One of Cañete’s first acts was to write to the Coya Doña Beatriz asking for her help in persuading her nephew Sayri Túpac to receive his envoys. The delegation that subsequently left Cuzco for Vilcabamba, and which also included the Coya’s husband Diego Hernández, the chronicler Betanzos and two Dominican friars, was led by her 23-year-old son Juan Serra de Leguizamón, as two of Sayri Túpac’s warriors record:
. . . as I was at the time with Sayri Túpac Inca in the Andes [Vilcabamba] and at war, I saw the friar Melchor [de los Reyes] and another friar companion of his, and also Juan de Betanzos, and that they went to where the Inca was, but he did not wish Betanzos or any other person to enter where he was, and so the friars went ahead alone, and Betanzos returned [to Cuzco] – Chasca, Indian.19
As a warrior in the service of the Inca Sayri Túpac, in his company I saw Juan Serra enter, as he was his first cousin the Inca received him well, and also out of respect to his mother Doña Beatriz Yupanqui, his aunt. And also entered there the friar Melchor. And I heard Juan Serra say to Sayri Túpac that if he left the viceroy the Marqués de Cañete would give him many Indians and houses for his people and many clothes and other goods, so that he would be content; and all this Juan Serra told him many times and in my presence, and I also heard him say the same to his warrior chiefs. I further witnessed Juan Serra take part in the treaty and discussions with Sayri Túpac, and the Inca sent him twice to the Lord Marqués about his leaving, and Juan Serra came two times to see the Inca, bringing with him payment and presents – Paucar Yupanqui, Inca.20
The Marqués de Cañete and the Inca Sayri Túpac in Lima. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)
Though the chronicler Juan de Betanzos in his history claimed the credit for the negotiations with the Inca, in fact he had been turned away by his captains as Juan Serra de Leguizamón’s probanza shows. In October 1557, leaving behind his younger full-blooded brother Túpac Amaru and his half-brother Titu Cusi Yupanqui in guard of his mountain realm, the Inca finally began his progress from Vilcabamba accompanied by his daughter and young sister-wife Cusi Huarcay (Doña María) and several hundred of his warriors. The caravan of litters that would take him and his family to the valley of Andahuaylas was escorted by his cousin on horseback and by the Coya Doña Beatriz’s husband Diego Hernández. Ordering his cousin Juan to ride ahead to Lima to inform the Viceroy of his arrival, in January 1558 Sayri Túpac entered the capital of the viceroyalty, and at whose gates he was met by the cabildo of the city. Cañete received him with equal honour, seating him by his side in the audience chamber of his palace.
Garcilaso de la Vega recorded that on the night of a banquet given by the Archbishop of Lima, in which the Inca was presented with the documents awarding him a pardon and the grant of his encomiendas of Indians, he had observed in quéchua that he had traded what had once been the empire of Tahuantinsuyo for the equivalent of a thread of the cloth that covered the dining table. The encomiendas awarded him and his descendants in perpetuity included much of the Yucay valley, which had once formed part of the lands of his grandfather the Emperor Huayna Cápac’s panaca of Tumibamba. His transformation into a Castilian encomendero would be completed on his later arrival in the ancient capital of his ancestors with his baptism and Christian marriage to his sister, for which a special dispensation from Rome would eventually be secured by King Philip II. Carried in a litter in accordance with Inca custom, he made a tour of the little that by then remained of the monuments of the city in the company of his cousin, to whom the Conquistador Juan de Pancorbo recalled ‘he showed great love’.21 Thousands of his subjects from across the former Inca empire made pilgrimages to the city to render him homage during his stay at his aunt Doña Beatriz’s mansion. Among the relatives who came to pay him homage was the nineteen-year-old Garcilaso de la Vega. Before his departure to his encomienda in the Yucay he gave his cousin Juan sole legal right to administer his lands and wealth, and also dictated a will, witnessed by Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and by Doña Beatriz’s husband Diego Hernández, in which he left him 1,000 pesos of gold in gratitude ‘for the work he has done for me and for his service to me’.22 The heir to his considerable fortune he named as his only child and daughter who had been baptized with him, and who had been christened Beatriz in honour of his aunt. The lengthy legal authorization he gave his cousin to administer his possessions demonstrates his total dependence on him, and may explain much of Juan’s motive in persuading him to leave Vilcabamba:
