Pizarro

by Stuart Stirling

  Within three years Gasca’s legacy would once more throw Peru into civil war with an abortive rebellion at La Plata of the encomendero Sebastián de Castilla, who had so grandly accompanied Gonzalo on his entry into Lima, and who later betrayed him. Eight months afterwards 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. The 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 the famous Nazca lines, north of Arequipa. A month later he was defeated at Pucará, north of Lake Titicaca, by an army led by Lima’s judges. Captured and taken to Lima where he was hung, his decapitated head was placed in an iron cage alongside 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 the entire conquest of the Inca empire and which, albeit for a brief period, had witnessed America’s first independent state.

  The rebellions of Peru were recorded by four contemporary chroniclers; there was also 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, penned in the early part of the seventeenth century. The first account was published by Agustín de Zárate, who had lived in Lima at the outset of the insurrection. Many of the events concerning the Conquest, which he also wrote about, he had researched while staying with the conquistadore Nicolás de Ribera, the ‘old man’. 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 in his native city of Valladolid he wrote his history, Historia del Descubrimiento y Conquista de la Provincia 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 authorised its publication. A year afterwards Zárate’s history was published in the Netherlands, and twenty-six years later sections of it were 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 was of either Spanish or Mexican mestizo parentage, had probably served as a conscript in the loyalist army. Though some historians believe he was never in Peru, it appears implausible that his superbly descriptive and colourful account of Gonzalo’s rebellion, which is by far the most accurate, could have been recorded on simple hearsay. Either it was completely plagiarised from an unknown eyewitness or it was written by him. A talented linguist, Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, included a vocabulary of quéchua in his account Historia de las Guerras Civiles del Perú. Almost nothing is known of his life, other than that 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 transcribed and 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. His manuscript, which also contained a brief though inaccurate outline of Inca history, was published in Seville in 1571.

  Pedro de Cieza de León is regarded not only as the foremost historian of the rebellions and of the Conquest, but of Inca civilisation. Born in Extremadura, though by adoption a native of Seville, where his family had 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 Hernando Pizarro had brought back with him to Spain. In 1536 Cieza de León was made an encomendero of Urute, in Colombia, 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 would later record 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 would form 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, and leaving as his literary heir the great Dominican reformer Bartolomé de las Casas. Only within the last hundred years or so 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 in the early seventeenth century the official historian of the Council of the Indies Antonio de Herrera extensively plagiarised.

  Fourteen years before Cieza de León’s death his patron Pedro de Gasca was buried in the church of La Magdalena at Valladolid. On the walls of the church’s façade can still be seen the rebel banners of Gonzalo’s army which he had taken with him on his journey home, sculpted and surmounting the coat of arms his grateful emperor had awarded him.

  Whatever Gonzalo Pizarro’s shortcomings and the trail of blood left by him and his mentor Carbajal, he had demonstrated that the lands of New Castile and the Panamanian Isthmus could survive independently of the mother country, and that their wealth could be retained for their own betterment and prosperity. It was a dream few would aspire to in the centuries to come, and not until Simón Bolívar’s triumphant entry into the former Inca capital three hundred years later would it become a reality, a dream for which Gonzalo paid with his life on the plains of Jaquijahuana.

  TEN

  Inca Princesses, Courtesans and Wives

  of Pizarro’s Conquistadores

  I was born as a flower of the field,

  as a flower I was cherished in my youth.

  I came to full age, I grew old;

  Now I am withered and die.

  Inca memory poem

  The earliest surviving records of the Inca princesses, the daughters and nieces of the Emperor Huayna Cápac, are to be found in the eyewitness accounts of Pizarro’s conquistadores at Cajamarca, where some of them had formed part of Atahualpa’s large harem of concubines. Some were his sisters and cousins, others were simply his mistresses who were not of Inca royal blood, but daughters of his principal caciques. Pedro Pizarro recalled that almost all of them were exceptionally beautiful.

  The most important Inca princess at Cajamarca was Atahualpa’s half-sister Quispe Sisa, who after her baptism at Jauja was known as Doña Inés, and who was Pizarro’s mistress and the mother of his two children Francisca and Gonzalo, born at Jauja and at Lima.

  Shortly after the unsuccessful siege of Pizarro’s new capital by the Emperor Manco, Pizarro rid himself of his mistress, marrying her off to his servant Francisco de Ampuero, who would become one of Lima’s wealthiest encomenderos. Separated from her children, who were brought up in the Spanish household of Pizarro’s sister-in-law, the young and vivacious Inca princess was to live out her days as a maltreated wife in fear of her psychopathic husband.

