By now, however, the remaining native defenders had retreated to the three towers, with the Inca noble who had been placed in charge striding about on top of the central one. This same orejón had no doubt been present less than a month earlier in the town of Lares where he and a host of other nobles had drunk from the golden vases of chicha and had pledged themselves to Manco’s rebellion. Wearing confiscated Spanish weaponry, the noble presented such a spectacle and fought so ferociously that he guaranteed a place for himself in the otherwise heavily Spanish-centric chronicles. According to Pedro Pizarro:
[At the top of the highest tower was] an orejón so courageous that the same might be written of him as has been written of some Romans. This orejón wore an oval shield on one arm and had a club in that hand and a sword in the other and a morión on his head. He had taken these weapons from the Spaniards who had died upon the roads, as well as [from among the] many others that the Indians had in their possession. This orejón, then, moved like a lion from one end to the other on top of the highest part of the tower, preventing the Spaniards who wished to climb up it with ladders from doing so, and killing the Indians who surrendered…. Whenever one of his men warned him that some Spaniard was climbing up at a certain place, he rushed at him like a lion … wielding his sword and shield.
Hernando Pizarro now ordered that the scaling ladders be set against all three of the towers and that his men storm them simultaneously. According to Pedro Pizarro,
The Indians that this orejón had with him had by now all given up and had lost their courage, and it was he alone who was fighting. And Hernando Pizarro ordered those Spaniards who were climbing up not to kill this Indian but to take him alive, swearing that he would not kill him if he had him alive. Then, climbing up one of the towers, the Spaniards reached the top from two or three sides.
According to another eyewitness:
During this time they hit him with two arrows [yet] he paid as little attention to them as if they hadn’t touched him. And seeing that his people were all weakening and that the Spaniards were everywhere on their ladders and each hour were pressing [their advance] more, having nothing more to fight with, seeing clearly that everything was lost, he threw the battle axe he had in his hand [down] at the Christians, and taking handfuls of earth he stuffed these in his mouth and rubbed his face with such anguish … that it can scarcely be described. Not being able to stand the sight of the fortress being overcome, and realizing that its loss meant his death—due to the promise he had made to [Manco] Inca—he covered his head and face with his mantle and threw himself down from the tower [to a spot] more than one hundred estados below, and thus was smashed to pieces. Hernando Pizarro was very disappointed that they hadn’t taken him alive.
With the native defenders now out of weapons, their heroic commander dead, and Spaniards clambering into all three towers, the rout soon became a slaughter. “With his death the remainder of the Indians lost their courage,” wrote one chronicler, “giving way to Hernando Pizarro and his men who were [now] able to enter and who put all those inside to the sword.” Countless natives, rather than face sure death at the hands of the Spaniards, chose instead to leap from the high walls and from the towers. Most died on impact. Others, falling on top of the piles of the dead, survived, although these, too, were soon clubbed or stabbed to death. By the time the last defenders of the fortress were overcome, so many bodies lay strewn about the area that groups of vultures and majestic black condors soon descended to the ground to feast upon their flesh. Wrote one of the Spanish attackers, Alonzo Enríquez de Guzmán:
We … assaulted and captured the fortress, killing 3,000 souls. They killed our captain, Juan Pizarro … and during the combat in the city they killed four Christians, not including more than thirty others who they killed on the ranches and farms of the Indian chiefs, while they were out collecting their tribute.
As was usual in the lopsided battles between natives and Spaniards, thousands died on the Inca side while the Spaniards suffered relatively few losses. Thus far in Manco’s rebellion, in fact, the mortality score had risen to perhaps two to four thousand dead native troops versus roughly thirty-five dead Spaniards, two African slaves, and an unknown number of dead native auxiliaries. That lopsided ratio, however—and indeed nearly three years of almost uninterrupted Spanish victories—was soon about to change.
10 DEATH IN THE ANDES
“You already know how I prevented you from inflicting harm on those evil people who … had entered my realm…. [But] what is done is done…. From now on beware of them, for … they are our worst enemies and we will perpetually be theirs.”