Be it known that I, Inca Sayri Túpac Manco Cápac Yupanqui, Inca and encomendero of this great city of Cuzco, of these kingdoms and provinces of Peru . . . authorize you Juan Serra de Leguizamón, my cousin and citizen of this said city, and entrust you to act on my behalf in all matters . . . also in regard to all my lands and possessions and income of maravedí pesos of gold and of the tribute of my Indians . . . and that you be charged with all the administration of my goods, lands and Indians . . . and whatever tributes of coca . . . .this first day of October, 1558 . . .23
Some time after the Inca’s departure from Cuzco the Coya Doña Beatriz was once more faced with the harrowing experience of witnessing the mummy of her father displayed for private viewing in the mansion of the city’s Governor Juan Polo de Ondegardo. It was an event he proudly recorded several years later with the testimony Viceroy Toledo included in a letter to the Council of the Indies:
. . . being at the time in charge of the government of these provinces, some twelve or thirteen years ago, with much diligence and through various sources, I was able to discover the said bodies . . . some of them so well embalmed and so well maintained as at the time of their deaths; and four of them, which were those of Huayna Cápac and Amaru Topa Inca and Pachacuti Inca, and that of the mother of Huayna Cápac, who was called Mama Ocllo, and the others, I discovered in bronze cages that had been secretly buried; and also among them I discovered the ashes of Túpac Inca Yupanqui in a small earthen jar, wrapped in rich cloth and with his insignia; for it was this mummy, I had heard, Juan Pizarro burnt, believing that treasure had been buried with it . . .24
Though the licentiate Vaca de Castro at one time had the mummies in his possession, nothing is known of what became of them until Ondegardo’s announcement of their discovery. It seems more than likely that their location had been revealed to him by the Inca Sayri Túpac on the advice of the Dominican Melchor de los Reyes, who had instructed his conversion to Christianity. Whatever the truth of the matter, they remained in near perfect condition in Ondegardo’s mansion until their removal to Lima on the instructions of Cañete, and where they were eventually buried in the grounds of the city’s hospital of San Andrés. With silent resignation the Coya accepted the sacrilege.25 Her only consolation was the reward Cañete gave her for her collaboration, of the encomienda of Juliaca,26 on the northern shores of Lake Titicaca, the lands of which had formerly belonged to her guardian the cacique Cariapasa, and which in the eighteenth century would be possessed by the marqueses de Valparaíso.
Eighteenth-century Cuzco portrait representing Doña Bernardina Serra de Leguizamón, the conquistador’s granddaughter, engraving by Champin, from Castelnau. (National Arts Library, V&A Museum)
Arms of Doña Bernardina Serra de Leguizamón: eight saltires of Serra as border of arms awarded her grandmother, the Coya Doña Beatriz Yupanqui, engraving by Champin, from Castelnau. (National Arts Library, V&A Museum)
The role the Coya’s son Juan had played in the negotiations with the Inca were also rewarded by Cañete, but only with the grant of a virtually insignificant encomienda at Písac in the Yucay, valued at less than 400 pesos of silver annually. It was a pitiful recognition of his services, and is clear evidence of the prevalent discrimination against his mestizo origin. All of the witnesses to Juan’s probanza he at that time presented to the Audiencia of Lima, and which was sent to King Philip II, testify to his poverty and dependence on his parents, among them the Conquistador Francisco de Villafuerte, who recalled that Juan had
spent a period in jail at Cuzco for failing to pay a debt of 70 pesos of silver.27 Unlike his childhood companion Pedro del Barco, who led an abortive rebellion of mestizos in Cuzco in 1560, and for which he was exiled to Chile, he appears to have led a virtually reclusive life. At his encomienda at Písac,28 below the Inca mountain ruins that had once been the summer retreat of his grandfather Huayna Cápac, he built his hacienda in one of the most beautiful Andean valleys. For some thirteen years he remained Písac’s encomendero, living there with his wife Doña María Ramírez,29 whom he had married at Lima at the time he had accompanied his cousin the Inca to the viceregal capital. Nothing is known of his bride’s family, nor whether she was Spanish or mestiza. Two children were born to the marriage: Don Juan-Pablo and Doña Bernardina. The small colonial township of Písac, built by Jesuit missionaries and by his son, and whose colourful Sunday market and Inca ruins are today one of the most popular tourist attractions near Cuzco, is all that remains of his legacy. Until his death at the age of thirty-seven,30 he continued to petition the Crown to award him the encomiendas of Juan de Saavedra, of Quispicanchis,30 and that of the licentiate de la Gama, each valued at 7,000 pesos of gold in annual income.31 He received neither.
