The Last Conquistador

by Stuart Stirling

  At the time of the Vilcabamba campaign there were possibly as many as 4,000 Spaniards living within Pizarro’s governorship of settlements and encomiendas, probably 200 of whom were women.14 One of the encomiendas Pizarro had awarded in the Cuntisuyo, near to Mansio’s lands, was to the Irishman Thomas Farrell – possibly one of the many Catholic exiles who had fled to Spain after the Reformation.15 In 1540 there were 274 encomiendas recorded in the various regions of the colony: 86 at Cuzco; 22 at Huamanga; 34 at Huánaco; 37 at Arequipa; 45 at Lima; 45 at Trujillo; and 5 at Chachapoyas.16 The colony’s missionary Orders of Dominicans and Mercedarians, who perhaps numbered no more than a hundred throughout the various settlements, over the years acquired some of the largest encomiendas in Peru. Only later did the Franciscan Order, which held a small mission in the Quito region, and the Augustinian Order establish themselves in Cuzco and in the southern provinces of the Collasuyo.17 The end of Inca resistance also enhanced the colony’s appeal to a large number of immigrants from both the Isthmus and Spain, and who began to populate the settlements at Arequipa, Sucre and Huamanga: mostly peasant farmers and Basque and Sevillian merchants, attracted by the 200 per cent profit on the goods they imported. Artisans and architects were also among the new arrivals, and who with the aid of Indian craftsmen began transforming the former Inca palaces of Cuzco into the monasteries, churches and mansion houses of its conquistadors, pre-Colombian foundations visible underneath their sombre walls and façades reminiscent of Toledo.

  An encomendero carried by his vassal Indians. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  The Indian chronicler Poma de Ayala described Cuzco’s encomenderos as wearing ‘thick doublets, flat scarlet hats with plumes, tight fitting breeches, and short capes with long sleeves’.18 It was a far cry from the morrión helmets and armour they now only wore in their expeditions, or the virtual rags most of them possessed when they had left Panama only a decade previously. Their ear lobes, clothes and armour, bejewelled with precious stones, the veterans of Cajamarca presented an extraordinary and exotic spectacle to the Isthmian arrivals, as did the rich livery of their horses and Negro slaves, and escorted on their travels by their Indian caciques and warriors from their encomiendas. The horses they rode were mostly of part Arab stock from Andalusia, small in height, hardy and intelligent, and comparable to the wild North American Palomino the Spaniards had taken there. Their mules, which were favoured by many of the conquistadors because of their strength and ability to carry heavy armour, were imported from as far afield as the island of Mallorca, reputed to breed the finest animals.

  Pizarro further extended the frontiers of the colony by authorizing the conquest of Chile under Pedro de Valdivia, who founded its settlement of Santiago. Three years previously a small settlement had also been established from Spain at Our Lady of Buenos Aires, the future capital of Argentina, and which later moved across the río de la Plata to Asunción, also named after the Virgin. Another expedition, which Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo commanded, was to the north-equatorial Amazon basin in search of the legendary kingdom of el Dorado, the Golden one. This place was so named because of a legend of a tribal chief who it was said covered his naked body with gold dust, which he would wash away by bathing in the waters of the Lake of Guatavitá as an offering to his people’s gods. The expedition, however, discovered neither el Dorado nor any of his tribe’s fabled treasure, though some of its volunteers explored the Amazon as far south as the Napo River, where they first learned of the existence of a tribe of women warriors, known as Amazonians.

