The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  After a careful examination of the terrain, General Quizo decided to attack Pizarro’s city from three sides—north, east, and south. He would then use his overwhelming numbers to overrun the city, similar to Manco’s strategy in Cuzco. Dividing his army into three divisions, Quizo ordered a division of Tarama, Atabillo, Huánuco, and Huayla tribes to attack from the north, a second division of Huancas, Angares, Yauyos, and Chauircos to attack from the south, while he himself would lead the third division and would attack directly from the east. Quizo’s forces, like so many Roman legions, now began to take up their positions, making themselves visible to the city’s defenders for the first time as they began emerging from the gray mist. “The Governor, seeing such a multitude of warriors,” wrote one Spanish survivor, “had no doubt whatsoever that our side was completely lost.” Finally, with his legions now waiting for his signal and watching them hoist their cloth banners aloft, General Quizo gave the command to attack.

  Quizo’s three forces now began a pincer-like movement toward the city, advancing across the plain to the sound of the Incas’ traditional martial music of conch shells, clay trumpets, and drums. From above, the divisions looked like a three-sided clamp that was slowly tightening to crush the city. Pizarro, meanwhile, had stationed his eighty cavalry within the city, hidden from sight. When Quizo’s divisions finally began arriving at the city’s outskirts and the rest of the attacking troops were now well exposed on the plain, Pizarro gave his own signal to attack.

  A group of harquebusiers now suddenly appeared, firing their weapons, their heavy barrels issuing clouds of smoke and their lead balls ripping into Quizo’s attackers. Next the cavalry charged. With lances and swords drawn and shouting hoarsely, the Spaniards galloped rapidly toward the attackers’ front lines, smashing into them, then began slashing downward with their swords and thrusting repeatedly with their spears. The Spaniards’ native auxiliaries, meanwhile, far more numerous than the conquistadors, also charged out, counterattacking the Inca troops with stone and bronze-tipped clubs. Fierce fighting broke out, although as usual the warriors’ clubs and sling stones were no match for armored Spaniards with their thousand-pound horses and their carefully honed, slicing blades of steel. Although Quizo’s troops had succeeded in reaching the outskirts of the city, it was there that the Inca attack stalled, as the Spanish foot soldiers, cavalry, and native auxiliaries fought fiercely to prevent Los Reyes from being overrun.

  All afternoon the battle raged, with the Spaniards’ armored cavalry exacting a deadly and unequal toll on Quizo’s troops. Finally, the Inca general ordered his forces to retreat to the hills ringing the city, knowing that the steep escarpments there would protect them from further cavalry attacks. Quizo and his own division retired to the tall, brown, sugarloaf-like hill now called Cerro San Cristóbal, which still rises up over Lima from across the Rimac River. Quizo’s other divisions, meanwhile, seized the hills to the north, south, and west, thus practically encircling the city.

  For the next five days Manco’s finest general laid siege to Pizarro’s City of the Kings, with the Spaniards having to fight fiercely each day to prevent the city from being overrun. By the sixth day, however, General Quizo had reached a turning point. Manco had not ordered his veteran general to lay siege to the city, but to take and destroy it, and to put the Spaniards there to death. The constant, unequal attrition, however, was undoubtedly beginning to demoralize the general’s troops. Well aware that Manco’s warriors still surrounded Cuzco but had been stalemated there for more than three months, Quizo no doubt felt pressure to finish the job here on the coast and to return and assist his emperor in the battle for the Inca capital. Each day, however, Quizo witnessed from his hilltop position the Spanish cavalry wreak havoc among his attacking warriors, inflicting severe losses. The only chance he had of breaching Pizarro’s defenses, Quizo concluded, was to launch one final and overwhelming blow upon the city—but this time he himself would lead the charge.

  Calling for an assembly of his captains, Quizo waited patiently for them to arrive. From the heights of Cerro San Cristóbal, the general could look out over the city and could see the Inca roads stretching north, east, and south while to the west lay the dull, metallic blue ocean enveloped in fog. To the east rose the Andes, but only their flanks were now visible due to the constant mist. Gradually, Quizo’s captains arrived on their litters, resplendent in their cotton or alpaca tunics, their colorful mantles, and their various ornaments of gold, silver, and copper. Once they had assembled, Manco’s general stood and gestured down at the Spanish settlement, announcing gravely that he was “determined to enter the city and take it by force or to die in the attempt. ‘I intend to enter the town today and kill all the Spaniards who are in it,’” Quizo said, the golden plugs in his earlobes glinting as he turned. “‘Those who accompany me must go with the understanding that if I die, all will die, and if I flee, then all will flee.’ The native captains and leaders all agreed to go with him.”

  Having learned no doubt from his spies that the Spaniards had their own women in the city, Quizo now promised his captains that he would distribute the women to them as gifts, so that the two races could mate and “produce a strong generation of warriors.” The general also reminded his captains that if they were successful, then the hated invaders’ last toehold on their sacred coast would be smashed, and that Tawantinsuyu, land of the four quarters, would soon be free of the false viracochas from across the sea. Later that afternoon, after the captains had returned to their troops and on the sixth day of the siege, General Quizo launched his final assault on Pizarro’s City of the Kings. Wrote one chronicler:

  The entire [native] army began to move with a vast array of banners, from which the Spaniards recognized the determination and will they were coming with. The Governor [Pizarro] ordered all the cavalry to form into two squadrons. He placed one squadron under his command in ambush in one street, and … the other squadron in another. The enemy was already advancing across the open plain by the river. They were very magnificent men, for all had been hand-picked. The general [Quizo] was advancing in front of them, wielding a lance.

