The news of Almagro’s successful crossing of the Atacama, of some 500 men and what remained of his Indian auxiliaries, and their arrival at the settlement of Arequipa had been relayed to the Inca, who had once more withdrawn his forces to Ollantaytambo but had suffered the desertion of a great number of his warriors from the subject tribes. On reaching the township of Urcos, 25 miles south-east of Cuzco, Almagro sent emissaries to Hernando Pizarro informing him of his intention to take possession of the city as forming part of his governorship, the Crown’s award of which he had only received during his expedition to Chile. He also dispatched two of his captains, Pedro de Oñate and Juan Gómez de Malaver, to the valley of the Yucay in an attempt to negotiate a peace settlement with the Inca – an interview also recorded in their letter to the Emperor Charles V:
. . . finally, he [the Inca Manco] ended our meeting, saying: ‘Ask my father Almagro if it is true what he says and that you are not lying, that I will be allowed to leave in peace and enter the city together, he, with his men, and I, with mine; and that he will leave me to kill all those Christians who have harmed me: then shall I know whether what he says is the truth.’ And while we were still with him an Indian brought from Cuzco a letter Hernando Pizarro had sent him, which he showed us, telling him that he should not go in peace with Almagro because he was planning to burn him alive and make his brother Paullu Inca, who he had brought with him from his discovery of Chile; he then told us that the letter had been read to him by a Christian who was his captive . . .30
Machu Picchu. (Alexander Stirling)
The failure of the emissaries to persuade the Inca to accept a peaceful settlement only hardened Almagro’s resolve to press his claim to the governorship of Cuzco by force of arms, and he ordered his army to break camp. In the bitter cold of the Andean winter his troops entered Cuzco under cover of darkness. His men and auxiliaries, led by the Inca Paullu, took possession of the city’s buildings, setting fire to the lodging where Hernando Pizarro and his brother Gonzalo had barricaded themselves. Most of the survivors of the siege, exhausted by their suffering and fearful for their lives, willingly surrendered to his troops. The few men who refused, among them Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, were put in irons and imprisoned with Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro, their Indian women and children left to the mercy of Almagro’s soldiers, who had little to show for their long and arduous march other than their hatred for the Pizarros.
Diego de Almagro’s occupation of Cuzco would finally bring to an end any hope the Inca Manco might have held of defeating the Spaniards, even though the conquistadors had suffered the loss of a thousand men throughout their various settlements. For a further two years his depleted armies would continue to wage their struggle until they were finally defeated by superior arms and cavalry. Accompanied by a few remaining squadrons of his warriors, the Inca Manco retreated from the Yucay to face his exile in the mountain fastness of the forests of Vilcabamba. There, he built a fortified township, which would be known as the ‘lost city of the Incas’, and whose ruins possibly lie buried in the sub-tropical forests of Espíritu Pampa, north-east of Cuzco, and not far from the great Inca mountain Temple of Machu Picchu, which would remain unknown to the conquistadors and to the world until its chance discovery by the young American archaeological student Hiram Bingham in 1911.31
* Viracocha was the name by which the Spaniards were first known because of the Incas’ initial belief that they were the spirit warriors of their god of that name.
6
THE WARS OF THE VIRACOCHAS
Though their wars were long, and of great occurrence, never before in the history of the world did a people of a nation so cruelly pursue them, ignoring death and their own lives in order to avenge their passions and hatred of one another . . .
