Civilizations

by Laurent Binet

  Atahualpa relaxed his pose, walked towards him, bent down, picked up the paintbrush, and handed it back to the artist.

  This is what actually happened, and not what Gómara claimed. In fact, he said many other things, too, that I think it best not to mention.

  And, on this subject, I hereby affirm that what is contained in this book is very truthful. These are not old tales of Mochicas and Chimus that stretch back seven hundred harvests: these events happened only yesterday, so to speak, and they happened precisely how and when I say they did.

  In any case, the question of the king’s fate remained in limbo. But Philip’s life now hung by a thread.

  Atahualpa had great plans for reforming Spain, which he believed he could accomplish only if he was fully invested with royal power, having rid himself of all dynastic obstacles.

  His advisers were taken aback: a reform? Religious? Again?

  Atahualpa’s response cannot be contradicted by Francisco de Gómara or Antonio de Guevara or Alonso de Santa Cruz or any other chronicler of the Fifth Quarter. He said: ‘Not religious. Agrarian.’

  40. Philip

  There are two of them, both very little; a chaperone guards them. Their father is dead, their mother far away. They are playing at the edge of the large pond in the Alcazar, with their little wooden boats. They are dreaming of glory, of storms and adventures. Philip sees himself at the head of a great fleet. He is sailing off to conquer the land of the pirates, with Quizquiz beside him, following his return. Marie, not wanting to be outdone, says: ‘First, we take Tunis. Then we take Algiers.’ Brother and sister argue over the capture of Barbarossa. The chaperone, dressed in black, watches them tenderly.

  A letter from Lisbon says their mother is on her way with her little brother Luis, Duke of Beja, their uncle, who is bringing them twenty-three caravels. But it is Doria, the old admiral, who excites their imagination, leading his Genoan galleys. And those funny Indians, where are they?

  Quizquiz is setting fire to Toledo.

  Higuénamota is sleeping with the king of France, who will send ten thousand men.

  Manco is arriving in Brussels, with his Valencian Moriscos, after a long march.

  Ruminahui is on his way to Barcelona, where troops are gathering.

  In the cool of the palace, where King Peter the Cruel once sat on the throne, Atahualpa pores over maps and drawings, surrounded by his engineers, absorbed in vast landscaping plans for the cultivation of corn and papa in the mountains of Spain. In the south, the Sierra Nevada, which he knows well after crossing it while fleeing Granada. In the north, the Pyrenees, home to his friend Marguerite of Navarre. For a long, long time he fled; now he will build. His eyes are red, as usual.

  From a window of the palace, Chalco Chimac observes the two children. His gaze is black, as is his heart.

  Chalco Chimac was a terrible thing.

  He goes down into the garden and whispers something to the chaperone. The old woman turns pale but does what she is bid. She makes some excuse and takes Marie away. The little girl protests, she doesn’t understand, she wants to keep playing, she would even like to fight but worries about creasing her pretty dress. In the end, she gives in and follows the old woman.

  Philip is not a bad child, but deep inside he is thrilled to have the pond to himself. Nobody to contest his orders. He and he alone commands the little boats. With a palm leaf picked up in the garden, he creates waves in the pond, making his toys move. The waves spread. His ships sail across the water.

  He hasn’t noticed Chalco Chimac behind him. His dog Sempere is sleeping peacefully.

  Little Philip is light, he is leaning over the water; one hand is enough. The sound is not much louder than a falling stone. The child’s cries wake the dog, which understands, and barks, helpless. The scene drags on, horrifyingly. Guards come running but, seeing their general standing motionless beside the pond, they withdraw cautiously. Then the little boy falls silent. He floats, face down. The dog’s barks change to plaintive whines.

  At that very moment, Isabella is sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar, happy at having seen her brothers again, at the prospect of seeing her children.

  Still engrossed in his plans for agrarian reform, Atahualpa talks passionately about local crops and those little white llamas that one sees all over the Spanish countryside.

  Disturbed by the unusual agitation in its pond, a swan flies over the Inca. He does not look up.