In 1569 his mother the Coya died.32 Mourned by her people and by her Spanish husband and her three sons, the last surviving daughter of the Emperor Huayna Cápac and of the Coya Rahua Ocllo was laid to rest at one of Cuzco’s churches, its site now unknown and forgotten.
9
THE HOUSE OF THE SERPENTS
Nothing is more certain than death,
and nothing more uncertain than the time of it . . .
The Emperor Charles V’s Will
Overlooking the plaza de las Nazarenas in Cuzco stands the convent of that name, known also as the casa de las sierpes, the house of the serpents, or the house of Leguizamón. Though converted in the late seventeenth century into the convent church of the Order of Nazarus, much of its façade, patios and structure remain as they would have appeared at the time Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and his family lived there. Above its portico and doorway are sculptured what remain of his family arms, a border of eight saltires awarded his ancestors in commemoration of the victory of Baeza against the Moorish armies on St Andrew’s day in 1227, supported by two giant serpents – symbolic of the mansion’s earlier site as the Inca house of learning, Yacha huasi, and of its surrounding area known as Amaru cata, the slope of the serpent. The Jesuit chronicler Bernabé Cobo recorded that several huaca stones formed part of its masonry and were venerated by the Incas of the city as magical and sacred shrines.1 Built some ten to twenty years after the Conquest, the site had formed part of the original allotments Pizarro had awarded his men after the city’s capture, and was one of the few buildings to have partly survived the earthquake that demolished most of Cuzco in 1650. Its yellowing Inca stone masonry and colonial patio are all that remain of the memory of its former occupants, the sounds of their voices and their morrión helmeted and velvet-clad images lost in the distance of time amid the silence of its convent walls.
Mansio’s mansion, Cuzco, detail of wall showing snake imagery. (Nicholas du Chastel)
Mansio’s mansion converted into the convent of Las Nazarenas, Cuzco. (Nicholas du Chastel)
In 1571 when the Conquistador had led the procession of family mourners from his mansion to one of Cuzco’s monastery churches for the burial of his eldest son Juan he was fifty-nine years old. His young wife Doña Lucía had been dead ten years, and who in the fifteen years of their marriage had borne him two daughters and five sons. The eldest of their children was Doña María, born at Cuzco in the closing years of Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion, and who at the age of eleven had been placed in the city’s Franciscan convent of Santa Clara, located in the same square as her parents’ mansion, then known as Santa Clara la vieja. It was the first such institution founded in Peru in 1550, and had been established at Cuzco seven years later in the houses that had belonged to the Conquistador Alonso Díaz, principally for the daughters of impoverished veterans of the Conquest. Under its first abbess, Doña Francisca Ortíz, it numbered twenty-four nuns of Spanish parentage, twelve mestizas and forty creole girl students who were educated until they reached marriageable age. Among the founding nuns were the daughters and granddaughters of the conquistadors Bernabé Picón and Francisco de Villafuerte.2 In defiance of her parents Doña María chose to enter the convent’s novitiate. It was an action that led to a lengthy dispute between her father and the nuns, to whom he was eventually forced to donate a dowry of jewels and vestments, valued at 2,000 pesos of gold, together with 700 cattle for the convent’s farms.3 His refusal to give any further donations on behalf of his daughter may explain the wording of much of the Franciscan chronicler Diego de Mendoza’s account of the young novice:
. . . among the glories of this life was Sister María de Leguizamón, one of the twenty-four founding nuns of this convent, daughter of the valorous conquistador Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and of his wife Doña Lucía, citizens of Cuzco, who were well known in this realm for their nobility and wealth, and who at the age of eleven left the home of her parents, and fleeing from there, and from the vanities of the world, entered the convent of Santa Clara . . . and from where not all the influence of her parents would make her leave; neither by enticements nor promises; until they disinherited her, denying her their refuge and her maintenance . . . yet at so tender an age she commended herself to God . . . and the more her parents denied her vocation the more she accepted her spiritual sisters as her family . . . bringing her from the confusion and captivity of Babylon to the doors of Sion . . .4
Street adjoining Mansio’s mansion, Cuzco. (Nicholas du Chastel)
