The Last Conquistador

by Stuart Stirling

  We have been commissioned to write the enclosed, in order that Your Majesty may learn the truth of what weighs on our conscience, and what we owe to the loyalty and service to His Majesty, of what we were informed by Manco Inca Yupanqui, who is the Inca at present in rebellion, and who was at the time some seven leagues from Cuzco at a village known as Tambo [Ollantaytambo] . . . the Inca received us well and listened to our words and made the following reply: ‘How is it that the great Apu [lord] of Castile ordered that I and my women be imprisoned with iron rings to our necks, and that I be urinated and excreted in my face? And that Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the principal lord, would take my wife, and who he still holds with him? And that Diego Maldonado would torture me so as to demand from me gold, telling me that he was also a great lord?’ He also protested that Pedro del Barco and Gómez de Mazuelas, who are encomenderos of this city, and Alonso de Toro and Pantiel [de Salinas], Alonso de Mesa, Pedro Pizarro [the future chronicler] and Solares, all encomenderos of this city, urinated on him when he was being held captive, and that with a lighted candle they burnt his eyelashes . . .15

  Nor was the young hidalgo Serra de Leguizamón untainted by the cruelty shown the Inca prince. For weeks the Inca Manco suffered the abuse of his captors, chained to a stake in the main square of the city, a spectacle that outraged his subjects, however tainted their loyalty, and led to the killing of several encomenderos in the outlying regions of the city. The immediate retribution of the Spaniards was recorded by Diego Camacho, whose brother was one of the victims:

  Because of the killings by the Indians in the province of Cuntisuyo of an encomendero by the name of Pedro Martín [de Moguer] and another encomendero called Simón Suárez, I saw the captain Juan Pizarro and Gonzalo Pizarro, and Mansio Serra among them, leave the city with other soldiers to exert reprisal of the province; and being as I was in the city of Cuzco I heard it said the reprisal had been carried out at the capture of the mountain fortress of Ancocagua, where more than eight thousand Indian warriors had taken refuge, and that a great deal of fighting took place . . .’.16

  The chronicler Cieza de León wrote that Mansio and three other conquistadors, Juan Flores, Francisco de Villafuerte and Pedro del Barco, volunteered to gain entry to the fortress by shaving their beards and disguising themselves as Indians, and that they made their ascent of the mountain crag at 2 in the morning, accompanied by an Inca lord:

  The Spaniards were fearful, believing they had been betrayed and cursed the orejón [Inca lord] who appeared to have closed the gate behind him, but throwing back his robe he took out his battle axe and shouted: ‘Viracochas, come quickly!* and which they did, though some Indians had injured the orejón: many now came shouting they had been betrayed and wounding the orejón, who they killed and who begged the Spaniards to avenge his death. The four men with their swords in hand fought alone against the entire encampment of Indians, their lives being saved solely by the darkness of the night. Juan Pizarro with the rest of his men then came to their aid, and as dawn was breaking the Indians could see their great number that had gained entry into their fortress, nor could their enemies lightly ignore the clamour of shouting of their men, women and children, and those who could see the steel of their swords many decided to take their own lives, throwing themselves over the cliffs on to the crags and rocks below, where the blood of their brains coloured the snow . . . without restraint the Spaniards wounded and killed, cutting arms and legs, letting none survive: the yanacona did the same, and the greater their clamour the greater the killing . . . and those who were not killed, with their women and children, whose eyes they shielded, threw themselves over the cliffs to their deaths . . .17

  When Juan Pizarro and his squadron returned to Cuzco he was to find the city under the control of his elder brother Hernando, whom Pizarro had appointed governor, an action demonstrative of the rigid order of seniority among Pizarro’s captains. After an absence of three years he had returned to Peru laden with honours from the court at Toledo where he had taken the Crown’s share of the Cajamarca treasure, and where he had been made a knight of Santiago. He had brought back with him 4 white women slaves for his brother Pizarro, and had also obtained permission to import 100 Negro slaves for both himself and his brother, which only confirms the conqueror of Peru’s former trade as a slaver.18 Aware of the ill-feeling the Inca’s imprisonment and the killings at Ancocagua had created among the natives of the city, he ordered the Inca Manco’s release and restored some of his privileges. As a further act of reconciliation he granted the Inca permission to leave Cuzco to officiate at a ceremony in the neighbouring valley of the Yucay in the company of the High Priest the Villac-Umu, who had deserted Almagro’s expedition to Chile. It was a gesture influenced in part by the Inca’s promise to bring him a quantity of gold from the valley and a life-size gold statue of his father Huayna Cápac. Unbeknown to the Spaniards, the Inca had been planning to make his escape from Cuzco and head an uprising organized by the Villac-Umu, who had spent months travelling across the Bolivian altiplano, highland region, recruiting men and arms. The Conquistador Bernabé Picón recorded that the planned rebellion was betrayed to the Spaniards by the Coya Doña Beatriz, possibly out of love for Mansio: ‘At the time the Villac-Umu, who had deserted the expedition for the discovery of Chile of the Adelantado Don Diego de Almagro, returned to Cuzco, I heard it said that Doña Beatriz warned her master Mansio Serra, with whom she was not married, that the Villac-Umu had come to take the Inca with him who wished to flee the city, and that he made this publicly known and informed Hernando Pizarro.’19

  On the eve of Easter Sunday word finally reached the city of the mass uprising throughout the four suyos.