  Chalco Chimac was a terrible thing, in the service of his master.

  41. Tunis

  Everything became easier once Philip was dead.

  The Cortes of Castile and Aragon, buried in Tawantinsuyu gold, proclaimed Atahualpa I king of Spain, Naples and Sicily. For the sake of convenience, he agreed to be baptised, since the Levantines took this ritual so seriously. He was given the name Antonio, although that is not how history has remembered him because everyone, whether friends or enemies, with the exception of certain old Castilian Christians, went on calling him by his real name.

  What history remembers are his promises to the Cortes. Like his predecessor, he swore that he was determined to live and die in Spain. We have seen how he kept his word.

  What followed was a policy of marriages, intended to strengthen the Incas’ position in Europe.

  Isabella, destroyed by her son’s death, did not have the strength to deny Atahualpa’s request a second time; and so Charles Quint’s widow became his secondary wife. The ceremony was more solemn than joyous, since she was still in mourning. In order not to deepen the bride’s sadness, it took place not in Seville’s cathedral – where Charles’s remains now rested – but in Córdoba’s. Inca pomp met royal Spanish pomp. The king of Spain placed sandals on the feet of his new bride, then llamas were sacrificed, as custom dictated. Crates of jewellery were delivered to the queen.

  In happier circumstances, Quispe Sisa married Lorenzino and went with him to Italy. As his wedding gift, Atahualpa appointed the young man Duke of Florence in place of his cousin Alexander, who – having lost the support of Charles Quint – had to leave the city as the people threw stones and yelled insults at him.

  Manco was promised to the daughter of Marguerite of Navarre, little Jeanne d’Albret.

  Young Charles Capac would marry Marie, daughter of Charles Quint and Isabella of Portugal, granddaughter of Joanna the Mad and Philip the Handsome, great-granddaughter of the Catholic monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.

  Toledo fell under a rain of pebbles reddened in fire like embers. Quizquiz’s catapults and his endless reserves of gunpowder finally overcame the rebels’ resistance. Antonio de Leyva was thrown alive from the battlements. Cobos and Granvelle were spared death after swearing allegiance to Atahualpa. Tavera refused to submit to this oath and was hanged after first being whipped. The traitor Sepúlveda was thrown into a dark cellar filled with snakes and his skin, having been peeled from his corpse, was used to make a drum that was sent to the Inca.

  With Atahualpa having been baptised, the Tunis expedition was blessed by the Pope. Barbarossa’s fleet, massively outnumbered, was routed and sunk. The port of La Goulette was taken after a hard, month-long siege. Atahualpa was from the north, so had never experienced the deserts in Chile; he suffered from the heat and thirst but did not let it show. Once they were in possession of La Goulette, the way was open to Tunis, where the pirate Barbarossa, named captain-general of the sea by Suleiman, had barricaded himself with five thousand Janissaries, his elite Turkish troops. His position appeared unassailable; the men were suffering in the heat and with illness, and Atahualpa was losing patience, when a slave revolt rescued him. Twenty thousand Christians, held in the city’s prisons, rose up against their masters and ran to the castle gates.

  Pedro Pizarro was the first to enter the city, at the head of a regiment of Moriscos from the Albaicín that had been trained by Ruminahui. Beside him, Puka Amaru – who, after almost killing the young Pedro in Toledo, had since become his most faithful lieutenant �
�� smashed skulls with his star-headed club. Tintoretto painted that scene, and the red-headed Quitonian found fame.

  Unleashed on their former masters, the twenty thousand Christian slaves ravaged the beautiful Berber city. And so Atahualpa made his entrance into a mass grave, a city of corpses and smoking ruins. Even so, he saluted this resounding victory by yelling Charles Quint’s old motto, three times over, to his troops: ‘Further! Further! Further!’ A huge roar echoed the words back to him.

  The triumph was not total, however, because Barbarossa managed to escape. Tunis itself was of no great value; Atahualpa needed to clean up the whole Barbary Coast. The child, Luis of Portugal, insisted that they should flush the pirate out from his lair in Algiers. Atahualpa would have liked to grant his new brother-in-law’s wishes, but for reasons of his own, he did not want this affair to drag on.

