his way for three years through what are now Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Mississippi, Soto would die destitute and delirious on the banks of the Mississippi River, which he was the first European to discover. The man who had befriended two Inca emperors—and who had lanced and ridden his way through Peru and had found wealth beyond his wildest dreams—was ultimately consigned to the same river, which carried his rag-covered and emaciated body gently downstream. He was forty-two years old at the time.
With Francisco Pizarro, Almagro, Soto, and most of the recently arrived Spaniards gone, the city of Cuzco was now left in the hands of Manco Inca and Pizarro’s two younger brothers, Juan and Gonzalo. Although twenty-four-year-old Juan Pizarro had a reputation for being impetuous, he nevertheless was popular among the rank-and-file conquistadors. An excellent horseman, Juan had become a captain at the age of twenty-two and had ridden with Soto in the cavalry vanguard down the Andes. In the absence of Soto and Almagro, Francisco had appointed Juan as the new corregidor, or lieutenant governor, of the city.
One year younger than Juan and thirty-five years younger than his brother Francisco, Gonzalo Pizarro was tall, graceful, black-bearded, extremely handsome—and had a reputation as a womanizer. The twenty-three-year-old was also a “fine horseman and … a great shot with the harquebus,” wrote sixteenth-century historian Agustín de Zárate. Though illiterate, “he expressed himself well although with great vulgarity.” Gonzalo, however, suffered from a tendency to view other Spaniards either as good friends or bitter enemies. It was a decidedly negative characteristic that would ultimately deeply affect the history of both the Pizarros and Peru. Unlike Juan, who was the only Pizarro who had a reputation for being generous, Gonzalo was also known as the stingiest member of a family already infamous for its parsimony.
With Cuzco now in the hands of the two young Pizarro firebrands, and the ameliorating influence of Francisco Pizarro having disappeared, the relationship between the Spaniards in the city and its native inhabitants not surprisingly began to deteriorate. The Spanish citizens of Cuzco, well aware that Manco’s brother, Atahualpa, had collected a stupendous amount of treasure, were convinced that Manco must know the location of more gold and silver. They soon began pressuring the young emperor to divulge its whereabouts. For a while, Manco did his best to give the Spaniards what they asked for, revealing cache after cache of gold and silver figurines, statues, and other objects. The more he revealed, however, the more the Spaniards clamored for more. “As the greed of men is so great,” Manco’s son Titu Cusi later commented, “it controlled them to such an extent that … one after the other they came to pester my father and to try and take from him [even] more silver and gold than had already been taken.”
The Spaniards, however, weren’t interested in only the power, the status, and the life of ease that gold and silver provided—they were interested in satisfying their sexual desires as well. From the moment of their arrival in Peru, in fact, the Spaniards had eagerly pursued native women. Since both the Inca and Spanish societies made a clear distinction between nobles and commoners, however, many of the Spanish leaders insisted on taking native mistresses only from the Inca royalty. Francisco Pizarro, for example, a fiftysix-year-old bachelor who had never married, soon took a daughter of the emperor Huayna Capac, whom he called Inés, as his mistress. Even the squat and ugly Almagro—fifty-nine years old and with one eye reduced to a pink pulp—began to sleep with a beautiful, royal-blooded sister of Manco Inca, called Marcachimbo,
[who] was the daughter of Huayna Capac and of his sister, and who would have inherited the Inca Empire had she been a man. She gave Almagro a pit in which there was a quantity of gold and silver tableware, which once melted down yielded eight bars or 27,000 silver marks…. She also gave another captain 12,000 castellanos from the leftovers from that pit. But the poor woman was not shown any greater respect or favor by the Spaniards because of this. On the contrary, she was repeatedly dishonored, for she was very pretty and had a gentle nature, and she caught the pox…. Finally, however, she married a Spanish citizen and in the end our Lord was well served when she died a Christian and was a very good wife.