Pedro de Cieza de León
Las Guerras Civiles del Perú
The morning after his entry into Cuzco the 64-year-old Adelantado Almagro, accompanied by his Isthmian mestizo son Diego and his principal captains, proclaimed himself ruler of the southern territories of the Inca empire. Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro, together with several of their supporters, among them Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, were at first imprisoned in the house of Diego Núñez de Mercado, and then in what had been the Temple of Coricancha.1 The Imperial city was a charred ruin as the Friar Bishop Valverde would recall a year later on his return from Spain, bringing with him some fifty servants and relatives:2 ‘. . . most is tumbled down and burned . . . and few stones of its fortress standing. It is a wonder when one finds any house in the environs with more than walls.’3
The retribution of Almagro’s landless and impoverished soldiers was relentless in their search for the hidden caches of gold and silver of their prisoners and in the rape of their women. Within days, however, Almagro ordered his men to resume their march to confront the approaching army of Alonso de Alvarado which Pizarro had sent from Lima. As Alvarado rested his troops by a river at Abancay, north of the city, Almagro’s horsemen attacked them. Led by Rodrigo de Orgóñez, a veteran of the Spanish imperial army that had sacked Rome 10 years previously, the rebels routed Alvarado’s contingent of 500 men. The humiliation that Alvarado and his men endured during their long march to Cuzco, chained in columns and many of them barefoot, was a sight that brought even greater alarm to the imprisoned loyalists of the city. Most of them by now believed they would be killed or spend the rest of their days rotting in the improvised cells of the fortress of Sacsahuaman, the site of their past victory against the Inca Manco. For almost twelve months they would remain prisoners, though a number of them escaped, including Alvarado and Gonzalo Pizarro. The wealthiest among them, mostly veterans of Cajamarca, were tortured by Almagro’s men to reveal the whereabouts of their gold and silver, hidden mainly in the gardens or walls, tapados, of their lodgings. Their Indian women were to suffer a similar fate. Nearly all were raped, the most important of whom, such as the coyas Doña Beatriz and Doña Juana, were made concubines of Almagro’s captains. It was a fate probably also shared by one of Pizarro’s women, the Ñusta Cuxirimay Ocllo, known as Doña Angelina.4 Though Pizarro sent various emissaries to Almagro, and was himself to meet his former partner under a flag of truce, he failed to reach an accord with him. Almagro’s subsequent decision – against the advice of all his captains – to release Hernando Pizarro, as a gesture of goodwill, was however to enable Pizarro to order the army he had recruited at Lima to make its advance on Cuzco.
At dawn on 26 April 1538, within sight of the city’s walls at a plain known as Salinas, the two armies eventually faced one another on either side of a river. Almagro’s troops, numbering 500 men, half of whom were horsemen, were commanded by Orgóñez and supported by 10,000 Indian auxiliaries led by the Inca Paullu with 6 small canon. Hernando Pizarro, his huge figure in full armour and dressed in orange livery, commanded the loyalist forces of 700 men, and advanced his infantry across the river. Reminiscent of a medieval battle, the conquistadors, accompanied by their armed Indian retainers and watched by their camp women from the safety of their tents, slowly advanced towards one another, their pennants adorned with the arms awarded them by their distant Emperor in whose name they fought, loyalist and rebel alike. Orgóñez’s pikemen also made their advance, assisted by two columns of cavalry which were ordered to begin their attack: at full gallop, their lances breaking on impact, a desperate and bloody hand-to-hand fight ensued, leaving 150 Spaniards dead. Almagro, who was too ill to take part in the fighting, observed the battle from a hillock and witnessed the slaughter of his wounded men at the hands of his own Indian auxiliaries, who at the last moment changed their allegiance. He stayed there for almost two hours before mounting his mule and making his escape to Cuzco. The dead were looted of their armour and weapons, and what had not been stripped from their corpses by their countrymen was pillaged by the Indians. In the ruins of the fortress of Sacsahuaman Almagro was captured and taken manacled to the Temple of Coricancha.