MANCO INCA, 1536
“War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.”
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, 1511
FRANCISCO PIZARRO DID NOT LEARN OF MANCO INCA’S RE-bellion until May 4, 1536, two days before Manco’s massive assault on the besieged Spaniards in Cuzco. Alarmed, he dashed off letters to his brother Hernando and to a few other citizens in Cuzco, letting them know that he would send reinforcements as soon as possible. The contents of only one of those letters—which eventually made its way up into the Andes and arrived in Cuzco months later, ripped in pieces and more than likely splattered with blood—has survived. It was sent by Pizarro to Don Alonzo Enríquez de Guzmán, a cavalryman of noble birth, who three weeks later would be involved in the desperate storming of Saqsaywaman:
Magnificent Sir,
Today I arrived in this [City] of the Kings [Lima], after a visit to the cities of San Miguel and [the newly founded city of] Trujillo, with the intention of resting after so many hardships and dangers. But before I could even get off [my horse] they gave me some letters from you and from my brothers through which I was informed of the rebellion of that traitor, the Inca [emperor]. This greatly troubles me on account of the detriment it will cause to the service to the Emperor, our lord, and of the danger that you are in, and of the trouble it will cause me in my old age. I am greatly consoled by your presence there [in Cuzco] and … if it is the will of God, we will rescue those of you there. And thus I leave you, praying to our Lord to watch over and to aid your magnificent person.
This 4th of May, 1536
Francisco Pizarro
During the Inca rebillion, Gentral Quize’ warriors captured a number of spanish survivors and sent them to Manco Inca.
Pizarro had only founded the City of the Kings—so named because it had been established on the Feast of the Epiphany, also known as the day of the Three Magi Kings—four months earlier. Lying on a flat desert plain, the city was bordered by the Rimac River. Rimac, a runasimi word that meant “the Speaker,” would later be corrupted into the city’s eventual name, Lima. The area Pizarro had chosen had been settled for thousands of years before his arrival and was still littered with scattered adobe pyramids, constructed with millions of bricks so worn by the elements that they resembled natural hills.
Pizarro had been busy distributing encomiendas among his Spanish followers in Lima and supervising the construction of buildings around the town square, using the labor of Spaniards, natives, and African slaves. After his brilliant military campaign, beginning with Atahualpa’s capture in Cajamarca and ending with the crowning of Manco Inca in Cuzco, Pizarro had done everything in his power to follow up his military victories with the equally important goal of winning the peace. No one was more aware than Pizarro of the necessity of consolidating the Spaniards’ grip on the newly won empire, or of how weak that grip actually was.
Even now, four years after his arrival in Tawantinsuyu, Pizarro still had fewer than six hundred Spaniards situated in the central portion of the Inca Empire, an area roughly the size of modern-day Peru, which probably contained more than five million inhabitants. That meant that the Spaniards in Peru were outnumbered by natives in a ratio of nearly 10,000 to 1. Currently, roughly two hundred Spaniards inhabited La Ciudad de los Reyes (The City of the Kings), several dozen lived in J
auja, a small number in San Miguel and in Trujillo, and 190 were trapped in Cuzco, including two of Pizarro’s brothers, Hernando and Gonzalo. Another force of 140 Spaniards, under the leadership of Captain Alonso de Alvarado, was currently beyond Pizarro’s reach, mired in the distant cloud forests of northeastern Peru, where they were busy conquering the Chachapoya civilization. Likewise, although Pizarro’s former partner, Diego de Almagro, had at his disposal a force of five hundred more Spaniards, these were presently far to the south in what is now Chile and were embroiled in their own desperate struggle for survival.
