The Last Conquistador

by Stuart Stirling

  Battle of Huarina. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  Only some weeks after the battle did Gonzalo make his entry into Cuzco, where he received the rapturous acclamation of the very settlers who had prepared his gallows in expectation of his defeat, and from whose wooden poles hung the corpses of the city’s Mayor and one of its regidores. Somehow Mansio managed to escape and flee the city, evading his certain execution at the hands of Gonzalo. For days the rebel soldiers pillaged the mansions of Cuzco’s defectors in an orgy of retribution, raping with abandon the city’s women, Spaniard and Indian. Cespedes recorded that Gonzalo sold some of the loyalist prisoners as slaves.30 The obese Carbajal ordered that the wives and daughters of Arequipa’s loyalists be brought to Cuzco, most of whom had already been raped by their captors. One woman, María Calderón, the wife of the astrologer and loyalist captain Jerónimo de Villegas who was lodged in Mansio’s residence, was visited by Carbajal. He ordered his Negro slaves to strangle her for having criticized him publicly, and who then hanged her by the neck from the window of her bedroom – a corner window of the Casa de Sierpes, facing the square of the Nazarenas.31

  By the end of December 1547, Gasca’s army of reconquest had reached the city of Jauja, reinforced by many former rebel encomenderos. ‘I was in the valley of Jauja with the president Gasca among his troops he took with him for the castigation of Gonzalo Pizarro and his followers,’ recalled Pedro Súarez de Illanes, ‘and there I saw and met Mansio Serra, who was well armed, with horses, and in good order, as a fine soldier and hidalgo . . .’.32 After waiting for the winter rains to pass, Gasca’s army reached the Apurímac River and the vicinity of Cuzco in the early part of April 1548. At the valley of Jaquijahuana, a few miles north of Cuzco, the two armies of some 2,000 Spaniards took up their battle positions. One by one, however, the rebel cavalry, and then its infantry, began a mass desertion. Within the hour both Gonzalo and Carbajal were prisoners.

  Most chroniclers record that Gonzalo Pizarro met his death with resolve and dignity. His sentence was proclaimed before the entire army by the judge Andrés de Cianca:

  . . . it be declared that the said Gonzalo Pizarro has committed the crime of laesae majestatis against the crown . . . and for which we condemn him as traitor and his descendants in the male line for two generations and in the female line for one generation . . . that he be taken from his imprisonment on a mule with his feet and hands manacled and that he be brought before this royal assembly of His Majesty . . . and that his crimes be proclaimed . . . and that he be brought to this place of execution and that his head be struck off . . . and that after his death it be taken to the city of Lima . . . and that under it be inscribed in large lettering: This is the head of the traitor Gonzalo Pizarro who was brought to justice in the valley of Jaquijahuana where he gave battle against the royal standard in defence of his treason and tyranny . . . and we further order that his house in Cuzco be razed to the ground and that its foundations be scattered with salt . . .’33

  Francisco de Carbajal, who some chroniclers claim was then eighty years old, shared his caudillo’s fate. His former adversary Centeno, who had ordered he be unharmed by the throng of soldiers who clamoured to attack him, was said to have been visibly irritated by the fact that Carbajal did not appear to recognize him, and asked him whether in fact he did recall him. ‘My god, sir!’, Carbajal is recorded to have exclaimed, ‘having only ever seen your buttocks in retreat, I can say I do not.’34 Stripped of armour he was dragged naked in a basket by several mules to the scaffold, where, before being hung, he was asked by his confessor to say the Our Father and the Hail Mary.35 Defiant to the end, and to the amusement of the onlookers who crowded his gallows, he repeated just the words: ‘Our father, hail Mary.’