  More or less three years after the conquest [Mansio recalled] this city of Cuzco was besieged in a general uprising led by Manco Inca . . . in whose defence I served . . . and the said Manco Inca attacked the city with a great number of warriors, of more than two hundred thousand Indians, and besieged and captured much of the city and setting it on fire, and those who remained in its defence, I among them, barricaded ourselves in one of its fortresses which in the Indian language is called Hatuncancha; and Manco Inca sent a great number of Indians against the city of Los Reyes where the Marqués Pizarro was at the time, and against other settlements of Spaniards . . . from as far as Chile to Popayán and Pastu, a distance of some seven hundred leagues . . . and there were many in this city who attempted to flee to the ports of Lima and Arequipa to escape by sea, but who were detained by Hernando Pizarro and Juan Pizarro and Gonzalo Pizarro, the Marqués Pizarro’s brothers, who defended this city, and who I accompanied in that defence . . . and it was known that the Marqués had sent word from these realms to Guatemala and to Tierra Firme [Panama] asking them for their help.20

  The Inca Manco’s siege of Cuzco. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  In the first few days of the siege the garrison had retreated to the two fortress palaces of Suntur Huasi and Hatuncancha, to the north-east of the square of Aucaypata, where they barricaded themselves, and from where day and night they led sorties of cavalry and infantry to face the onslaught of warriors who had set fire to the city’s buildings. Of the Spaniards, 30 lay dead and most of the company of under 200 men were wounded in the initial days of fighting. The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega records that at night the surrounding hills were lit by thousands of fires, and that in the day nothing but the massing of warriors could be seen.

  Within a week the Inca Manco’s squadrons of Quéchua and subject tribes, which had marched undetected to Cuzco from all the suyos of the empire, had taken control of most of the city. Their renewed loyalty to their former Inca lords was due primarily to the brutality shown them by their encomenderos and sexual abuse of their women, in either their encomienda lands or settlements. In all probability Manco’s army numbered between 100,000 and 200,000 warriors and yanacona porters. In the fortress of Hatuncancha, amid the cries of the wounded and stench of unburied bodies, three friars heard the confessions of
the 200 men as they prepared for their deaths. Several hundred of their Indian auxiliaries and their Negro and Isthmian slaves were also barricaded inside the fortress, together with Indian concubines and children, among them the Coya Doña Beatriz and her two-year-old son. Francisco de Illescas recalled that the Coya had also been accompanied by the Inca’s two young daughters, whom she had taken to live with her after he had fled the city: ‘and because of which I heard it said it was the reason many dangers the Indians had intended were avoided . . .’.21 In the stockades of the fortress the Spaniards had stabled what had survived of their horses and mules, some eighty animals. Pedro Pizarro wrote that in one of the many forays the horsemen made into the square Mansio had been unseated from his horse, escaping with his life, and had seen his mount speared and hacked to death. In another sortie, which had prevented the burning of the thatch roof of the fortress tower of Suntur Huasi, some of the besieged men and women, invoking the intercession of God for their deliverance, claimed to have seen the apparition of the Virgin – an event that would be commemorated years later by the construction on its site of Cuzco’s church of the Triunfo. Another miraculous apparition – known as the Miracle of Santiago – that the beleaguered garrison claimed had been seen at the height of the siege, and which would also be represented in the religious art of the colony, was of Spain’s patron saint, as recorded by the chronicler Friar Martín de Murúa:

  The Miracle of Santiago. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  Sacsahuaman. (Alexander Stirling)

  I wish to refer to what I have heard told by Spaniards and Indians, who swear to the truth of what they say, and who recall that in the most difficult time of the fighting a Spaniard appeared mounted on a white horse and killing many Indians, and many of the Spaniards believed him to have been Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, one of the leading conquistadors of Cuzco; yet later, when they enquired about this they discovered that he had not been fighting there, but in another part of the city, even though there was no other among the Spaniards who possessed a white horse other than he. It was understood by many that it had been the Apostle Santiago, patron and defender of Spain, who had appeared there.22

  The Inca had established his principal encampment overlooking the city on a hill known to the Quéchua as the Speckled Hawk, in the massive stone fortress Temple of Sacsahuaman, from where with impunity he commanded the daily assault. Built by the Emperor Huayna Cápac’s grandfather, the fortress, comprising three great stone defensive towers, ringed by a wall whose foundation stones were of some 12 ft in height, had been completed by the Emperor Huáscar to guard Cuzco’s northern approach. A description of the stronghold was left by the chronicler Pedro Sancho de la Hoz:

  A fortress of earth and stone of great beauty, with windows that look out on to the city and which give it an aspect of much attraction. Within the fortress are many chambers and a principal tower, of cylindrical shape, with four or five smaller towers, one above the other: the chambers and halls within are small, though their walls are of fine workmanship, and so well assembled, their stone joinery in perfect order like that which can be seen in Spain, one against the other, though without any evidence of sand, and so smooth that they appear as if polished. It possesses so many adjacent towers and courtyards that a person would be unable to inspect them all in one day: and many Spaniards who have travelled in Lombardy and other foreign realms say that they have never seen the like of such a fortress or castle. It could garrison five thousand Spaniards: neither can it be besieged by battering ram, nor can it be mined from underground, because of its mountainous position . . .23

  Diego Camacho recalled that the siege lasted for fourteen months in all, and that Mansio served there all that time:

  . . . with his arms and horses, in the day and at night time, taking part in the engagements and battles of each day with the natives, in which we all ran great risk and fought with much difficulty: for we were surrounded by more than three hundred thousand Indian warriors, and they had put us under such duress that they burned the greater part of the city; and seeing this, and realizing the danger, the captain Juan Pizarro decided that we had to capture the fortress where a great number of warriors had fortified themselves; and so it was decided, and among those who went up there was this witness and Mansio Serra, and some seventy soldiers in all; and for some days we had the fortress besieged and one night Mansio Serra and a few others volunteered to gain entry through a small opening they had seen, and thus they entered, and all the others after them, and we captured the surrounding area to the fortress at great peril and much fighting, and that night Juan Pizarro was killed. Hernando Pizarro, who had remained in the city, then came up and we held to the siege until the fortress was captured: scaling its walls with ladders, and in all this, as in the earlier siege of the city, Mansio Serra’s service was of principal importance . . .24

  Lucas Martínez Vegazo stated that twelve conquistadors climbed up into the fortress: ‘. . . killing and wounding the natives and shouting “España! España!”’25 Mansio himself claimed he had been the first to enter and cry victory, though wounded in the stomach.26 It was said that the killing had been so intense that for days hundreds of condors could be seen swooping down on the fortress’ bloody walls to eat the flesh of its dead warriors. The capture of Sacsahuaman would form part of the legends of the Indies, recounted in the taverns and gaming houses of Spain, and commemorated by the coat of arms awarded Cuzco by the Cardinal of Seville: ‘A castle of gold in a field of red, in recognition that the said city and its fortress were conquered by force of arms in the royal service; and for a border eight condors in a field of gold, which are large birds like vultures of the province of Peru, in recognition that at the time the city was won they flew down to eat the flesh of the dead . . .’.27

  The fall of the great fortress, whose giant stone foundations can still be seen above Cuzco, marked a turning point in the siege of the city and had gained Hernando Pizarro’s weary and half-starved soldiers a period of respite, though their victory had been marred by the death from his wounds of Hernando’s brother Juan. In the following days, several sorties were ordered into the surrounding countryside to forage for food and llamas, before Hernando Pizarro himself led a squadron of horse into the northern valley of Ollantaytambo. Beyond what is known as the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Ollantaytambo and its river of Urubamba are dominated by surrounding mountains, in the far extremity of which lies the ruins of its giant stone terraced fortress where the Inca had positioned the bulk of his army. The small squadron of horse finally entered the valley and slowly made their way up towards the fortress, the massive walls of which were manned by archers from the Amazon subject tribes. The horseman Diego Camacho recalled the failure of the expedition:

  In the company of Mansio Serra this witness and seventy horsemen went to the said province and fortress, which we attacked on the day of our arrival. The Indian warriors, having ventured out of the fortress, a great battle took place until that night, in which many Spaniards were killed and wounded; and abandoning our encampment and tents we were forced to flee to Cuzco that very night, losing everything we had taken with us; for had we remained until morning not one of us would have returned alive because of the great numbers of warriors and the ruggedness of the land.28

  Their retreat from the valley would within a short time lead to a further siege of the city, and though its garrison by now had sufficient food supplies it would be several months before one of the two armies marching to its relief would reach the vicinity of Cuzco.

  Pizarro, having himself successfully withstood the attack on his small settlement at Lima, had raised a force of some 350 men under the command of Alonso de Alvarado, which would later be reinforced by a further 200 men from the Isthmus. However, it was Almagro’s dishevelled army, which had found neither gold nor riches on its ill-fated expedition to Chile, that was the first to reach the city, having marched across its vast and desolate northern desert. The chronicler Ló
pez de Gómora recorded:

  There is a desert from Atacama, the last town in Peru, to Copayapú, the first in Chile, a distance of some eighty leagues [280 miles] . . . as the water was not sufficient to supply the whole army, Almagro ordered the horsemen to cross the desert in bands of five or six . . . Jerónimo de Alderete, who was governor of Chile many years later, was once in Copayapú, and seeing that there was not much snow on the passes went to see whether he and his company could find any trace of the losses Almagro’s army had suffered . . . they found a Negro leaning against the rocks in a standing position and also a horse standing as if carved of wood, with its reins now rotted in his hands . . .29