Inca noble and arms of Paullu Inca, engraving by Champin, from Castelnau. (National Arts Library, V&A Museum)
. . . In the said province of Peru there are many princesses, especially in the city of Cuzco, daughters of Huayna Cápac, who many a fine hidalgo would marry, for some demand them; though for lack of their dowries they refuse to betroth them, especially as all of them previously possessed dowries and much land that was left them by their The Inca Paullu’s palace of Colcampata, engraving by Champin, from Castelnau. (National Arts Library, V&A Museum) father: Your Majesty: I beg that because of your own respect for their lineage you order they be given dowries and lands so that they may live decently and marry, and so they will be secure to live honestly and in the service of God . . . there is a citizen of Cuzco, a poor hidalgo, who has married a daughter of Huayna Cápac, sister of Paullu Inca, who is called Doña Beatriz, and who by the grace of God has children and who lives in great poverty: I beg Your Majesty that you grant them an encomienda so that they may be able to sustain themselves, and, in so doing, render God great service, and by which much joy will be given the natives . . .29
The Inca Paullu’s palace of Colcampata, engraving by Champin, from Castelnau. (National Arts Library, V&A Museum)
It was a degradation from which only the Inca Paullu would be immune. Then aged twenty-four, a few months older than his half-brother Manco, his mother, the daughter of a tribal chief from Huayllas, had been a concubine of the Emperor Huayna Cápac. Though possessing neither the purity of royal Inca blood of his half-sisters Doña Beatriz and Doña Juana, he had established himself as puppet ruler at Cuzco, ingratiating himself with his people’s conquerors and receiving the begrudging obedience of the Inca lords, by then virtually reduced to begging for a living. Exempt from sharing the bondage of their former subject tribes, the Incas of the city by now represented an almost pathetic spectacle in their ceremonies held by Paullu in the palace of Colcampata, which Pizarro had awarded him, and which had previously belonged to Almagro. His treatment by the city’s encomenderos was little better than that of his relatives: ‘Paullu Inca, lord and natural brother of Atahualpa, sons of Huayna Cápac, is a man of little caution unlike the Spaniards, and each day they cheat him, and take from him what he owns, either by force or deception, obliging him to sign documents and papers he can neither read nor understand . . . and Your Majesty should see he be not maltreated, so that such maltreatment be not witnessed by his caciques who visit him to render him homage . . .’.30
Paullu appealed to the Crown for justice, informing the Council of the Indies of his wish to become a Christian and relating his service on behalf of the Spaniards, and boasting that he had served them ‘on horseback and on foot with crossbow and musket . . .’.31 The Council not only upheld his title to an encomienda, but prohibited any Spaniard from entering his palace at Cuzco without his permission. The royal decree was also to award him a coat of arms and the rank of a hidalgo – an honour that later influenced his adoption of Spanish court dress, though he never learnt to speak Castilian. Vaca de Castro was also instructed by the Council to award a number of encomiendas to the other principal members of the Inca royal family. The Coya Doña Beatriz, mother of Mansio’s eight-year-old son Juan and of her Spanish husband’s two sons, Pedro and Martín, was awarded the encomienda of Urcos, lying to the south-east of Cuzco.32 Her sister Doña Juana, who had been the concubine of the rebel commander Juan Balsa and mother of his son Juan, was also awarded an encomienda, but forced to marry the Conquistador Francisco de Villacastín. The favour shown the two princesses was also aimed at persuading them to abandon their religion. In 1543, at a ceremony in the principal church of Cuzco, imitating the pomp and ritual of the Castilian court, the licentiate presided at the baptism of both princesses, in which they were given their Spanish names and hidalgo title. Paullu, for whom Vaca de Castro stood as godfather, was given the name and title of Don Cristóbal. It was an occasion, however, that would be marred by the Inca Paullu’s gift to the Spanish governor of the mummy of his father the Emperor Huayna Cápac, and which to the consternation of the two princesses he later exhibited privately in one of the city’s mansions, charging the Indians of Cuzco for the privilege of seeing it. Only the intervention of the Dominican Friar Tomás de San Martín, who threatened to excommunicate him, led him to order the mummy’s removal, though he refused to surrender the gold he had obtained.33
