The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  To the Spaniards in Cuzco, a strange and unusual silence seemed to have descended upon the Kingdom of Vilcabamba; messages no longer arrived from the Inca emperor nor were any envoys allowed to enter. An impatient Toledo finally sent a second envoy, his close friend, Atilano de Anaya, this time with a letter that the viceroy had written directly to Titu Cusi:

  If you have faith and devotion to the service of God and to my lord the King as you have said you have [wrote Toledo], show yourself by coming out to meet with them [the envoys] and by listening to what they have to tell you on behalf of my lord, His Majesty the King, and of myself. And if not, we shall certainly be disabused of any illusions and can decide on how to proceed.

  Toledo simultaneously sent a letter to King Philip, sounding out the monarch on how he felt about the possibility of launching an unprovoked war on the last independent remnant of the Inca Empire.

  Your Majesty will appreciate that it will be convenient to terminate this affair once and for all in such a way that it has the effect of securing a firm peace or else this debate must be ended by war. One way or the other, a town of Spaniards will be established in the province of Vilcabamba, whose [military] force [on the] frontier will assure peace [there] from now on…. Your Majesty should … determine whether war should be waged on him [Titu Cusi] or not … [for] if he doesn’t want to come out the cause of the war will be justified.

  As the viceroy’s letter made its way slowly to Spain, the envoy Anaya arrived at the banks of the Urubamba River, at the hanging bridge of Chuquichaca, where Gonzalo Pizarro had once battled Manco’s defenders. Spotting native warriors on the other side, Anaya shouted for permission to come across. The warriors replied that the Spaniard could proceed. But once he arrived on the other side of the river, they killed him. The Incas had apparently feared that the envoy might learn of Titu Cusi’s death and that the Spaniards would thus learn of their kingdom’s weakened condition.

  For Viceroy Toledo, Anaya’s murder was the proverbial final straw. Not wishing to wait another eight months for a reply from the king, Toledo soon began making preparations to invade the Incas’ kingdom and to seize or kill Titu Cusi, intending this time to succeed where two previous Spanish expeditions had failed. By May of 1572, Toledo had assembled a formidable army composed of two forces: the first, consisting of 250 armored Spaniards and some two thousand native auxiliaries, Toledo ordered to enter Vilcabamba via the Chuquichaca bridge and fight its way to the capital. The second force, which was comprised of some seventy Spaniards, he ordered to invade Vilcabamba from the opposite direction, across the Apurímac River, in a sort of pincer movement. Toledo was determined that this time the Inca emperor would have no chance to escape.

  Sometime in early June, the main expeditionary force under the command of General Martín Hurtado de Arbieto crossed the Chuquichaca bridge and began heading up into the Vilcabamba Valley. Three elderly conquistadors, now in their sixties, who had fought alongside Francisco Pizarro, accompanied them as guides: Alonso de Mesa, Hernando Solano, and Mansio Serra de Leguizamón. The rest of the participants were of a younger generation, many of them owners of encomiendas that had been handed down to them by their conquistador fathers. All, however, had a mutual interest in extinguishing the Incas’ final remaining stronghold.

  Despite a valiant native resistance, the outcome of the campaign was a foregone conclusion. The invading army was well equipped, well armed, and determined; it also had the advantage of plentiful cannons, horses, harquebuses, and swords. While the emperor Tupac Amaru’s forces dutifully gave battle, ambushing the Spaniards on the treacherous trails and often delaying their progress, once again the natives found that their wooden maces and clubs and even their bows and arrows were no match for the Spaniards’ horses and steel weapons. The only real question for the invaders was: would the Inca emperor escape and, in so doing, live to fight another day?

  The Spaniards quickly captured Vitcos, the city that Diego Orgóñez had pillaged and where Manco Inca had almost been captured. They then crossed over the Colpacasa Pass before beginning to head down alongside the Pampaconas River, giving battle to Inca defenders along the way. Finally, on Tuesday, June 24, 1572, just outside the capital of Vilcabamba,

  General Martín Hurtado de Arbieto ordered that all of the men form themselves into companies with their captains and the Indian allies … with their generals…. [And] with their banners … they marched off taking the artillery [with them]…. At ten o’clock in the morning they marched into the city of Vilcabamba, everyone on foot, for it is a most rugged and wild country, in no way [suitable] for horses.

