Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  On 5 January 1533 Hernando Pizarro and a small squadron of horse left Cajamarca on a journey that took them across the central Andes to the Inca temple at Pachacamac, situated near Pizarro’s future settlement and capital at Lima, and a distance of several hundred miles. For almost four months Hernando Pizarro led his twenty horsemen through the mountains – at one stage the snow was so deep it reached up to the horses’ girths – and crossing the reed bridges that hung above the rivers and canyons, until they finally descended into the great coastal desert and plain. ‘All the rivers have their own bridges,’ wrote Hernando, ‘of either stone or reed. At one great river, which was very turbulent and wide, and over which we crossed, there was a bridge made of reeds, which was a marvel to see, and which the horses also crossed.’11 Pedro de Cieza de León, who years later visited Pachacamac, recorded that its temple was constructed on top of a hillock and was made of earth and mud-brick. Its doors and walls were decorated with the figures of wild animals. And inside, where they kept their idol, lived the priests of the temple.

  Some chroniclers deny that Hernando Pizarro found any great amount of treasure at the temple. Native accounts, however, contradict this. The Indian Pola, who had been present when Hernando and his squadron arrived at the temple, testified that ‘before their arrival the Spaniards had sent messengers to all the neighbouring provinces, ordering them to bring all their treasures of gold and silver, their mamacona and their fine clothes and jewels, and their herds of llamas; and I saw that they took from the temple of the Sun at Pachacamac and from its idol a great quantity of treasure: gold and silver vessels, jugs, pitchers, images of the puma and of foxes, of men and women, of maize, of frogs and snakes, all of which was taken to a great chamber and given to Hernando Pizarro; and he took the treasure to Cajamarca with him, and it was carried by more than ten thousand Indians.’12

  While at Pachacamac Hernando Pizarro received word that Atahualpa’s warrior chief Chalcuchima had positioned his army at the Inca town of Jauja in the central Andes, and that he was in possession of a great quantity of treasure. Taking his vast caravan of llamas and Indian porters with him, Hernando retraced his march northwards towards Chalcuchima’s camp. ‘The town of Jauja is very large and lies in a beautiful valley,’ recorded one of his horseman, ‘a great river passes through it, and its climate is temperate. The land is fertile. The town is built in the Spanish manner with rectangular streets, and has several outlying villages … some of us even thought there were at least one hundred thousand people in its main square. The markets and streets were so full that every single inhabitant seemed to be there on the day of our arrival. Chalcuchima had also his servants there, whose duty it was to supply provisions for his army. He was much feared throughout the countryside, since he was a great warrior and had subdued for his master Atahualpa more than six hundred leagues of territory.’13

  Another conquistadore recalled that when they had first entered the town’s central square they were confronted with the horrific spectacle of thousands of lances spiked with the heads and tongues of the Emperor Huáscar’s defeated warriors. It was there that Hernando Pizarro ordered that the horses of his men be shod with the silver he had been given by Chalcuchima, who only a short while previously on Atahualpa’s instructions had killed the Emperor Huáscar. Chalcuchima agreed to accompany the Spaniards to Cajamarca in order to see his master.

  Several early historians, among them Agustín de Zárate and Garcilaso de la Vega, claimed that at the time of his brother’s journey to Pachacamac Pizarro also sent Hernando de Soto to Cuzco in the company of the Extremaduran Pedro del Barco. Pedro de Cieza de León mentions only the names of three relatively insignificant foot soldiers on the Cuzco expedition, attended by an African slave. Neither Francisco López de Jerez, Pizarro’s secretary, nor his successor Sancho de la Hoz, both of whom were at Cajamarca, make any mention of Soto’s journey to Cuzco. Del Barco, as his testimonial demonstrates, only arrived at Cajamarca much later with Almagro’s reinforcements.14 What may have inspired such a tale was its assertion by del Barco’s mestizo son, who would have known both Zárate and Garcilaso de la Vega, repeated in his own later testimonial, but which was, in fact, a colourful invention on his part to glamorise his father’s role in the Conquest.15 It is more than likely that Pizarro, who was suspicious of Soto’s ambition, would not have allowed him to leave Cajamarca at such a time. In support of the latter view, it is also known that Soto was in the town on the eve of Easter Sunday when Diego de Almagro’s exhausted army of reinforcements finally reached Cajamarca.

