To be able to do so, however, Pizarro first had to establish a relationship with his hostage. The Inca emperor had to understand clearly what it was that he and the other Spaniards wanted. In exchange for prolonging Atahualpa’s life, Pizarro wanted power and absolute control. If he could control the Inca elite at the top of the social pyramid, then he and his Spaniards could control everything that lay beneath—land, labor, gold, silver, women—everything that this obviously rich empire had to offer. If Pizarro’s band of armed entrepreneurs could somehow maintain their new position, then, like parasites, they could feed off the Inca body politic—the labor of the masses—and could thus begin the lives of luxury that they had risked their very lives for.
In a sense, New World conquest was about men seeking a way around one of life’s basic rules—that human beings have to work for a living, just like the rest of the animal world. In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, Spaniards were not looking for fertile land that they could farm, they were looking for the cessation of their own need to perform manual labor. To do so, they needed to find large enough groups of people they could force to carry out all the laborious tasks necessary to provide them with the essentials of life: food, shelter, clothing, and, ideally, liquid wealth. Conquest, then, had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living. Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement.
Thus, as food was being served while native warriors still lay dying outside in the numbing cold of the Andean night, Pizarro sought to introduce Atahualpa to what he and his companions had in mind: “Don’t take it as an insult that you have been defeated and taken prisoner,” Pizarro began, presumably slicing off a hunk of llama meat and with one of his interpreters translating, “for with the Christians I have brought with me, though so few in number, I have conquered greater lands than yours and [I also] have defeated more powerful lords than you, placing them under the dominion of the Emperor, whose vassal I am, and who is King of Spain and of the universal world and under whose command we have come to conquer this land.”
Pizarro was clearly exaggerating the rather minor skirmishes that he and his men had had prior to their arrival in Peru, while borrowing Cortés’s capture of the distant Aztec Empire as his own personal accomplishment. But Pizarro’s message was clear: the disaster that had befallen Atahualpa was as inevitable as were the movements of the stars in the heavens—and any future resistance would be as futile as it would be horrific. “You should consider it to be your good fortune that you have not been defeated by a cruel people such as yourselves,” he continued, as his men outside cleaned blood off their daggers and swords. “We treat our prisoners and conquered enemies with mercy and only make war on those who make war on us. And, being able to destroy them, we refrain from doing so, but rather pardon them.”
Pizarro was of course counting on the fact that Atahualpa knew nothing of the bloody atrocities the Spaniards had committed in the Caribbean, or in Mexico, or in Central America, and that he had never heard of Columbus, or the slave trade, or the assassination of Montezuma, the Aztec emperor. As Atahualpa listened in silence, Pizarro now began driving the main point of his message home: “When I had a chief, the lord of an island, my prisoner,” Pizarro said, looking directly into Atahualpa’s eyes, “I set him free so that from then on he might be loyal. And I did the same with the chiefs who were lords of Tumbez and Chulimasa and others who, being in my power and deserving death, I pardoned.”
Pizarro paused to slice off more meat as the interpreter caught up. “If you were seized and your people attacked and killed, it was because you came with so great an army against us, [despite my] having begged you to come peacefully, and because you threw the book on the ground in which were written the words of God. For this reason our Lord allowed that your arrogance should be destroyed and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.”
Atahualpa, widely reported to be a clever man, immediately understood the significance of Pizarro’s offer. Wrote one eyewitness:
Atahualpa responded that he had been deceived by his captains, that they had told him to not take the Spaniards seriously. That he personally had desired to come in peace, but that they had prevented him and that all those who had advised him were now dead.
The Inca emperor, who only a few hours before had been absolute ruler of the greatest empire the Americas had ever known, now asked Pizarro for permission to confer with some of his men. According to another eyewitness:
The Governor immediately ordered them to bring two important Indians who had been taken in the battle. The … [emperor Atahualpa] asked them whether many men were dead. They told him that the entire countryside was covered with them. He then sent word to the [native] troops who had remained not to flee but to come serve him, since he was not dead but was being held by the Christians.
