by Hugh Thomas
Gonzalo and La Gasca fought two battles. The first, at Huarina on the shores of Titicaca, was won by the former. Carvajal was Gonzalo’s commander as usual, and he still had with him four hundred skilled fighters, among them Juan de Acosta and the experienced Hernando Bachicao. For once, his arquebusiers had a decisive effect, though the cavalry of the two sides fought fiercely. Bachicao seems to have changed sides in the middle of the battle, but then changed back again. Gonzalo’s camp was sacked, but Centeño’s infantry was too busy doing the sacking to be able to fight afterward. Then the victorious captains returned to Cuzco to seek supplies and reinforcements. There they were diverted by feeling that they needed to execute—in some cases brutally—Spaniards and Indians whom they thought not in favor of Gonzalo.
In these moments of hesitation, La Gasca recovered. He sent Alonso de Alvarado back to Lima to seek artillery, clothes, arms, craftsmen capable of making arquebuses, powder, pikes, and helmets. He dispatched two commanders to assemble the remains of Centeño’s forces; he captured one of Gonzalo’s friends, Pedro de Bustamante, and had him strangled. He then organized a new army in which the commanders were the same as they had been before but whose captains included such old stagers as Gómez de Alvarado, of Mexican fame, and Pascual de Andagoya. Rojas was his captain of artillery. Equipped for war, La Gasca had with him Loaisa, the archbishop of Lima, as well as the bishops of Cuzco and Quito, not to speak of the heads of the order of Saint Dominic and of the Mercedarians.
La Gasca left Jauja, making for Cuzco, on December 29, 1547, with about 1,900 men, including 400 horse, 700 arquebusiers, and 500 pikemen. This was the most formidable army that had yet been assembled in the New World. They spent the three months of the Peruvian winter at Antahuailla. Many of Gonzalo’s men joined him, and La Gasca was especially pleased by the adhesion of Pedro de Valdivia from Chile. La Gasca said that he valued Valdivia more than 800 good soldiers. La Gasca wrote a long letter to Gonzalo on December 16, 1547, with a meticulous response to all the comments made by Pizarro to the Emperor in his letter of July 20.21
Given this swelling success, Gonzalo’s friend the ex-judge, Cepeda, suggested to his leader that he should accept peace terms with La Gasca. Gonzalo consulted several of his captains. Bachicao, Juan de Acosta, Diego Guillén, and Juan de la Torre considered themselves invincible and advised Gonzalo not to treat. Carvajal then returned and had Bachicao strangled for deserting in the middle of the Battle of Huarina. He also had strangled María Calderón, who had railed against Gonzalo’s intransigence. Her body was hung outside her window.
For the moment, Gonzalo seemed well enough. He entered Cuzco triumphantly—with flowers, bells, Indians greeting him as the Inca, and trumpets. The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega saw it all as a boy. He also observed Carvajal, old but indomitable, entering the city on a large dun-colored mule.
Gasca moved toward Cuzco with his great army, and reached the river Abancay. Then he faced the river Apurímac. Where should the army cross? There were three or four bridges. The road was almost impassable for men in any kind of formation, because of the sharpness of the mountains on both sides of the river. Advised by the imaginative Valdivia, La Gasca pretended to build bridges at four new places so that Gonzalo would not know which section he would use. Carvajal is said to have commented: “Valdivia is in this land or else it is the devil.” Carvajal had known Valdivia in Italy, perhaps even, heroically, at Pavia. La Gasca decided to cross the river at Cotapampa.
Carvajal advised Gonzalo how to destroy everything living on the northern bank of the river and, playing on the inexperience of half of La Gasca’s army, fall on them while they were crossing. But, for reasons now difficult to understand, Gonzalo preferred to rely on the counsel of Juan de Acosta, who had accompanied him on his cinnamon journey and who now lazily permitted the enemy to cross at night while he slept. Had Carvajal’s advice been followed, Gonzalo would have had a chance of victory. Now, however, there was little that he could do. He fell back on Sacsahuamán, where La Gasca could attack only from the front and where he hoped to be able to destroy his enemy by heavy artillery fire. Gonzalo had become bemused by the effectiveness of artillery. At the end of March, he wrote desperately to Father Francisco de Herrera, then a priest in his own encomienda of Charcas, “God is fighting for us, your excellency must believe that, we can conquer the world.”22
At Sacsahuamán, the battle was not to be, for Gonzalo’s army was melting away. Even Diego de Cepeda (of all people) abandoned Gonzalo, as did Garcilaso de la Vega. The pikemen dropped their weapons and took to their heels; the arquebusiers copied them with their weapons. Carvajal was for once uncertain what to recommend. Gonzalo took the hint. He rode toward the enemy and, coming up with Villavicencio, said, “I am Gonzalo Pizarro, I wish to surrender to the Emperor.” He preferred to surrender honorably rather than to flee in dishonor. He was taken to La Gasca who asked Gonzalo if he thought it right to have stirred up the country against the Emperor and to have made himself governor against the will of His Majesty, as well as to have killed a viceroy in a pitched battle. Gonzalo replied that the judges of the supreme court had bidden him become governor and he had himself authorized these actions in light of the power vested by His Majesty in his brother, the Marquess. As to the viceroy Núñez Vela, the judges had ordered him to be expelled from Peru. He, Gonzalo, had not killed the Viceroy. But the relations of those whom the Viceroy had killed had been obliged to seek revenge. Everything he had done had been at the insistence of his fellow residents.
La Gasca replied that Gonzalo had shown himself most ungrateful for the grants that the King-Emperor had made to his brother Francisco. Those grants had enriched them all, though they had been poor before. They had raised them from the dust. In any case, Gonzalo himself had done nothing in respect of the actual discovery of Peru.
Gonzalo replied: “My brother alone was enough to discover the country, but all of us four brothers were necessary for its conquest. We and our relations and friends did what we did at our own risk and expense. The only honour which His Majesty gave to my brother was to make him a marquess. He did not lift us from the dust since the Pizarros have been noblemen and gentlemen with our own estates since the Goths came to Spain. If we were poor, that explains why we ventured out into the world and won this empire and gave it to His Majesty, though we might have kept it, as many others have done who have won new lands.”
La Gasca considered and said to his advisers, “Take him away, he’s as much a rebel today as he was yesterday.”23
Meanwhile, Carvajal, seeing the game was up, fled on a pony. It fell into a stream, pinning one of its rider’s legs under it. Some of his men who were also fleeing found him and took him to La Gasca in the hope that he would pardon their misdeeds if they handed in a prisoner such as he.24 Carvajal was taken to a makeshift jail. His guards at first put lighted torches between his shirt and his back, but Diego Centeño, who had known him well, put a stop to that torture.25
The following day, April 10, 1548, Gonzalo Pizarro, Carvajal, Juan de Acosta, Francisco Maldonado, Juan Vélez de Guevara, Dionisio de Bobadilla, and Gonzalo de los Nidos—all the leaders of the Pizarros who had not deserted—were executed. Carvajal was treated especially harshly. He was dragged from prison to an execution yard by a horse and there hanged. The heads of the dead were cut off and sent for exhibition to numerous places in Peru. Gonzalo’s body was buried in the Mercedarian church in Cuzco, alongside that of Almagro. His house was razed. Of course, his heirs lost all his valuable encomiendas. Another whom La Gasca executed was Francisco de Espinosa, nephew of the famous Licenciado Espinosa who had served as Gonzalo’s maestresala.26
La Gasca was shortly received in Cuzco with the ceremonies usual for the reception of great men, which had included Gonzalo Pizarro only a short time before. There were bullfights and shows of tilting. Alonso de Alvarado and the judge Andrés de Cianca punished all Gonzalo’s supporters if they had not given themselves up. Some were hanged, some quartered, some w
ere condemned to serve in La Gasca’s galleys, some were flogged.27 The last caused a scandal, for the Indians, still secretly worshipping their dead, had not seen Spaniards beaten before.
Soon the Spanish victors would turn their imaginative attention to the Peruvians, whom they had so roundly defeated. In the 1550s, Juan Polo de Ondegardo, a Spanish magistrate, would begin profound inquiries into the nature of the Inca religion. He established that the Incas worshipped at more than four hundred shrines in or near the city.28 He found in 1558 that the descendants of the Inca were still worshipping their ancestors’ mummies.
One element in La Gasca’s success should not be ignored: “The desire of the Spaniards to see the things of their own land in the Indies has been so desperate,” wrote Garcilasa de la Vega, “that no effort or danger has been too great to induce them to abandon the attempt to satisfy their wishes.”29 As they wanted wine, oranges, horses and dogs, guns and swords, wheat bread and salt beef, a real break with the old Spain was inconceivable.
La Gasca hoped to persuade the heirs of Manco Capac, headed by the five-year-old Sayri-Tupa, to come out of their secret encampment in the jungle at Vilcabamba, and he made some headway in this.
31
Valdivia and Chile
Are you not aware, Christian Soldier, that when you were initiated into the mysteries of the life-giving feast, you enrolled in the army of Christ?
ERASMUS, Enchiridion
We have run ahead of the story. For in April 1539, Francisco Pizarro—apparently triumphant in all Peru over the Indians of the region and his Spanish rivals—made a journey of exploration to Charcas and Lake Titicaca. Among the followers and friends with him was Pedro de Valdivia, who had recently been his chief magistrate and who had been asked to lead the army against Almagro. After his victory at Las Salinas, Pizarro gave Valdivia the valley of Canela, “the cinnamon valley,” in Charcas as an encomienda and the rich silver mine of Porco. Pizarro probably thought of him as an entirely reliable captain who could be counted upon in all circumstances. It was, therefore, probably an unwelcome surprise when Valdivia asked for permission to explore and conquer the land to the south that had been abandoned by Almagro. But Pizarro, wrote Valdivia himself, “seeing my determination graciously opened the door.”1 Pizarro also took away his grants in Peru, but Valdivia did not seem to mind.
A military man and the descendant of military men, Valdivia was the son of Diego de Valdivia and came from a village named either Castuera or Campanario in the beautiful valley known as the Serena in Extremadura. His hometown was about twenty miles from Cortés’s birthplace, Medellín, and so not far from the hometowns of all the great conquistadors. He entered the army about 1520 in Italy, where he fought under Henry of Nassau, then Prospero Colonna, finally at Pavia under the immortal Pescara. Valdivia seems in those campaigns to have been a simple soldier. He married Marina Ortiz de Gaete of Zalamea, also in the Serena, and lived an impoverished life with her, without children. He apparently met Pizarro in Trujillo, in Extremadura, in 1529.
Valdivia left Spain in 1535 and spent an unprofitable year or so with Federman in Venezuela. He then went to Peru and earned the nickname of “the perfect captain,” for he inspired high regard among his men. His motives in wishing to go to Chile seem simple. He later wrote to the emperor Charles: “I have no other wish than to discover and to settle lands for Your Majesty and no other interest, together with the honours and favours which you may be pleased to grant me, than to leave a memory and the good report which I won in war as a poor soldier in the service of an enlightened monarch who, putting his sacred person every hour against the common enemy of Christianity and its allies, has upheld, and upholds, with its unconquered arm its honour and God’s.” Valdivia said that he aspired to be a governor, a captain, a father, a friend, a geometrician, an overseer, “to make channels and share out water, a tiller and a worker at the sowings, a head shepherd, a breeder, a defender, a conqueror and a discoverer.”2
From the beginning, Valdivia had difficulties with the nature of his command, for he owed his commission to Francisco Pizarro, not to the King nor to the Council of the Indies. Pedro Sancho de Hoz, who had joined Pizarro in Panama and been at Cajamarca, where he received one full share of gold, together with a quarter share for secretarial work (he was for a time Pizarro’s secretary), was a rival. Sancho de Hoz had been concerned in all the great dramas in the conquest of Peru: as a clerk at the execution of Atahualpa and a notary at the creation of the new Spanish city of Cuzco. He wrote the texts of many grants of the encomiendas in that city and himself had one. Pizarro seems to have dismissed him as a secretary in early 1535, for Sancho had told Fray Tomás de Berlanga—the Dominican vice-provincial and later bishop of Panama and then Peru—that Pizarro had not paid the King’s one-fifth on the silver that he had used to buy Pedro de Alvarado’s ships. Sancho was a good writer. His account of the Spanish discovery of Cuzco is second to none.3
Sancho de Hoz was back in Spain in 1536 and seemed as rich as all those who had been at Cajamarca. He went to live in Toledo and married Guiomar de Aragón, who was perhaps a child of a royal bastard. Then Sancho persuaded the Council of the Indies to make him not only chief notary of mines in Peru, but also governor of the territories leading to the Straits of Magellan, and to give him permission to penetrate south of Peru in general, making him captain-general “of the people who go on the expedition and those found in the discovered territory.” He returned to Peru to find Valdivia had also been given the right to penetrate the south. Pizarro commented, “Pedro Sancho has come back from Spain as stupid as when he went.” But Sancho was persistent in his demands and caused no end of difficulty.
Pizarro sought to be the mediator between Valdivia and Sancho de Hoz. He adopted a twentieth-century solution by asking them both to lunch. Pizarro asked Sancho to show his credentials. These indicated that he had indeed been asked by the Crown to explore the seas, the coasts, the ports to the south of Peru but—and this was a most curious qualification—“without entering into the confines and territories of those portions which have been given in government to other persons.”4 Pizarro was tactful (his capacity for tact was one of his remarkable characteristics). He pointed out that, in any expedition, Valdivia’s capacity to lead men in battle would be most helpful; and he thought that Sancho de Hoz could contribute to the success of the enterprise because of his wealth and his capacity for administration. He asked them to form a partnership. They agreed, though it was said that Pizarro gave Sancho de Hoz too much wine. The agreement read: “I, Pedro Sancho de Hoz will go to the city of Los Reyes [that is, Lima] and from there I shall bring fifty horses and mares … and I will bring two ships loaded with necessary things … including 200 shields. And I, Captain Pedro de Valdivia, say that, in order to serve His Majesty better in the expedition which I have begun, I accept the said company.”5 But despite this agreement, there was always ambiguity. Was Valdivia the subordinate of Sancho de Hoz? Or was Sancho his subordinate? Pizarro gave the latter some kind of document, but its contents are unknown. Perhaps it was destroyed by Valdivia when Sancho de Hoz tried to kill him.
In January 1540, Valdivia set off on his expedition. He seems to have been accompanied by only seven men. These included Luis de Cartagena as his secretary, perhaps a member of the famous converso family of that name. Others were Juan Gómez de Almagro, the alguacil mayor (chief constable) who had married Colluca, daughter of Atahualpa. His father, Diego de Almagro’s brother, Alvar, also traveled. Valdivia brought with him his beautiful and resolute mistress, Inés Suárez. Pizarro had asked Valdivia what he planned to do with her when he left for Chile. “I will carry her with me if your excellency gives me leave.” “How will you manage that if your wife is still living in Spain?” asked Pizarro. “Inés is my servant,” Valdivia answered. In fact Valdivia’s relation with Inés was based on more than love. Valdivia had always been a gambler and was wont to go to Francisco Martínez de Peñalosa’s bar in Cuzco. Here he saved Inés, then a widow
from Palencia, who was being molested by a certain Fernán Núñez. She had come to the Indies to look for her husband first in Venezuela, then in Peru. She had obtained a small encomienda in Cuzco. She turned out to be brave, intelligent, and resilient.
In addition to his seven Spaniards, Valdivia took a large escort of Indian servants; there was a rather gloomy send-off, with a complete absence of the shining armor, the plumes, the banners, and the trumpets frequent on such occasions. This absence, coupled with the presence of a servile people who were jaded, dust covered, and sweaty, left the impression of a drove of slaves guarded by a few horsemen of low rank, instead of an expedition marching to conquer one more kingdom for the European emperor Charles.
One companion who was not present was Sancho de Hoz. The explanation was that he was in prison in Lima for debt. The rich often suffer from financial conundrums. So his two ships with their horses and shields were naturally missing.
The route taken by Valdivia was the one by which Almagro had returned. They traveled about twelve leagues a day. Almagro’s brother Alvar fell from his horse and died. There were other difficulties. But as Valdivia went south, he was joined by others: For example, at Arequipa, Fray Juan Lobo and Alonso de Monroy, a member of that remarkable family of Extremadura from whom Cortés descended, attached themselves and their destinies to him. At Tarapacá, seventy soldiers came in from the sea, including two new priests, one of whom was Fray Rodrigo Marmolejo, and two Germans, Juan Bohon and Bartolomé Flores.
