The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  Because the Incas practiced a religion different from the Spaniards’ Christian faith, in other words, by definition they were pagans, and as such were actually believed by the Spaniards to be worshipping a character the Spaniards called el demonio, the devil. Now, two humble Spanish missionaries had a golden opportunity to change all that.

  The two friars had very distinct personalities. Friar García took a fire-and-brimstone approach to preaching, had a short temper, and was extremely intolerant. Discovering, for example, that the native boys he had begun preaching Christianity to were secretly praying to their other gods as well, the friar “punished them … with ten or a dozen lashes,” an act that understandably angered the boys’ fathers. The latter complained to the emperor and García soon found himself forced to apologize, under threat of being thrown out of the kingdom. On other occasions, horrified by the seemingly bacchanalian festivals and copious drinking associated with Inca religious festivals, the abstemious friar often delivered to groups of drunken native revelers a fiery lesson on the Christian concepts of hell and eternal damnation—then threatened them with both. Nor was Titu Cusi immune to the friar’s zealous onslaughts: when Friar García learned that the emperor had more than one wife, “the servant of God castigated him [Titu Cusi] with apostolic zeal.” Apparently, the zeal of the apostles not only went unappreciated by the emperor, but greatly annoyed him as well.

  Friar Diego Ortiz, by contrast, was much more relaxed in his missionary style and, as a consequence, Titu Cusi is said to have taken an immediate liking to him. Unlike his compatriot, Ortiz was affable and flexible and generally more congenial. Within a short while, two tiny Christian churches began to operate in the Incas’ hidden kingdom: Friar García’s in the small town of Puquiura and Friar Ortiz’s in Huarancalla. Situated roughly eleven miles from each other, the churches were located two to three days’ journey from the capital of Vilcabamba, which neither friar had as yet been allowed to enter.

  One day, however, Titu Cusi surprised the friars by inviting them to visit what they had long been hoping to see: “I want to take you to Vilcabamba,” the emperor told them, “since neither of you have seen that town. Go with me, for I want to entertain you.” In early 1570, then, at the height of the rainy season, Titu Cusi, his entourage, and the two friars set out, the emperor carried in his traditional litter and the two friars accompanying him on foot. According to the Augustinian chronicler Antonio de la Calancha, both friars had previously “tried to go to Vilcabamba to preach, because it was the largest town, and in it was the University of the Idolatries, and the witch doctors [who were] masters of the abominations.” Neither friar, however, had succeeded in achieving their goal. Now at last, after packing their clothes, Bibles, and crucifixes, they were about to reach the Incas’ final religious stronghold—the place where Satan himself must surely dwell.

  For the next few days, the friars struggled up and down steep, wet trails, many of them so flooded by rivers that the fathers had to pick their way amid submerged rocks. Wrote Calancha:

  Not used to getting their feet wet, they slipped and fell, and there was no one to help them get up. They held one another’s hands while the sacrilegious natives laughed aloud at them…. The blessed priests walked like this for more than two leagues, praising God and singing Psalms…. They reached dry land frozen and covered in mud.

  Finally, after following an Inca road alongside a river and then through thick rain forest, the two friars arrived at the outskirts of Vilcabamba. As the two prepared themselves to enter the capital, they received a piece of unsettling news. The emperor had changed his mind, they were informed. Titu Cusi now forbade the two friars from entering the capital; instead he insisted they remain beyond its view. Titu Cusi later explained:

  [The friars] have not baptized anyone here [in the city of Vilcabamba] because the things that must be known and understood concerning the law and commandments of God are still very new to the people of this land. [Yet] I will try, little by little, to make sure that they learn.

  The chronicler Calancha, however, who did considerable research on the subject, had a different explanation for the emperor’s sudden change of mind, believing that Titu Cusi had prevented the friars from entering Vilcabamba simply because he did not wish them to see “the worship, rites and ceremonies that the Inca [emperor] and his captains practiced each day with their witch-doctors.” Perhaps anticipating that the friars would react angrily to the city’s numerous idols and temples in the Inca capital and perhaps also wishing to avoid a confrontation between the friars and his own priests, Titu Cusi once again declared the Inca capital off limits.