  It had taken Almagro’s reinforcements almost two months to reach the valley from the bay of San Mateo where his armada had landed. Numbering some one hundred and fifty volunteers, from the Isthmus, among them were Pedro del Barco, a veteran of the conquest of Nicaragua, and the eighteen-year-old hidalgo Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, whose testimonial states that he brought with him his ‘horses and servants’,16 Luis Sánchez, one of Almagro’s foot soldiers, recorded that they had suffered greatly in fighting off attacks from the coastal Indians, ‘from hunger and deprivations, and in the crossing of many mountains, ravines and rivers’.17 Nicolás de Ribera, who had been responsible for recruiting many of Almagro’s Nicaraguan volunteers, recalled that Pizarro ‘was greatly overjoyed by our arrival, for we had arrived at a time when he had great need of our assistance because of Atahualpa’s imprisonment and the threat from the multitude of his warriors …’.18

  Almagro’s contingent had left Panama only a few weeks after the capture of Atahualpa. He had, however, received word via the various messengers Pizarro had sent him not only of the imprisonment of the Inca emperor, but of the ransom of gold and silver he had promised the Spaniards. As he inspected the piles of treasure stacked in the town’s central square, nothing could have astonished or offended him more than to learn that his men would be denied their share of the booty. It was a resentment and anger his men would share throughout the Conquest, and which would never subside. Almagro’s indignation and the coarseness of the abuse he levelled at Pizarro served only to highlight the open hostility between the two groups of conquistadores. Probably swayed by the ill-will he had provoked, Pizarro relented in part and persuaded Almagro to accept a quantity of treasure for himself and a token amount for his men. It was not what Almagro had wished, but he had little choice but to accept; he knew full well that Pizarro held the Crown’s mandate and that the supreme authority of their combined forces was vested solely in him.

  Shortly after Almagro’s arrival Hernando Pizarro and his horsemen returned to the valley with their huge caravan of treasure, accompanied by Chalcuchima. Pizarro and Almagro rode out of the town to greet Hernando, whose loathing and contempt for Almagro was made plain by his pointedly ignoring him. It was an insult that would once more destabilise relations between the two groups of Spaniards, each supporting their respective interests and leaders. Only after Pizarro had managed to persuade his brother to apologise to Almagro did a certain harmony once more prevail in the town.

  Atahualpa, who had witnessed the dissension with growing amusement, was nevertheless crestfallen at the arrival of Almagro’s reinforcements. Pedro Pizarro, who had accompanied Almagro’s forces from the settlement of San Miguel, recalled that the Inca emperor expressed his fears by crying out that he would be killed, but that Pizarro had tried to reassure him, promising to release him once all the treasure had been collected, and saying that he would give him the province of Quito for his own kingdom. For a while Pizarro’s words calmed Atahualpa, though he did not alter his opinion of Almagro, whom he would contemptuously refer to as the ‘one-eyed’. He equally demonstrated a dislike for the royal treasurer Alonso de Riquelme, whom Almagro had also brought with him from San Miguel, calling him ‘the fat man’. Possibly it was intuition, but both men would be the most vocal in demanding his execution in the months to come.

  Atahualpa’s only recompense was seeing his faithful warrior chief again, but whom he nevertheless treated with the s
ame aloofness and condescension as any other of his vassals.

  When Chalcuchima entered Atahualpa’s chamber he took a fair sized load from the back of one of the Indian porters who had accompanied him, and put it on his own back as an act of vassalage. As did all the other caciques who were with him. And thus they entered their master’s presence, and when Chalcuchima saw Atahualpa he raised his hands to the sun, and gave thanks for having been permitted to enjoy the sight. Then with great reverence, and with tears in his eyes he approached his master and kissed his cheeks, his hands and his feet; and all the caciques who were with him did the same, and Atahualpa preserved so majestic a stance that though he loved no one better than Chalcuchima he did not once look at his face or take any more notice of him than of the humblest of his servants.19

  A few days later Chalcuchima was tortured by Hernando de Soto, who partially burnt his legs when the Indian refused to divulge the whereabouts of some treasure Soto believed was hidden near Cajamarca – one of the many examples of the brutality of Pizarro’s conquistadores, perpetrated regardless of social or military rank, and of their relentless and obsessive search for gold. The brutality exhibited by Soto, who had often shown Atahualpa great kindness, is indicative of the mindset of the men of the Indies, none of whom, including Almagro and Pizarro, would have thought twice about meting out a similar punishment, nor believed they would have met a more humane fate at the hands of the Inca emperor. In giving evidence to an inquiry in 1607, the Indian Tancara stated that Hernando Pizarro had burned his grandfather and other caciques in the province of Omasuyos. Another Indian testimonial asserted that he had burned 600 Lupaca tribesmen after confronting them on the shores of Lake Titicaca.20

  An outward appearance of grudging cordiality was maintained in the encampment by both groups of conquistadores, conscious of the fact that unity was their only hope of fighting their way out of Cajamarca and seizing the imperial capital of Cuzco, where they believed the greatest amount of treasure was stored. Billeted in the tents they had brought with them from the Isthmus and in the mud-brick and thatch-roof houses of the town – only a few of which were of fine stone Inca masonry – the men were provided with food by their Indian women. They lived off a diet of potato, then unknown in Europe, maize, guinea pig, fowl, llama meat and chicha. Many of the Indian women had followed them from the coast, dressed in their scanty clothing and barefoot; others were natives of the town or had belonged to Atahualpa’s retinue. Their ethnic appearance and dress varied greatly: the Andean mountain people clearly identifiable by their high cheek bones and Asiatic features, in contrast to the flat-nosed and oval-faced coastal Indians, whose appearance was more Polynesian.

  The several thousand Indians who had sworn allegiance to Pizarro, and who were now encamped outside Cajamarca’s walls, represented a cross-section of the subject tribes. Each tribe wore its distinctive costume which the Indian historian and artist Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala recorded in his pen-and-ink sketches: the leaf-like body armour of the bowmen of the Antisuyo Mañari Amazon region; the cone hats and knee-length shirt robes of the southern Collasuyo men; the multicoloured and plumed headdresses of the northern Andean Chinchasuyo warriors; the shoulder-length hair crowned with a leather thong which marked out the soldier-lords of the westerly Cuntisuyo; and among them their former Inca lords, decked out in their richly embroidered woollen shirt kilts and silken capes, their hair cut short to denote their princely rank, and accompanied by their women in their long sleeveless shirts and capes, which were attached at the collar by a gold or silver pin clasp. It was a sight few of the conquistadores could ever have imagined witnessing, and which demonstrated the vastness and diversity of the empire they had set out to conquer and subjugate, and which filled even the most foolhardy with as much fear and apprehension as excitement.

  The animosity between Almagro and Hernando Pizarro nevertheless soon reasserted itself and their constant bickering was creating a problem for Pizarro. He realised that it would be in his own and his brother’s best interests if Hernando returned to Spain with what had been smelted of the Crown’s share of the ransom treasure, where he could secure for Pizarro the necessary guarantees for his governorship of the conquered territories. It would also enable Hernando to counter in person any claim made by Almagro or any of his agents at the Spanish court to his share of the governorship. Hernando had no love for the Indies, nor did he have the slightest desire to settle in Peru whatever riches and honours his brother would have awarded him. His simple wish was to accumulate as much personal wealth as he possibly could in the shortest period of time, and to use it to secure for himself the civic and social recognition in his native township that his father’s impecuniousness and meagre hidalgo rank had denied him.

  Hernando Pizarro left Cajamarca for the Isthmus some two months after Almagro’s arrival in the valley and a month after Pizarro had ordered the smelting of the ransom treasure. Hernando took with him 100,000 pesos of gold that made up the royal fifth of the Crown’s share of the booty, together with his own sizeable fortune and various artefacts, among them a life-size gold statue of a boy. In the first days of January 1534, some six months after leaving Peru, Hernando’s galleon the María del Campo, piloted by Pedro Bernal, docked at Seville. It took almost an entire day for the labourers of the Casa de la Contratación to unload the wooden crates of gold and silver and pile them on to the ox-carts waiting to make the short journey to the depository at the rear of the palace of the Alcázar. For a number of weeks the treasure was left on public display at Seville in the courtyard of the Contratación. People flocked to see the spectacle, among them a young boy who would grow up to become the historian Pedro de Cieza de León. The officials of the Contratación ordered the treasure to be smelted a month later, robbing the world of one of the greatest examples of Inca culture and civilisation.