Pizarro’s Captain Sebastián de Benalcázar, meanwhile, commanded two hundred Spaniards far to the north, having conquered what is now Ecuador. But it would take months to convey a message to Benalcázar asking for help, and still more months before any troops could arrive. In reality Pizarro and his Spaniards controlled only tiny pockets of Peru and had relied upon their alliance with Manco Inca to extend that control into the provinces. With the collapse of the Spanish-Inca military alliance, however, Pizarro and his fellow Spaniards were now exposed for what they really were: a relatively tiny group of increasingly desperate foreign invaders. For the time being then, the only troops Pizarro had to send in relief of Cuzco were those with him in the fledgling City of the Kings.
Pizarro was as yet uncertain what precisely had precipitated the rebellion, or how widespread it was, or how many native forces were involved. The cause or causes of Manco’s uprising really didn’t matter, however. The only important thing was to put an end to it immediately, before the rebellion could spread. If Manco Inca were to seize Cuzco, then not only would Pizarro’s brothers and nearly half of his available forces be killed, but the conquest of Peru would have to begin all over again. And this time, the Incas would not be so easily fooled by Spanish promises of goodwill and brotherhood.
Within a week of receiving news of Manco’s rebellion, Pizarro had armed and dispatched the first of two relief forces. The initial column consisted of a cavalry contingent of thirty men led by a thirty-three-year-old captain named Juan Morgovejo de Quiñones. Pizarro ordered Morgovejo to head due east along the Inca road that ran from the coast up into the Andes, then to proceed south toward Vilcashuaman, a strategic crossroads that lay a little over a hundred miles to the west of Cuzco, where four Inca roads met. Seizing Vilcashuaman would prevent Inca forces in the north from moving south against Cuzco and would simultaneously prevent Manco’s forces from moving north and spreading the rebellion.
After dispatching Morgovejo, Pizarro’s next move was to send a second relief force of seventy cavalry, this one led by his relative Gonzalo de Tapia, but by a different route. Tapia’s column was to follow the Inca road south on the coast for nearly a hundred miles, then to take a branch heading east that climbed into the Andes. Eventually, the cavalry unit would turn south onto the same main Inca highway, or capac ñan, that Morgovejo had taken; it would then ride in relief of the capital.
What neither Pizarro nor his two captains realized, however, was that Manco had already sent a native army north from Cuzco under the command of one of his generals, Quizo Yupanqui. Quizo’s orders were to pin down Pizarro’s forces in Lima and thus to prevent Pizarro from relieving the besieged mountain capital. That would leave Manco free to deal with “the Spanish problem” in Cuzco as he chose. The two captains of the relief columns, meanwhile, were also completely in the dark about the extent of the Inca rebellion. Neither was aware that they had actually entered enemy territory as soon as they had left Lima. Manco’s uprising—like ripples spreading out from the center of a pond—had already progressed from Cuzco south to the Collao near Lake Titicaca and north into central Peru, as far as Jauja. As soon as the two Spanish columns had departed from Lima, therefore, native runners had begun carrying information on their whereabouts to General Quizo, who was kept continually informed of their movements. Undoubtedly, Quizo was also shown clay topographic maps of the area the Spaniards were traveling in. Inca commanders routinely used such models in order to devise their battle plans.
By now, the Spanish forces in Lima, Jauja, and Cuzco were operating in a virtual information blackout, completely unable to communicate with one another. Not only had the Incas succeeded in severing the Spaniards’ lines of communication, but they had also been busy redesigning their military tactics. After three and a half years of occupation, Manco’s generals knew by now something about the strengths and weaknesses of Spanish military techniques. Attacking Spanish cavalry while on level ground was tantamount to suicide, no matter how many native troops they brought to bear. They also knew that the only successes their troops had thus far enjoyed had been when they had attacked Spaniards in terrain so rough that the superior mobility and speed of the Spaniards’ horses had been neutralized. Now, with advance knowledge of two Spanish columns moving slowly between the jagged heights and narrow passes of the Andes and taking into account everything he knew about the invaders, General Quizo carefully made his plans. “[Their strategy] was the following:” wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Agustín de Zárate, “they would allow the Spaniards to enter a deep, narrow gorge and, seizing the entrance and the exit with a great mass of Indians, they would then hurl down such a quantity of rocks and boulders from the hillsides they would kill them all, almost without having to come to grips with them.”
