The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  Pizarro surprisingly accepted Atahualpa’s explanation for Huascar’s sudden death—that his brother’s guards had murdered him without his orders. With only one Inca emperor left and with that one as securely in his possession as was an ever-increasing amount of gold, the important thing was that Pizarro was still able to control the empire through Atahualpa, whose lords and chiefs continued to obey their king.

  The contrast between Atahualpa’s behavior toward his subjects, meanwhile, and his behavior toward his captors fascinated the Spaniards. To those natives beneath him on the hierarchical scale—which included every citizen in the Inca Empire—Atahualpa’s behavior remained aloof, stern, and magisterial. Usually the emperor received visitors while seated behind a screen, so that he himself could not be seen. Only with select individuals did Atahualpa grant them the privilege of viewing him in person. As a rule, the Inca style of governance was to treat one’s underlings with disdain, thus reinforcing the divisions of power. In the presence of his subjects, therefore, Atahualpa behaved every bit the god descended to earth, projecting a culturally prescribed aura of power and divinity.

  Toward the bearded invaders, however, who by their very seizure of him had trumped his own ranking in power, Atahualpa displayed a completely different side of his personality; in the Spaniards’ presence, the imperial facade imposed by Inca culture disappeared. In its place, Atahualpa instead behaved more like an “emperor without clothes,” perhaps revealing something closer to his true personality. Alone among the Spaniards, Atahualpa was convivial, friendly, even cheerful—a man in fact who bent over backward to please. The Spaniards, in the meantime, allowed Atahualpa to maintain his own servants, to continue the life of luxury to which he was accustomed, and to continue running his empire. But the Spaniards no longer allowed Atahualpa to wage war, to command armies, or to make any attempt to free himself.

  During the many months of Atahualpa’s captivity, a number of Spaniards grew fond of the native emperor, especially Hernando de Soto and Hernando Pizarro. The two Spanish captains even taught the Inca emperor how to play chess and spent hours with him enjoying a game originally invented in India. Atahualpa soon became proficient and gave chess the name of tap-tana, or “surprise attack,” thoroughly enjoying the game’s obvious parallels with military strategy.

  Peppering his captors with questions, Atahualpa in fact amazed the Spaniards, who often marveled over the supposed barbarian’s display of reason and logic. “After he was a prisoner,” wrote the notary Francisco de Xerez, “the Spaniards who listened to him were astounded to find so much wisdom in a barbarian.” “[The emperor] is the wisest and most capable [native] who has ever been seen,” wrote Gaspar de Espinosa. “He likes to learn about the things we possess to such an extent that he plays chess very well. By having this man in … [our] power the entire land is calm.”

  The Spaniards, meanwhile, most of whom were from the lower classes and a third of whom were illiterate, were fascinated by their close proximity to royalty, even if this were only of the barbarian kind. Coming from an extremely hierarchical society themselves, the Spaniards couldn’t help but be dazzled by Atahualpa’s royal treatment, or by the fact that he was waited upon hand and foot by a covey of beautiful women, most of whom were his concubines. Remembered Pedro Pizarro, who was eighteen years old at the time:

  The ladies … brought him his meal and placed it before him on delicate green rushes…. They placed all the dishes of gold, silver, and earthenware [on these rushes] and he [Atahualpa] pointed at whatever appealed to him. It was then brought over, one of the ladies taking it and holding it in her hand while he ate. One day, while I was present and he was eating in this manner, a slice of food was being lifted to his mouth when a drop fell onto the clothing he was wearing. Giving his hand to the Indian lady, he rose and went into his chamber to change his clothes, then returned wearing a tunic and a dark brown cloak. I approached him and felt the cloak, which was softer than silk, and said to him, “Inca, what is this robe made of that it is so soft?” He replied that it was from the skins of [vampire] bats that fly by night in Puerto Viejo and Tumbez and that bite the natives.

  When asked how it had been possible to collect so many bats, Atahualpa paused and said that it was done by “‘those [native] dogs from Tumbez and Puerto Viejo—what else did they have to do other than to catch bats and make clothes for my father?’”