  One of the differences between Inca and Spanish methods of warfare was that the Inca general and his field commanders often led the charge. The typically polyglot amalgamation of native troops, apparently, was accustomed to being led and inspired. As long as they could see their commanders riding on their litters beside or ahead of them, the natives fought with determination. If their commanders went down under enemy maces or sling fire, however, then their attack often would falter. The Achilles’ heel of Inca warfare, therefore, was the placement of the command center of their assaults often at the very apex of their attacks. Spanish commanders, by contrast, normally directed their battles from a position at the rear. Except in the capture of Atahualpa, for example, Pizarro had always sent others—Diego de Almagro, Hernando de Soto, and other captains—to lead the advance. If something should have happened to them, then Pizarro still would have remained in full control of the invasion. According to one chronicler,

  [General Quizo] crossed both branches of the [Rimac] river in his litter. Seeing that [the enemy warriors] were starting to enter the streets of the city and some of Quizo’s men were moving along the tops of the walls, the [Spanish] cavalry charged out and attacked with such great determination that, since the ground was flat, they routed them instantly. The general [Quizo] was left there, dead, and so were forty commanders and other chiefs alongside him. Although it seemed as if our men had specially selected them, they were killed because they were marching at the head of their men and thus they were the first that the Spaniards smashed into. The Spaniards continued to kill and wound Indians as far as the foot of the hill [of San Cristóbal], at which point they encountered a very strong resistance from a defensive site they had made.

  Night began to fall on a battlefield littered with native bodies and with the bloodied and torn litters of the fallen Inca commanders. The next morning, when the Span
iards awakened they found that the entire native army had disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Crushed psychologically by the loss of their general and of so many of their leaders, Quizo’s troops had retreated to the Andes. Once again, armored Spanish cavalry—given plenty of room to maneuver—had proven to be the decisive factor. That, coupled with Quizo’s fatal strategy of placing himself and his commanders in the vanguard, had stopped the Inca assault on Pizarro’s coastal city quite literally dead in its tracks.

  Three days after Quizo’s death, a breathless chaski runner arrived at Ollantaytambo to Manco’s camp. The emperor sat with a grim face as the chaski repeated a message carried by more than sixty different relay runners about the recent disaster on the coast: General Quizo’s string of victories had ended; the general to whom Manco had just presented his sister as a wife was dead—and so was a long list of fine Inca commanders; Quizo’s army had retreated in disarray back into the mountains, Manco was told. The Spanish city had not been overrun. Francisco Pizarro was still alive, his cavalry intact.

  For Manco, the news of Quizo’s defeat was devastating. The empire’s finest general, upon whom so many of his hopes had been pinned, had been destroyed. Whether Manco realized it or not, however, he himself was responsible for Quizo’s death. Encouraged by his general’s seeming invincibility, and perhaps also due to sacred omens or to the advice of oracles, Manco had sent his victorious general on a suicide mission. The Inca emperor had apparently ignored the fundamental reason for Quizo’s prior successes—the effective use of Andean topography to neutralize the dreaded Spanish cavalry—and instead had ordered him to attack on a wide-open plain where that same cavalry could not be stopped. Quizo’s final, desperate charge calls to mind the much later Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, the Australian assault on Gallipoli, the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, or any other number of hopeless military endeavors. No doubt, Quizo himself must have known that he had been ordered to carry out a mission that would very likely result in his death. Yet, under the direct order of his divine emperor, Quizo had had no other choice than to attack.

  Inca tradition had further imperiled Quizo’s final assault by ensuring that the Inca general would have a front-row seat when the stakes were at their highest, riding on one of the finest litters in the empire at the very point of the attack. Some Spanish accounts stated that General Quizo was ultimately felled by a harquebus bullet, others that he had died from a lance plunged directly into his heart. No matter. The great warrior was dead, and with him died Manco’s finest military commander—the only Inca general who had thus far managed to successively defeat the Spaniards. With Quizo’s army now in disarray, Manco was no longer in a position to prevent Pizarro’s cavalry from riding in relief of Cuzco. Manco was about to receive even worse news, however: a column of four hundred, fully armored Spanish soldiers was on its way back to Peru—and riding at its head was Pizarro’s one-eyed ex-partner, Diego de Almagro.

  11 THE RETURN OF THE ONE … EYED CONQUEROR

  “And as much friendship and brotherhood of many years as existed between [Pizarro] and Almagro, self-interest severed these, greed clouded his [Pizarro’s] mind, and ambition to rule and distribute [encomiendas] acted against what would have been more long lasting if they were in poverty and want, not having come upon such a wealthy land as the two of them did—so uneducated that they did not know the letters of the alphabet as such—but there was only envy, deceit, and other unjust ways [between them].”