Taking the name of Sister María of the Visitation, Doña María was to become one of the most prominent figures in Cuzco, devoting much of her life to the care of Indians in the native hospital of the city, and eventually was elected abbess of Santa Clara. Friar Mendoza in his history refers to her many demonstrations of sanctity and mortifications. At her death, at the age of sixty, he recalls that a choir of angels was heard singing Vespers in the chapel of the convent, and that some days later she appeared to one of the nuns. Four years after her death, when the convent was transferred to its present site, the friar writes that her coffin was opened and that her body was found to be incorrupted, adding that in order to place her remains in a smaller coffin to be taken for burial in their new church the nuns broke her legs, and that ‘blood flowed freely from the wounds . . .’.5
Hardly any records survive of Mansio’s other children. His son Jerónimo also entered the religious life as a Dominican in the monastery of Santo Domingo at Cuzco, built on the foundations of the Inca Temple of Coricancha, and where his mother Doña Lucía had been buried.6 The licentiate Cepeda wrote in a letter to King Philip II from Sucre, dated 14 February 1585, enclosing a missive from the Jesuit Alonso de Barzana: ‘In order to comply with my office in approving the native speech of the Indians among the clergy who reside within this bishopric of Charcas, I can testify that the Reverend Father Jerónimo de Leguizamón, curate of the parish of San Pedro de Potosí, speaks with great propriety the quéchua language.’7 Only three of Mansio’s legitimate children married. His eldest son Mansio, heir to his encomienda of Alca, married Doña Francisca de Caveruelas. Whatever the reason, it was a marriage of which Mansio disapproved, and because of which he disinherited his son, and spent years in litigation fighting the demands of his granddaughters, the eventual heirs to his encomienda.8 His sons Pablo and Miguel never married. His son Francisco married Doña Elena Girón de Heredia, the daughter of a hidalgo from Seville, and who on his return to Peru is listed as being accompanied by Francisco de Castro, one of his mother’s relatives, and two servants.9 The name of his youngest daughter Doña Petronila’s husband remains unknown. Another of his daughters was Doña Paula, whose mother was Indian, and who also formed part of his household. Each of his children and grandchildren ended their lives in anonym
ity with the exception of the Coya Doña Beatriz’s grandson, Don Juan-Pablo de Leguizamón, who was appointed by the Crown corregidor of Yucay, and who was known to the chronicler Bernabé Cobo. In 1617 he is recorded as having written to the Viceroy with regard to a quantity of Inca treasure he had discovered at his encomienda at Písac.10 Nothing more is known of their lives.
The Archangel St Gabriel, late eighteenth century, Potosí School. (Private Collection)
Though plagued by his gambling debts, and virtually dependent on money lenders, at the time of his eldest son’s funeral Mansio Serra de Leguizamón was nevertheless still a figure of considerable importance, though he presented a somewhat forlorn figure. ‘. . . in later years,’ Garcilaso de la Vega recorded, ‘the cabildo of Cuzco, seeing how ruined this son of theirs had become because of his gambling, in order to cure him of his addiction elected him alcalde of the city for the term of a year: a service he performed with all care and diligence, for there was much of a gentleman about him, and for the whole of that year he never once touched a card’.11 Contrary to what Garcilaso wrote from the distance of his Spanish exile, a will made by Mansio several years later shows him to have continued his passion for gaming: ‘. . . I owe Juan Gómez 800 pesos of silver,’ the will, dated 1576, records, ‘. . . Agustín Alzazan 100 pesos . . . Agustín López Gómez 150 pesos . . . 1,000 pesos Antonio Pereyra, alcalde, won from me at gaming . . . the licentiate Alonso Perez 4,000 pesos . . . 3,400 pesos I owe the said Diego de los Ríos from gaming, and which he won from me . . .’.12 His debts forced him to sell one of the first mining concessions at Potosí,13 which he had possibly acquired during the closing years of Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion. His varying fortunes, however, are demonstrated by a later will that shows him to possess imported tapestries and a variety of silver ornaments which decorated his mansion, together with various sums of gold and silver. According to the testimony of his witnesses to his probanza Mansio maintained his household in apparent comfort, if not luxury, at a time when it was not uncommon for a colonial grandee to accommodate not only his immediate family but a large number of dependants, Negro slaves and Indian retainers.
The Last Conquistador Page 16