  There are, however, few descriptions left of Pizarro. Mansio Serra de Leguizamón considered him to be one of the bravest men he had ever known.19 A man of the Indies, who had spent less than a third of his life in his native Spain, the conqueror of Peru was never understood by his own King or countrymen. Nor were the methods he employed found acceptable by a Castilian court. Neither was his execution of Atahualpa condoned. That the conquest of the Inca empire would have been achieved sooner or later by a European power was inevitable. That any other conqueror would have been more humane is debatable. A simple man of simple tastes, though ennobled after the siege of Cuzco, he exhibited none of the ostentation of his veteran soldiers, dressed habitually in a black smock. It was said of him that he gambled a little and played bowls.20 Like most of the Cajamarca veterans he lived with his Indian women, mothers of his four children, at Lima: a settlement whose coastal climate and wooden buildings resembled the homeland of many of its Sevillian merchants. There, amid the peace and relative prosperity of the colonists of his capital, an event took place that once more brought Peru to civil war. On the morning of Sunday 26 July 1541, a group of armed men made their way into his mansion. Hearing the disturbance caused by their entry, Pizarro attempted to strap on his armour, and accompanied by his half-brother Pedro de Alcántara and two pages, sword in hand, he confronted the intruders whom he recognized to be veterans of Almagro’s defeated army. In a few minutes he lay dead, his face and body mutilated by the sword and poniard wounds of his assailants. He was sixty-five years old and was buried like a common criminal in an unmarked grave.* Within hours of his death Almagro’s son by his Isthmian Indian mistress Ana Martínez was proclaimed by his supporters to be ruler of Peru.

  The licentiate Don Cristóbal Vaca de Castro. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  Diego de Almagro, known as el mozo, the younger, had arrived in the colony two years after the capture of Cuzco. Though he had been pardoned by Pizarro for his part in his father’s rebellion, he had nevertheless appealed to the Crown for the restitution of his governorship. His petition influenced the Council of the Indies to send the licentiate Don Cristóbal Vaca de Castro to the colony as arbitrator of his father’s long-standing dispute, and also to hear in person the charges that had been levelled against Pizarro of complicity in his execution. The rebellion spread throughout the settlements, forcing many of the encomenderos to flee to the coast or to the northern Andes, where loyalist contingents later mustered to await the arrival of the licentiate, who would assume the governorship of the colony. Mansio recalled:

  I left Cuzco for the coast, in order to take a caravel in search of the licentiate Vaca de Castro, accompanied by eight friends, all well armed, mounted and provisioned; and because Almagro, the younger, had been informed that I had gone in search of the licentiate, he took from me my house in Cuzco and my Indians; and I and my friends were captured by García de Alvarado, his captain, who dispossessed us of our arms, horses and Negro slaves, all of which were worth some eight thousand pesos of gold, and having robbed us and hung one of our companions he brought us to Cuzco as his prisoners.21

  Mansio was taken prisoner in the Cuntisuyo by a rebel squadron of Almagro’s commander García de Alvarado, who had executed in Arequipa’s main square Mansio’s comrade in arms Francisco de Montenegro, who he hanged. His partially built mansion in the city and his encomienda of Alca were looted and stripped of all their possessions and appropriated by Martín de Bilbao, one of Pizarro’s assassins. Among the few loyalists who had managed to flee Cuzco was the Friar Bishop Valverde, the veteran of Cajamarca, who on reaching the equatorial coast was killed by Indians in the estuary of Guayaquil. Others, who at the time were on various expeditions of conquest, as in the case of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, were to remain ignorant of the rebellion and of Pizarro’s death.

  In the closing days of 1541 the licentiate Vaca de Castro landed on the northern coast. On reaching Quito he sent dispatches to all the principal municipalities and settlements, calling for their surrender and offering the rebel army that had assembled in strength at Lima and at Cuzco a pardon if they laid down their arms. It was an offer that was ignored not only by Almagro, but by the majority of the cabildos, many of whose officials had requisitioned the encomiendas in their regions. However, it was several months before he could assemble an army, of under a thousand men, many of them from the Isthmus, to march south and relieve Lima. For eleven mo
nths the city of Cuzco remained in the hands of Almagro and his captains, supported by the Indian auxiliaries of the Inca Paullu, who once more sided with a rebel army. Weapons of every kind, coat armour and gunpowder were manufactured in the city’s armouries, most of whose smiths were Greeks and employed by their fellow countryman Pedro de Candía, one of the few disaffected veterans of Cajamarca who had thrown in his lot with the rebels. Mastiffs, originally brought from the Isthmus for their use against Indians, were trained as attack dogs to head the vanguard of the cavalry. In the first days of September 1542, the rebel army left Cuzco on its march north to the central Andean settlement at Huamanga. Like many other conquistadors, Alonso de Mesa, who had also managed to flee Cuzco before its capture, fearing he would be killed in the coming battle, dictated his will shortly before the rebel army reached the mountain ridge of Chupas. Among his various bequests he ordered that in the event of his death a gaming debt owed him by Mansio be repaid. He ends his will by listing the possessions he had taken with him to battle: ‘a dark brown stallion, and one which is black called Gaspar, and a black mare called Fernanda, together with my arms and my spurs . . .’.22 On the mountain ridge of Chupas, the two armies met in an encounter as bloody as that of Salinas, described in part by Lucas Martínez Vegazo and several other encomenderos of Arequipa in a letter to the Emperor Charles V:

