The Last Conquistador

by Stuart Stirling

  The most revealing, if not contradictory, insight into Mansio’s character, and almost at variance with the energy and time he spent petitioning the Crown to compensate him for the loss of his original award of encomiendas, is the attitude he demonstrated in his later years towards his tributary Indians, and the restitution he would make them in both his wills. Though a number of conquistadors in their old age were to make similar restitutions for their share of booty and treasure they had obtained at Cajamarca and at Cuzco, there is little evidence to deny their sincerity, even if such sentiments were influenced by their impending deaths and the advice of their confessors. Many made no such gestures. Neither did any of the later colonists, responsible for a far greater exploitation and ill treatment of the Indians of their encomiendas than the by then elderly conquistadors, a number of whom, like the trumpeter Pedro de Alconchel of Vilcaconga, were virtually penniless. Nor was any such sentiment shared by the Crown officials of the colony: as in the case of the eight-year-old son of the Judge Melchor Bravo de Saravia who was awarded an encomienda.14 In his first will Mansio ordered his executors to return to his Indian vassals much of the produce and livestock of his encomienda:15

  Patio of Mansio’s mansion, Cuzco. (Nicholas du Chastel)

  I declare that the produce and inheritance of Vizan [Alca] . . . belongs to the Indians of my encomienda because it was they who planted it, and they who built its hacienda, and because of which it is theirs and which they are to keep and own, as it was once their own . . . I declare that all the horse mares, goats, Castilian sheep, belong to the Indians of my encomienda . . . and this I return to them so that it be distributed among them . . . I declare that I have received [over the years] in tribute from my Indians of my encomienda some 50,000 pesos of gold, and it is what I owe them, and I beg that they pardon me, for I no longer have any money to repay them . . .16

  Considering that the produce and livestock of his encomienda – virtually its entire wealth – should by right have been inherited by his children, his action betrays an extraordinary sense of morality shared by few of his countrymen, however late in his life. His encomienda of Aymara tribesmen at Alca in the Cuntisuyo, bordering the Cotahuasi River, was some 140 miles south-west of Cuzco, and north-west of the city of Arequipa. Like all other encomiendas it was held by him for the duration of his life and that of his successor and heir. In a report of inspection carried out in 1572, its population, livestock and annual produce were recorded as comprising: ‘. . . 938 male tributary Indians; 770 children; 130 elderly Indians; 2,640 women; 8 caciques; 1,860 pesos of mined silver; 1,744 pesos of mined gold; 130 head of cattle, each valued at 2 pesos of silver; woven cloth valued at 175 pesos of silver; maize valued at 187 pesos of silver; wheat valued at 143 pesos of silver; 400 poultry birds, each valued at 50 pesos of silver . . .’.17

  The encomienda was liable for the payment of a salary for two missionaries (802 pesos of silver), a legal tax (703 pesos of silver), and a payment to the caciques for the labour of their people (200 pesos of silver). Apart from his income of livestock, Mansio received annually some 2,401 pesos of silver. From a smaller encomienda at Vito,18 of Manarí Indians, near the eastern tropical region of the Antisuyo, he received a further 55 pesos of silver annually. It was an income that included, as Mansio mentions in his last will, plantations of alfalfa, timber and a goat farm in the neighbouring valleys of Cuzco.19

  By 1571 Mansio had spent thirty-eight years of his life in Peru: a land still virtually unexplored, varying in climate and terrain, from its mountain enclave of Cuzco to its eastern forests of the Antisuyo, and as far south as the Bolivian altiplano and the pampas of Argentina, whose city of Mendoza had been colonized by settlers from Chile, bringing with them the vines that would later found the great vineyards in the foothills of the Andes. In the sub-tropical valleys vast crops of coca were produced, together with fruit and tobacco – known in Spain as the Holy plant because of its reputed medicinal properties. In the great plains and mountain-terraced farmlands maize and potatoes. From the rivers, lakes and Pacific coast, all types of fish were also brought into the markets at Cuzco and other settlements. Though llama meat, guinea pig and maize were the staple diet of the early settlers, within twenty years of the Conquest almost every European crop, livestock and working animal had been imported into Peru. It was a wealth that would transform the encomiendas into farm land and their Spanish masters into landed and mostly absentee aristocrats.