  With Suleiman weakened, and further preoccupied by a new war against the Persians, the pressure on Ferdinand had lessened on the eastern front, allowing him to attack in the west. Having come into possession of a kingdom, the Inca was in no mood to lose it. Moulay Hassan, a Moor who had been Sultan of Tunis before being expelled by Barbarossa, had his privileges restored in return for signing a treaty that made his kingdom a tributary of Spain. After all, Atahualpa had liberated Tunis from the Turks’ yoke. The regiment of Moriscos from the Albaicín was left to garrison the city.

  The fleet took to sea again and set sail for Sicily. The reception he received in Palermo allowed Atahualpa to gauge the impact of his victorious campaign. Suddenly, the Inca had become a Christian hero. A triumphal arch was built in his honour. The Pope sent his congratulations. Everyone compared him to a certain Scipio. Alonso de Santa Cruz, who had not yet become a historian but was at the time only a cartographer, had drawn a map that would be used by the painter Vermeyen for a monumental tapestry entitled The Conquest of Tunis. And the black drink flowed freely.

  42. The Mita

  Atahualpa exhausted the delights of Palermo before returning to Seville, loaded with crates of Sicilian wine.

  Manco’s reports informed him that the people of Flanders were extremely hostile to the deported Moriscos, and the regent, Mary of Hungary, had not extended the warm welcome that her position as a subject of the king of Spain might have led them to expect. Then Manco had gone to Germany. There, in the Lutheran-held regions, it was even worse: following a demand from Luther himself to ‘battle the demonic forces’, the Moriscos were massacred, only a few of them escaping. Manco, too, was almost killed. Atahualpa merely ordered him to go to Navarre to present gifts to Marguerite, his future mother-in-law. In truth, he was still indifferent to the troubles in the north. He had not yet grasped how much was at stake.

  He was reassured by a letter from Lorenzino in Florence: Atahualpa’s reputation now shone so brightly in the Fifth Quarter that Ferdinand himself would not dare attack the saviour of Christianity any time soon, out of fear that he would be universally condemned and banished from Europe. That was all he wanted to know.

  Finally, the Inca could devote himself to his secret passion. All monarchs, of course, are intoxicated by their conquests. But Atahualpa had understood this truth: it is more difficult to reign than to wage war. His ancestor Cusi Yupanqui had shrunk the borders of the Empire more than any other sovereign. But the name that posterity had bestowed on him reflected the nature of his legacy: Pachacuti. Remaker of the World.

  In reality Atahualpa’s ambitions went far beyond a bit of landscaping in the Sierra Nevada. His brother Huascar was sending him entire shiploads of riffraff from the dregs of the Empire – Collas, Chachapoyas, Chimus, Canaris, Caras – precisely because Atahualpa needed manpower on a massive scale. Wherever land remained unexploited – on mountainsides, on snowy peaks, on arid plains; places where nobody had ever thought to grow anything at all – he, Atahualpa, would plant corn, quinoa and papas, the last of which had become so popular in the Fifth Quarter that the French called them pommes de terre: apples of the earth. All these vast solitudes were covered with crops; networks of canals were dug to irrigate land that had been written off as sterile.

  The sheep, those little white llamas that proliferated all over Spain, had been a parasite on the earth for far too long. Atahualpa considered them responsible for those bare, dry, dusty landscapes. He had entire flocks slaughtered. The new king of Spain did not want a population of shepherds. He wanted his nation to take root.

  He created granaries. The meat of the slaughtered sheep was cut into strips, salted, dried. The grains of corn and quinoa were turned into flour. The potato tubers were frozen at night and dried during the day so that they could be conserved for several moons. Food supplies were kept in earthenware jars or buried in deep holes.

  With these reserves, he would be able to feed anyone who was hungry in times of scarcity, plague or ruined harvests.

  Spanish peasants began chewing coca, increasing their resistance to fatigue and providing them with added medicinal benefits. (It is true that some abused it, and they soon sank into a stupor.)