  Disappointed, the two missionaries soon trudged back to the village of Puquiura, where Friar García had his church. Frustrated by the emperor’s refusal, the friars apparently decided that now was the opportune moment to cleanse their local parishes of the false gods the natives still worshipped. At a place nearby called Chuquipalpa, the friars had been told, there emerged from the ground a giant, light-colored rock that was located next to a spring of water. The Incas worshipped many springs, rocks, hills, caves, and other natural features of their landscape; apparently, they held this site, too, to be sacred, having built a temple of the sun alongside it. According to Calancha, however, the site was obviously devoted to devil worship, for it included

  a temple of the Sun, and within it a white rock above a spring of water where the Devil appeared. This was worshipped by the idolatrous natives, as it was the principal mochadero—the common Indian word for their shrines—in those forests…. Inside the white rock, called “Yuracrumi,” presided a Devil [who was] captain of a legion of devils…. The Devil was extremely cruel, for if they ceased worshipping him for a few days, he killed or injured them, causing great damage and fear.

  Convinced that Satan and his minions were purposely blinding the natives from the word of God, the two friars now led some of their congregation to the sacred Inca shrine, uttering prayers and carrying a large cross before them. The friars soon set fire to the complex, doing their best to destroy it and using various solemn incantations with which to banish Lucifer, the fallen archangel, from the area. Their work done, the friars then returned to the village of Puquiura, leaving the smoldering ruins and a group of shocked natives behind.

  Word of the friars’ blasphemy soon spread throughout the tiny kingdom, however, and the reaction was nearly instantaneous. “The Inca emperor’s captains were furious and planned to kill the two friars with their spears, thinking nothing of tearing them to pieces,” wrote Calancha. “They arrived at the town [of Puquiura] wanting to give vent to their fury.” The two friars, having unleashed a storm of anger, would have immediately lost their lives if it had not been for the intervention of their local congregation. So great was the outrage, in fact, that the emperor Titu Cusi soon arrived, having hurried to the site on his royal litter; he quickly took charge of the situation. The emperor now banished García from the kingdom, no doubt fed up with the friar’s messianic fervor. Titu Cusi allowed Friar Ortiz to remain, however, who now meekly returned to his church in Huarancalla.

  Although he had escaped unpunished, Ortiz had nevertheless made permanent enemies in Vilcabamba, many of whom would never forgive the friar for the sacrilegious nature of his actions. The displaced residents of Vilcabamba, after all, were well aware of the fact that they had been forced by the Spaniards from their highland empire and had been basically at war with them for the last thirty-four years. Now a Spaniard who was living as a guest in their kingdom had just committed an act equivalent to burning the local church to the ground. It would take considerable skill on Ortiz’s part to regain the natives’ trust.

  During the following year, Titu Cusi did his best to steer his small ship of state safely through the tempestuous waters of post-conquest Peru. The emperor continued to exchange diplomatic letters with the Spanish government in Cuzco, always dangling before them the hope that he might one day abandon Vilcabamba, while Friar Ortiz presumably conti
nued to preach the bearded invaders’ religion in Huarancalla. In May of 1571, twenty-six years after Manco’s assassination, his now forty-one-year-old son decided to pay a visit to a sacred shrine in Puquiura, located just outside Vitcos, where Manco had been killed. Titu Cusi, in Calancha’s description,

  remained there all day, mourning the death of his father with pagan rites and shameful superstitions. To conclude the day he started … [fencing], which he had learned in the Spanish manner, with his secretary, Martín Pando. He sweated heavily and felt cold. He ended it all by drinking too much wine and chicha, became drunk, and woke up with a pain in his side, a thick tongue (he was very fat) and with a churning stomach. Everything was vomiting, screaming, and drunkenness.

