The Last Conquistador

by Stuart Stirling

  The various descriptions of Cuzco recorded by the Spaniards depict its masonry and the decorative artwork of its buildings as beyond anything they had ever witnessed in the Indies, and its great temple fortress of Sacsahuaman, constructed with stone blocks of some 12 ft in height, dominating its northern approach, as equal in grandeur and size to any such building in Spain. Laid out in the shape of a puma, the ancient deity of the Chavín civilization of the central Andes, the city’s main square of Aucaypata was paved in stone and lined with sand brought from the beaches of the Pacific,17 flanked by the palaces of its living and dead emperors.

  The cacique Cápac Apo Guaman Chaua, of Chinchasuyo. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  Amarucancha, one of its four great palaces, possessed an entrance façade of white and coloured marble, its outer walls protected by two great separate cylindrical towers. Its stone chambers were hung with sheets of gold and silver and its interior niches were decorated with gold jewelled sculptures. Though no examples of painting and wall murals have survived, there is no reason to believe they did not exist, but were destroyed by the Spaniards because of their indigenous themes. Forty years after the Conquest the Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo commissioned painted genealogies of the Incas on materials to be sent to Spain, and which also depicted Inca history.

  An image of the palace of Amarucancha’s size can be envisaged when compared to an adjoining building of a lesser structure, known as the Acclahuasi, the residence of the virgins of the sun, the mamacuna, who numbered some 1,500 women chosen for their beauty from each of the suyos of the empire as concubines for the royal harem. Casana, the palace Pizarro was to requisition for himself, contained a hall enclosure that could hold 3,000 people.18 Across the great central square the Yacha Huasi, the house of learning, the school of its princes and Inca lords, presided over by the amauta, elders and poet bards, on the foundations of which the Conquistador built his mansion, had been constructed like all the other stone palaces with several courtyards and stockades, containing livestock of llamas, alpacas and vicuñas.

  Inca genealogy, late eighteenth century, Cuzco School. (Formerly in Private Collection)

  In death, as in life, the Quéchua celebrated the divine ancestry of their rulers in the religious ceremonies of their capital when the mummies of their dead emperors would be paraded in throne litters in front of thousands of their people and carried in procession to Coricancha, the city’s Temple of the Sun. Preserved with ointments and aromatic herbs and bound with white linen in an ovular shape, their faces masked in beaten gold, the mummies would be symbolically fed by their attendants with chicha, maize wine, and leaves of coca, a plant sacred to the panaca, and entertained through the speech of mediums. In a ritual that acclaimed the divinity of the Inca, the royal concubines and sister-wives of the Emperor and his daughters would play-act a theatre of the dead, miming the yuyaycucuy: the timeless frozen past of their people. Nothing today remains of Coricancha other than its foundation walling, nor of the other great sun temples founded at Pachacámac, south of Lima, Tumibamba, in Ecuador, and Copacabana, on the south-eastern shore of Titicaca in Bolivia, on the site of which was built a great pilgrimage shrine in the seventeenth century in honour of the Virgin. The chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León recorded Coricancha’s appearance, based on the evidence given him by Cuzco’s surviving Inca princes and the few remaining veterans of Cajamarca who had seen the temple before its conversion into the convent of Santo Domingo, where the Conquistador’s son Jerónimo would spend most of his adult life as a friar:

  The cacique Mallco Mullo, of Cuntisuyo, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. (Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  Its circumference is some four hundred paces, surrounded by a high wall of the finest masonry and precision . . . in all Spain I have not seen anything to compare to these walls, nor the placement of their stones, other than the tower known as Calahorra, by the bridge of Córdoba, and another edifice I saw in Toledo when I went to present the first part of my chronicle to the prince Don Felipe [the future King Philip II], which is the hospital the Archbishop Tavera commissioned to be built . . .19 The stone is somewhat black in colour, rough, yet excellently cut. There are many doors and their arches are of a fine construction; at mid height of the walls runs a band of gold, of some seventeen inches in width and two in depth. The doors and arches are also embossed with sheets of this metal. Within the enclosure are four houses, not very large but of similar construction, the interior and exterior walls which are adorned with sheets of the same metal, and their ceilings are of thatch. Built into the inner walls of these houses are two stone benches, illuminated by shafts of sunlight and decorated with precious stones and emeralds. On these benches sat the emperors, and if any person would have done the same he would have been condemned to death . . . at each of the entrances were porters who guarded the virgins, of whom there were many, being the daughters of the principal lords and chosen for their great beauty, and who would remain in the temple until old age; and if any would have had dealings with men they would have been killed or buried alive, as would also be the man’s punishment. These women were called mamacuna, who knew no other role than to sew and to paint the woollen garments for service in the temple, and in the making of chicha, which is a [maize] wine they make, and of which containers were filled in ample quantity . . . in one of these houses, the grandest of all, was the figure of the sun, of great size and made of gold, and encased with precious stones. There also were placed the mummies of the Incas who had reigned in Cuzco, each surrounded by a great quantity of treasure . . . around the temple house were a number of smaller buildings, which were the dwellings of the Indians who served in the temple, and an enclosure where they kept the white llamas and the children and men they would sacrifice. There was also a garden, the earth and grass of which was of fine gold and where artificial maize grew, also of gold, as were their stems and ears, and so well planted that even in a strong wind they would stand. As well, there were twenty llamas of gold with their lambs, and shepherds with their stone slings and staffs, all of the same metal . . .20