For three months the elderly adelantado wo
uld remain a prisoner. Sickly and broken in spirit Almagro presented a pitiful sight, pleading his age and his past service to the Crown. His words, however, were lost on Hernando Pizarro, who would neither forgive nor forget his own imprisonment and past humiliation, and who ordered Almagro’s execution. On 8 July the great square of the city was lined by a squadron of arquebusiers as a priest and Almagro’s executioner headed the small column of men from the Temple of Coricancha, behind which his garroted corpse was carried to a podium. To the sound of a drummer his head was struck off and placed at the end The Virgin of La Merced, eighteenth century, Potosí School. (Private Collection) of a pike, his one eye open, and his bearded and blood-smeared features were paraded before the silent throng of Spaniards and Indians and Negroes. Wrapped in a shroud, his headless and naked corpse was taken by his African slave to be buried in the monastery of La Merced. The Jesuit chronicler Blas Valera recorded that half a century later an elderly conquistador, who because of the year he mentions and his hidalgo rank in all probability was either Mansio Serra de Leguizamón or Alonso de Mesa, was to witness the ghosts of the men who had fallen at Salinas, among them Pedro de Leguizamón, one of the conquistador’s cousins who had fought in the ranks of Almagro’s army:
The Virgin of La Merced, eighteenth century, Potosí School. (Private Collection)
There is on the battlefield a church dedicated to St Lazurus, where the bodies of those who died there were buried. A noble and pious Spaniard, who had been one of the conquistadors, often went there to pray for the souls of the dead. It happened that while praying one day he heard groans and weeping in the church, and one of his friends who had fought and died in the battle appeared to him . . . and at his suggestion the mestizos, the sons of those Spaniards by Indian women, moved their fathers’ bones to the city of Cuzco in 1581 . . . and many Masses were said . . . and the vision then ceased to appear.5
At the time of Almagro’s execution Mansio Serra de Leguizamón was twenty-six years old. Nothing is known of his appearance or of his intimate character. Other than referring to his parents with affection in one of his wills and in his probanza, testimonial, he makes no mention of any of his courtly relatives. It was as though he had closed the door on his past for ever. Nor will it ever be known whether he had loved the young Coya, the mother of his son Juan, whom he named after his father. Her undoubted rape by Almagro’s soldiers and her concubinage to one of his captains would have been a humiliation his hidalgo pride would have been unable to accept, and it seems probable it was during this period of time that he abandoned her. It was a price he had paid for his loyalty to the Pizarros.
Almagro’s defeated veterans, deprived of their booty, faced a life of abject poverty; some, it was said, shared their cloaks for want of clothing. Almagro’s 22-year-old son Diego was sent to Lima under guard, where he lived under house arrest in a penury equal to any of his father’s supporters. The effects of the rebellion had furthermore created a scarcity of goods and a price inflation throughout the colony. It was a situation from which a number of conquistadors were to enhance their fortunes by trading as merchants. A letter of the period records that Hernando Pizarro imported into Cuzco from the Isthmus: ‘176 bottles of wine; sixty shirts of Holland lace; 26 pairs of velvet hoses; 71 pairs of shoes and velvet slippers; 18 spectacles; 56 pairs of leather gloves from Córdoba; 12 habits of the Order of Santiago; 80 hats; 6 jars of anchovies; and 386 packs of playing cards.’6 ‘A coat-of-mail and a helmet,’ Mansio complained, ‘cost 2,000 pesos of gold, and the rest of one’s armament and horse some 2,000 to 3,000 gold pesos.’7 In order to counter the growing discontent, especially among the landless volunteers from the Isthmus who had served at Salinas, Pizarro ordered a number of expeditions of conquest, which also enabled him to create more encomiendas.
One such expedition to the Cuntisuyo was led by Nicolás de Heredia and captained by Mansio, whose encomienda of Alca was in the province, who took with him forty of his Indian retainers. The horseman Rodrigo López Bernal recalled the Conquistador’s prowess as an Indian fighter among the squadron of a hundred Spaniards:
I saw Mansio Serra serving there as a captain and caudillo . . . and much was risked for there were few of us Spaniards in comparison to the great number of Indians who attacked us and surrounded us in very barren terrain, making it impossible for us to reach a river [Cotahuasi] for the water we needed to drink; and that night in the tambo fortress of Alca, Mansio Serra and the Indians in his service left our encampment in order to break the siege, entering the fortress from the high ground of a slope, passing their sentries and putting them to the sword so that they could not warn their warriors; and in this manner in the middle of the night they climbed to the upper villages where the great multitude of warriors were camped, and catching them asleep they killed many of them, and then gave the Spaniards who had remained below the signal to climb up and follow them . . .8
The conquest of the western Cuntisuyo was shortly followed by an expedition led by Hernando Pizarro and the Inca Paullu, who had been pardoned for his past disloyalty at Salinas, to the Collasuyo and the Desaguadero River on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca. This route would eventually take them to the Bolivian valley of Cochabamba, where they would engage the remnants of the Inca Manco’s southern armies, and then further south to the Charcas region and the future settlement at Chuquisaca (later known as La Plata because of its silver), the Bolivian capital of Sucre. It was a campaign that had not only established Chuquisaca and its neighbouring mines of Porco as a Pizarro fiefdom, but had seen the annihilation of Inca resistance in the southern part of the empire. It had also witnessed the virtual destruction at Titicaca of the Lupaca nation, whose elderly cacique Cariapasa9 was forced to abandon his lands and flee to the coastal region of Tacna, where he was to spend the rest of his days as a baptized Christian, taking the name of Juan, in bondage to the encomendero Lucas Martínez Vegazo. It was a pitiful end to the life of one of the Emperor Huayna Cápac’s greatest warrior chiefs and former guardian of his daughter the Coya Doña Beatriz. The expedition’s return to Cuzco would also mark Hernando Pizarro’s departure for Spain, together with one of the largest shipments of bullion and treasure. Unlike Soto’s reception at court, Hernando would be indicted for Almagro’s execution: a charge for which he would spend his remaining years under house arrest in resplendent luxury in the castle fortress of La Mota at Medina del Campo.