As the two Inca nobles left to carry out Atahualpa’s orders, the Spaniards who witnessed their departure must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. With their backs to the wall, they had taken a huge risk in trying to capture the emperor, a risk that had no guarantee of success. So many things could have gone wrong, not the least of which was the Incas’ reaction to their attack. Had Atahualpa’s warriors not panicked and instead of fleeing had charged directly at them, then it might have been the Spaniards who were massacred, and not the reverse. Pizarro had clearly understood, however, that even if he were successful in capturing the emperor, he couldn’t predict the reaction of either the emperor or of his men. Would Atahualpa cooperate? And if so, would his subjects continue to obey him? Or would they ignore his capture and instead attack?
After the two lords had departed, Pizarro no doubt quietly made the sign of the cross, touching his forehead and then each side of his chest. Military leader, strategist, diplomat, CEO, terrorist, and now hostage taker, Pizarro was also a sincerely devout Christian. The fifty-four-year-old conquistador fully believed in divine providence. He also believed that God had intervened today on the side of the slashing, blood-splattered Christians on the square. The proof lay in Atahualpa’s capture and in the fact that so many had been killed by so few. The Inca emperor and his subjects were nonbelievers, after all, whose souls, without conversion, were destined for hell. Though blood had been spilled, Pizarro was nevertheless convinced that in the end it would be he and his conquistadors and their bloody swords that would bring the great mass of nonbelievers into the sacred fold of the Lord.
Many of the Spaniards now sank into sleep, the first that some of them had had in more than forty-eight hours. Pizarro had appointed others to patrol the town that night. Soon, the town’s inhabitants who had hidden in their houses that day heard the metallic footsteps of the strange giant animals the bearded invaders rode, the horse hooves clacking slowly on the deserted streets, while bodies still lay strewn about in darkened piles. Meanwhile, inside the temple of the sun, Pizarro ordered that a bed be prepared for Atahualpa in the same room where he himself slept. As the two leaders from different worlds lay down in their beds—Inca style, with a gathering of richly woven blankets on the ground underlain by a woven mat—each no doubt had entirely different thoughts as he drifted off to sleep. Here, within a stone chamber that Inca masons had assembled with painstaking care, long before any Inca had ever heard of a Spaniard, drifted off to sleep two men upon whom the fate of the entire empire now rested: Pizarro and Atahualpa—the conquistador and the native king.
The next morning, Pizarro sent Hernando de Soto with thirty horsemen to investigate Atahualpa’s old camp, the same camp where Soto had had his first meeting with the emperor two days earlier. As they galloped along the now familiar road and then crossed the two rivers, Soto noticed that little seemed to have changed. The same great fleet of tents spread out before him in a vast tableau and here, too, stood what seemed to be the same vast ranks of native soldiers—as if the day before the Spaniards ha
dn’t even made a dent in their numbers. While clearly tense, none of the warriors made a move against the Spaniards. At least for the time being, they were obviously obeying the orders of their commanders, who in turn were obeying the commands of their captured emperor. With free rein now to plunder all that he had seen only a few days before, Soto and his men ransacked the royal camp, gathering up all the gold, silver, and jewels they could find, then galloping their horses over the plains, where they collected even more golden objects. For it was on the plain that Atahualpa’s frightened servants had dropped their serving pieces and ornaments as they themselves had fled. Before the sun had fully risen in the sky, Soto and his men
returned to the camp … with a large quantity of [native] men, women, sheep [llamas], gold, silver, and cloth. Among these spoils were eighty thousand pesos of gold, seven thousand marks of silver, and fourteen emeralds. The gold and silver were in monstrous pieces, large and small dishes, pitchers, jugs, basins, and large drinking vessels and various other pieces. Atahualpa said that all this came from his table service and that his Indians who had fled had taken a great quantity more.