  On 26 February 1547 a large crowd gathered in the main square of the City of the Kings to witness the execution of an Indian sorceress known as the witch Yanque. Among the officials standing on the square’s podium, waiting to witness the execution, was the city’s alderman Francisco de Ampuero, the victim of the witch’s enchantments. Standing
beside him, dressed in her native costume, was his Indian wife, an Inca princess; it was she who had instigated the acts of witchcraft, but she had been pardoned by the city’s magistrate at the behest of her husband. Most of the colonists assembled in the square had also attended the lengthy court hearing, in which the sorceress and her accomplice, the princess’s African slave Simón, had been interrogated by the public prosecutor and admitted their guilt after being tortured.

  The descriptions they gave both startled and infuriated the spectators, as they related how they had magically summoned Alderman Ampuero’s shadow and cast a spell restraining him from beating and maltreating his wife. But the alderman’s wife had again complained to the sorceress that her husband had continued in his maltreatment of her and this was the reason, the witch Yanque claimed, why she had been forced to conjure the devil himself, in the form of a four-legged animal. Both of the prisoners had received the severest sentences, while their client was left to the mercy of her husband.

  At precisely six o’clock that evening a small wooden cart drawn by four Indians entered the main square. Seated with her head bowed and wearing a yellow coned hat, on which was written the word ‘Blasphemer’, was the witch Yanque, who was then tied to a stake, surrounded by kindling, which was set ablaze.

  Nothing more is recorded of the Inca princess until eight years later, when she attended the same courtroom as a witness on behalf of the orphaned children of her brother, the former Emperor Atahualpa. In faltering Castilian she gave her name as Doña Inés, and declared that her Indian name had been Quispe Sisa, and that she was Atahualpa’s sister and the wife of the Spaniard Francisco de Ampuero, alderman and encomendero of the city.1

  After discarding Doña Inés, Pizarro began a relationship with her cousin Cuxirimay, Doña Angelina, by whom he had two sons, Francisco and Juan, born either at Lima or at Cuzco. Pizarro married neither of the princesses; possibly for the simple reason of the inbuilt racism common to most Spaniards, evidenced by the fact that only one of his more prominent conquistadores, Alonso de Mesa, in his old age eventually married a native woman. Not even the wealthy Cuzco encomendero Diego Maldonado, whose mistress the Inca Princess Doña Lucía Clara was the mother of his sons and heirs, contemplated such an action, preferring to seek a young Spanish bride, who, because of his old age and impotency, never gave him the legitimate Spanish heir he so much desired.2

  The fate of the other Inca princesses who had been at Cajamarca was no less humiliating. Hernando de Soto’s mistress, the Princess Doña Leonor, the mother of his daughter, was abandoned by him in Cuzco on his return to Spain. Eventually married to a humble Spanish armourer known as Baptista, el galán, the handsome, she experienced the horror of seeing him hung by Alonso de Toro, Gonzalo Pizarro’s governor, because of which, according to the testimony of the Morisca Beatriz de Salcedo, ‘seeing herself abandoned and without a husband, [she] died from sheer anger’.3

  Little is known of the life of Pizarro’s mistress Doña Angelina, other than that after Pizarro’s murder she was allowed to take her two young sons with her to Cuzco. There she later married the Spanish quéchua interpreter Juan Díez de Betanzos, who had served Carbajal during the Gonzalist rebellion as his treasurer and clerk, accompanying him throughout his murderous campaign in the Charcas. A native of Valladolid, on the strength of his wife being the mother of Pizarro’s mestizo sons Betanzos was awarded an encomienda by the governor Vaca de Castro, for whose inquiry into the origins of the Incas commissioned at Cuzco Betanzos had acted as interpreter to the city’s quipucamayoc and Inca lords. From much of the evidence he collected at the inquiry and from his wife’s relatives, he wrote his history Summa y Narración de los Incas, one of the earliest accounts of the Inca people and their culture. The first part of his manuscript was discovered in the library of the Escorial and was published in 1880. A second section, which had been in the library of the Dukes of Medinacelí, was discovered in Mallorca and first published in 1987. A dictionary of quéchua which he wrote as a foreword to his history has never been found.

  None of these princesses, however, was regarded by the Inca nobility as coyas, the legitimate daughters of the Emperor Huayna Cápac and his sister-queen Rahua Ocllo, as their mothers had been his concubines. Other than Princess Azarpay, who was later garrotted and killed by Pizarro in order to placate his mistress Doña Inés’s jealousy during the siege of Lima, only two of Huayna Cápac’s legitimate daughters survived Atahualpa’s massacre at Cuzco. Betanzos names them as the coyas Marca Chimbo (Doña Juana), and Quispiquipi (Doña Beatriz). The purity of their lineage is also verified in the testimonial of Doña Beatriz’s eldest son and the evidence given by the Inca lords.4

  Both girls, then possibly ten and nine years old, had been imprisoned by Quisquis after his capture of their brother the Emperor Huáscar and were intended for Atahualpa’s harem. The Emperor Manco was also to regard the girls as trophies because of their superior lineage, and on entering Cuzco with Pizarro he took possession of them.

  Some time before Diego de Almagro set off from Cuzco on his expedition to Chile, one of the missionaries who accompanied him recorded that Manco gave Almagro ‘a great quantity of gold and also one of his sisters, Marca Chimbo, a daughter of Huayna Cápac, who was the most important woman in the kingdom, and who, had she been a man, would have inherited the Inca realm; and she gave Almagro a cavern filled with gold and silver, which in bars weighed 27,000 pesos alone; and to another captain she gave from the same cavern the equivalent of 12,000 pesos of silver; and not even by these acts was she honoured by the Spaniards, being raped various times, for she was of a mild and gentle disposition and very beautiful, though later marked with syphilis.’5

  The next recorded mention of the Princess Doña Juana is as the mistress of Almagro’s secretary and treasurer Juan Balsa, who accompanied him at his execution and acted as the main executor of his will, and who was the father of her son Juan. Balsa was one of the conspirators of Pizarro’s murder and took a full part in his killing at Lima. He was soon after appointed by the younger Almagro as the commander of his army.

  At the Battle of Chupas, his mistress Doña Juana, mounted on a mule and holding their newly born child in her arms, witnessed his killing at the hands of his own Indian auxiliaries as he tried to make his escape. Regarded as part of the rebel booty she was given to the elderly Spanish interpreter Francisco de Villacastín, he whom Garcilaso de la Vega described as having his front teeth missing. Villacastín, though an insignificant figure in the early years of the Conquest, during Gonzalo’s rebellion became one of his most ardent supporters in Cuzco and was awarded by him the office of mayor of the city.

  It was during this period that Doña Juana was able to enjoy a level of luxury and position in Cuzco’s colonial society she had only briefly experienced during the younger Almagro’s rebellion as Juan Balsa’s mistress. However, at Jaquijahuana her husband Villacastín was exiled to Spain for life and died shortly afterwards in Cuzco’s jail, leaving her once more a widow and impoverished. The year of her death is unknown.

  Her son Juan Balsa was one of the leading mestizos in Cuzco and associated with a number of minor insurrections of mestizos, at one point betraying both the Spaniards to his Inca cousins at Vilcabamba, and later acting as one of the Spanish guides into the lost city at the time of its second invasion.6

  Also living at Cuzco in the early years of the colony was the Princess Chimpu Ocllo, Doña Isabel, a niece of Huayna Cápac. It would be through the writing of her son Garcilaso that much of the history of the Inca people would be made known to seventeenth-century Europe. For most of her early adult life Doña Isabel had been the mistress of the Extremaduran hidalgo Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega, who had arrived in Peru at the time of the siege of Cuzco. After serving under Gonzalo Pizarro in the conquest of the Collasuyo he had been awarded an encomienda at Tapacarí in the valley of Cochabamba, and though he had initially been opposed to Gonzalo’s rebellion he had later served under him until his desertio
n at Jaquijahuana. Pardoned by Gasca, he subsequently became corregidor of Cuzco and married a Spanish noblewoman: by then the aspiration of most of the better bred conquistadores who claimed hidalgo lineage.

  His mestizo son Garcilaso was born in Cuzco in 1539 and baptised with the family name of Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, though he would later adopt his father’s name. His education, together with that of other mestizo sons of conquistadores, was entrusted to Juan de Cuéllar, a canon of Cuzco, who in 1552 established a small school in the city. Among their fellow students were the sons of the murdered Pedro del Barco and Pedro de Candía, Pizarro’s old comrade, and Pizarro’s own son by Doña Angelina, Francisco. So proud was the canon of his charges, Garcilaso recalled years later, that he had wished he could have sent each of them to the University of Salamanca.

  A year after his father’s death in 1559, by then aged nineteen, Garcilaso left Cuzco for Spain and was never to return. After serving against the Morisco uprising in Andalucía in 1570, in the army of Don Juan of Austria, who a year later would destroy the Turkish fleet at Lepanto, he settled in the township of Montilla, and then at Córdoba. Far removed from his homeland, the former pupil of canon Cuéllar’s small school at Cuzco was to write one of the greatest narrative histories of the Americas, Los Comentarios Reales de los Incas and its sequel Historia General del Perú, a work that would influence the perception of Inca civilisation for centuries afterwards.