Despite his 64 years, Pizarro fought with the verve of youth, and the conspirators were unable to get past a door defended by the marquis and his four companions, who emulated his brio and his bravery.
“Traitors! Why do you want to kill me? How shameful! Attacking my house like brigands!” Pizarro shouted in a fury, brandishing his sword. As he wounded one of the conspirators whom Rada had pushed toward him, Martín de Bilbao ran his sword through his neck.
The conqueror of Peru uttered only one word: “Jesus!” and fell, tracing a cross of blood on the ground with his finger and kissing it.
Then Juan Rodríguez Barragõn broke a jug of Guadalajara earthenware over his head, and don Francisco Pizarro breathed his last.
Martín de Alcõntara and the two pages died with him, and Ortiz de Zõrate was left badly wounded.
The conspirators later tried to take Pizarro’s body away and drag it through the plaza, but the pleas of the bishop of Quito and the influence of Juan de Rada prevented this barbarous act. During the night two humble servants of the marquis washed the body; dressed it in the habit of the Order of Santiago but did not put the marquis’s gold spurs on for they had disappeared; dug a grave on the site of what today is the cathedral, in the courtyard that is still called the Patio de los Naranjos,6and buried the corpse. Pizarro’s bones today lie beneath the main altar of the cathedral in a velvet–lined chest with gold clasps. At least that is the general belief.
Once the murder had been committed, those responsible for it proceeded to the Plaza de Armas, shouting: “Long live the king! The tyrant is dead! Long live Almagro! May justice be done on earth!” And Juan de Rada rubbed his hands together in satisfaction, saying: “O happy day when it was seen that Marshal Almagro had loyal friends to take their vengeance on his murderer!”
Jerónimo de Aliaga, the factor Illõn Suõrez de Carbajal, the municipal magistrate Nicolõs de Ribera the Elder, and many of the eminent citizens of Lima were immediately imprisoned. The residences of the marquis, his brother Alcõntara, and Picado were sacked. The booty from the first of these was estimated to be 100,000 pesos, that of the second 15,000 pesos, and that of the third 40,000.
By three in the afternoon, more than 200 of Almagro’s supporters had set up a new municipal government, installed Almagro the Younger in the palace with the title of governor until the king ordered otherwise, recognized Cristóbal de Sotela as lieutenant governor, and given command of the army to Juan de Rada.
The Mercedarian friars, who in Lima as in Cuzco were supporters of Almagro, carried their monstrance in procession and hastened to recognize the new government. The friars always played a large role in the quarrels of the conquistadors. It was they who turned the pulpit of the church of Santo Espíritu into a platform for slandering the side that did not share their sympathies. And as proof of the influence that the sermons had on the soldiery, we shall copy a letter that Francisco Girón7 sent to Father Baltasar Melgarejo. The letter reads: “Most Magnificent and Reverend Sir: I have learned that Your Paternity does me more battle with his tongue than do soldiers with their arms. I beg you to be so kind as to remedy this, for otherwise, God granting me victory, Your Paternity will oblige me to turn a blind eye to our friendship and to the position that Your Paternity holds, the most magnificent and reverend person of whom may He keep. From this my camp at Pachamac. Your servant kisses the hand of Your Paternity. Francisco Hernõndez Girón.”
A historical observation. Rada was always the soul of the conspiracy, and Almagro the Younger was ignorant of all the plans of his supporters. He was not consulted regarding the murder of Pizarro, and the young leader played no role in it save to accept it as an accomplished fact.
Once Mayor Velõzquez found himself in prison, he was helped to escape by his brother the bishop of Cuzco, Fray Vicente Valverde, that fanatic of the Dominican order who exerted such influence with regard to the capture and torture of Atahualpa.8The two brothers then boarded ship to go join Vaca de Castro, but on the island of La Punõ the Indians shot them to death with their arrows, together with 17 Spaniards. We do not know for certain whether the Church venerates Father Valverde among its martyrs.
Velõzquez went from the frying pan into the fire. The Knights of the Cape would not have forgiven him either.
