Not everyone was convinced that Bingham had discovered the Incas’ rebel city, however. For the few scholars who had actually read the old Spanish chronicles, discrepancies seemed to exist between the Spaniards’ description of the city of Vilcabamba and the admittedly stunning ruins that Bingham had found. Was the citadel of Machu Picchu really the last stronghold of the Incas as described in the chronicles? Or could it be that Hiram Bingham—a man now feted and lionized around the world as an expert on the Incas—had made a colossal error, and the rebel city had yet to be found? For those scholars who had their doubts, there was only one way to find out—and that was to return to the sixteenth-century chronicles in order to learn more about how and why the Incas had created the largest capital of guerrilla fighters the New World had ever known.
2. A FEW HUNDRED WELL-ARMED ENTREPRENEURS
“In the last ages of the world there shall come a time when the ocean sea will loosen its bonds and a great land will appear and a navigator like him that guided Jason will discover a new world, and then the isle of Thule will no longer be the final limit of the earth.”
THE ROMAN PHILOSOPHER SENECA, WRITING IN HESPERIDIUM [SPAIN] IN THE FIRST CENTURY A.D.
ON APRIL 21, 1536, ON SATURDAY AT THE END OF EASTER week, few of the 196 Spaniards in the Inca capital of Cuzco realized that within the next few weeks they would either die or else would come so close to dying that every one of them would ask for absolution, the forgiveness of their sins, and would entrust their souls to their Maker. Just three years after Francisco Pizarro and his Spaniards had garroted the Inca emperor, Atahualpa (ah tah HUAL pa) and had seized a large portion of an empire 2,500 miles long and ten million strong, things were beginning to unravel for the Spanish conquistadors. For the last few years the Spaniards had consolidated their gains, installed a puppet Inca ruler, stolen the Incas’ women, gained dominion over millions, and sent a massive amount of Inca gold and silver back to Spain. The original conquistadors were by now all incredibly wealthy men—the equivalent of multi-millionaires in our time—and those who had stayed on in Peru had already retired to fabulously large estates. The conquistadors were established seigneurial lords, the founders of family dynasties. Already they had shed their armor for fine linen clothes, rakish hats spiked with gaudy feathers, ostentatious jewelry, and sleek linen tights. In Spain and other European kingdoms, and on scattered islands and possessions throughout the Spanish Caribbean, the conquerors of Peru were already legendary figures: young and old alike dreamed of nothing more than walking in these same conquistadors’ now finely appointed shoes.
The conquistadors Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro voyaging toward the new world and Peru, by the sixteenth-century native artist Felipe Huamá Poma de Ayala.
On this crisp spring morning, however, at an elevation of 11,300 feet in the Andes, church bells of bronze had begun to clang incessantly from a structure the Spaniards had hastily erected on top of the immaculately cut gray stones of the Qoricancha, the Incas’ temple of the sun. Rumors now swirled along the streets of this bowl-like city, surrounded by green hills, that the puppet Inca emperor had escaped and in fact was about to return with a massive native army, hundreds of thousands strong.
As the Spaniards swarmed out of their dwellings, arming themselves with steel swords, daggers, twin-pointed morion helmets, twelve-foot lances and saddling up their horses, they bitterly swore that the Inca rebels were so many “dogs” and “traitors.” The air was clear, sharp, and thin, and the iron-clad hooves of the horses clattered on the cut stones of the streets. A question that no doubt arose in at least some of the conquistadors’ minds, however, was—where had it all gone wrong?
Indeed, thus far the Spaniards had enjoyed one stunning success after another. Four years earlier, in September 1532, led by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, 168 of them had made their way up into the Andes—sixty-two on horseback and 106 on foot—leaving a cluster of lanteen-rigged ships moored in the deep blue waters of the Pacific Ocean, or the “Southern Sea.” The Spaniards had eventually climbed eight thousand feet and then had walked directly into the lion’s den—where the lord of the Inca Empire, Atahualpa, with an army of possibly eighty thousand warriors, was waiting for them.