  Battle of Chupas between Almagro and the loyalist army of Vaca de Castro. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  The rebels began their advance across the mountain ridge to almost a league in distance of our troops as their horsemen scouts rode out to inspect our positions. The governor [Vaca de Castro] then ordered one of his captains and fifty arquebusiers to move forward and take possession of the nearest ridge, and also another captain with equal number of lancers, which they succeeded in doing; seeing this, our enemies, who were still some three quarters of a league in distance from us, began to move in search of a position to engage us, and this they did, placing their artillery in line and their squadrons of cavalry who were some two hundred and thirty horse, accompanied by some fifty foot soldiers; their infantry consisted of two hundred arquebusiers and a hundred and fifty pikemen, all so well armed that not even troops from Milan could match them in their armour and weapons; their artillery consisted of six guns, of ten and twelve feet in length, and capable of shooting a ball the size of an orange; they also had six other smaller guns and great quantities of munitions and powder . . . the governor then ordered our advance, and we marched to within reach of their arquebusiers’ shot, advancing further still, until we engaged them with our lances, pikes and swords in a battle that lasted for almost an entire hour; and never was witnessed such a cruel and brutal fighting, in which neither brother, relative nor friend, spared each others’ lives . . .23

  Pedro de Candía, who had commanded the rebel artillery and had been reluctant to fire on the loyalist army, was within the hour lanced to death by Almagro. It was a betrayal that had effectively cost the rebels their victory, even though they had been urged to continue fighting by their young commander who promised them the Indian women of the loyalist captains for their booty.24 As at Salinas, the Inca Paullu and his auxiliaries, seeing the battle gaining in the loyalists’ favour, changed allegiance and Paullu turned on his former allies, slaughtering them without mercy. As night fell the dead and wounded could be counted in their hundreds, their bodies stripped of their clothing by the Indians as booty and left to be mauled by the packs of mastiffs. Among the dead were Vaca de Castro’s commander Alvarez Holguín and the rebel captain Martín de Bilbao, who had been awarded by Almagro Mansio’s encomienda and mansion at Cuzco, and who before the battle had harangued the loyalists by boasting that he had killed Pizarro. Almagro’s commander Juan Balsa, whose concubine the Coya Doña Juana had accompanied him to the battlefield, had managed to flee, only to be captured by his own Indian retainers who beat him to death. The news of the defeat of the rebel army and the summary executions of some hundred rebels at Huamanga within days reached Cuzco and resulted in the release of the loyalist prisoners, including Mansio. Almagro, who had fled to the Yucay valley, was eventually captured and brought to Cuzco where Vaca de Castro ordered his execution in the city’s main square. Honouring his last request, his headless body was taken to the convent of La Merced where it was buried beside his father, the head placed at the feet as the mark of a traitor.

  The rebellions of the conquistadors, however, had overshadowed what every new immigrant would soon realize was the transformation of the former Inca empire into little more than a human factory of slave labour for the benefit of its colonists, rich and poor alike. Even a humble Spanish barber or a barefooted immigrant was able to rent from an encomendero Indians for his personal service, who were little more than slaves. The Indian Poma de Ayala, in various of the pen-and-ink sketches he made for his chronicle, depicted the poorer Spaniards carried on the backs of their Indian servants, and the encomenderos on throne chairs, as had been the custom of the Inca emperors. Though responsible for the appalling treatment of the Indians by authorizing their bondage, the Spanish Crown, however, had always envisaged that their welfare would have been supervised by the missionary Orders in charge of their conversion. Very little is known of the Church’s early role in the Conquest, principally because it was neither politic for any chronicler openly to criticize its missionaries, and because most of the history of its evangelization was written by its members.