Since these particular Inca women were unmarried, their becoming the mistresses of the Spaniards apparently did not unduly bother the Inca elite. When Gonzalo Pizarro started taking an interest in Manco Inca’s young and beautiful wife, Cura Ocllo, however, the twenty-three-year-old Pizarro quickly discovered that his advances completely scandalized Inca society. Impetuous, arrogant, and with no existing law or authority in Peru to rein in his more outlandish impulses, Gonzalo did as he pleased. More and more, he treated Manco Inca and the rest of the native elite with contempt, insisting that the Inca emperor give him even more gold and silver and give up his wife. When a high-ranking Inca general rebuked Gonzalo for coveting the emperor’s wife, Gonzalo turned on him, his face flushing, grabbed the hilt of his sword, and threatened to kill the man on the spot.
“Who gave you the authority to talk to the King’s corregidor like that? Don’t you know what kind of men we Spaniards are? By the King’s life, if you don’t shut up I’ll seize you and play a game with you and your friends that you’ll remember for the rest of your lives. I swear if you don’t keep quiet I’ll slit you open alive and will cut you into little pieces.”
Although the Inca nobility, not the peasantry, was polygamous, every emperor, chief, or noble nevertheless had a “principal wife.” The latter was a woman with whom a ritual marriage ceremony had been performed and who had a guaranteed and permanent status. Additional wives, by contrast, were called “secondary wives,” or concubines. In the case of certain emperors, such as Huayna Capac, the concubines numbered in the thousands. Only children born of the principal wife had the “purest” blood and hence were deemed legitimate. Those born of a concubine were considered illegitimate. While members of the Incas’ high aristocracy were allowed to marry their half-sisters, only the emperor himself was allowed to marry his full sister. Once married, she became the coya, or queen, thus preserving the purity of the royal blood lineage. Cura Ocllo, therefore, was both Manco’s principal wife and his full sister. It was thus inconceivable that anyone else in the empire, let alone a foreigner, should dare to ask the emperor to give up his queen. That twenty-three-year-old Gonzalo Pizarr
o did so shocked not only the Inca elite, but also Manco Inca.
Hoping to placate the brother of the powerful Francisco Pizarro, however, Manco ordered that a large quantity of gold and silver be gathered. He soon arranged for it to be delivered and personally accompanied it to Gonzalo’s palace. “Come on, Mr. Manco Inca,” Gonzalo is said to have exclaimed, examining the treasure with interest yet not forgetting his demand, “let’s have the lady coya. All this silver is good, but [she] is what we really want.”
Recognizing how serious Gonzalo was, Manco now became desperate. Having already had to suffer the humiliation of hiding in Almagro’s bedroom to escape assassination, having had his palace ransacked, and presently being harassed on a daily basis for more gold and silver, Manco was now being ordered to hand over his very own wife and sister to an arrogant foreigner. Searching for a way out of his dilemma, Manco finally hit upon a seemingly reasonable solution: how about giving Gonzalo a beautiful woman other than his coya? An Inca woman even more beautiful than his queen? Recalled Manco’s son Titu Cusi:
My father, seeing with what insistence they were asking for the queen, and that he was unable to avoid [their request] in any other way, sent for a very beautiful woman, coiffed and very well dressed, in order to hand her over in place of the queen they were asking for. [But] when they saw her they said that she didn’t seem to be the queen they were asking for but rather another woman … and that he [Manco] should give them the queen and stop wasting their time.
Not willing to give up, Manco assembled twenty more beautiful women, hoping that Gonzalo would choose one or more of them and would eventually forget about his wife. Gonzalo, however, showed no interest; he insisted even more vehemently on possessing only the Inca queen. With mounting desperation, Manco finally sent for another of his sisters, Inguill, who resembled his wife closely. Making sure that she was dressed and coiffed identically to his coya, Manco led his latest decoy out to the Spaniards. The emperor then pretended to be dismayed that he had finally been forced to relinquish his very own queen. “When the Spaniards saw her come out … so elegant and beautiful, they shouted with much enthusiasm and joy, ‘Yes, she’s the one, she’s the one. She is the Lady coya—and not the others.’”
The Last Days of the Incas Page 20