  Atahualpa put an end to the system of land rent and rewarded the merchants who funded the army with loans.

  He abolished most taxes and handed out plots of land to peasants, assembled into ayllus, or to already established communities such as the comunidades, leaving each group to divide up the work and goods for itself.

  In exchange, he developed a system of chores that replaced the taxes, based on the mita in Tawantinsuyu. The peasants had to devote part of their time to work the Inca’s land, as well as the Sun’s (which were also owned by the Inca, as his representative on earth, although he delegated their management to the leaders of the cult). Each of these periods was marked by new celebrations that brightened the lives of the populace.

  This vast enterprise of redistribution had repercussions throughout society. Many Catholic priests abandoned their nailed god and transformed their churches into Temples of the Sun in order to benefit from the new system. For the same reasons, convents were turned into houses of Chosen Women.

  Craftsmen were subject to similar obligations: they had to devote part of their time to the collective effort (masonry, ironwork, bridges, canals, etc.) or to the personal service of the Inca (pottery, goldsmithing, textiles, etc.) – which, ultimately, amounted to the same thing.

  Every ayllu or community had to feed, house and heal the disabled, the elderly, the widowed and the sick.

  The fruits of the land belonged to those who worked it, even if there was a surplus, but the land itself did not. The distribution of land was regularly reviewed and adjusted according to need. If the population of a group fell, the land they were allotted shrank proportionately. And if the population rose, they were given extra land so that the group could feed the extra mouths. When there was too much variation between the sizes of the groups, there would be a redistribution of people. Armies of quipucamayocs kept accounts in their registers: men, women and children were so many little knots tied to coloured cords that formed the fringes of the quipus.

  Here and there, people bridled against these obligations; occasionally, there were revolts, which were severely punished.

  The Inca’s envoys, his governors, his curacas, and even some hidalgos that he recruited specifically for this purpose, were given the task of spreading his message throughout all the villages and towns of Castile and Aragon: namely, that the lands he took were not those that the Levantines needed, but those that they didn’t know what to do with, the ones they couldn’t work; that the only tribute he expected from them was the harvest of these lands, which he had prepared at his own cost; that, in fact, he was giving them his own goods by distributing to them what remained after providing for the upkeep of his army and his court; that the pointless dissentions and the disputes that used to arise between them had all disappeared; that, effectively, their entire kingdom could be certain that nobody – not the rich, not the poor, not the great, not the small – would have any cause for complaint.

 
Lastly, Atahualpa decreed that every peasant, on his wedding day, would receive a pair of llamas as a gift from his king.

  43. The Prince

  However, the Inca’s reign was still in its early days, and what he failed to realise was that this newness itself made him vulnerable. The son of the Sun did not command the same respect here as in his native land.

  ‘Nothing makes a prince so well esteemed as undertaking great enterprises and setting a fine example,’ said Machiavelli in his talking sheets.

  The new king took care not to diminish the privileges of Spain’s noble families. He distributed Golden Fleeces, a highly prized distinction that cost him nothing and possessed the advantage of binding him to whomever received it. It is true that they were few in number and had little in the way of resources, but the Spanish nobility constituted a potential source of danger, all the same, and it was expedient to keep them entertained.

  Atahualpa drank down the words of this Machiavelli because he had the feeling that he was telling Atahualpa’s own story through that of another man: ‘We have in our time Ferdinand of Aragon, the present King of Spain. He can almost be called a new prince, because he has risen, by fame and glory, from being an insignificant king to be the foremost king in Christendom; and if you will consider his deeds you will find them all great and some of them extraordinary. In the beginning of his reign he attacked Granada, and this enterprise was the foundation of his dominions. He did this quietly at first and without any fear of hindrance, for he held the minds of the barons of Castile occupied in thinking of the war and not anticipating any innovations; thus they did not perceive that by these means he was acquiring power and authority over them.’

  So it was that the Inca had, without knowing it, walked in the footsteps of this glorious predecessor, the grandfather of Charles, whose crown he had taken, and of Ferdinand, who claimed it was his by right.