  From the earliest days of the Conquest Negro slaves from the Isthmus had formed part of the colony’s labour force, mainly in the sub-tropical valleys of the Andes and coastal regions of Lima, Guayaquil and Cartagena. Their ownership was widespread, and many were acquired solely for domestic service, as in the case of the purchase made by Mansio in 1560, of a slave called Francisco for 1,000 pesos of silver.20 Their ownership was not confined to encomenderos, but was also common among merchants and the religious Orders. A number of freed Negroes are recorded to have later found employment as blacksmiths, tailors and carpenters in Lima and at Cuzco. No accurate record exists of their number, though at the time of Girón’s rebellion a company of some 400 were raised to fight in his ranks.21 The social structure of Peru, like that of the other colonies of the Indies, had been inherited from Spain, and which only varied in the pre-eminence given its conquistadors and encomenderos. In every walk of life the language and culture of its settlers were central to the maintenance of its conquest, influencing many of its surviving Inca lords and caciques to imitate their conquerors in dress and customs. Few Indians learned to speak Castilian, and as such became dependent on their interpreters in matters of law, which only led to their exploitation. Education was virtually restricted to creoles and mestizos and was the responsibility of the religious Orders, as in the case of the Dominican foundation of the University of San Marcos at Lima in 1551.

  The Dominicans, who had presided over the colony’s religious life since the earliest days of the Conquest, saw their influence further enhanced by the establishment of the Inquisition. At the first auto-da-fé at Lima in the winter of 1573 among the Holy Office’s victims was the incongruous sounding Frenchman Mateo Salade.22 Eight years later the English corsairs John Oxenham and Thomas Gerard and the Irishman John Butler were paraded as heretic penitents in the same square.23 Three future saints of the Catholic Church made their ministry at Lima: the Spaniard Toribio de Mogrovejo, a former professor of law at the University of Salamanca, was appointed Archbishop of Lima in 1580; Martín de Porres, the son of a hidalgo and a freed negress, born at Lima in 1579; and the Creole Isabel de Flores, who would be known as Santa Rosa de Lima and who had also been born in the viceregal capital, in 1586.

  St Ursula, late eighteenth century, Potosí School. (Private Collection)

  The development of the colony also saw the onus of its wealth become more than ever dependent on its mining industry: its silver mines discovered in the Bolivian region of the Charcas,24 and which had attracted many of the new immigrants to its mining settlement and city of Potosí. In the chronicles of the Indies no other city symbolized the untold wealth of the New World, and which even the great sixteenth-century Jesuit explorer Matteo Ricci illustrated in his map of the world commissioned by the emperors of China.

  Potosí’s fame derived from a mountain lying in the foothills of the Andes known as the Cerro Rico, the rich mountain, because of the abundance of its silver. It was discovered in 1545 at the time of Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion by a yanacona named Hualpa, the son of a cacique from the Cuzco region, who would end his days in bondage to a succession of Spanish overseers. By the time of the Viceroy Toledo’s visit in 1572 to the city founded at the foot of the mountain, its inhabitants were to number some 120,000 Spaniards, Indians and mestizos – by far the largest population of any city in the Americas and most of the capitals of Europe. Toledo was to award Potosí the title of ‘Imperial’ and Charles V’s coat of arms, to which his son Philip II later added the motto: ‘For the Powerful Emperor, for the wise
King, this lofty mountain of silver will conquer the world.’

  Early settlement at Potosí. (Private Collection)

  Men and women from every region of Spain and the Indies crossed the cordillera in search of Potosí’s windswept and desolate location. Some eighty churches were built in the city, among them San Lorenzo, one of the finest examples of Spanish mestizo architecture in the Americas. Cervantes, who many years later failed to secure an appointment as corregidor of the city of La Paz, described the great mining city as ‘a sanctuary for bandits, a safeguard for assassins, a cloak and mask for card sharpers, the aspiration of courtesans, the common disappointment of many, and the special remedy of a few’.25 By the end of the century it possessed 36 gambling houses, where some 800 professional gamblers and prostitutes plied their trade. The chronicler Bartolomé Martínez y Vela, who recorded Potosí’s celebrations to mark the feast of Corpus Christi, described how its Spanish miners would lavish their new found wealth on ‘fountains sprouting the finest European wines, the men with chains of gold around their necks, and their dark skinned mestizo women wearing slippers tied with strings of silk and pearls, their hair adorned with rubies and precious stones’. And as a final demonstration of their allegiance to their Christian faith, ‘they would cover the streets with bars of solid silver, from one end to another’.