At the first signs of revolt, Antonio Picado hid in the house of the treasurer Riquelme. His place of refuge having been discovered the following day, Almagro’s supporters came to seize him. Riquelme said to them: “I do not know where señor Picado is,” even as with his eyes he made signs for them to look for him under the bed. My pen declines to comment on such a base act.
The Knights of the Cape, headed by Juan de Rada and with the consent of don Diego, set themselves up as a tribunal. Each of them threw up to Picado the insults to which he had been subjected when as Pizarro’s secretary Picardo was all–powerful; he was then tortured to make him reveal where the marquis had hidden treasure; and finally, on September 29, he was beheaded in the Plaza de Armas with the following proclamation, read aloud by Cosme Ledesma, a Spanishspeaking black, to the roll of drums and accompanied by four soldiers with pikes and two others with matchlock harquebuses: “His Majesty has ordered the death of this man because he has been a troublemaker in this realm; and because he burned or seized many royal decrees, concealing them since they would bring harm to the marquis; and because he was extorting and had extorted as bribes from the country a large sum of gold pesos.”
The oath of the Knights of the Cape had been kept to the letter. And the famous cape served as Antonio Picado’s shroud.
III
The End of the Twelve Knights of the Cape and Their Leader
It is not our intention to go into details concerning the 14 months and a half that Almagro the Younger acted as caudillo, or to write a history of the campaign that Vaca de Castro was obliged to undertake to vanquish him. Hence we shall speak only briefly of the principal events.
With few sympathies among the residents of Lima, don Diego found himself forced to abandon the city in order to reinforce his troops in Guamanga and Cuzco, where he had many supporters. Days before beginning his retreat, Francisco de Chaves came to him with a complaint, and seeing that no remedy for it was forthcoming, he said to him: “I do not wish to be your friend any longer, and I return to you my sword and my horse.” Juan de Rada arrested him for insubordination, and had him beheaded immediately. Thus ended the life of one of the Knights of the Cape.
Juan de Rada, worn out by his years and his tribulations, died in Jauja as the campaign began. This was a fatal blow to the rebel cause.
García de Alvarado replaced him as general, and Cristóbal de Sotelo was named field marshal.
Discord soon broke out between the two heads of the army, and as Sotelo lay ill, García de Alvarado went to demand satisfaction for certain bits of gossip that had come his way. “I do not recall having said anything about you or about the Alvarados,” the marshal answered. “But if I have said something, I shall say it again, because, being who I am, I couldn’t care less about the Alvarados. And wait until I have recovered from the fever that has laid me low before you ask me for further explanations at sword’s point.” Thereupon the impetuous García de Alvarado committed the villainy of wounding Sotelo, and one of García’s partisans finished him off. Such was the death of the second Knight of the Cape.
Almagro the Younger would have liked to punish the treacherous murderer immediately, but it was not an easy undertaking. García de Alvarado, proud of his prestige among the troops, was plotting to rid himself of don Diego, and then, depending on what best suited him, either fight Vaca de Castro or come to an agreement with him. Almagro craftily dissembled, won Alvarado’s trust, and succeeded in luring him to a banquet that Pedro de San Millõn was giving in Cuzco. There, in the middle of the feast, a confidant of don Diego’s threw himself upon don García, saying to him:
“You’re a prisoner!”
“Not a prisoner, dead,” Almagro added and stabbed
him, with the other guests finishing him off.
Thus three of the Knights of the Cape left this world before doing battle with the enemy. It was written in the stars that all of them would die a violent death, bathed in their own blood.
Meanwhile, the decisive moment was approaching, and Vaca de Castro made peace overtures to Almagro and declared an amnesty, from which only the nine Knights of the Cape who were still alive, and two or three Spaniards besides, were excepted.
On Sunday, September 16, 1542, the civil war ended with the bloody battle of Chupas. Almagro, at the head of 500 men, was almost the victor over the 800 who were following the colors of Vaca de Castro. During the first hour victory seemed to favor the side of the young leader, for Diego de Hoces, who was in command of one wing of his army, totally routed a division on the other side. Without the daring of Francisco de Carbajal, who restored order in the ranks of Vaca de Castro and in addition to that, had it not been for the lack of experience or the treason of Pedro de Candia, who was in command of Almagro’s artillery, the victory of the men from Chile would have been assured.