Another of the Crown’s recommendations made to Vaca de Castro had been to obtain a record of Inca history. In a series of interviews with quipucamayoc at Quito and at Cuzco, a report was made of the Inca dynasties and of their history, most of which has been lost.34 The testimonies of the quipucamayoc at Cuzco were gathered by Pedro de Escalante, an Indian interpreter, and by the Coya Doña Juana’s husband Villacastín, who the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega recorded had two front teeth missing, the result of a stone having been thrown at him by a monkey.35 Villacastín was accompanied by the clerk and future chronicler Juan de Betanzos, also married to an Inca princess and who made a living as an interpreter. Much of the surviving evidence given by the four quipucamayoc interviewed at Cuzco was influenced by their dependence on the Inca Paullu, whose intention to discredit any rival claims to his leadership is more than evident in his pretence to have been the only legitimate heir to the Inca throne, stating somewhat imperiously that the royal coyas Doña Beatriz and Doña Juana had ‘already received enough to eat from the guardians of this realm’.36 The evidence was also rewritten in part years later by a friar in order to add weight to Paullu’s grandson’s future petitions.
Equally important to the reforms the Crown had wished to implement was an accord with the Inca Manco, who was still in rebellion in the forests of the Andes, and who was offered a rich encomienda by Vaca de Castro in exchange for his fealty.37 The interview of his emissaries with the Inca was recorded in a letter he sent to the Emperor, in which he describes the velvet brocade he sent Manco and the parrots he received from him in return. The Inca Don Martín Napti Yupanqui, who like other baptized members of the royal house had been granted hidalgo rank, recalled the failure of the mission: ‘In the presence of this witness the said governor Vaca de Castro sent from this city many Indians and orejones and other Indian servants with messages to the Inca Manco so that he would leave in peace with his people, but this he refused to do . . .’.38 Two years later the Inca Manco was dead, murdered by an Almagrist rebel who he had given shelter at Vitcos, near Vilcabamba. He was twenty-eight years old: a sad and often ignored figure in the history and tragedy of the Conquest.
Though the licentiate Vaca de Castro would prove to be the first of a long line of colonial administrators who were to regard their office as a means of enriching themselves and the coterie of relatives they each brought with them to Peru, in the two years of his administration he was to oversee the greatest economic prosperity the colony had ever witnessed. This was due principally to the mining of gold and silver in the Charcas region of Bolivia, near Sucre, and an increase in trade with the Isthmus. It was a period that also witnessed Spain’s dominion extended into the northern Argentine region of Tucumán. The final year of his governorship was, however, dominated by the news that reached Peru of a decree announced by the Crown in the city of Barcelona, known as the New Laws, governing the treatment of the natives of the Indies. Its author in part was Bartolomé de las Casas. Though excluding from its statutes Negro and Moorish slaves, its purpose was the reform of the encomienda system of tributary labour and the introduction of a legal framework to protect the Indians from the abuses inflicted on them by the colonists. It prohibited their labour as slaves and granted them the right of judicial redress to the Crown. It also denied the encomenderos’ heirs the right of succession to their encomiendas. The decree, moreover, entitled the Crown to obtain the entire tribute of the encomiendas at the expense of its encomenderos, who were only to be allowed a small share of their revenues in the form of a life pension, more than doubling the Crown’s income. In the
most contentious article of its statutes with regard to Peru, all encomenderos who had taken part in the Battle of Salinas, whether under the banner of the Crown or in the ranks of the elder Almagro’s rebel army, were to forfeit their encomiendas: a ruling that not only demonstrated the Crown’s censure of the elder Almagro’s rebellion and of his execution without royal approval, but which in effect would have left every veteran of the Conquest in ruin.