  Goods of every type were to be found in Potosí’s markets: ‘embroidery of silk, gold and silver from France, tapestries and mirrors from Flanders, religious paintings from Rome, crystal and glass from Venice, vanilla and cocoa from the Caribbean islands and pearls from Panama’.26 Portuguese traders also plied illicit merchandise across the selvas and cordillera of the Andes from their port at Río de Janeiro, the beaches of which they named in honour of Potosí’s Virgin of Copacabana, the reliquary of which was situated on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca, her gilded Indian features almost hidden by the jewelled offerings of her penitents, who in their thousands would thank or beg her for their fortunes. Describing another of Potosí’s religious festivals the chronicler Martínez y Vela wrote that the city’s nobility, numbering thirty counts of Castile, ‘were to form themselves into bands of men and women, wearing their costumes, with jewels and plumes and waving flags, and just to wrench these flags from one The Virgin of Copacabana, gold medallion, another they knifed and killed each other, leaving more than a hundred dead, men and women’. The Dominican Domingo de Santo Tomás referred to the Cerro Rico in his interview with the Council of the Indies as ‘a mouth of hell consuming thousands of innocent Indians’.27

  The Virgin of Copacabana, gold medallion, late seventeenth century, Potosí School. (Private Collection)

  The Viceroy Toledo assigned 95,000 Indians to Cerro Rico’s mines to labour as mitimae, working for one year, from sunset to sunrise. For every ten Indians only seven were to survive in what was to become a rabbit warren of human suffering, consoled solely by their addiction to coca, and whose labour left its young miners with the broken and haggard features of old men. Their addiction to coca also established an industry for the narcotic’s transportation and sale from the Andean sub-tropical valleys of the Yungas, near the city of La Paz which acted as a staging post for the mines, and from the rich harvests of the Cuzco region. By torchlight and working with pick axes, day and night, at any one time some 4,500 Indians mined the silver which was then taken by mule pack to the city’s Casa de la Moneda for minting. In a room of stone flooring and cedar wood, mules pulled the giant wheels that stretched through cylinders the stream of metal into bars and coins, one-fifth of which was put aside for the Crown and transported to the Pacific harbour of Arica. The treasure was then taken by small barques to Lima’s port of Callao, from where it was transported on caravels that would sail the fifteen days to Panama. Once more it was carried by hundreds of mules across the Isthmus to the Atlantic port of Nombre de Dios, from where the galleons sailed to Havana to await the treasure fleets from Mexico, before finally crossing the Atlantic to the Andalusian port of San Lúcar de Barrameda.

  Cerro Rico de Potosí. (Alexander Stirling)

  By the end of the eighteenth century the great mountain was exhausted of its silver: its city and convents, where nuns had once prayed for the souls of their governors, left barren and deserted, its churches and palaces carved with lotus flowers, devils and mermaids, emblems of the moon and of the sun, of winged angels and sad-eyed Indian madonnas, the sole legacy of its former glory.

  In 1571 – almost two centuries before the demise of Potosí – Don Francisco de Toledo, third Viceroy of Peru, arrived at Lima. The Emperor Charles V had by then been dead thirteen years; Cervantes was twenty-four years old; and the young Cretan painter Domenico Theotocopoulos, known as el Greco, the Greek, had as yet to reach Spain from Italy; neither had the great monastery palace of the Escorial been completed, being already eight years under construction. A younger son of the Conde de Oropesa, and probably named after an ancestor who had died on the walls of Constantinople defending its last Christian emperor,28 Toledo had been one of the very few courtiers present at the deathbed of Charles V at the monastery of Yuste.29 Aged fifty-four and a confirmed bachelor, he proved to be one of the foremost colonial administrators of the Indies, and in turn possibly the most ruthless in his treatment of the remnants of the Inca royal family, initiating a genocide that would see their descendants exiled or die from sheer poverty. His purpose was the reform of the colony’s bureaucracy which had suffered from the nepotism and scandals of his predecessor viceroys the Marqués de Cañete and the Conde de Nieva, both of whom had died at Lima: the former as a result of being refused an extension to his governorship, and the latter from a head wound after falling from the balcony of his mistress’ mansion. The reforms he implemented in the twelve years of his governorship affected not only the bureaucracy of the colony, but the re-organization of its Indian labour. Prone like Philip II to involve himself in the minute detail of government, Toledo established the foundations of a system of administration that survived almost unchanged until Peru and Bolivia’s independence in the early nineteenth century. Two other factors that also left a lasting influence on the colony were his establishment of the Inquisition at Lima and the arrival of the Jesuit Order, which was to dominate the future intellectual life of Peru and which would be responsible for much of the scarce humanity shown the Andean people in their evangelization.