  On another day, Pizarro’s young cousin accompanied a native to a royal storehouse filled with trunks made of dark leather.

  I asked him what the trunks contained, and he showed me some in which they kept everything that Atahualpa had touched with his hands and the clothes he had thrown away. Some contained the rushes that they placed before his feet when he ate, in others the bones of the meat or birds he had eaten … in others the cores of the ears of corn he had held in his hands…. In short, everything that he had touched. I asked him why they kept all this there. They told me that it was in order to burn it because every year … what had been touched by the [Inca] lords, who were sons of the Sun, had to be burned, reduced to ashes, and thrown into the air, and that no one was allowed to touch it.

  Perhaps the closest modern equivalent to such behavior is the reverence still shown by the Catholic faithful before the reliquaries of the saints, whose bones and bits of hair are kept as precious, sacred objects even today. Such was the adulation that Atahualpa, the Son of the Sun, received during his lifetime.

  When November and December of 1532 and then January of 1533 rolled by, the pile of golden objects still had not reached the line that Atahualpa had drawn on the wall of the chamber. Both Pizarro and Atahualpa were by now restless. Pizarro was impatient to receive reinforcements, to complete the gathering of the treasure, then to journey south to Cuzco, the Incas’ capital, and thus to finish the conquest. Atahualpa, meanwhile, was anxious to give the Spaniards what they coveted so that they would leave his empire forever. When one of Atahualpa’s brothers arrived, supervising a caravan of treasure, he told Atahualpa that another treasure convoy had been delayed at Jauja, a city lying between Cajamarca and Cuzco, and that much more gold still remained in the capital and had yet to be removed from the temples.

  Impatient for his release, Atahualpa suggested to Pizarro that the latter send some of his troops to Cuzco in order to supervise the collection of the ransom. Pizarro, however—knowing that Atahualpa had two armies in the south and another in the north—was reluctant to divide up his forces, for fear of an attack. Three of Pizarro’s men—perhaps bored with so much waiting and having heard Atahualpa’s glowing descriptions of the Inca capital—nevertheless quickly volunteered to make the journey south. Two of them—Martín Bueno and Pedro Martín de Moguer—were illiterate sailors from a seacoast town in southern Spain’s Andalusia. The third was a Basque notary named Juan Zárate.

  Pizarro agreed to send the three men yet just as quickly reminded Atahualpa of the nature of their relationship: if anything should happen to the three Spaniards, he warned, then he would have him killed. Atahualpa reassured Pizarro, offering to provide an Inca noble, a number of native soldiers, and also porters who could carry the three Spaniards on royal litters. Pizarro then met with the men, ordering them to take possession of the city of Cuzco in the name of the king and to do so in the presence of the notary, who was to draw up a legal document to that effect. He then gave the three orders to carefully behave themselves—to do nothing that the Inca orejón accompanying them did not wish, so that they would not be killed. Their mission was to reconnoiter the conditions and terrain to the south, to help with the collection of treasure in Cuzco, and to bring back a full and detailed report of everything they saw.

  One can only imagine what a journey the three men had—the first Europeans to travel along the jagged crest of the Andes from Cajamarca to Cuzco—all seen from the height of their royal litters, as if the two rough sailors and the humble notary had suddenly been transformed into powerful Inca lords. The litters they traveled on were luxury ve
hicles consisting of two long poles, sheathed on their ends in silver in the form of animal heads, and with a floor built between them. On the floor was constructed a passenger seat which in turn was overlain with soft cushions. Low walls boxed in the sides of the seat for security while overhead a canopy of feathers interwoven with cloth protected the passenger from both sun and rain. Carried normally by members of the Rucana tribe, who were trained since their youth to provide the smoothest ride possible, litters were clearly a mark of power and prestige. Their use was restricted to only the highest Inca nobility.