Francisco Pizarro at this time was a fifty-four-year-old, moderately wealthy landowner who had been living in Panama and who had thirty years of Indian fighting experience behind him. Tall, sinewy, athletic, with hollow cheeks and a thin beard, Pizarro resembled Don Quixote, even though Don Quixote wouldn’t be created for another seventy-three years. A poor cavalryman (until literally the last moments of his life, Pizarro preferred fighting on foot), Pizarro was also quiet, taciturn, brave, firm, ambitious, cunning, efficient, diplomatic, and—like most conquistadors—could be as brutal as the situation required.
For better or for worse, Pizarro had been molded by the region he hailed from in western Spain—Extremadura.* An impoverished, rural, backward area, Extremadura was covered in arid, Mediterranean scrub and lay marooned like a landlocked island in the midst of a relatively poor country just emerging from the feudal ages that had yet to become a nation. The region, it was well known, typically produced men who were both uncommunicative and parsimonious, men who showed little emotion and who were known to be as tough and unsympathetic as the landscape that had nurtured them.
Of such gritty material were made both Pizarro and a large number of his fellow conquistadors, many of whom had also come from the same region. Vasco Núñez de Balboa—the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean—for example, was from Extremadura. So was Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida. Hernando de Soto, the seasoned explorer who would later fight his way through what are now Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, was an extremeño. Even Hernando Cortés, the recent conqueror of the Aztec Empire in Mexico, had grown up within forty miles of his compatriot and second cousin Francisco Pizarro.† That the conquerors of the New World’s two most powerful native empires grew up within forty miles of each other, however, is certainly one of the world’s most extraordinary facts.
Pizarro’s native city of Trujillo, which had a population while he was growing up of only about two thousand vecinos, or citizens who had full rights, was divided into three sections. Each corresponded to the social stratification of the city’s inhabitants. The walled town, or villa, rested on top of a hill with a view of the countryside. Here rose the turreted houses of the knights and of the lower nobility, with their coats of arms, or lineages, prominently displayed over their doorways. It was here, too, that Francisco’s father and his father’s family lived. The second section of the city, formed around the town’s plaza, lay on flat land beside the hill. Here lived the merchants, notaries, and craftsmen, although, somewhat later, more and more of the hilltop nobility moved to homes occupying prominent positions on the plaza, including Francisco’s father. The final section of the city lay along its outer periphery, along the roads that led off toward the fields. Referred to derogatorily as the arrabales, a connotation that combined both the notion of “outskirts” and “slums,” it was here that the peasants and artisans lived in homes that were as far physically as they were socially from those at the town’s center. It was amid the outer section of this rural yet highly stratified city, which mirrored Spanish society at large, that Francisco Pizarro grew up with his mother, a common maid. A person who grew up in an arrabal was called an arrabalero. The latter referred to a person who was “ill-bred,” or, in modern parlance, a person who has grown up on “the wrong side of the tracks.” Such was the social stigma that Francisco Pizarro labored to escape from long before departing for the New World.
Pizarro, however, was not only stigmatized by growing up in an arrabal, he was also stigmatized by the fact that his father had never married his mother. That meant that not only would he be unlikely to inherit any part of his father’s estate (even though he was the eldest of four half-brothers), but that he was also illegitimate, meaning that he would forever be regarded as
a second-class citizen. In addition, Pizarro had received little if any schooling and thus remained illiterate for his entire life.
Pizarro was only fifteen years old (and Cortés eight) when Columbus returned in from his first voyage across the unexplored ocean. In announcing his supposed discovery of a new route to India, Columbus wrote a letter to a high-ranking official describing his voyage that was quickly published and became a runaway bestseller for the age.