The Spaniards—most of whom were in their twenties and for many of whom this was their first expedition—couldn’t believe their good luck. Almost overnight they seemed to have cracked open the hard outer shell of an empire and now, as if from a giant piñata, gold, silver, and jewels suddenly began to tumble to their feet. While his men admired the loot, Pizarro noted that the llamas—strange, flat-backed, camel-like creatures with large eyes and biting yellow teeth—were befouling the square, the same square that he had earlier ordered some of the captive natives to clean of dead bodies. Pizarro now insisted that the llamas be set free, as they might encumber troop movements if the Incas should decide to attack. Besides, there were so many of the animals that the Spaniards could easily kill as many as they needed for food. Pizarro next ordered the natives who had been captured to assemble on the square, choosing some to serve the Spaniards and ordering the rest to return to their homes. The governor then ordered Atahualpa to disband his army, overruling some of his captains who had suggested that first the right hand of each native soldier be cut off before sending them on their way. The bloody rout the day before, Pizarro no doubt felt, was sufficient to get his message across: that a new set of masters had arrived in Peru—and that those new masters were to be strictly obeyed.
The behavior of Pizarro and his entourage had thus far followed standard conquest procedure. First, evidence of a native empire had to be discovered, one civilized enough to include a mass of native peasants who were used to paying taxes to an elite. It was of no use to find “wild” Indians who didn’t farm or had no experience with civilization. The Spaniards, after all, had come to create a feudal society over which to rule, and a feudal society, by definition, required a tax-paying peasantry.
Second, a few legalities had to be taken care of, which normally included the need for obtaining a royal license from the monarchs of Spain. Third came a legal pretext, which in the case of Atahualpa consisted of reading him the Requerimiento and thus his legal rights. Conveyed to him in probably a bad translation, the Requirement had informed Atahualpa that he had the right to accept the new power structure—and that if he or anyone else resisted they would quickly be put to the sword. According to the logic of sixteenth-century Spanish jurisprudence, by refusing to submit to the Spaniards and by throwing to the ground a black object with fine squiggles on its leaves that he had no way of understanding, Atahualpa had immediately forfeited his rights to the Inca Empire.
The fourth step in the normal process was to begin the conquest itself, one that was almost always accompanied by a massive display of terror in a typical “shock and awe,” or “blitzkrieg,” campaign. Savage attacks were purposely unleashed in order to crush native resistance and to terrorize the local inhabitants into obeying their new masters. Cortés had done this early on in Mexico, where in the town of Cholula he and his men had massacred an estimated three thousand natives in less than two hours. Spaniards throughout the Indies, in fact, had frequently cut off the arms or hands of any natives who resisted their demands, and had burned alive many native chieftains, using such spectacular displays to sow terror throughout the local population. Pizarro and his men, in their slaughter of perhaps seven thousand natives in less than a few hours, had obviously set a new benchmark for terror in the New World. Every Spanish leader, however, had to determine just how much terror was necessary in order to achieve the desired results. Pizarro’s goal was not to exterminate the natives but to control them. Pizarro also knew that, if needed, additional terror could always be methodically applied.
One of the final protocols of the typical Spanish conquest was to capture alive the native leader, if at all possible. In most cases, the Spaniards could then leverage the bonds of loyalty the subjects had for their leader as a method of political control. The power gained by capturing one native leader, seized by a relatively small group of Spaniards, was similar to the effect of fielding a Spanish army of thousands, which no conquest expedition in the New World possessed.
In terms of standard operating procedures, then, the conquest of Peru was proceeding very well indeed. Pizarro had discovered a vast, wealthy civilization based upon tax-paying peasants, had acquired the proper licenses for its plunder, had informed the local ruler of the new power structure and of his obligation to submit, had successfully carried out a massive shock and awe campaign after the ruler’s refusal, and now held that same ruler hostage, whom the rest of the empire’s inhabitants appeared to be continuing to obey. The final steps in this process, Pizarro knew, were to consolidate and extend his already substantial gains, to carry out the empire’s plunder, and then to begin diverting the vast stream of tax revenues away from the Inca elite and into the arms of Peru’s new rulers.