  Diego de Centeno. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1-4)

  Each and every one of the encomenderos and conquistadors of Peru had at one time or another supported Gonzalo’s rebellion, including Centeno. Some of them, like the father of the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, who had deserted Gonzalo at the field of Jaquijahuana by galloping across to the enemy lines, were pardoned. Others were less fortunate, and little mercy was shown the rank and file of the rebel prisoners who were sentenced to be brought to Cuzco on the backs of llamas and publicly flogged, before being taken to the Pacific ports for deportation as slaves in the royal galleys. All the principal rebel captains taken prisoner were hung and quartered, their heads ordered to be placed on poles in each of the settlements of the colony. A certain Estremaduran called Serra, who may possibly have been a relative of Mansio, was condemned to be flogged and to have his tongue cut out, a sentence Gasca himself recorded to the Council of the Indies: ‘. . . so disgraceful was his rebellion that a day before the battle of Jaquijahuana, being one of the enemy scouts, he had been spotted by our men and urged to join them and serve the king but shouted that they could kiss his backside, and that had they meant the king of France he might well have joined them, even though he had a fine king in Gonzalo Pizarro . . .’.36

  Fountain on the patio, Mansio’s mansion, Cuzco. (Nicholas du Chastel)

  Mansio’s role in the rebellion is virtually unrecorded. The silence of his witnesses to his probanza and their perjured declaration, of having no knowledge of his complicity, among them the former President of the Audiencia of Lima, Melchor Bravo de Saravia, were indicative of the involvement of almost all the principal magnates of Peru in the insurrection. Even though his initial loyalty and imprisonment would have been made known to Gasca, his later involvement must have been serious enough to have warranted the sentence the judge Andrés de Cianca subsequently passed on him at Cuzco, ordering him to ‘pay a thousand gold pesos towards the crown’s soldiers and to be banished from Cuzco for a term of two years’.37 It was a sentence that prompted the Friar Alonso de Medina, one of the most tenacious preachers of Cuzco, to write a theatrical protestation to Gasca denouncing the treachery of each of the colony’s cities and encomenderos: ‘Tell me Cuzco, why is it that you do not speak? Being as you are a traitor to the Crown? See here, a certain Mansio Serra, traitor in death in your service to Gonzalo Pizarro, and who, when he was dead, neither wished to serve the king; traitor in life, without ever repenting, and allowed to keep his Indians, his mansion and a life of repose . . . see here, Maldonado, the rich, traitor in your youth, and traitor in your old age . . .’38 Though in his probanza Mansio claims that Gasca subsequently entrusted him with the capture of the few rebel captains still at large in the Cuntisuyo and the Charcas, his service on behalf of the Crown was more than likely a means of reducing his sentence of exile.

  To commemorate his victory, which had left only sixteen dead, Gasca ordered the foundation at Chuquiabo, a valley south of Lake Titicaca, of the city of Nuestra Señora de la Paz, Our Lady of Peace, later known as La Paz, the administrative capital of Bolivia, and where the rebel and loyalist dead from the Battle of Huarina were buried many years later. His decision, however, to allow most of the former rebel encomenderos, including Mansio, to retain their Indians and lands prompted an outcry of protest from the volunteers he had brought with him from the Isthmus, who clamoured for what they saw to be a just reward for their service. Though he had been able to reward some of his captains with a number of encomiendas, there were not enough within the colony to appease his followers, fermenting a dissent that soon manifested itself in open rebellion. Taking with him the blood-stained banners of the rebel army which had marked his victory, on his arrival in Spain he was rewarded with the bishopric of Palencia, from where some ten years later, after the abdication of the Emperor, he would journey from his diocese to greet his sovereign during his final journey to his retreat in the Estremaduran monastery of Yuste.39

  Convent church of San Francisco, La Paz. (Alexander Stirling)

  Battle of Chuquinga. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  Within three years Gasca’s legacy would once more throw Peru into civil war with an abortive rebellion at Sucre of the encomendero Sebastían de Castilla. Eight month
s later a further insurrection was led in Cuzco by the encomendero Francisco Hernández Girón, who attempted to kill the city’s governor in protest at the introduction of a law prohibiting Indian servitude. This revolt, supported by the hundreds of landless veterans of Gasca’s army, lasted for almost a year and once more witnessed the defeat of a loyalist army at Chuquinga, near Nazca, north of Arequipa. Mansio’s role as a captain of horse and scout for the loyalist army is recorded in considerable detail by witnesses to his probanza. Girón, who credited his victory not only to the prowess of his men, among them a regiment of Negro slaves, but to witchcraft, was a month later defeated at Pucará, north of Lake Titicaca, by an army led by Lima’s judges, and in which Mansio also served. Captured and taken to Lima where he was hanged, his decapitated head was placed in an iron cage beside the two cages that contained the skulls of Gonzalo and Carbajal. This marked the end of almost seventeen years of rebellion which had left more Spanish dead than during the entire conquest of the Inca empire.