  The Friar Vicente de Valverde, first Bishop of Cuzco, engraving by Champin, from Castelnau. (National Arts Library, V&A Museum)

  From the earliest days of the Conquest and of Cajamarca, the Dominican friar and future Bishop of Cuzco Valverde appears to have had little influence over the behaviour of Pizarro’s men. The sexual needs of the conquistadors and their open relationships with their Indian women were possibly ignored by him. It was a stance from which few of the other missionary Orders would vary other than from appearances, especially as Pizarro himself had lived openly with his Indian mistresses. Only the Indian chronicler Poma de Ayala, born shortly after the Conquest, and whose manuscript was discovered in the Royal Library at Copenhagen in 1908, directly censured the rampant immorality of the colony’s missionaries in the sexual abuse of their charges. Like all institutions, among its sinners were also its saints, principally the Dominicans Bartolomé de las Casas and Domingo de Santo Tomás, a future Bishop of Sucre and author of a dictionary of quéchua published at Valladolid in 1560, and who had represented the rights of the Indian caciques at court in their failed attempt to purchase their freedom. More than any other Order the Dominicans dominated the religious life of the colony until the arrival of the Jesuits some forty years after the Conquest. Casas, who held considerable influence at court, was a former encomendero of the island of Hispaniola and the most vocal critic of Indian bondage. Though he had never been to Peru, and accepted the slavery of Negroes as morally justifiable, his writings had by then become the singular most important condemnation of the conquest of the New World, and of colonialism in general.

  Over the years the Council of the Indies had been informed of the state of Indian affairs. Several testimonies are to be found in the Archives of the Indies of Indians protesting to their local missionaries of their maltreatment at the hands of their encomenderos. One such appeal was presented to Bishop Valverde in Cuzco by an Indian who had taken the name of Juan de Vegines, and who he later ordered to be freed from his bondage: ‘who complained to his Grace of the treatment he had received from his master the encomendero Alonso de Luque, who whipped him repeatedly and kept him tied by a chain, and gave him little to eat . . .’.25 There was little in fact that Valverde or the few missionaries who opposed such treatment could do, other than to appeal to the Crown.

  It was in this atmosphere of reform, purveyed in the Spanish court and in the Council of the Indies, that the licentiate Vaca de Castro, a native of León and knight of Santiago, had been ordered to Peru with a mandate not only to implement changes to the
existing laws governing Indian welfare, but drastically to curtail the power of the conquistadors. Sooner rather than later, however, his mandate became apparent to the victorious encomenderos of Chupas by his refusal to award them any further land grants of Indians, an act that they viewed as a direct threat to their feudal privileges which they had won by the sword. Equally, his corrupt nature was also to manifest itself in the various awards he was to make to merchants, from whom it was later claimed he had received bribes, and to the religious Orders. Martel Santoyo in a letter to the Spanish court wrote: ‘All the monasteries of the Dominicans and Mercederians hold encomiendas. Not one of them has doctrined or converted one single Indian. They attempt to extract from them [their encomiendas] what they can, working them to the utmost; with this and their collections of charity they enrich themselves. A bad example. It would be better that those who come are diligent in their morals and doctrines . . .’26

  Irrespective of his own moral failings, and ignoring the more apparent abuse of the encomienda Indians that he had been charged to eradicate, the licentiate Vaca de Castro would nevertheless be responsible for alleviating the poverty to which the Inca royal family had fallen, and which had been condemned by the Council of the Indies. Several years previously Bishop Valverde, referring to the poverty and degradation of the women of Inca nobility, many of whom had reverted to prostitution, wrote to the Emperor: ‘Your Majesty has the obligation to grant them the means to eat, for they wander this city abandoned, and which is a great shame to witness: and what I feel is that the women, after being instructed, will become Christians, for there will be no lack of men who would wish to marry them if Your Majesty were to reward them . . .’.27 Another letter, written by Luis de Morales in 1540, records: ‘There are many who have nothing to eat and who die of hunger, and who, from house to house, beg for food in the name of God and of his Holy Mother . . .’.28 A letter he wrote a year later refers to the poverty of the Inca princesses, and in particular that of Mansio’s former mistress the nineteen-year-old Coya Doña Beatriz, who had married an impecunious Vizcayan hidalgo, Pedro de Bustinza: