Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  An encomendero of Lima would recall that some five years after the events at Cajamarca, veterans could still be seen wearing the jewels they had taken there as booty. Most of them would dissipate their fortunes, gambling them away at cards in the months they stayed in the encampment, or in their reckless spending on the few available goods to be found which they paid for in bars of gold and silver. Francisco López de Jerez recorded that a jug of wine cost 60 pesos of gold; a pair of boots or breeches, from 30 to 40 pesos; a cape, 125 pesos; a clove of garlic, half a peso; a sword, 50 pesos; a sheet of vellum paper, 10 pesos.25 The foot soldier Melchor Verdugo is recorded as having purchased for 2,000 pesos a horse, an Isthmian Indian and woman, described as marked with a facial scar, and 20 chickens from the priest Ascencio. A horse in poor condition was valued at 94 pesos, one in good condition at 3,000 pesos. Negro slaves, depending on their age and physique, were sold for between 300 and 600 pesos. Juan Pantiel de Salinas, one of the farriers, is reported to have spent days shoeing horses with silver.

  Diego de Trujillo recorded that though the chamber where the gold had been kept had at one time been set on fire ‘and the gold had to be thrown elsewhere; much more, however, was received by the marqués [Pizarro] than had been agreed [by Atahualpa]’.26 Another conquistadore also recalled that he had seen a great chamber filled with golden vases and many other pieces, which had not formed part of the distribution. At a secret inquiry ordered by the Emperor Charles V and held several years later by the Friar Bishop Tomás de Berlanga at Lima and at Panama, others testified to the irregularities they too had witnessed. Ironically, one of the witnesses was Hernando de Soto, whose decision to testify was possibly influenced by his resentment at Pizarro’s failure to award him a suitable governorship and who claimed that he had witnessed both Pizarro and Almagro sell a great quantity of the ransom silver for their own enrichment.

  What is not given much importance by any of the chroniclers other than Pedro Pizarro is that Pizarro also distributed among his men the thousands of subject Indians and their caciques encamped at Cajamarca, whose native lands his men would also subsequently be awarded as encomiendas, and whose warriors would form the private armies of each of them in their later civil wars and rebellions against the Crown. It was this distribution more than any other that laid the foundations of the colonial aristocracy of Peru, and which in some cases remained virtually unchanged until the agrarian reforms of the twentieth century.

  The allocation of the booty at Cajamarca inevitably sealed Atahualpa’s fate. López de Jerez recorded how, at the time, the Inca emperor had told a number of his guards that he had seen a ball of fire illuminate the night sky, and that he knew it was an omen of his own death.27 Legend has created an almost theatrical picture of the events that led to his supposed trial and execution, based on the alleged evidence of the Indian interpreter Felipillo, who was said to have overheard Atahualpa ordering an attack on the town. An Indian eyewitness, however, recalled: ‘the truth is that they killed Atahualpa because of the lies of the tongue of Don Felipe [Felipillo], who had invented such lies because he had slept with one of Atahualpa’s women, and he feared for his life.’28

  The young woman in question was Atahualpa’s favourite wife and first cousin Cuxirimay. Eighteen years later the Spanish interpreter Juan de Betanzos, who had himself married Cuxirimay, by then known as Doña Angelina, records in his history of the Inca people what his wife told him of the events of those days, though disguising her identity:

  At that time Atahualpa had a number of wives, among them one who was called Sancta [Cuxirimay], who was very fair skinned and very beautiful. And a certain Indian whom the marqués [Pizarro] had brought with him and who admired her, one day, when Atahualpa had left his chamber, entered there and seduced her by force; and returning to the chamber Atahualpa found him there, and shouted at him: ‘Dog of the coast lands! you take my wife because I am a prisoner! for if I were not so, well do you know I would punish you and all your lineage and nation!’ And in fear the tongue fled and planned his revenge, though Atahualpa said nothing to anyone of this. A few days later, the tongue made it known that he had heard Atahualpa plan his escape, having ordered his warriors to approach nearby, and he informed the marqués of this, telling him that Atahualpa planned to kill every single Spaniard.29

  Betanzos adds that both the royal treasurer Alonso de Riquelme and Almagro believed the story and pressed Pizarro to execute Atahualpa. He also mentions that Atahualpa thought Almagro a miserable man for not having given him a fine dagger he much admired, and which Almagro had worn at their first meeting.