The tactic was one designed by the Incas to harness the jagged contours of the Andes as their ally, while turning that same topography into an enemy of the Spaniards. It was soon to become the central strategy in General Quizo Yupanqui’s campaign.
Gonzalo de Tapia’s force of seventy men, meanwhile, riding due south from Lima and then eastward up into the Andes, was the first to experience the Incas’ new military tactics. Until now, the Spaniards had assumed that mounted cavalry were practically invincible when confronting native armies, no matter how many natives were arrayed against them. Crossing a fifteen-thousand-foot pass, Tapia’s column soon came upon the royal Inca road that stretched down along the spine of the Andes from above Quito in what is now Ecuador southward for nearly three thousand miles into Chile. Turning south onto the main highway, the Spaniards next crossed the high, treeless grasslands, or puna, of Huaitará, dotted with herds of thickly fleeced alpacas, wisps of quickly moving clouds, and the occasional mountain lion, which the Incas called puma.* High above the column soared occasional condors, black with white markings and naked yellow heads, whose seven-foot wingspans were nevertheless dwarfed by the immensity of the nearby snow-covered peaks. The relief column next crossed the Pampas River on an Inca bridge, then entered a narrow canyon with high jagged walls, the noise of the river filling the canyon, punctuated only by the clopping of the horses’ hooves.
Both the Spaniards and their mounts were tired by now and were feeling the effects of the high, thin Andean air, which is alternately warm by day and cold by night. Half drowsing in their saddles and climbing slowly up the canyon toward a pass, the Spaniards were abruptly jolted awake when masses of native warriors suddenly appeared ahead, seemingly out of nowhere. Quizo’s troops charged toward the column, launching a volley of sling-driven stones that slammed into the cavalrymen at the front. Caught by surprise, Tapia and his men turned their horses around and raced back down the canyon, only to find that the bridge over the river they had just used had disappeared; native warriors had dismantled it soon after the Spaniards had ridden across.
Surrounded now by sheer canyon walls and with an impassable river behind them, the Spaniards were trapped. As the men shouted to one another, wheeling their horses around and trying to decide what to do, a noise as loud as a cannon suddenly erupted in their midst. A huge boulder had smashed into the ground from above, crushing a number of riders and horses and spraying others with a deadly shrapnel of rocks. Looking up, the Spaniards saw in horror that natives lining the canyon walls were pushing more boulders over the edge and that others were already crashing down. Amid the noise and confusion and the cries of the wounded the Spaniards k
new one thing for certain: they had just been caught like rats in a carefully prepared trap.
Two, three, and now four more boulders hit the ground, exploding on impact and taking groups of horses and their riders down with them. Uninjured horses neighed, wounded horses screamed, and the Spaniards shouted hoarsely in the mounting confusion as more boulders continued to crash down upon them. Some riders tried to escape, bolting with their horses either forward or back down the canyon, but these immediately ran into a hail of sling stones and arrows shot by jungle archers. A few slammed their horses into the masses of warriors, slashing at the natives with their swords, but soon a sea of hands surrounded them and pulled the Spaniards from their mounts. Thrown to the ground, the armored invaders immediately disappeared beneath a thicket of copper-, bronze-, and stone-tipped clubs that rose up and then came down again, again and again.
General Quizo more than likely witnessed his carefully designed ambush from a perch high on top of the canyon rim. The general would have watched with satisfaction as wounded Spaniards crawled on the ground, pursued by native troops who used their heavy wooden porras to mash in their heads. Other warriors grabbed the now riderless horses by the reins, a few of which reared up on their haunches but were unable to escape. Within less than half an hour a force of seventy Spaniards—only ten fewer than the entire cavalry contingent currently fighting in Cuzco—had been reduced to a few crawling survivors.
The Last Days of the Incas Page 27