  Some ten or twelve days after Hernando Pizarro’s departure for Spain, two of the three Spaniards who had gone to Cuzco – Pedro de Moguer, Juan de Zárate and Martín Bueno – returned to Cajamarca, carried in litters by their Indian porters and followed by a train of 255 llamas. Sancho de la Hoz witnessed how they brought with them ‘the gold from Cuzco, part of which was smelted, and which were small and fine objects, and also some five hundred sheets of gold that had been taken from the walls of its temple; the smallest of the gold sheets weighed some ten or twelve pounds, and had covered the entire inner walling of the temple; they also brought with them a gold throne chair in the shape of a figure, which weighed eight or ten pounds; also a gold bowl which was of very fine workmanship, and many other such pieces, including cups and plates. From these gold objects two and a half million pesos was smelted, and when converted into fine gold was a million and three hundred thousand and twenty pesos.’21 Pedro de Cieza de Léon, who interviewed various Inca lords who had been present in Cuzco at the time of the arrival of the three Spaniards, describes in some detail the Spaniards’ wanton behaviour in the capital where they were received as gods and carried about the streets in litter chairs. Not only did they desecrate the temple of Coricancha but they instigated a mass orgy and rape of its mamacona.

  The Cajamarca treasure was smelted in nine separate forges. For seven days and nights 11 tons of gold and silver artefacts were fed into the furnaces, yielding some 13,420lb of 22.5 carat gold in ingots, and 26,000lb in silver.22 The distribution of the treasure took a whole month to complete. A document, signed by Pizarro, recorded that the full amount of treasure smelted at Cajamarca amounted to 1,326,539 pesos of gold and 51,610 marks of silver. The gold had been smelted into ingots of 8lb weight with a value of about 1,000 pesos. Neither of these figures included the gold and silver artefacts and jewels, mostly emeralds and pearls, which the conquistadores seized as personal booty, nor Atahualpa’s gold throne which Pizarro appropriated for himself. Years later the conquistadore Diego Maldonado, known as ‘el rico’, the rich, married a Spanish nobleman’s daughter and gifted her an Inca necklace of emeralds, together with a gold life-size statu
e of a puma, which he probably looted at Cajamarca or at the sacking of Cuzco.

  Each of Pizarro’s horsemen was awarded approximately 8,800 pesos of gold and 362 marks of silver, each of his foot soldiers 4,440 pesos of gold and 181 marks of silver. His own official share of the booty was 57,740 pesos of gold and his captains also received a far greater share than the other men. Hernando de Soto, who was awarded 17,740 pesos of gold, some years later brought back with him to Seville a personal fortune of 100,000 pesos of gold, demonstrating the enormous discrepancy between the official records and the actual amount of booty seized by the conquistadores at Cajamarca and later at Cuzco – booty that was never declared to the Crown or recorded by its treasury official Alonso de Riquelme, either through fear or because he was bribed.

  The awards in gold to Pizarro’s brothers were indicative of their influence in his small council of captains: Hernando Pizarro – 31,080 pesos; Juan Pizarro – 11,100 pesos; Sebastián de Belalcázar, Pedro de Candía and Gonzalo Pizarro – 9,009 pesos each. The Friar Valverde, because of his vows of poverty, received no award. The few men who had stayed behind at San Miguel, and who had formed part of Pizarro’s expeditionary force, were awarded 15,000 pesos between them. Almagro’s men were awarded 20,000 pesos. It was a gesture that did little to alter their feeling of resentment and which only strengthened their demand to leave Cajamarca and to continue their march to Cuzco, the sacking of which they saw as their only hope of enriching themselves. Pizarro, however, made two individual awards to Almagro’s men: one was to the young horseman Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, whom he awarded 2,000 pesos of gold, and the other was to Nicolás de Ribera, the old man.23 Ribera was an old comrade of Pizarro’s and one of the thirteen men of Gallo. Serra de Leguizamón’s award was possibly in recognition of some service he had rendered, or simply due to the fact that Pizarro was fond of him, as the trumpeter Pedro de Alconchel noted.24