  It is implausible, however, that Pizarro would have been swayed in his decision to execute Atahualpa by anyone’s demands. It was a simple question of political expediency. He no longer needed Atahualpa for the gathering of his booty. Nor did he feel secure with the thought of freeing him as he had promised. Only once he was dead would Huáscar’s defeated warriors march against his remaining armies. And it was Huáscar’s warriors, more than anyone else, who demanded Atahualpa’s execution.

  Pizarro’s brother Hernando, who would later claim to have disapproved of his action because it lacked the Crown’s authority, was at that time in the Isthmus and about to sail for Spain. Hernando de Soto, who had offered to take Atahualpa to Spain – ostensibly for the same reason and possibly to further his own influence at court – was also absent from Cajamarca, engaged in a scouting sortie to investigate Felipillo’s report, which proved to be without foundation.

  Pedro Pizarro recalled that Atahualpa broke down in tears, telling Pizarro that there was no truth in Felipillo’s story, and that not one single Indian in his entire empire ‘would dare urinate without his permission’. López de Jerez recorded the following dialogue between the two men:

  ‘What treachery is this?’ Pizarro shouted at Atahualpa, ‘forcing me to arm my men, having treated you with the honour of a brother?’

  Atahualpa replied: ‘Are you jesting with me? You are always making such jests. What reason would I have to annoy so valiant a company as you and your men? Do not jest with me.’

  He then records that Pizarro ordered a chain to be brought and placed round Atahualpa’s neck.30

  At approximately seven in the evening of 26 July, his neck, arms and feet manacled in chains, the Inca emperor was brought out of the chamber that had been his prison for almost eight months into the town’s darkened square, the central area of which had been illuminated by torches, where he was tied to a stake and made to sit on a stool in front of the entire assembly of conquistadores. A witness recorded that he had continually repeated in quéchua: ‘Why are they going to kill me? What have I or my sons or my wives ever done to them?’31 He was then addressed through an interpreter by the Friar Valverde and urged to accept baptism, but he made no reply until a Cañari tribesman whom Pizarro had appointed his executioner approached him. It was then, the horseman Lucas Martínez Vegazo recorded, that he began to cry out, entreating Valverde, as if he were agreeing with what had been demanded of him, and Valverde baptised him, giving him Pizarro’s name of Francisco, and telling him that because of his repentance he would not be burnt alive as had been decreed. He once more began to cry out, gesturing with his hands and indicating the height of his children whom he said were very young, and pleading with Valverde to commend their safety to Pizarro. ‘He wept and spoke to the interpreter,’ recalled Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, ‘and again he asked the marqués to care for his two sons and daughter he had left in Quito.’32 Many of the Inca lords and his women who had accompanied him in his imprisonment began to wail and to prostrate themselves on the ground, but by then the Cañari had been given the signal he had been waiting for and, with one wrench of each end of the rope he had tied around Atahualpa’s neck, garrotted him. All that night his body remained in the square, seated on the stool and tied to the stake, his head slumped to one side, his arms and legs covered in his blood.

  The events at Cajamarca were recorded by eight conquistadores
. They were men neither schooled as historians nor possessed of any literary pretensions, but who were among the few of Pizarro’s volunteers able to read and write. In a letter to the Audiencia of the island of Hispaniola, where he had stayed for a brief period on his return voyage to Spain, Hernando Pizarro had described only the principal events of his brother’s march to Cajamarca, an account which was the first to reach Spain. So self-centred was his report that he mentioned the name of no single conquistadore other than himself and his brother Pizarro. A copy of his letter was made by his brother’s old enemy the chronicler and genealogist Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, which the latter incorporated in his Historia General y Natural de las Indias, written c. 1550, in the island’s fortress of Santo Domingo, of which he was warden.