  The small procession soon headed south from Cajamarca, climbing the flanks of fantastic mountains, cutting past pale, blue-green glaciers, crossing through Inca cities and villages set beside rivers that sparkled in the sun, then traversing giant gorges on hanging Inca bridges while witnessing vast flocks of llamas and alpacas that seemed to extend for as far as the eye could see. Strangers in a strange land, these were the first Europeans to witness an untouched Andean world, one with a thriving civilization in all its color and scarcely understood complexity. Everything was new—plants, animals, people, villages, mountains, herds, languages, and cities. A trio of Marco Polos adrift in the New World, they were similarly off to seek riches in a distant and fabled city. Wrote the notary Pedro Sancho de la Hoz:

  All the steep mountains … [have] stairways of stone. One of the greatest works the conquistadors … [witnessed] in this land were these roads…. Most of the people on these mountain slopes live on hills and on high mountains. Their houses are of stone and earth [and] there are many houses in each village. Along the road every four to seven miles are found the houses built for the purpose of allowing the lords to rest while they were out visiting and inspecting their realm. And every seventy miles there are important cities, capitals of the provinces, to which the smaller cities brought the tributes they paid with corn, clothes, and other things. All these large cities have storehouses full of the things that are [harvested from] the land. Because it is very cold, little corn is harvested except in specially designated places. But [there are plenty of ] vegetables and roots with which the people sustain themselves and also good grass like that in Spain. There are also wild turnips [potatoes] that are bitter.* There are many herds of sheep [llamas and alpacas], which go about in flocks with their shepherds who watch over them and keep them away from the sown fields. They have a certain part of [each] province set apart for them [the herds] to winter in. The people, as I have said, are very polite and intelligent and always go about dressed and with footwear. They eat cooked and raw corn and drink a lot of chicha, which is a beverage made from corn that is much like beer. The people are very friendly and very obedient and [yet] warlike. They have many weapons of diverse sorts, as has been told.

  Like Cortés’s men gaining their first glimpse of Tenochtitlán—the capital of the Aztecs that his fellow Spaniards likened to a city more wondrous than Venice—when the three travelers finally arrived in Cuzco, after more than a month of being carried ever southward, they, too, were stunned by what they beheld. Nestled on a hillside that opened into a broad valley at 11,300 feet, the Incas’ mountain capital appeared like some medieval town in the Swiss Alps, with smoke rising from the thatched roofs of its high-gabled houses and with green hillsides and snow-and-ice-covered mountains rising in the distance. “This city is the greatest and finest that has ever been seen in this realm or even in the Indies,” the Spaniards later wrote the king. “And we can assure your Majesty that it is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be very remarkable even in Spain.” Wrote Sancho de la Hoz:

  [It is] full of the palaces of the lords…. The greater part of these houses are made of stone and others have half of the facade of stone … the streets are laid out at right angles. They are very straight and are paved with stones and down the middle runs a gutter for water and lined with stone…. The plaza is square and the greater part of it is flat and paved with small stones. Around it are four palaces of lords, which are the main ones in the city; they are painted and carved and are made of stone and the best of them is the house of Huayna Capac, a former chief, and the gateway is of red, white, and multi-colored marble…. There are … [also] many other buildings and grandeurs.

  On the heights above the city, the Spaniards saw a fortress with three towers that resembled a European castle. When the three visitors presumably used sign language to point and ask, their hosts replied with a word that sounded like Saq-say-wa-man, which they eventually learned meant “(the fortress of ) the satisfied falcon.” Described Sancho de la Hoz:

  Upon the hill, which … is rounded and very steep, there is a very beautiful fortress of earth and stone. Its large windows, which look over the city, make it appear even more beautiful…. And many Spaniards who have been in Lombardy and in other foreign kingdoms say that they have never seen another building like this fortress nor a more powerful castle. Five thousand Spaniards might fit within it. It cannot be given a broadside [with a cannon] nor can it be tunneled [beneath], because it is located on a rocky hill.

  One side of the Inca fortress was protected by an immense stone wall composed of rocks of gargantuan size—thirty-ton behemoths that somehow the Incas had cut and carved and moved into place. Elsewhere in the city, as the Spaniards wandered about, they were stared at by the curious inhabitants, whose cotton or alpaca-wool tunics and headbands, as well as hairstyles, indicated both their rank and what part of the empire they hailed from. Everywhere they looked, the Spaniards saw finely constructed stone walls lining the streets, walls that exhibited the most remarkable craftsman-ship the Spaniards had ever seen. According to Sancho de la Hoz:

  The most beautiful thing that can be seen among the buildings of that land are these walls, because they are of stones so large that no one who sees them would say that they had been placed there by human hands, for they are as large as chunks of mountains…. These are not smooth stones but rather are very well fitted together and interlocked with one another.

  Pedro Pizarro recounted: “[And they are] so close together and so well-fitted that the point of a pin could not have been inserted into any of the joints.” Concluded de la Hoz: “The Spaniards who see them say that neither the bridge of Segovia nor any of the structures that Hercules or the Romans made are as worthy of being seen as this.”

  The capital of the New World’s greatest empire was a clean, well-engineered, and obviously well-organized place. If the hallmark of civilization is the intensification of production of food and other goods and the corresponding increase of population and the stratification of society, then nowhere was this more apparent than in Cuzco, which in the Incas’ language means “navel.” It was in this very valley—where the four suyus met and formed their epicenter—that the Incas had begun their rise to power. Now the rest of the empire was connected to it via a webwork of umbilical-like roads—roads that, all combined, stretched for more than 25,000 miles, from the Inca capital to the furthest frontiers.

  Here, in the polyglot navel, the ruling emperor normally lived, and also the lesser lords. It was here, too, that even chiefs from distant provinces had their homes. A sort of gated community for the elites, Cuzco was the royal hub of the empire, a city that was purposely meant to display the ostentation of state power. To serve the elites, peasants—the workhorses of the empire from which all the nation’s power derived—visited the capital daily and kept it supplied with every conceivable kind of product the elites might require. Everywhere the Spaniards traveled in the city, in fact, they found warehouses stuffed to the ceiling with goods that millions of industrious citizens were constantly churning out, and that were then collected, tabulated by an army of accountants, and stored in massive, state-owned warehouses.

  As they had been instructed, the three Spaniards “took possession of that city of Cuzco in the name of His Majesty.” The Basque notary, Juan Zárate, dutifully drew up a document that he signed with a flourish and notarized with a seal, as puzzled natives no doubt watched
over his shoulder. Neither the natives nor the two illiterate Spanish sailors who had accompanied him could read a word of what he had written.

  What had really caught the trio’s attention, however, from the moment they had looked down upon the capital after crossing the final crest of hills, were certain buildings that seemed to burn as brightly as the sun, as if the buildings themselves had been dipped into a golden fire. After some investigation, they discovered that, sure enough,

  These buildings were sheathed on the side where the sun rises with large plates of gold…. They said there was so much gold in all the buildings of the city that it was a marvelous thing … [and that] they would have brought much more of it if this would not have detained them longer, because they were alone and over 250 leagues from the other Christians.

  Before the three conquistadors could begin collecting the gold, however, they first had to meet with the Inca general who was in command of the city. Cuzco, after all, was presently an occupied city, the former command post of the provinces that had fought against Atahualpa. Until very recently, Huascar had worn the royal fringe, or mascapaicha, and from here he had commanded his armies. It was here, too, that he had received reports about the battles raging to the north, which over the last few years had gradually moved closer and closer, until the final battle had finally crashed down upon him like a giant tsunami.

  One of Atahualpa’s finest commanders, General Quisquis, presently occupied the capital with thirty thousand troops—legions who were nearly as foreign to Cuzco’s citizens as were the three men riding about on royal litters and speaking an unintelligible tongue. Like General Sherman’s brutal march through Georgia during the American Civil War, Quisquis had fought an equally devastating campaign all the way down the spine of the Andes, had occupied Cuzco with his legions, had captured the emperor Huascar, and had exterminated almost all of Huascar’s family including even the unborn children. Only after his successful campaign did the general receive surprising reports about the sudden attack of a marauding band of foreigners in the north, who had somehow managed to capture the emperor. And only later did he begin receiving the ominous and puzzling orders from Atahualpa to send all available gold and silver objects north to Cajamarca, sacred objects that apparently were needed in order to secure the emperor’s release.