  The Spaniards found that the hidden capital Gonzalo Pizarro had sacked thirty-three years earlier now lay desolate, smoldering, and empty. In a report the Spanish general later submitted to Viceroy Toledo, Arbieto stated that he and his men “found [Vilcabamba] abandoned [with] around four hundred intact houses and their shrines and idolatries were here just as they had been before this city was captured. We found the houses of the Inca [emperors] burned … and all the … Indians, warriors as well as peasants, had fled to wherever they could.” The chronicler Murúa marveled at how, when the Spaniards arrived,

  The entire town was found to be sacked [so thoroughly] that if the Spaniards and [their auxiliary] Indians had done it, it could not have been worse…. All the Indian men and women had fled and had hidden themselves in the jungle, taking everything they could. They torched and burned the rest of the corn and food that was in the … storehouses … so that when the expedition arrived it was still smoking, and the temple of the Sun, where their principal idol was [located], was burned. [The Incas] had done the same when Gonzalo Pizarro … had entered the city, and the lack of food had forced … [Gonzalo’s expedition] to return and to leave the country in … [the emperor’s] power. [The Incas] expected in a similar manner that when the Spaniards presently found no food nor anything else with which to subsist upon, that they would turn back and leave the land and that they would not stay there nor settle it, and for this reason the Indians fled, setting fire to everything that they were unable to carry [away with them].

  By now the Spaniards had learned that Titu Cusi was dead, and that a new emperor, Tupac Amaru, had been crowned. But neither the new emperor nor his attendants, nor the temple priests, nor the priestesses, nor anyone else who had inhabited the city could be found. Stone fountains spurted water and streams gurgled nearby as brown and green lizards scrambled across the cut stones of the Incas’ deserted palaces. As the Spaniards searched the smoldering city, they also noticed that not all the gabled houses were covered in traditional thatch; instead, a few had rooftops of tile, in imitation of the roofs in Cuzco, which in turn were in imitation of those in Spain. Despite the Incas’ sacking of their own capital, Murúa described some of what the Incas had left behind:

  The town has, or it would be better to say had, a location half a league [1.75 miles] wide, like the layout of Cuzco, and a long distance in length. In it they used to raise parrots, hens, ducks, local rabbits, turkeys, pheasants, curassows, guans, macaws, and a thousand other kinds of birds of diverse and showy colors and [that are] very beautiful to see…. The houses and storage huts are covered in good thatch and there are numerous guavas, pecans, peanuts, lucumas, papayas, pineapples, avocados, and many other cultivated and wild trees. The palace of the Inca [emperor had] different levels, [was] covered in roof tiles, and the whole palace was painted with a great variety of paintings in their manner, which was something well worth seeing. The town had a square large enough for a good number of people, where they used to celebrate and even raced horses. The doors of the palace were made of a very fragrant cedar, which there is a great quantity of in that land, and [some of the] roofs were of the same wood. The Incas barely missed the luxuries, greatness, and sumptuousness of Cuzco in that distant or, better said, exiled land. Because everything they wanted to have from outside [of Vilcabamba], the Indians brought to them for their contentment and pleasure—and they enjoyed
themselves there.

  General Arbieto sent out a number of small, mobile forces in different directions, hoping to capture the Inca leaders and especially their new emperor, Tupac Amaru, who was rumored to be fleeing with his pregnant wife. One unit was formed under the command of a young, ambitious captain, Martín García de Loyola, a man eager to prove himself and who picked a select company of forty men. In a petition he later submitted to the king, García de Loyola made clear what had motivated him and many of the other Spaniards to join Arbieto’s expedition:

  [When] war was declared by the Viceroy against the Inca [emperor] who was discovered in the province of Vilcabamba working against your Majesty … many rewards were offered in your Royal name to those who participated, and in particular an income of a thousand pesos [was promised annually] from [tribute-paying] Indians to the person who captured the Inca.