The number of dead on both sides was over 240, and the number of wounded was also considerable. In view of such a small a number of combatants, carnage such as that can be explained only by keeping in mind that the supporters of young Almagro had for their leader the same fanatical devotion that they had professed for his father the marshal, and it is a well–known fact that fanaticism for a cause has always made for heroes and martyrs.
Those were indeed the days when great valor was needed to enter the fray. Battles ended in hand–to–hand combat, and strength, skill, and high morale determined the outcome.
Firearms were three centuries away from rifles with a firing pin and were, rather, a bother for the soldier, who could not use his musket or harquebus unless he was equipped with a steel, a flint, and tinder for lighting the fuse. Artillery was in its infancy; if stone–throwing mortars or falconets were of any use, it was to make noise as did petards. In a word, gunpowder was wasted by firing in salvos, and since calibrated range finding was as yet unknown, cannon balls landed wherever the devil guided them. Today it is a joy to fall on the battlefield, for the cowardly as for the brave, with the same exactitude with which an equation in the third degree is solved. One’s fellow dies mathematically, according to the book, clean as a whistle, and in short it must be a consolation that the soul is being taken to another neighborhood. No question about it, a cannon ball today is a scientific one, born educated and knowing precisely where it is going to land. This is progress, and the all rest is sparks and fizzles.9
With all hope of victory gone, Martín de Bilbao and Jerónimo de Almagro refused to leave the battlefield and flung themselves on the enemy’s ranks shouting: “Kill me; I killed the marquis!” They soon lay lifeless. Their dead bodies were quartered the following day.
Pedro de San Millõn, Martín Carrillo, and Juan Tello were taken prisoner, and Vaca de Castro immediately ordered them beheaded.
Diego de Hoces, the brave captain who caused such havoc among the royalist troops, managed to escape from the battlefield, only to be beheaded in Guamanga a few days later.
Juan Rodríguez Barragõn, who had remained behind as lieutenant governor in Cuzco, was taken prisoner in the city and put to death. On learning of his defeat, the same authorities who had appointed don Diego went over to the victor’s side in the hope of obtaining amnesties and rewards.
Diego Méndez and Gómez Pérez managed to find asylum with the Inca Manco, who had refused to capitulate to the conquest and was maintaining a large army of Indians on the peaks of the Andes. They lived there until the end of 1544. In the middle of a quarrel with the Inca Manco one day, Gómez Pérez stabbed him to death, whereupon the Indians murdered the two Knights of the Cape and four other Spaniards who had sought refuge with them.
Almagro the Younger fought desperately until the last moment, when, the battle now lost, he spurred his horse on, galloped toward Pedro de Candia, and crying out “Traitor!” ran him through with his lance. Thereupon Diego Méndez made him take flight with him to go join the Inca, and the two of them would have succeeded in doing so had not Méndez taken it into his head to enter Cuzco to bid his mistress farewell. Because of this imprudence the valiant youth was taken prisoner, while Méndez managed to escape, only to die later at the hands of the Indians, as we have already recounted.
Almagro was brought to trial and emerged a condemned man. He appealed the verdict to the Royal Tribunal of Panama and to the king, and the appeal was denied. Then he said forthrightly: “I place Vaca de Castro before God’s tribunal, where we will be judged without passion, and then I shall go to my death in the same place where my father was beheaded. I ask only that I be buried in the same grave, beneath his remains.”
“He met death courageously,” we are told by a chronicler who witnessed his execution. “He refused to have his eyes blindfolded so that he might fix them on the image of Christ Crucified until his last moment; and as he had asked, he was buried in the same grave as his father the marshal.”
He was a young man 24 years old, born of a noble Indian mother from Panama, of medium height, fair of face, a fine horseman, very courageous, and skilled in the use of arms; he shared the cleverness of his progenitor, exceeded his father in liberality, for he was most generous, and like him, knew how to win the devotion of his followers.