  Philip II, an engraving of a Titian painting. (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium)

  The rebellions of Peru were recorded by four contemporary chroniclers,40 other than an account based on Pedro de la Gasca’s memoirs, written in about 1565 by Juan Calvete de Estrella who had never been to Peru, and that of Garcilaso de la Vega, written in the early part of the seventeenth century. The first account was published by Agustín de Zárate, a treasury official from Valladolid, who had lived in Lima from the outset of the insurrection. Many of the events concerning the Conquest, which he also wrote about, he had researched while staying with the Conquistador Nicolás de Ribera. His affiliation with the rebel cause enabled him to obtain permission from Gonzalo to return to Spain, where he was imprisoned on suspicion of complicity in the rebellion. During his incarceration at Valladolid he wrote his account of the rebellion and of the Conquest, Historia del Descubrimiento y Conquista del Perú. After his release in 1554, Zárate obtained a minor post at court which enabled him to accompany the regent, the future King Philip II, to England for his marriage at Winchester cathedral to Queen Mary Tudor. It was during the voyage of the royal galleon from La Coruña to Southampton that Philip read his manuscript and authorized its publication. A year afterwards Zárate’s history was published in the Netherlands, and twenty-six years later it was translated into English under the title The Strange and Delectable History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Provinces of Peru.

  Unlike Zárate, the chronicler Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, who had arrived in Peru at the outbreak of Gonzalo’s rebellion, witnessed Gasca’s final victory at Jaquijahuana and accompanied him to Panama on his return to Spain. Of either Spanish or Mexican mestizo parentage, he had served as a conscript in the loyalist army, and in the short time he had lived in Cuzco had befriended the Inca Paullu. A talented linguist, Gutiérrez de Santa Clara included a vocabulary of quéchua in his account Historia de las Guerras Civiles del Perú, one of the most descriptive and colourful of all the chronicles of the rebellions. Almost nothing is known of his life, other than he is recorded to have been living in Mexico in 1603, over half a century after leaving Peru. His manuscript, originally entitled Quinquenarios, is preserved in the provincial library of Toledo and was published in 1904.

  Diego Fernández, known more commonly as el Palentino because of his birthplace in the Castilian city of Palencia, was an official chronicler. A clerk to the Audiencia of Lima, he had arrived in Peru shortly after Gasca’s victory. Some years later he was commissioned to write a history of Girón’s insurrection. Fernández subsequently wrote an account of Gonzalo’s rebellion, leaving possibly the most vivid portrait of Carbajal which he obtained from eyewitnesses, and whose influence on the events of the time he establishes more than any other chronicler. His manuscript, which also contained a brief outline of Inca history, was published in Seville in 1571.

  Pedro de Cieza de León is regarded as not only the foremost historian of the rebellions and of the Conquest, but of Inca civilization. Born in Estremadura, though by adoption a native of Seville, where his family held trading interests with the Isthmus and Caribbean islands, he had emigrated to the New World inspired by the treasures and Inca artefacts he had seen as a young boy lining the quays of Seville which Pizarro had sent back from Cajamarca and had been publicly displayed before being melted down. In 1536 Cieza de León was made an encomendero of Urute, in Colombia, and from where, eleven years later, he joined Gasca’s army. From Tumibamba to Túmbez, and through the central Andes, he followed Gasca’s troops on their march south to Cuzco, visiting the various Inca sites he later recorded in an almost journalistic style, leaving a descriptive sketch of each region and of its people and customs. At Cuzco, as in the settlements of the Collasuyo and Charcas he later visited with Gasca’s permission, he was given access to the quipucamayoc and amauta elders, from whom he was able to gather much of the information that formed part of his chronicle of the Inca people. After only four years in the colony he returned to Seville, where in 1553 he published the first part of his history, dying a year later. Only within the last hundred years have Cieza de León’s other manuscripts been discovered, revealing a prolific account, ranging from the mythology of the Incas to the Conquest, and later civil wars and rebellions of the Spaniards: a work which the official historian of the Council of the Indies, Antonio de Herrera, in the early seventeenth century plagiarized without reservation.41 Fourteen years after Cieza de León’s death his patron Pedro de la Gasca was buried in the church of La Magdalena at Valladolid, on the walls of whose façade the rebel banners he had taken with him on his journey home can still be seen, sculptured and surmounting the coat of arms his grateful Emperor had awarded him.