On 10 January 1544, the official chosen to introduce the new legislation to the colony arrived in the Isthmus of Panama. Don Blasco Núñez Vela, a former inspector of Castile’s garrison, who had been appointed to replace Vaca de Castro as the first Viceroy of Peru, was accompanied by several lawyers and a large retinue of clerical administrators. Though warned by the Audiencia of Lima of the folly of attempting to bring into effect such drastic reforms, the elderly Viceroy ignored the advice and proceeded to introduce the decrees in his lengthy progress from Túmbez to Lima. His entry into the capital did little to ingratiate him with its encomendero nobility, whose vast wealth and social pretensions he openly ridiculed, describing those of them who claimed hidalgo rank to have been little more than ‘tailors and cobblers’.39 Vaca de Castro, who had voiced his misgivings of the New Laws, was arrested and imprisoned on a charge of sedition and corruption. Also arrested in Lima was an official whose loyalty the Viceroy had questioned, and whose killing he inadvertently ordered. Imprisoned by his own soldiers, the Viceroy eventually fled to Quito, leaving in ruins the Crown’s authority. The fate of the licentiate would be no less ignominious. Freed from captivity, he returned to Spain and faced trial on charges of appropriating funds from the sale of encomiendas and embezzlement – charges he would vehemently deny, pleading poverty and penury which his correspondence with his wife in Spain during the years of his governorship did little to substantiate: ‘. . . all I have sent you and will also send you, you must treat with great secrecy, even among the servants, for the less the king knows, the more reward he will show me . . . and not a straw must be purchased in my name, so it is known that neither you nor I possess a single maravedí.’*40 For over a year he was imprisoned at the royal fortress of Simancas, and then lived under house arrest in the Castilian township of Pinto where Mansio Serra de Leguizamón had spent his childhood, before being exonerated of all charges. This was far removed from the anarchy and rebellion that had taken hold of the land he had left behind, and of a governorship to which his heirs, among them his son Don Pedro Vaca de Castro, the future Archbishop of Seville, would owe their fortune.
* Pizarro’s supposed remains are buried under the high altar of Lima’s cathedral.
* A peso of gold was worth approximately 470 maravedís.
7
THE DEVIL ON MULEBACK
. . . let us pray to God with all our hearts he be content with these few crumbs we offer him.
Francisco de Carbajal,
after hanging four prisoners
Shortly before the flight of the Viceroy Núñez Vela from Lima, an elderly and portly hooded figure could be seen making his way on muleback across the arid landscape of the Cuntisuyo towards Cuzco. Francisco López Gascón, who as a young man had studied for the priesthood in his native Castile and had adopted the name of his former patron Cardinal Bernardino de Carbajal, had been on the point of returning to the Isthmus, and had been unable to find a ship at Arequipa.1 Several years previously he had arrived in the colony from Mexico accompanied by a Portuguese woman, owning, as he was fond to boast, ‘only the few coins he had owed a tavern in Seville’.2 A former veteran of the Italian wars, he had commanded the licentiate Vaca de Castro’s infantry at the Battle of Chupas. Exhausted by his long journey, he entered Cuzco with little more than what he possessed in his baggage and a reputation for a brutality that would within the year pervade Peru.