  Machu Picchu. (Alexander Stirling)

  These images of a people at the height of their civilization would all but disappear within ten years of their conquest, the treasures of their gold and silver metal work melted into ingots, the stone masonry of their palaces used to buttress the foundations of the mansions and churches of their conquerors. At an enquiry held at Cuzco by the Viceroy Toledo in March 1572, he instructed the four surviving conquistadors in the city to give evidence of what they knew of the Inca lineage. Their words he recorded in a letter to the Council of the Indies and to King Philip II:

  What they have always heard told by the older Indians concerning the lineage of the Incas, and by others, is that from the first [Inca] until Huáscar, who was the last, there were twelve in number . . . and they have heard it said that Túpac Inca Yupanqui, father of Huayna Cápac, was the first who by force of arms made himself lord of the whole of Peru, from Chile to Pastu [Colombia], retaking various provinces in the vicinity of Cuzco which his father Pachacuti Inca had conquered, and which had rebelled . . . and that Huayna Cápac, his son, inherited his sovereignty and conquered further lands, but because of his death Huáscar, his legitimate son, succeeded him; and while the realm was at war between Huáscar and Atahualpa, his bastard brother, Don Francisco Pizarro by order of His Majesty came to these kingdoms, and with him the said witnesses Alonso de Mesa, Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, Pedro Alonso Carrasco and Juan de Pancorbo.21

  Incas of Peru, engraving. (Private Collection)

  The chronology and accounts of the reign of the Emperor Huayna Cápac and of the subsequent wars of succession to his empire are full of ambiguity and contradiction in the early Spanish chronicles, none of whose authors were witnesses to the events they recorded. All their accounts were dependent on the testimony of the amauta bards and quipucamayoc they each in turn interviewed over the years at Cuzco. The evidence of
their informants appears to vary depending on their allegiance to the rival panacas of Huayna Cápac’s sons. The prominence given to Atahualpa’s illegitimacy by the Spaniards was possibly more the work of the chroniclers themselves in portraying a European sense of morality, and in somehow justifying the legality of Atahualpa’s killing at Cajamarca. The portrayal of Huáscar as a corrupt tyrannical weakling by a number of chroniclers also adds to the justification of the Conquest. Possibly neither representation was accurate, other than in the sense of demonstrating their respective ambition to occupy their father’s throne. God and man to his people, the Emperor Huayna Cápac had brought his dynasty to the pinnacle of its power.22 Though raised in Cuzco he had been born at Tumibamba and had spent much of his life campaigning to expand and secure the frontiers of his empire. Only in the latter part of his reign did he move his court from Cuzco to Quito, north of his retreat of Tumibamba, which he had named in honour of his panaca. Each of the early chronicles records that the succession to his throne had remained unresolved. Though neither primogeniture nor legitimacy in the European sense of the word was an established requisite among the Quéchua, the purity of the Emperor’s blood line, and by a tradition established by Huayna Cápac’s parents, of royal incest, favoured the succession of the son of a sister-queen.23

  The Coya Rahua Ocllo. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  It was a succession that depended also on the sanction of the High Priest of the Sun, the Villac-Umu, a shaman from the ayllu of Tarpuntay, and on the allegiance of the imperial panacas of Cuzco. On the death of his sister-queen the Coya Cusi Rimay, who was probably the mother of his son Ninancuyochi, the Emperor married their younger sister the Coya* Rahua Ocllo, who for many years had been his concubine.24 Reputed for her exceptional beauty and the magnificence of the court over which she presided, she was said to have been accompanied by a thousand musicians during her travels across the empire.25 The eldest of their sons was Topa Cusi Huallpa, known as Huáscar, the Hummingbird, whom the Emperor had appointed Governor of Cuzco and of his southern domains.26 The youngest of their daughters was the Coya Quispiquipi Huaylla, who after her baptism would be known as Doña Beatriz Yupanqui,27 and who was the mother of the Conquistador’s son Juan:

  As is publicly known of Huayna Cápac Yupanqui,* once king and lord of these realms of Peru, and of its mountains and valleys . . . that among his many children born to him was my mother Doña Beatriz Yupanqui. And that at the time of her birth at Surampalli in his domain of Tumibamba, he gave her for her guardian and service the cacique Cariapasa, principal lord of the Lupaca, for being his legitimate daughter of his queen, mother of Huáscar Inca, who was to succeed him as king and lord . . .28

  The Emperor Huayna Cápac. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  The Indians and Inca lords who were witnesses to her son’s testimonial thirty years after the Conquest record that great feasting was held throughout the empire at her birth which lasted for ‘ten days and ten nights’.† The palace compound of Surampalli where the Coya Doña Beatriz was born was identified by the archaeologist Max Uhle in 1923, in the valley of Yunguilla, lying south of Tumibamba.29 As her son recalls, at her birth she was awarded to the guardianship of the Cacique Cariapasa, Lord of the Lupaca nation, one of her father’s great warrior chiefs. As the daughter of the Emperor she was also given lands in Huayna Cápac’s personal fiefdom of the Sacred Valley at Yucay, north of Cuzco, at Huaylla, from which she took her territorial title, and which would later form part of the rich encomienda of Callanga of her Spanish lover.