  That night, the emperor suddenly began to bleed from his nose and mouth while complaining of severe chest pains. The next morning he was even worse. When two of his assistants gave him a medicinal beverage to try to stop the bleeding, to their horror Titu Cusi stiffened. Then, suddenly, he died.

  Grief-stricken and angry at their emperor’s abrupt death, a number of natives soon seized upon the notion that Friar Ortiz must have somehow been responsible. Ortiz was a Spaniard, after all, and it had been almost in this same spot that other Spaniards had murdered Titu’s father. The bearded friar had also profaned one of their sacred shrines only the year before. Although Ortiz had not been with Titu Cusi when the emperor had become ill, that fact had little significance among a population where illness was often related to witchcraft and where it was known that sorcerers could kill from a distance. Ortiz often ministered to the sick, performing what appeared to be bizarre rituals and speaking in a language or languages (Latin and Spanish) that the natives didn’t understand. Ortiz was therefore no doubt considered by the natives to be a sorcerer, or omo.

  An angry mob soon seized the friar, tying his hands together behind his back so forcefully that they dislocated a bone. Stripping away the friar’s clothes, the crowd began shouting that Ortiz had killed the Sapa Inca; they then began clubbing and beating him. That night, the natives left the naked and bruised friar outside on the ground in the cold, periodically pouring water on the cords binding his hands in order to ensure that the cords swelled and caused the friar even greater agony.

  The next day, Ortiz’s captors dragged him to Puquiura, to the church that Friar García had built. Since the two friars had often claimed that their god had the power to restore the dead to the living, the angry natives now demanded that Ortiz raise Titu Cusi from the dead. Freed from his bindings, the naked friar now shuffled slowly into the church, put on some vestments, and then began to say mass, hoping to calm the still angry crowd. Far from Cuzco and thus beyond the help of his countrymen, surrounded by hostile natives and with the dead body of Titu Cusi lying nearby, Friar Ortiz invoked the name of God repeatedly, no doubt in an effort to enlist His aid. The natives, meanwhile, waited impatiently for signs of life from their dead emperor, vowing to kill Ortiz if Titu Cusi didn’t stir. When the crowd saw that the friar had finally finished his mass, crossing himself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Espíritu Santo, and seeing that Titu Cusi hadn’t moved, they angrily seized the friar again, binding up his arms and demanding to know why Ortiz’s god hadn’t returned their emperor to the living. “He [Ortiz] responded that the Creator of all things, who was God, could do it,” wrote the Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa, “but that [Titu Cusi] did not come back because it wasn’t the will of God—that [God] must not want the Inca [emperor] to return to this world.”

  The friar’s response was clearly not what the natives wanted to hear; the crowd now dragged Ortiz to a large cross that stood outside, bound him to it, and began to flog him. They then forced the hapless friar to swallow a vile concoction of urine mixed with other bitter substances. No doubt worried about the possible repercussions of killing him, however, the mob decided to take Ortiz to Vilcabamba—the city Titu Cusi had never allowed a Spaniard to enter. Lacing a cord through a hole they bored in the flesh behind his jaw, the crowd began dragging the naked friar after them. In Vilcabamba, Titu Cusi’s younger brother—Tupac Amaru—would have to decide the friar’s fate. For Tupac Amaru was now the new Inca emperor.

  If Ortiz’s previous journey to Vilcabamba had been a miserable one, his present march was inconceivably worse. It was the rainy season again, thus the exhausted and wounded friar tried to stumble as best he could along the slippery trail on bleeding feet, repeatedly falling to his knees and exclaiming “Oh God!,” or wading through water as he was pulled forward by the rope fastened through his skin. For two days the natives dragged the man who they were certain had killed their emperor over the rugged trail, stopping only at night to rest. If ever there were an instance of a Christian being tortured for the sins of others—in this case for the sins of every conquistador who had ever harmed a native in Tawantinsuyu—then this was certainly it. Finally, however, on the third day, in the village of Marcanay, just a few miles from the capital city, the procession stopped; the natives now sent messengers ahead to confer with Tupac Amaru, in order to determine the fate of their prisoner.