The object of the elderly soldier’s journey was the summons he had received from Pizarro’s youngest remaining brother Gonzalo, who at the head of an armed company of encomenderos from Sucre had entered the city two months previously and proclaimed himself ruler of Peru, in protest against the New Laws. Tall and black-bearded like all his brothers, Gonzalo was then thirty-two years old. Neither greatly intelligent nor particularly articulate, he was said to have been a handsome man and renowned for his sexual promiscuity and the physical courage he had demonstrated in his expedition to the Amazon basin in search of el Dorado, from where he had returned to Quito barefoot and in rags. The chronicler Agustín de Zárate, who almost lost his life for writing a history of Gonzalo’s rebellion, described Gonzalo as a ‘fine horseman and musketeer, and though of little culture he spoke well, though very coarsely . . .’.3 Gonzalo’s popularity among the colonists as his brother’s political heir was unrivalled by any other conquistador. His proclamation, however, was opposed by a small group of Cuzco’s encomenderos, though equally opposed to the New Laws, among them Mansio Serra de Leguizamón. The retribution of Gonzalo’s followers was swift: ‘. . . he ordered I be tortured and caused me much injury,’ Mansio Serra de Leguizamón recalled, ‘and he seized from me my Indians and my house, which he gave to his ally and vassal Guerrero; and he kept me prisoner and threatened to have my head cut off, which he would have done had it not been for his fear of people’s reaction’.4 Francisco de Illescas stated that no one was able to leave the city ‘without being brought back a prisoner and hung, and only after Gonzalo Pizarro and his men had left Cuzco was he [Mansio] able to make his escape from his confinement and flee the city on horseback . . .’.5
Some twenty of the city’s most influential encomenderos fled the city to Arequipa’s port of Mollendo where they had hoped to find a ship that would take them to Lima, only to discover that its few remaining vessels, alarmed by the news of the impending rising, had weighed anchor, leaving them no option but to disperse.6 Most of them made the long and arduous journey along the coast; others, including Mansio, whose encomiendas were located in the region, sought refuge among their Indians. Though their flight from Cuzco had initially caused many conquistadors assembled in the rebel encampment to the north of the city to waver in their allegiance, the future course of events was decided by the rank and file of the city’s landless Spaniards, who would form the backbone of the rebel army: merchants, artisans and former conscripts of the Almagrist wars, together with various members of the religious Orders. The Friar Agustín de Zuñiga declared publicly that if the decrees of the New Laws were carried out ‘they will leave my sisters and nieces with no future but the whorehouse’.7 It was a following that owed as much to the charismatic personality of Gonzalo, as to the fears they shared with the veteran conquistadors for reforms that would deny them the labour of their Indians, on whose servitude the wealth and livelihood of each colonist, poor and rich alike, depended.
Reinforced by some 20,000 Indian porters, 12,000 of whom would act as handlers of their cannon, the rebel army Francisco de Carbajal had joined at Cuzco finally began its march north towards Lima. Only on reaching the central Andes did Gonzalo learn of the arrest of the Viceroy and of his departure from the capital on a ship bound for the Isthmus. Poised within a few hours’ march of Lima, Carbajal, who had by then been appointed by Gonzalo commander of his army, taking with him a hundred arquebusiers, entered the city at night and demanded a signed decree from its officials confirming Gonzalo’s governorship of the colony. In the early hours of that morning, he then led three of Cuzco’s fugitive encomenderos, naked and on mules, to the outskirts of the city where he hung them from a tree, each according to their rank, selecting the highest branch for the hidalgo and conquistador Pedro del Barco.8 It would be the first sight the 600 soldiers of the rebel army would have of the city on their march into its main square: the Indian handlers positioning their cannon facing its principal buildings, the infantry and cavalry forming their squadrons alongside, supported by arquebusiers. Flanked by Carbajal on his mule and by the banners emblazoned with the arms of Cuzco and of the Pizarros, Gonzalo was acclaimed caudillo of Peru. One by one, the
bishops of Lima, Quito and Cuzco acknowledged his authority, followed by the judges and Crown officials and the Mayor of Lima Nicolás de Ribera. On the morning of 28 October 1544, the colony severed its allegiance to its Viceroy, and in all but name to Spain. It was an act that would be followed by the surrender of the Pacific fleet and the capitulation of the Isthmus of Panama.
Sebastían de Benalcázar. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)
Within five months of the city’s seizure the rebel army once more continued its march towards the northern equatorial coast, where the Viceroy’s ship had inadvertently landed him, and where he had raised a small force of loyalists, among them the Conquistador Sebastían de Benalcázar, who had brought with him a squadron of men from his fiefdom at Popayán. In a campaign that would last for almost a year the rebel forces would finally entrap the loyalist troops on the plains of Añaquito, leaving among the loyalist dead St Teresa of Avila’s brother Antonio de Ahumada.9 The elderly Castilian Núñez Vela, whose blood-stained beard and hair would be worn as adornments on the helmets of the rebel captains,10 was stripped of his armour and clothing and left naked to the mercy of the Indian auxiliaries.
The Last Conquistador Page 12