It is likely that Pizarro overheard Columbus’s fantastic tale, either as part of an eager group of listeners to whom the story was read, or else as the story was passed along by word of mouth. In any event, it was an extraordinary account, a tale as rich as any fiction, one that told of the discovery of an exotic world where riches could literally be plucked like so much ripe fruit from a landscape similar to the Garden of Eden. And, like the popular novels that had started circulating since the printing press had been invented two decades earlier, Columbus’s Letter, or Carta, hit Europe like a thunder-bolt:
I found very many islands, filled with innumerable people, and I have taken possession of them all for their Highnesses [King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella], done by proclamation and with the royal standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me…. The people of this island [Hispaniola, the island that today Haiti and the Dominican Republic share] and of all the other islands that I have found and of which I have gotten information, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them…. They refuse nothing that they possess, if it be asked of them; on the contrary, they invite any one to share it and display as much love as if they would give their hearts. They are content with whatever trifle of whatever kind that may be given them, whether it be of value or valueless. …
Their Highnesses can see that I will give … [the king and queen] as much gold as they may need…. I will give them spices and cotton … and mastic … and aloe … and slaves, as many as they shall order…. I also believe that I have found rhubarb and cinnamon, and I shall find a thousand other things of value…. And thus the eternal God, Our Lord, gives to all those who walk in His way triumph over things that appear to be impossible, and this was notably one … with many solemn prayers for the great exaltation which they shall have in the turning of so many peoples to our holy faith, and afterwards for the temporal benefits, because not only Spain but all Christendom will have hence comforts and profits.
Done [written] in the caravel [Niña], off the Canary Islands, on the fifteenth day of February, in the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-three. …
The Admiral
Columbus’s enthusiastic report no doubt fired the imagination of the teenaged Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro, of course, was already well aware of the fact that his future on his native peninsula would probably be a bleak one. The world that Columbus described, by contrast, must have seemed to offer so many more possibilities than his own.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the class system in the kingdoms of Spain had been in place for centuries and was a very rigid one. Those at the top—the dukes, the lords, the marquis, and the earls—owned vast estates on which peasants worked. It was they who enjoyed all the privileges and social prestige that the late fifteenth-century Spanish kingdoms had to offer. Those at the bottom—the peasants, artisans, and, generally speaking, all those who had to perform manual labor for a living—usually remained in the same class to which they were born. In the kingdoms of Spain, as else-where in Europe, there was little upward social mobility. If one were born poor, illiterate, and had no family pedigree, then one could read one’s future as plainly as a geographer could read one of Columbus’s finely drawn maps. There were only two ways to gain entrance to elite status: either through marriage to a member of the elite (which was exceedingly rare) or else by distinguishing oneself in a successful military campaign.
Thus, in the year 1502, at the age of twenty-four, the impoverished, illiterate, illegitimate, and title-less Francisco Pizarro had perhaps not surprisingly found his way onto a ship that had set out from Spain for the Indies—the islands Columbus had declared were located in Asia (known at the time as the “Indies”) and thus were inhabited by “Indians.” The fleet was the largest yet to cross the Atlantic; it carried 2,500 men and a large number of horses, pigs, and other animals. Its destination, in fact, was the very same island that Columbus had described only nine years earlier: Hispaniola. As Pizarro’s ship arrived and set anchor before the lush green island rising up from a turquoise sea, a small boatload of Spaniards came out to meet them, soon informing the excited passengers that “You have arrived at a good moment [for] … there is to be a war against the Indians and we will be able to take many slaves.” “This news,” recalled one young passenger, Bartolomé de Las Casas, “produced a great joy in the ship.”*
Whether Pizarro participated in that particular war against the local natives is unknown. By 1509, however—some seven years after his arrival—Pizarro had risen to become a lieutenant in the local military of the governor, Nicolás de Ovando, a loosely knit force that was frequently used to “pacify” native rebellions. While Pizarro’s exact duties are unknown, he was working for a governor who at one point had rounded up eighty-four native chiefs and then had them massacred—simply to send an unmistakable message to the island’s inhabitants to do as they were told.
With Hispaniola and other nearby islands becoming increasingly depleted of natives due to slaving (already by 1510 the first African slaves began to be imported into the Caribbean in order to replace the quickly disappearing native population), Pizarro made his way around 1509 to the newly discovered mainland of Central America. Pizarro was again following in Columbus’s footsteps, as the great Italian mariner himself had discovered the coasts of Honduras and Panama on his fourth and last voyage of 1502–1504. * By 1513, at the age of thirty-five, Pizarro had risen still further; he was now second-in-command on an expedition led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa that eventually crossed the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean. As Balboa waded into the waters of that vast ocean, claiming it for the Spanish monarchs, Pizarro must have realized that at last he was nearly in the same position that Columbus had been in years earlier. Now he, too, was exploring lands that no European had ever seen. And this was only the beginning.
The expedition cut short by stumbling upon a vast ocean was a far cry from the later Baroque portraits of handsome, noble Spaniards in armor wading out into the Pacific, unfurling colorful flags as a scattering of naked Indians watched in admiration. From the beginning, the Isthmus expedition had been one of pure brute economics. Balboa and Pizarro’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean, in fact, had occurred as a by-product of a military campaign, one that had been carried out in order to find a tribe of natives reputedly rich in gold. Elsewhere in that very same year, another Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, had discovered a land he called Florida while on a slaving expedition amid the islands of the Bahamas. It was through slaving and plundering expeditions that the Spaniards were discovering more and more of the New World.
Unsuccessful in their search for gold, Balboa and Pizarro became increasingly brutal as they trudged their way back empty-handed through the mosquito-infested jungles. Along the way, Balboa captured some local chiefs and demanded that they reveal to him the location of the rumored gold. When the chiefs replied that they were unaware of any, Balboa had them tortured. After the chiefs still failed to supply any useful information, Balboa had them killed. Six years later, in January 1519, and as the result of a struggle for power with the new Spanish governor, Balboa was himself arrested and subsequently beheaded. Pizarro, once Balboa’s second-in-command, was the arresting officer.
By 1521, the now forty-four-year-old Francisco Pizarro was one of the most important landowners in the new city of Panama, living on the coast of the very same ocean that he and Balboa had discovered. A part owner of a gold mining company, Pizarro had also received an encomienda, or Indian grant, of 150 natives on the island of Taboga, just off th
e Pacific coast. As an encomienda holder, Pizarro received both labor and tribute from the Indians. The island also had fertile soil for crops and abundant gravel that Pizarro sold to newly constructed ships as ballast.
Still, Pizarro was not satisfied. What good was owning a tiny island and living off a mere 150 natives when another Spaniard, Hernán Cortés, from the same region of Extremadura in Spain, had just conquered an entire empire at the age of thirty-four? In Spanish culture in the sixteenth century, the ages between thirty and forty-five were considered the prime years for men, that is, those were the years in which a man was considered to be both mature and to have the most energy.
Pizarro, however, at forty-four, was already ten years older than Cortés had been when the latter had begun his conquest of the Aztec Empire, an enterprise that had taken three long and grueling years. Pizarro thus had only one prime year left. The question no doubt on Pizarro’s mind then was: had Cortés found the only empire in what was now known to be a New World? Or could there be more? For Pizarro, time was running out. It was either now or never. And since everything of value seemed to have already been discovered to the north and east, and since the west was bounded by what appeared to be a vast ocean, the only logical direction to look for new empires was toward the unexplored regions to the south.
By 1524, three years after Cortés’s conquest, Pizarro had formed a company with two partners, Diego de Almagro—a fellow extremeño—and a local financier, Hernando de Luque. The three men were following an economic model that had originated in Europe and that by now was spreading throughout the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean—that of the private corporation, or compañía.
The Last Days of the Incas Page 3