  The Castilian Cristóbal de Mena, a veteran of the conquest of Nicaragua, who because of his displeasure with Pizarro had returned to Spain immediately after the distribution of Atahualpa’s ransom, shortly afterwards published his Conquista del Perú, llamada la Nueva Castilla, one of the few chronicles highly critical of Pizarro. Mena was the first of the conquistadores from Cajamarca to return to Spain, and even though he had been present at Atahualpa’s killing had managed to reach Seville on 5 December 1533, four weeks before Hernando Pizarro. Other than a meeting he is recorded to have had with one of Almagro’s agents in Spain in 1536, nothing else is known of his life.

  Mena’s controversial account of the early Conquest was followed by the publication at Seville of Verdadera Relación de la Conquista del Perú by Pizarro’s secretary Francisco López de Jerez, and written partly as a refutation of Mena’s chronicle. It has always been assumed that because of a leg wound he had suffered during the capture of Atahualpa, López de Jerez had been forced to return to Spain directly from Cajamarca, arriving at the port of Seville, as he affirms in his chronicle, in June 1534. The few surviving records show that he married for a second time, to the daughter of an hidalgo family from Seville, and that in 1554, signing himself solely Francisco López, he was granted permission to return to Peru as notary to the Audiencia of Lima. It was a post historians have always believed he never filled, believing that he remained in Spain until his death, the place and date of which are unknown.

  His presence as notary to the Audiencia of Lima between 1559 and 1565, however, can be established by the words added to the final page of the conquistadore Mansio Serra de Leguizamón’s testimonial to the Crown: ‘inscribing my signature Francisco López, who had been among the men who had gone immediately afterwards [from Cajamarca] to place Cuzco under the royal jurisdiction, in the company of the reserves of the Captain Hernando de Soto and Mansio Serra and Martínez Vegazo as they marched southward from Vilcasbamba to Cuzco, all of which he witnessed’.33 The only other person at Cajamarca of the same name was an illiterate surgeon-barber who served on the later march to Cuzco, but only as far as Jauja. He returned to Spain in 1535.

  The foot soldier Pedro Sancho de la Hoz replaced López de Jerez as Pizarro’s secretary and was the author of Relación del Descubrimiento y Conquista del Perú, dated 1534, which he sent to the Emperor Charles V, the original manuscript of which has been lost. A copy was translated into Italian by the Venetian geographer Gian Battista Ramusio and published in 1550 in his third volume of Navigationi e Viaggi, an account of the discovery of the New World which to this day serves as a primary source for the history of the Americas. Sancho de la Hoz left for Spain two years after writing his chronicle, but like so many of the returning conquistadores he soon dissipated his share of the Cajamarca and Cuzco treasure, and was given permission to return to Peru in 1539. Eight years later, during the settlement of Chile, he was executed by one of the conquistadore Pedro de Valdivia’s captains on a charge of sedition, his head displayed in the main square of its capital at Santiago.

  Miguel de Estete, a Riojano from Santo Domingo de la Calzada, had been one of the men Hernando de Soto had brought with him from Nicaragua. During Atahualpa’s imprisonment he had accompanied Hernando Pizarro to the coastal temple at Pachacamac, his description of which López de Jerez incorporated in his chronicle. On his return to Spain in 1534 Estete settled at Valladolid, where he possibly wrote his account Noticia del Perú. The date and place of his death, too, are unknown.

  Juan Ruiz de Arce, an Extremaduran who had lived in Jamaica and in Honduras, returned to Spain a year after Cajamarca, where he was received at court. In the absence of the Emperor Charles V from the court he records that he and other conquistadores who had returned from Peru

  went to kiss the hands of the empress. She received us very well, thanking us for the services we had rendered, and offering to reward us; and so great was her kindness that anything we wished was given us, and there was not one disappointed man among us who left the court. There were twelve of us conquistadores in Madrid, and we each spent there a great deal of money. As the emperor was absent, the court was empty of his courtiers, so that each day we greatly enjoyed ourselves, though some of us remained without a penny. We jousted and took part in mounted cane fights, which were so splendid and grand it was something to admire. And after we had concluded our business there, each one of us marched off to his own village and land, and without much of the money we had originally brought with us.34

  As the manuscript he wrote for his children attests, Ruiz de Arce was one of the few conquistadores not to have squandered his fortune at court, retiring instead to his native township of Albuquerque. His account, consisting of seventeen folio pages, remained unknown until its discovery and publication in 1933.