Thus, with the sad end of their leader and of the Knights of the Cape, the band of men from Chile was annihilated.
1One of the many battles between Spanish factions in sixteenth century Peru. On April 26, 1538, at Salinas, Hernando Pizarro defeated Diego de Almagro, who had rebelled against Francisco Pizarro’s authority in Peru.—Ed.
2 A play on words: “Guate–peor” is a punning comparative of “Guatemala.” The proverb usually runs: “salir de Guatemala para ir a Guatepeor,” to fall from the frying pan into the fire, see George W. Umphrey’s Tradiciones peruanas (Chicago: B. H. Sanborn & Co., 1936), 19.
3 Honor to whom honor is due [French].
4 Before arriving in Peru, Pedro de Alvarado (1485–1541) had participated with Hernán Cortés in the Conquest of Mexico. When the Spanish were forced from Tenochtitlan on July 1, 1519, by Aztec resistance (recorded in history as the “Noche Triste,” or “Sad Night”), Alvarado used his lance to vault away from his pursuers.—Ed.
5 Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (d. 1625), author of Historia de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Océano en VIII décadas, desde 1492–1515(1726–1730).—Ed.
6 Patio of the Orange Trees.
7 After the events described in this tradition, Francisco Hernández de Girón (d.1554) became a military ally of the first Viceroy of Peru, Blanco Núñez de Vela, who was defeated by Gonzalo Pizarro in the Battle of Iñaquito in 1546. After Gonzalo Pizarro’s execution in 1548, Girón associated himself La Gasca, a representative of the Spanish king who executed him for leading a bloody revolt against his authority. For more on these events, see “The Magistrate’s Ears” and “The Demon of the Andes.”—Ed.
8 Vicente de Valverde (d.1542) was the Dominican friar who gave the signal to capture Atahualpa when the Inca ruler threw down a bible that Valverde had offered him.
9 This passage is a fine example of how Palma ironically interjects the republican present into his evocation of the colonial era.—Ed.
The Magistrate’s Ears
I
A Chronicle of the Era of the Second Viceroy of Peru
The imperial town of Potosí was, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the place to which fortune hunters chose to flock. This explains why, five years after the discovery of its rich mines, the town’s population numbered over 25,000 souls.
“A mining town,” the proverb goes, “is a lustful, lawless town.” And never was a proverb more apt than in the case of Potosí during the first two centuries of the conquest.
The year of grace 1550 was drawing to a close, and the mu
nicipal magistrate of the town was the bachelor–of–laws don Diego de Esquivel, an irascible and covetous man, who was reputed to be capable of auctioning off justice in exchange for bars of silver.
His Honor was also fond of the fruit of paradise, and in the imperial town there was much gossip about his exploits as a philanderer. Don Diego had not gotten himself into the fix of having the parish priest read him the famous epistle of Saint Paul and prided himself on belonging to the brotherhood of bachelors, who in my opinion constitute, if not a social plague, a threat to other people’s property. There are those who affirm that communists and bachelors are bipeds closely resembling each other.
In those days His Honor was infatuated with a girl from the town; but she, wanting no more to do with the magistrate, had very politely sent him packing, placing herself in the safeguard of a soldier of the Tucumán infantry regiment, a lad who had fallen madly in love with the damsel’s charms. Hence the magistrate was eager for the chance to take his vengeance on the ungrateful girl who had snubbed him, as well as on the lad who had won her favor.
Since the devil never sleeps,1it happened that one night a great commotion broke out in one of Potosí’s many gambling houses, swarms of which, contrary to the ordinances and decrees of the viceroy, were to be found in the calle de Quinto Mayu. A gambler, a novice when it came to prestidigitation and lacking the skill to make the little cubes behave, had allowed three dice to roll out of his hand when the stakes were high, whereupon another of the gamblers, possessed of a short temper, had brought out his dagger and pinned the neophyte’s hand to the gaming table. The shouts and the fracas that ensued brought the night watch, and with it the magistrate, armed with his ceremonial sword and staff.
Peruvian Traditions Page 7