  Casa de la Moneda, Potosí. (Alexander Stirling)

  The Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  Fourteen months after his arrival at Lima Toledo left his capital on a tour of inspection that would last for almost five years. After a sojourn at Huamanga, the present day city of Ayacucho, he travelled south to Cuzco where he was met on the outskirts of the city by a delegation of its officials, among them the city’s six surviving conquistadors: Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, Diego de Trujillo, Alonso de Mesa, Pedro Alonso Carrasco, Hernando de Solano and Juan de Pancorbo, who made him a gift of a roan stallion, its leather saddle trimmed in gold. The reception given him was as lavish as the city had accorded Gonzalo Pizarro almost a quarter of a century previously after his victory at Huarina. Lodged in the mansion of Juan de Pancorbo, and then in that of the encomendero Diego de Silva, Toledo presided over the processions of Spaniards and Inca nobles that passed his balcony to honour him. For several days he was fêted with cane and bull fights arranged by the encomenderos, in which several of the elderly conquistadors took part.30

  The festivities and honours shown Toledo did little to detract from his planned reforms of the city’s cabildo and its ruling hierarchy of encomenderos. Within the week he ordered its regidores to elect a landless soldier as one of its alcaldes. Though each of the cabildo’s members had agreed among themselves to vote against the election, with the exception of Hernando de Santa Cruz and Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, they eventually succumbed to Toledo’s command once he ordered his personal guard to enter their chamber and threaten them with ex
ile to Chile.31 Mansio, who at the time was procurator-general of the city, refused to be intimidated by Toledo, and sent him possibly one of the most impertinent and patronizing letters he would ever receive:

  The Most Excellent lord Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, in the name of this great city of Cuzco and of its cabildo, and as its Procurator General, I find it necessary to point out that the cabildo of this city, having judicially elected alcaldes by a majority of votes Rodrigo de Esquivel and Martín Dolmos, encomenderos of this city and persons of quality . . . Your Excellency, nevertheless, without the consent of the cabildo and without possessing a single vote personally, awarded one of the offices to Juan López de Izutarregui . . . something Your Excellency should rectify, so that the election and mandates by the cabildo be ratified, as they have been these last forty years . . .32

  For a further two pages Mansio lectured him on the civil rights of the city, and of its feudal privileges to elect its own officials. Toledo curtly ordered that his candidate be appointed at once – an order that was adhered to without exception.

  Toledo’s action was repeated throughout the colony, and brought to an end the political monopoly and judicial power the encomenderos had held in the cities and regions of their land holdings. Like the priest-governor Pedro de la Gasca, Toledo earned both the antagonism as well as the begrudging respect of the colony’s grandees, conscious of their inability to manipulate a government they had always held as an extension of their own privileged status. From ordering the acquisition of a new premises for Cuzco’s jail, to the widening of its central square, his reforms were greeted with approval by the city’s settlers. Toledo also demanded funds from the city’s cabildo for the building of Cuzco’s cathedral which he ordered should take six years to complete, but which in effect took eighty-two years, and is regarded by the architectural historian Harold Wethey as ‘the finest church of the western hemisphere’.33 His nomination of Juan Polo de Ondegardo, a former Governor of Sucre, as Cuzco’s Governor was also characteristic of the appointments he made, of men who were lawyers by profession yet possessing experience as administrators, and of an intellectual calibre almost unknown among their predecessors.