  The palaces and temples of Tumibamba, the ruins of which lie buried in the neighbourhood of the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca, had been built on the site of the former capital of the Cañari people by the Coya’s father and grandfather at the time of their separate conquests of the northern Andes.

  They are among the finest and richest [palaces] to be found in all Peru, situated at the crossing of two small rivers in a plain having a circumference of twelve leagues. It is a chilly land, abounding in game such as deer, rabbits and partridges, turtledoves and other birds. The Temple of the Sun was of stone put together with the subtlest skill, some stones are large, black and rough, and others seem of jasper . . . the façades of many of the buildings are beautiful and decorated, some had been set with precious gems and emeralds, and inside, the walls of the temple and the palaces of the Inca lords, had been covered with sheets of the finest gold and embossed with many statues, all of this metal . . .30

  Among the hundreds of other sons and daughters born to the Emperor was Atahualpa, the great Turkey Cock, whose mother was his cousin and who was regarded as the Emperor’s favourite son.31 Three other sons, also from different mothers, whose names feature in the history of the Conquest, were the Incas Túpac Huallpa, Manco and Paullu. What each chronicler records is that in the last years of Huayna Cápac’s life his empire was devastated by a plague, probably smallpox, which had spread from the northern borders of his realms to as far south as Cuzco. The chroniclers record that the epidemic was believed by his shamen to have been the retribution of the god Viracocha, and for whose appeasement the human sacrifice of thousands of children was ordered throughout the empire. The Jesuit Bernabé Cobo wrote that in an act of penitence the Emperor had gone into seclusion and had fasted to bring an end to the suffering of his people, and that during his fast he had seen the ghosts of three dwarfs enter his chamber which he interpreted as a sign of his impending death. The chronicler Sarmiento de Gamboa also describes in some detail how the Emperor then summoned his diviners to guide him in his choice of successor. The carcass of a young llama was brought to his presence and its entrails were read by the High Priest, the Villac-Umu, who informed him that the auspices for the succession of his son Ninancuyochi were unfavourable. The carcass of a second llama was brought to him, and again the same auspices were predicted for the succession of his son Huáscar. It was a divination that would never be repeated.

  In the year 1530 of the Christian calendar, the Inca Emperor was dead.32 A thousand servants from his household were killed in sacrifice to serve him in the afterlife,33 and for ten days the tribes of Quito mourned his passing in the traditional weeping before his body was taken to Tumibamba to be mummified, where the Cañari people who worshipped the moon deity would mourn their sovereign for the length of an entire moon.34 At Tumibamba the High Priest offered the throne to Ninancuyochi, but within a few days he too was dead, either poisoned or stricken by smallpox. The little that can be surmised from all the conflicting accounts is that the widowed Coya Rahua Ocllo was instrumental in the High Priest’s subsequent proclamation of her son Huáscar as Emperor: an election welcomed by the panacas of Cuzco who over the years, and to their detriment, had witnessed the growing pre-eminence of their northern empire. Among the dead Emperor’s sons only Atahualpa, who had the support of his father’s northern warrior armies, and who was then possibly twenty-seven years old, five years older than Huáscar,35 would excuse himself from travelling south to Cuzco to pay homage to his brother.

  The Emperor Húascar. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  Within a few weeks the cortège of the Emperor’s mummified body began its 1,200-mile journey south to Cuzco. Bound in white cloth, it was carried on a throne litter by his principal lords and accompanied by the litters of the Coya Rahua Ocllo and her retinue. The procession travelled on the great Chinchasuyo road that separated the coastal plains and the cordillera, from where its progress was reported to the new Emperor by the chasqui, relays of runners, who could cover the entire distance the cortège would travel in less than five days. To the traditional wailing of women mourners, their breasts exposed in demonstration of their grief, the caravan of litters and armed warriors with their baggage train of yanacona porters and llamas made its ascent into the cordillera along its stone terraced roads and canyon valleys. At the mountain rest house of Limatambo, where it had encamped for several days, the Coya Rahua Ocllo was summoned by her son to travel ahead
to Cuzco. Some time after her departure the retinue of Inca princes and lords was massacred. It was an act she would never forgive her son, and a reprisal for what he had believed had been his relatives’ complicity in Atahualpa’s refusal to render him homage. The massacre, chronicled by most of the early Spanish accounts, would also add to the resentment they recorded that was felt by the lords of Cuzco to their new Emperor’s decision to appropriate the panaca lands and wealth, and which would unite many of them in siding with Atahualpa’s eventual rebellion.36