  Tupac Amaru—whose name means “Royal Serpent”—was at the time around twenty-seven years old. He was both very conservative and religious. He had never agreed with his older brother Titu’s policy, for example, of allowing foreign missionaries to enter their kingdom. When informed that the Spaniard who had killed his brother had been brought to nearby Marcanay, Tupac Amaru refused to see him, essentially sealing the friar’s fate. The messengers now returned to the village where Ortiz was still enduring attacks from the crowd. Once Tupac Amaru’s message had been received, a warrior stepped up and finally put the unlucky friar out of his misery with an Inca axe. As Ortiz’s body lay twitching on the ground, it was no doubt clear to all those assembled that neither the teaching of Christianity nor the presence of Spaniards would ever again be allowed into the Kingdom of Vilcabamba.

  One hundred miles away and roughly seven thousand feet higher in elevation, the Spaniards in Cuzco were unaware of the recent changes that had occurred in the nearby rebel kingdom—that Titu Cusi had died, that a Spanish friar had been killed, or that another son of Manco Inca had just become emperor. A new Spanish viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, had arrived in Cuzco some three months earlier, after having already spent roughly a year and a half in Peru. At fifty-six years of age, Toledo was a firm, no-nonsense disciplinarian, a man the king had entrusted to reorganize the affairs of his distant colony and to settle the problem of the rebellious natives in Peru.

  For the previous half century, Spanish ecclesiastics and philosophers had debated one another over what rights, if any, the natives in the New World should enjoy. Some had argued that Spain had no right to despoil native rulers of their kingdoms and empires and to conquer the inhabitants of the New World. A few had even argued that Spain should return the empires they had already conquered to their original rulers or to their heirs. Others felt that the inhabitants of the New World, being pagan, were both morally and intellectually inferior to Europeans and that, like wayward children, they needed to be ruled by Christians. The latter could then not only bestow upon them the word of God, but also the refinements of European civilization.

  Viceroy Toledo belonged firmly to this last group. The natives of Peru were inferior peoples, he believed; their destiny was thus to be ruled by a superior civilization—that of the Spaniards—who were entitled by God to organize and dictate the natives’ activities for the benefit of all concerned. The inhabitants of Peru should therefore be converted to Christianity, the one true faith, and without question should be forced to give up their idolatrous religious beliefs. Just as important, Toledo felt, was the necessity of neutralizing the influence and power of the natives’ previous masters, the Incas, who continued to rule a small kingdom and who still influenced, both morally and spiritually, many of the natives now under Spanish rule. The Incas’ independent Kingdom of Vilcabamba, Toledo had concluded, remained a pernicious inf
luence that had caused untold problems in the past. If left unchallenged, it would surely cause many more in the future.

  In order to understand the natives’ previous rulers better—and thus his enemies—Toledo had begun a series of investigations into the oral history of the Incas soon after his arrival in Peru. Toledo did so by systematically interviewing older natives and the quipucamayocs—the native specialists who could still read the Inca quipus, the knotted string records. Discovering that the Incas had conquered their vast empire only relatively recently, Toledo concluded that the Inca elite had no more right to rule the various ethnic groups of Peru than did the Spaniards, who had thus been justified in defeating the Incas by force of arms. The only solution to the current “Inca problem,” Toledo finally concluded, was to eliminate or neutralize the Incas’ remaining monarch—whom the Spaniards still believed to be Titu Cusi.

  Such was the state of affairs in July 1571, just a few months after the death of Titu Cusi, when Viceroy Toledo sent an official envoy to Vilcabamba. The envoy soon arrived at the banks of the Apurímac River with a group of native chiefs, then sent four of the chiefs across the river to arrange for permission to enter the kingdom. Although the chiefs dutifully crossed over, all four mysteriously disappeared. Three weeks later, the envoy made a second attempt, this time sending two natives ahead. Only one of the two returned, however, wounded and bleeding, and reported that they had been attacked.