Pizarro’s campaign in the Collasuyo was followed by the invasion of Vilcabamba, the Inca Manco’s refuge in the sub-tropical Andean forests. The Indian auxiliaries in the campaign were commanded by the Inca’s brother, Paullu, who, taking advantage of the role he would play in the invasion, petitioned Pizarro to award him an encomienda of various lands in the Cuntisuyo and Antisuyo, including Mansio Serra de Leguizamón’s rich fiefdom in the valley of Callanga in the Yucay.10 Pizarro agreed to his request and promised to recompense the encomenderos for their loss. It was a promise he would never be able to fulfil, as the Conquistador’s younger son Francisco arrogantly reminded the Council of the Indies some fifty years later:
Of the said services of my father they were not honoured with sufficient dignity; for though the Marqués Don Francisco Pizarro at the beginning of the Conquest and settlement gave to my father the encomiendas of Cuntisuyo [Alca] and Antisuyo [Catanga and Callanga], which was worthy of his honour, Paullu Inca, a son of Huayna Cápac, having placed himself in the royal service, petitioned for the said provinces of Antisuyo as they had been the hereditary lands of his father and ancestors, and as the Marqués felt the matter to be of such importance for the benefit of the Crown he awarded him the encomiendas of Antisuyo which were of great value, of [annual] rent of more than twenty thousand pesos . . . and even though the Marqués Pizarro promised my father that he would give him an encomienda of equal value, he was never able to do so because of his death . . .11
In April 1539, the army assembled at Cuzco – 300 Spaniards and 1,000 Indian auxiliaries – under the command of Gonzalo
Pizarro. The road they took was retraced four centuries later by the American Hiram Bingham in his search for Vilcabamba. Mansio, who captained a squadron of cavalry, recorded that he was in the vanguard of the fighting and that he captured the Inca’s wife and his brother Cusi Rimache.12 He also recorded that Manco, who had made his escape across a river, cried out to him in quéchua: ‘. . . that he was not such a coward as they thought him, and that his warriors had killed some two thousand Spaniards since and before his rising, and that he intended to kill them all’.13 Titu Cusi Yupanqui, one of Manco’s sons, claimed that on the expedition’s return to Cuzco it halted for a short while at the mountain hamlet of Pampaconas, where many of its soldiers attempted to rape the captured Coya Cura Ocllo, who defended herself by defiling her body with her excrement. Some four months later Pizarro brought the Coya to the township of Ollantay in the Yucay valley, from where he sent Manco some gifts in the hope of negotiating a peace. Incensed that his messengers, a Negro and two Indians, had been killed, Pizarro ordered what was one of the most pitiful and brutal acts recorded of his person. Stripped of her clothes and tied to a pole and whipped by his Cañari auxiliaries, the Coya was ordered by Pizarro to be shot dead with arrows. Her mutilated body was then placed in a canoe and let loose to float down the Yucay River. On his return to Cuzco Pizarro implemented a further reprisal in the city and in the Yucay with the burning of a number of Inca lords and caciques, among them the shaman Villac-Umu, who had been captured in the Cuntisuyo. These acts would forever taint his name with ignominy in the eyes of a by now defeated and almost defenceless people, and whose plight and abject poverty are only chronicled in the few surviving records in the Archives of the Indies, at Seville.
The Last Conquistador Page 10