  * La Peregrina was purchased by the actor Richard Burton from a member of the Spanish Borbón family as a wedding gift for his wife Elizabeth Taylor.

  8

  THE COYA OF CUZCO

  . . . ichach munani, íchach manamuni,

  . . . perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t.

  The Coya’s reply to her enforced marriage vows

  Garcilaso de la Vega

  Comentarios Reales de los Incas

  The few records to survive of the Coya Quispiquipi Huaylla, who after her baptism was known to the Spaniards as Doña Beatriz, show her to have been one of the most remarkable if not tragic figures of the conquered Inca dynasty. Nothing is known of her appearance. At the time of Gonzalo Pizarro’s execution she was twenty-seven years old. As a young girl she had suffered the loss of her father the Emperor Huayna Cápac, and within a few years had witnessed the killings of both her mother and her brother Huáscar at the hands of Atahualpa’s warrior chiefs. Aged twelve, together with her only surviving full-blooded sister, the Coya Marca Chimbo, a year older than her, she had been kept a prisoner in Cuzco to await the triumphal entry into the city of her half-brother Atahualpa, for whose personal harem she had been selected. Nor is anything known of the role of her guardian the cacique Cariapasa, Lord of the Lupaca, into whose care she had been entrusted by her father, only that he returned to Cuzco after the arrival of the Spaniards and urged his bondaged tribesmen, encamped near the city, to return to their lands. What is recorded, however, is that like her sister she was awarded in concubinage by her half-brother the Inca Manco, only to be abandoned by her Spanish lover some five years later after her presumed rape by Almagro’s soldiers when they took possession of Cuzco. Nothing is known of her in the immediate years after Mansio left her, nor whether she had been able to keep her son with her. Nor will it ever be known if she had ever loved his father.

  The Coya’s later marriage to Pedro de Bustinza, a penniless treasury official, who had come to Peru in the retinue of Hernando Pizarro on his return from Spain, did little to alleviate the poverty in which she had been forced to live. This situation did not improve until the licentiate Vaca de Castro awarded her the encomienda of Urcos, south-east of Cuzco, part of the lands that had been granted by Pizarro to his brother Hernando. The only
mention made of her during this period is by the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega who records the death of her husband Bustinza, who Gonzalo Pizarro had appointed Mayor of Cuzco after his victory at Huarina. Betrayed by one of his wife’s cousins, Bustinza was captured by loyalists while raising Indian auxiliaries from his wife’s lands and taken to Gasca’s encampment at Jauja, where he was hanged. Twenty-seven years old and a widow with three sons, the Coya’s future was to depend on the outcome of the forthcoming battle at Jaquijahuana, the result of which she knew was to determine the choice of Spaniard both she and her encomienda would be awarded by the victor. It was said that for several days before Gonzalo and Carbajal led the rebel army out of Cuzco the carcasses of dead foxes had been found in the city’s streets, killed by plague, an omen regarded by the Indians as foretelling his defeat. Her nephew the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega recorded:

  The wife of Pedro de Bustinza, who was a daughter of Huayna Cápac, and whose Indians of her encomienda belonged to her and not to her husband, the governors [Gasca] gave in marriage to a fine soldier of good character called Diego Hernández, who it was said -more from malice than truth – in his youth had been a tailor. And when this was known to the princess she refused to marry him, saying that it was not right that a daughter of Huayna Cápac should be married to a tailor; and though the Bishop of Cuzco begged her to reconsider and the captain [Diego de] Centeno and other personages tried to persuade her, none were able to do so. It was then they called upon Don Cristóbal Paullu, her brother, who on visiting her, took her aside to a corner of a room, who told her that it was not in their interest that she refuse the marriage, for it would only bring hardship to the royal family and the Spaniards would regard them as their enemies and never more offer them their friendship. She then agreed to accept her brother’s command, though not in very good faith, and thus she went before the bishop and the altar. And being asked by an interpreter if she would accept to be the wife of the soldier, she replied in her language: ‘ichach munani, íchach manamuni,’ which means, ‘perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t.’ And so was concluded the betrothal, which was celebrated in the house of Diego de los Ríos, encomendero of Cuzco . . .1