  PEDRO DE CIEZA DE LEÓN,

  THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF PERU, 1554

  “The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes.”

  NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, 1511

  DESPITE THE DEATH OF GENERAL QUIZO, MANCO INCA WAS nevertheless determined to continue his siege of Cuzco, hoping that through a combination of starvation and gradual Spanish attrition that he could eventually overcome Hernando Pizarro’s beleaguered men. For four months after Quizo’s death, Manco continued to surround the Inca capital, using the converted fortress of nearby Ollantaytambo as his headquarters. Although Manco’s forces were ultimately unable to prevent the Spaniards from resupplying themselves with food, they were too strong, however, for Hernando and his trapped men to break out of the city and escape.

  With the return of Almagro from Chile, conflicts soon erupted over the control of Peru.

  Sometime in January or February 1537, roughly nine months into the siege, a chaski messenger arrived at Manco’s fortress in Ollantaytambo. A large force of Spaniards, the messenger said, roughly four hundred of them and with many horses, had just arrived in the Inca town of Arequipa, a little over two hundred miles to the south. With them rode Manco’s brother Paullu on a royal litter, and also Pizarro’s old partner, Diego de Almagro. Manco no doubt stared at the messenger, who as a commoner stood with averted eyes to the ground, then looked down at the Yucay Valley, stretching out before him. Suddenly, Manco must have realized, despite all his efforts, the balance of power had abruptly shifted, almost as if there had been another pachacuti, or overturning of the world. Diego de Almagro had returned to Peru.

  The sixty-one-year-old Almagro had left Cuzco some twenty months earlier, with five hundred Spaniards, twelve thousand native auxiliaries, and hundreds of horses. During nearly two years of savage fighting with local natives and a trek of over three thousand miles, Almagro and his men had crossed over Andean passes so clogged with snow that some Spaniards had pulled their boots off only to discover that their frozen toes had come off. Elsewhere, the Spanish invaders had stacked the numberless dead bodies of their native porters as shelter against the icy wind. The members of Almagro’s expedition had endured starvation, constant attacks, and eventually, some two hundred miles to the south of what is now Santiago, Chile, they had run into the fierce Araucanians. The latter not only stopped the Spaniards in their tracks, forcing them to retreat, but would successfully fight off all further attempts to subjugate them for the next two centuries.

  To his great disappointment, Almagro had gradually come to realize that the governorship the king had granted him contained none of the riches of Peru. Francisco Pizarro had received by far the wealthiest portion of the Inca Empire, Almagro now knew—and he had received its dregs. Eventually, after a long, debilitating trek north during which many more men and horses died, what was left of the expedition reached the town of Arequipa, in what is now the southern Andes of Peru. At least a hundred Spaniards, innumerable African slaves, and over half of Almagro’s horses had died during the expedition. Similarly, most of Almagro’s twelve thousand native auxiliaries had either died or else had abandoned the expedition and fled. Their dreams of finding a second Peru full of towns, cities, fertile farms, and rich mines now shattered, Almagro’s followers—most of whom had missed out on the distributions of treasure in Cajamarca and Cuzco—were now intent on only one thing: returning to Peru and seizing whatever riches there they could find.

  Such was the state of affairs when Almagro first received news that the young Inca emperor Manco Inca had rebelled, that a massive native uprising had occurred, and that several hundred Spaniards were currently trapped in Cuzco, a city that he had personally coveted for years. Paullu, who had accompanied the expedition to Chile, soon sent a messenger to Manco’s camp bearing a letter from Almagro. The messenger, presumably, was accompanied by a literate Spaniard and by a native interpreter who could translate Spanish into runasimi.

  “My well-loved son and brother,” Almagro addressed the much younger Manco,

  While I was in Chile … they gave me news that the Christians were abusing you, and about the robbery of your property and house, and about the seizure of your beloved wives, which gives me more pain than if they had done that to me, especially because I believe that what they did to you was u
njust. And because I appreciate and love you and consider you a true son and brother, as soon as I found out I immediately decided to come with a thousand Christians and seven hundred horses, who are with me now, and with letters and powers from the King, my lord, in order to restore all that they took from you and to punish those responsible for treating you so badly, as their crimes demand.

  Almagro had purposely inflated the number of his troops in order to appear more powerful than he actually was, and had also lied about bearing letters regarding Manco’s situation from the king. The conquistador continued:

  Because if you rose up or made war, it was caused by their being so wicked that you were unable to tolerate it. And although with your [recent] punishment [of them] you must be satisfied, given that I want to personally take care of this, in order to send them as prisoners to the King who will order that they be executed, it seems to me that with my arrival you should be confident … that you will never lack my help [again]…. And even though the troops I have with me are so numerous and so powerful that they are enough to subjugate a great portion of the earth, and [even though] I am daily expecting another two thousand men, I wouldn’t think of doing anything without your approval and advice, nor would I ever refuse you the friendship and goodwill that I have always felt towards you…. I can only hope that … you will come see me, if that is possible, [and] you can have complete confidence in me … [for] I give you my word. This will be brief, as I want to know about your health, which God grants you as you wish.