  Whoever captured the Inca emperor, in other words, was to be granted an encomienda with enough natives on it to guarantee a lifetime income of one thousand pesos (around ten pounds of gold) per year, a grant that could then be passed on for one additional lifetime to the recipient’s son, daughter, or other heir. The stakes on both sides, therefore, couldn’t have been any higher: a fortune in gold and an easy retirement for whoever captured the Inca emperor versus the capture and imprisonment or death of the Inca emperor. The Spaniards also wished to put an end to future native rebellions by driving a stake into the heart of the final pocket of Inca resistance.

  The ensuing pursuit through the jungle after the Inca emperor was consequently a brutal one. Descending the river Masahuay (probably today’s Cosireni and Urubamba Rivers), García de Loyola and his men traveled more than a hundred miles, deep into the region of the Mañari Indians, an ethnic group probably related to today’s Campas or Machiguengas. Floating on rafts and led by their native guides, the Spaniards drifted downstream through the primeval wilderness of the upper Amazon. Immense trees in various shades of emerald and green with enormous trunks rose alongside the riverbanks beside them, some with giant crowns full of flowers, others with exotic fruits. Toucans with their disproportionately large and colored beaks occasionally looked down upon the armored men drifting below, cocking their heads sideways for a better view.

  As the Spaniards floated downriver, they periodically captured frightened natives on rafts or in canoes and forced their captives to give them information as to the whereabouts of the fleeing Inca emperor. The Spanish bounty hunters soon learned that the emperor “Tupac Amaru was in the Momori Valley, secure [in the belief] that it was not possible to catch him [there] because of the impenetrability of the country and of the rivers.” Encouraged by the fact that they were obviously heading in the right direction, García de Loyola and his men now continued on downriver, braving the cataracts and rapids and eventually arriving at Momori. There, the Spaniards were encouraged to learn that they were gradually closing the distance between themselves and the fleeing emperor, as only

  five days previously he [Tupac Amaru] had left that place … and had gone by canoe to the [land of the] Pilcosonis, another province further inland. But Tupac Amaru’s wife was frightened and depressed because she was within days of giving birth and, because he loved her so much, he himself helped her to bear her burden and waited for her, walking little by little.

  Quickening their pace, the Spaniards now began to chase their quarry by both day and night, guided by Mañari Indians and lighting their way late at night with torches. As the orange flames illuminated the strange, eerie black jungle, the Spaniards sometimes froze momentarily as unseen beasts suddenly crashed noisily away. Finally, after a chase that had lasted for more than two hundred miles, the Spaniards eventually glimpsed a small fire flickering ahead through the jungle. Moving cautiously with drawn swords, García de Loyola and his men emerged into a small clearing where they found Tupac Amaru and his pregnant wife huddled beside a campfire. The two royal fugitives no doubt must have looked up bleakly as the bearded men emerged from the darkness, the fire causing the steel of their swords and breastplates to glisten. There, in the middle of the night, deep in the Amazon rain forest, the thirty-five-year-long Spanish campaign to destroy the rebel province of Vilcabamba and to seize its last remaining Inca emperor had finally came to an end.

  On September 21, 1572, on what the Spaniards call St. Matthew’s Day and in the month the Incas called the Coya Raymi, or the “Festival of the Moon,” General Arbieto’s victorious expedition arrived at the gates of Cuzco. Tupac Amaru and the rest of the Spaniards’ high-ranking prisoners marched before the cavalry, tethered by ropes and chains to their Spanish captors. Virtually all the Spanish and native inhabitants of the city turned out to watch the expedition’s triumphal return after nearly four months. Arbieto and his men now marched and rode into the city, their native auxiliaries walking alongside together with the Spaniards’ numerous black slaves. The victors carried with them their captured treasure, such as the golden punchao, or sacred image of the sun, which they had discovered in the forests outside Vilcabamba; they also brought the mummified bodies of Manco Inca and Titu Cusi—the two rebel leaders, now dead, who had caused the Spaniards so much grief with their deadly insurgency campaigns.