  Pedro Pizarro and Diego de Trujillo were among the few veterans still alive and able to dictate their memoirs at the behest of the Viceroy Toledo. Pedro Pizarro sent his memoir, dated 7 February 1571, the following year to Spain, which was subsequently lost. Having participated in the events of the Conquest from the age of fifteen, when he had first enlisted as one of his kinsman’s volunteers in his native city of Toledo, he became one of the wealthiest encomenderos of Peru and one of the founders of its beautiful colonial city of Arequipa, where he died in 1587. Pedro Pizarro is recorded to have had ten legitimate children and one illegitimate mestiza daughter. In the early seventeenth century a copy of his manuscript was acquired from one of his descendants by the Jesuit chronicler Bernabé Cobo.

  Trujillo, who was illiterate and dictated his memoir, left Peru shortly after the Conquest with his share of booty for Spain, where he lived for some ten years in the township of his name in Extremadura. By then destitute, he returned to Peru, where because of his past service he was awarded a small encomienda, and lived out his days in Cuzco. An old man, seated outside his house like the old peasant he was, he became a familiar sight, recalling the glories of his past youth to whoever would listen to him. One of his redeeming virtues was the kindness he showed in his old age to the orphaned children of Atahualpa, Diego and Francisco Hillaquita. Abandoned in Cuzco’s monastery of Santo Domingo, where Almagro had taken them after bringing them from Quito, they had remained under the care of its Dominican friars, possibly earning their living simply as servants. Contrary to his promises to their father on the day of his execution, Pizarro made no provision for them. However, Trujillo obtained legal custody of the two boys and for several years gave them a home in his small house in Cuzco. His manuscript was discovered in 1934 in the library of the Royal Palace in Madrid.

  FOUR

  Cuzco

  From these realms has been taken such an infinity of gold and silver and pearls and riches to the kingdoms of Spain …

  The horseman Mansio Serra de Leguizamón

  By the time Hernando de Soto returned to Cajamarca an air of desolation had settled on the town, reflected in the faces of the conquistadores, who in the weeks since his departure had attempted as best they could to come to terms with the events that had taken place. Soto had ridden as far north as Cajas with his squadron of horse, but not a trace of the Inca army had been found.

  His reaction to Atahualpa’s death was voc
al and disparaging. He had been told of the manner in which the Inca emperor had died and how the following day his body had been taken to the makeshift chapel of the town, where he had been given a Christian burial in his baptised name of Francisco, a name chosen for him by the Friar Valverde in honour of Pizarro. He was also to learn how Atahualpa’s distraught wives had searched for his spirit in the chamber where they had shared his imprisonment, playing their drums and cymbals, and calling out his name, and that one of the women, Cuxirimay, had tried to kill herself, and that a number of others had killed themselves.

  The burial Mass had been said by the priest Francisco de Morales, who had come to Cajamarca with Almagro’s reinforcements and who would take back to Spain as a memento the tassel he had removed from the emperor’s headdress. A few of the conquistadores had collected other items of his clothing, which in the years to come would serve as family heirlooms and as proof of their presence at Cajamarca. It was a presence which in time established the nobility of Peru’s encomendero aristocracy, giving preference to those who had taken part in Atahualpa’s capture.

  Pizarro’s motive for ordering the killing of Atahualpa was soon made apparent with his decision to appoint a new emperor to unite the thousands of warriors from Huáscar’s defeated armies and from the subject tribes camped in the valley, whom he would need as auxiliaries on his march to Cuzco, the capture of which he knew was imperative for the success of the Conquest. Taking Cuzco was also paramount in the minds of Almagro’s men, who saw the sacking of the Inca capital as their only means of acquiring the wealth that had brought them so far afield, and from which as yet only Pizarro’s men had profited. Pizarro’s choice as emperor was Huáscar’s young brother Túpac Huallpa, who had sought shelter at Cajamarca, and who had been so scared of Atahualpa that he had slept on the floor of Pizarro’s chamber the entire time before the execution.