Not long after Pizarro had ordered Atahualpa to disband his army, the giant Inca camp Soto had visited began to pack up and disperse. Abruptly decommissioned, Atahualpa’s warriors now began fanning out in every direction as most headed off to the distant villages from where they had been conscripted. The planned triumphal march to Cuzco now canceled, confusion and rumors began to spread from Cajamarca to all parts of Peru, as the traveling warriors frequently paused on their return journeys to recount to groups of fascinated listeners the story of the recent massacre. In modern terms, their story was a simple one: a band of foreign terrorists had captured their leader and now held him prisoner. The inevitable questions in the shocked listeners’ minds were: Who were these foreigners and what did they want? And, How long were they likely to stay?
As Atahualpa watched Pizarro’s men marveling and shouting to one another excitedly about the golden plates and goblets from his camp, his observations of the invaders’ behavior must have led him to an inescapable conclusion: obviously, these bearded foreigners were here merely to maraud and steal. Few in number, they were clearly not a conquering army and thus must have no intention of staying. Instead, their only interest appeared to be in plundering all they could. Once the foreigners had gathered all they could carry, Atahualpa reasoned, watching them with a slight frown, then surely they would take their booty and leave. The foreigners, after all, didn’t even try to hide from view what seemed to excite them most. Anything made of gold, which the Incas called qori, or of silver, which they called qullqi, seemed to fascinate them more than anything else.
The Spaniards’ behavior, in fact, no doubt reminded Atahualpa of the behavior of the barbarians the Incas had conquered in the Antisuyu, or eastern quarter, of their empire, those who inhabited the dark, dense, seemingly claustrophobic jungles and who seemed to have a fascination for almost anything the Incas produced. The Incas called the uncivilized peoples beyond their eastern borders the Antis.* Surely, Atahualpa no doubt believed, despite their strange animals and powerful weapons, these foreigners were no different. They, too, were like the Antis or other marauding tribes. Barbarians. The question no doubt foremost in Atah
ualpa’s mind, therefore—as he observed the Spaniards excitedly fingering his dinnerware and babbling in an unintelligible tongue—was how could he hasten these savages’ departure? And how could he, in the meantime, stay alive and regain his own freedom?
Having spent the last five years ruling as the de facto emperor of the northern half of the Inca Empire, making decisions on a daily basis and deciding which problems had to be addressed and how they might be overcome, Atahualpa not surprisingly now came up with a possible solution for his predicament. Motioning to one of the interpreters and to Pizarro, the emperor walked into one of the rooms of the temple of the sun, then with a piece of chalk drew a white line on the wall, reaching up well over his head to do so. Turning to Pizarro, Atahualpa told the grizzled conquistador, a quarter of a century older than himself, that he was well aware of why the Spaniards had come to Tawantinsuyu, and that he, Atahualpa, would present them with all the gold and silver objects they wished—if Pizarro would spare his life.† One eyewitness wrote:
The Governor asked him how much he would give and in what span of time. Atahualpa said that he would give a room full of gold that measured twenty-two feet long by seventeen feet wide, filled to a white line half way up its height, which, from what he said, would be over eight feet high. He [also] said that he would fill the room to this height with various pieces of gold—jars, pots, plates and other objects and that he would fill that entire hut twice with silver, and that he would do all this within twelve months.
Most of the gold and silver objects were in Cuzco, Atahualpa explained, a city lying far to the south. Thus it would take him about a year to collect all that he had promised. If nothing else, Atahualpa no doubt thought, he would at least be increasing his own value to the Spaniards and therefore would be buying himself more time. With additional time, he would have more opportunities. For even though he was captive, Atahualpa still commanded armies totaling perhaps 100,000 men. It was too dangerous, however, to risk ordering his armies to attack, for he might be killed in the process. Yet if he could simply remain alive, and if the Spaniards were to let down their guard for even a moment, then he might still be in a position to do something about it.
The Last Days of the Incas Page 11