  As Tupac Amaru and his captains were led away and imprisoned, the conquering Spaniards, by contrast, were treated to celebrations that lasted late into the night. Within a matter of days, the Spaniards quickly tried, convicted, and then executed Tupac Amaru’s generals. Their offense, apparently, had been to command the military defense of Vilcabamba against the Spanish invaders. Their real crime, of course, was to have resisted the final Spanish subjugation of Tawantinsuyu. A gathering of Spanish priests who spoke runasimi, meanwhile, did their best to convince Tupac Amaru to convert to Christianity, no doubt hoping that the emperor would choose to save himself spiritually, even if it proved impossible to do so physically.

  The twenty-nine-year-old emperor, who had done his best to strengthen the Inca religion in Vilcabamba during his brief, sixteen-month reign, eventually agreed to convert. A strong motivation for doing so was no doubt the fact that he had been informed that a trial was being conducted against him, a trial in which his very life hung in the balance. Tupac Amaru was being accused, basically, of having been the ruler of a rebel state that had launched raids upon Spanish-controlled Peru, and also of having allowed heathen religious practices to be tolerated within his kingdom. The raids, of course, had been launched not by Tupac Amaru, but by his older brother Titu Cusi, and by his father, Manco Inca. Both of those emperors had done so only after the Spaniards had attacked and occupied Tawantinsuyu, which, from the Incas’ point of view, the Spaniards had no right to rule. The “heathen religious practices” the emperor was accused of were likewise part of the Incas’ own native religion, one that they had practiced since time immemorial and long before the arrival of the Spaniards.

  Tupac Amaru himself was neither conversant in the Spanish language nor familiar with Spanish jurisprudence, nor did he have any legal counsel to defend him. His trial therefore was the sixteenth-century equivalent of a kangaroo court. Even if the Inca emperor had been supplied with the finest legal representation from Spain, however, and even had such representation argued that the Spaniards had no legal right to invade the Inca Empire, it is unlikely that the results would have been different. The prosecution, no doubt, would have argued that God himself had given the pope the right to assign Tawantinsuyu to the king and queen of Spain, and that the Spaniards were thus simply carrying out God’s will. For the Incas of Vilcabamba to resist such a commandment was therefore both blasphemy and treason, and were actions that were obviously contrary to God’s will. Besides, even though Tupac Amaru was now converting to Christianity, he had nevertheless been the spiritual leader of a pagan religion, one that had worshipped false idols and that in fact had worshipped Tupac Amaru as a false god himself.

  The verdict was thus a foregone conclusion. Neither the Spaniards nor the Incas would ever have allowed an independent,
hostile enclave to exist within a territory they had conquered, nor would they have allowed an important resistance figure to inspire disloyalty among their newly conquered citizens. Just as the Romans had destroyed Spartacus, the Spaniards had cleansed from their native country every last vestige of the Moors. The laws of empire building are brutal and dispassionate, and both the Incas and the Spaniards implicitly understood them. No two empires, after all, can exist simultaneously in the same area; the stronger empire will always defeat the weaker, until in the end only a single empire remains.

  Not surprisingly then, after only three days of trial, the judge selected by the viceroy condemned Tupac Amaru to death. And although various religious leaders in Cuzco pleaded with the viceroy for the emperor’s life to be spared, Toledo insisted that the sentence be immediately carried out. The king’s viceroy was determined to remove from Spain’s new colony the last vestige of Inca independence and to crush once and for all the possibility of another native rebellion. Tupac Amaru, he therefore insisted, must not be allowed to remain alive.

  On September 24, 1572, a phalanx of guards brought the emperor from his prison and led him through the streets to the main square. This was the same square where, thirty-seven years earlier, Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors had set up camp the day they had first arrived in Cuzco and where once a succession of Inca emperors had held giant religious ceremonies that symbolized their vast power. Now, in the center of the square, a simple scaffold awaited. One chronicler wrote that: