The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  To keep track of their citizens and of their respective births, deaths, marriages, ages, taxes paid and taxes owed, the government employed a virtual army of accountants and administrators. Specialists in each province stored on quipus census information such as the multiple categories of citizens and the numbers of citizens that belonged in each category. A centrally controlled group of inspectors, called the tokoyrikoq—meaning “he who sees all”—oversaw each of the provinces and reported to the inspector general, who was often a brother of the Inca emperor.

  To better manage the vast empire they had created, the Inca elite invented a hierarchical system that organized the taxable heads of households into groups of 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, and 10,000. At the top of the Inca social pyramid, then, stood the emperor, who was the supreme commander of the state, of religion, and of the armed forces. Below him stood the four prefects, or apus, who formed the Incas’ Supreme Council, each of whom represented one of the empire’s four quarters, or suyus. Beneath these stood the imperial governors, or tocrico apus, who were selected from the Inca nobility. The governors resided in the roughly eighty-eight provincial capitals and carried out administrative and judicial functions. Death sentences, for example, could only be approved by a tocrico apu, not by a lower administrator. Beneath the governors operated several layers of local chiefs, called curacas, who in return for exemption from taxation and other perks were required to organize the collection of taxes from their own ethnic groups. The status of each curaca was directly proportional to the number of households he represented, which could range anywhere from 100 to 10,000 individuals and their families. Beneath this relatively thin veneer of governing elites, and making up more than 95 percent of the empire’s social pyramid, labored the vast pool of commoners—the millions of working peasants, artisans, herders, and fishermen whose surplus labor was regularly siphoned off in order to keep the empire organized and functioning.

  In return for land rights, protection from invasion, the maintenance of the state’s religion, and guaranteed food, clothing, and shelter, Inca citizens were required to occasionally fight in wars, to donate two to three months of labor a year, and to obey the set of rules laid down by the Inca elite. Reciprocity was therefore the keystone, the master gear in the elaborate system of interrelationships that bound the Inca elite and the rest of the empire’s inhabitants together. Remove those reciprocal relationships and—like a vast mechanical clock that had suddenly sprung a gear—the complex empire the Incas had devised would cease to function.

  Such was the nature of imperial rule that Manco Inca began working to shore up in the latter half of 1534. His task was not an easy one. Already, the empire had been weakened by years of civil war. Although an Inca emperor once again ruled Tawantinsuyu, Manco had been placed there by a band of foreigners whose motivations began to be more and more suspect with each passing day. The Spaniards, for example, had already defiled the Incas’ sacred temples and in so doing had humiliated the priesthood and a good portion of the local population. To at least some of the Inca elite—who were already beginning to believe that the Spaniards were usurpers, not liberators—the Spaniards’ behavior began to make Manco Inca appear to be a collaborator rather than a sovereign Inca king.

  Unlike his older brother Atahualpa, who toward the end of his captivity had finally grasped the Spaniards’ true intentions, Manco was still oblivious to the transformation occurring in Peru. For the moment, Manco didn’t appear to understand that Francisco Pizarro was being friendly and attentive simply because he was stalling for time so reinforcements could arrive. From a military standpoint, the fledgling Spanish cities in Peru were like a tiny string of islands in the middle of an endless sea of potentially hostile natives. For the time being, that sea was relatively calm, yet conditions could easily change. The last thing Pizarro wanted to do therefore was to incite the natives to rise up against them.

  At the same time, however, Pizarro was just beginning to realize that some of the Spanish reinforcements he had patiently been waiting for might prove more dangerous than a potential native attack. Back in March, Pizarro had learned the alarming news that Hernando Cortés’s second-in-command, Pedro de Alvarado, had recently landed on the coast of Ecuador with 550 Spanish conquistadors. Alvarado was apparently determined to carve out his own governorship in the area, despite the fact that Pizarro was the only person who had a royal license to conquer any portion of the Inca Empire.

  Pizarro’s partner, Diego de Almagro, however, had hurried north as soon as he had learned the news. Unwilling to have their years of efforts derailed by competition, Almagro ultimately succeeded in negotiating a peaceful resolution. In return for 100,000 pesos (about one thousand pounds of gold), Alvarado agreed to cancel his plans of conquest and also to allow 340 of his conquistadors to join Pizarro and Almagro in completing the conquest of Peru. The negotiations had occurred just in time, it turned out. For no sooner had Almagro begun to head south again than he almost immediately ran into a large Inca army commanded by General Quisquis, who had been retreating gradually northward since having abandoned Cuzco more than six months earlier.

  Quisquis and his troops, having been away from their homes now for more than two years, were dumbfounded to encounter a large Spanish army where they had least expected one. The Inca general had assumed that the northern part of the empire was still free of the hated foreigners. Soon a series of battles ensued. In one of them Quisquis’s troops successfully ambushed a group of fourteen Spaniards and beheaded all of them. In another, they managed to wound twenty Spaniards and kill three of their horses. Still, after years of fighting and now suddenly confronted by a force of nearly five hundred Spaniards and a large number of horses, Quisquis’s men became demoralized; the vast majority of them wanted simply to drop their weapons, muster themselves out of the army, and return to their homes. Even more shocking to the proud Inca general, however, was the fact that his very own officer corps wanted to give up the struggle as well.

  “His captains told Quisquis to sue the Spaniards for peace since they were invincible,” wrote sixteenth-century historian Francisco López de Gómara. General Quisquis, however—the same commander who had led victorious armies down the length of the Andes, who had successfully fought and captured Huascar, and who had then occupied Cuzco—was insistent that his officers and troops remain and fight. An able tactician, Quisquis was gradually learning that by stationing his warriors on steep escarpments where the Spaniards’ horses could not maneuver, he could neutralize the invaders’ most powerful weapon. With his own officers now threatening to abandon the campaign, however, Atahualpa’s former general found himself unable to hide his growing fury. “He [Quisquis] threatened them because of their cowardice and ordered them to follow him so that they could regroup [and fight again].” Quisquis’s officers now rebelled, however, refusing to follow their general’s commands.

  Like any military group, the Inca army functioned on the basis of strict discipline. Atahualpa, after all, had executed a whole battalion of soldiers in Cajamarca simply for having shown fear of the Spaniards’ horses. Insubordination was an even greater crime and was severely punished. Even in the chaos of the present situation, Quisquis’s officers’ behavior amounted to treason. “Quisquis heaped scorn upon them for this and swore to punish the mutineers,” wrote López de Gómara. Suddenly, however, “Huaypalcon [one of Quisquis’s officers] threw a lance that struck his chest. Many others then ran forward with their clubs and battle-axes and killed him.”

  So ended the life of one of the Inca Empire’s finest generals, the man who had been forced to obey, although grudgingly, Atahualpa’s orders to allow the first three Spaniards to ransack the Inca capital. Despite the execution of his emperor, Quisquis had valiantly led his men against the Spaniards, even as the chaos unleashed by the invasion had continued to turn the Incas’ world upside down.

  Not long after Quisquis’s death, one of Pizarro’s captains, Sebastián de Benalcázar, finally cornered the last
of Atahualpa’s three great military leaders, General Rumiñavi, in Ecuador. After a long, desperate campaign, a climactic battle finally took place in which Rumiñavi’s troops surrendered yet he himself narrowly escaped. Spanish troops eventually caught up with the Inca general, however, as he was attempting to cross a snow-covered mountain. Taken back to Quito, neither Rumiñavi nor a host of other captured nobles were shown any mercy by their captors. According to the chaplain Marcos de Niza, Captain Benalcázar

  summoned Luyes, a great lord of those that were in Quito and, burning his feet, he tortured him in many different ways in order to make him divulge the whereabouts of Atahualpa’s [supposed] hidden treasure—which he knew nothing about. He [next] burned [chief] Chamba alive, another very important lord, who was innocent. He also burned Cozopanga, who had been the governor of the province of Quito and who had come in peace, because he did not give as much gold as [Captain Benalcázar] demanded, nor did he know anything about the buried treasure. [The captain] burned him along with many other chiefs and important men so that no native lords would remain in that land.

  Finally, the Spaniards led General Rumiñavi out onto Quito’s main square. There the great general was summarily executed for the “crime” of having resisted the occupation of his country by foreign invaders.

  With Atahualpa’s top three generals now dead, with Cortés’s partner, Pedro de Alvarado, bought off, and with hundreds of new Spanish reinforcements currently headed south, control of the riches of Peru now seemed to be securely in the hands of the two original conquering partners, Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro. Through their puppet emperor, Manco Inca, the two presently controlled the Incas’ extensive governing apparatus, were able to collect taxes, and were in a position to suppress any potential native revolts that might develop. As long as they could maintain the peace, Pizarro and Almagro seemed set upon a course that would gradually transform Tawantinsuyu into a lucrative new colony of the rapidly expanding Spanish Empire.

  Now, with the last military campaign against hostile Inca troops apparently over, Pizarro gradually began shifting his focus from his role of military leader to that of administrator. Pizarro was, after all, governor of the Kingdom of New Castile, a seven-hundred-mile-long section of the vast native realm the Spanish crown had authorized him to conquer. There remained only one small problem, however, a problem that had originally arisen when Pizarro had returned from Spain with titles only for himself and with virtually none for his partner. Almagro, of course, had been extremely angry at the time and had almost refused to proceed with the proposed conquest of Peru. Only by promising his partner partial control over whatever realm the two of them might conquer, had Pizarro finally been able to persuade Almagro to join him.

  The question remained, therefore: What about Almagro? What about the partner he had counted upon to organize expeditions and who had loyally provided him with reinforcements and supplies for the last ten years? The one who had lost an eye on their very first expedition? What role would he play in Peru? While Pizarro had granted Almagro an encomienda, as he had to the other conquistadors who had chosen to remain in Peru, Pizarro nevertheless remained indisputably governor of Peru, the equivalent of a Spanish viceroy. In this area of the New World at least, Pizarro was second in power only to the Spanish king. The Inca Empire appeared to be thousands of miles long, however, much longer than the seven hundred miles the crown had granted to him. So what was Almagro’s fair share?

  In December 1534, Pizarro and Almagro met on the coast of Peru near the site of a new town Pizarro was busy founding: La Ciudad de los Reyes, the City of the Kings—or Lima, as it would later be called. As Pizarro busied himself with outlining his new city on barren sands in full view of the Pacific Ocean—where he no doubt envisioned future fleets of merchant ships on-loading more gold and silver—Pizarro had every intention of living the remainder of his life peacefully while administering to his empire. Pizarro, therefore, no longer needed an ambitious ex-partner whose specialty was organizing, financing, and carrying out expeditions of conquest. Pizarro suggested to Almagro that the latter travel to Cuzco and take over the lieutenant governorship of that city, a position temporarily held by Almagro’s friend Hernando de Soto. Maybe that would satisfy Almagro’s ambitions. Surprisingly, Almagro accepted, but only because he was counting on receiving a grant of a governorship from the king, which he had already petitioned for. The two men no doubt embraced each other. Then Almagro climbed into his saddle, swung his horse around, and began the eleven-thousand-foot climb and four-hundred-mile journey to Cuzco.

  Shortly after Almagro’s departure, however, news arrived from Spain that King Charles had decided to split the Inca Empire in two. The king intended to award the “northern part” of the empire to Pizarro and the “southern part” to Almagro. The details of the arrangement and the precise delineations between the two kingdoms were to arrive by ship much later in the person of Hernando Pizarro, who was now on his way back to Peru and carried the king’s orders with him.

  As Pizarro continued tracing the outlines of his city’s future plaza in the sand, he no doubt stopped long enough to watch a messenger hurry off on horseback to inform Almagro of the king’s decision. Little did he or anyone else know, however, that the king’s decision would soon drive a wedge between the two conquistadors that would alter the balance of power in Peru. For the time being, as the graying conquistador returned to surveying his new city, behind him in the distance, the horse with its messenger gradually disappeared in a fine plume of dust.

  8 PRELUDE TO A REBELLION

  “As God and my conscience are my witnesses, it was evident to all concerned that it was only because of this maltreatment that the peoples of Peru were finally provoked into revolt and took up arms against the Spanish, as, indeed, they had every cause to do. For the Spanish never treated them squarely, never honored any of the undertakings they gave, but rather set about destroying the entire territory, for no good reason and without any justification, and eventually the people decided that they would rather die fighting than put up any longer with what was being done to them.”

  FRIAR MARCOS DE NIZA,

  ORDER OF THE FRANCISCANS, 1535

  “Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.”

  NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, 1511

  DIEGO DE ALMAGRO ARRIVED IN CUZCO IN LATE JANUARY OF 1535 having been appointed by Pizarro to take over the lieutenant governorship of the city. After nearly a year of military campaigns in the central and northern portions of the empire, Almagro had brought back with him more than three hundred of the new troops he had separated from Hernando Cortés’s second-in-command, Pedro de Alvarado. Just before he reached the Inca capital, a messenger overtook Almagro with news that the king was going to grant him a governorship to the south of Pizarro’s. In the year 1535, however, along the western coast of South America, only a ship’s pilot could accurately measure geographical distances—and thus far none in Peru had attempted to demarcate the boundaries of Pizarro’s territory. Exactly where Pizarro’s governorship ended and Almagro’s would begin, therefore, was anyone’s guess.

  The Incas sometimes presented their women to the Spaniards as gifts; at other times, the Spaniards seized them as their own concubines.

  As the new group of Spaniards rode and marched into the capital of the Incas, marveling at its setting and architecture, they soon realized that they had arrived too late to partake of its spoils or to be awarded encomiendas like the others. Undoubtedly, the conquistadors looked with envy at the eighty-eight encomenderos who had chosen to remain in the capital and who were now fabulously wealthy men. Many of the latter had already shed their armor and instead wore stockings, capes, and hats pierced by stylish feather plumes. By contrast, the newcomers wore patched and stitched clothing and scarcely ha
d a coin to their names. This newest group of conquistadors had come to Peru in the belief that here they could instantly become rich. Abruptly disabused of this notion, they now realized that they had missed that opportunity by at least a year, if not longer; it was a realization that caused more than a few of them to become quite bitter.

  With a minority of the Spaniards extremely wealthy and a majority extremely poor, political divisions between the two groups not surprisingly began to appear. Those Spaniards to whom Pizarro had granted encomiendas were naturally indebted to him; those who had arrived with Almagro, on the other hand, were hoping that loyalty to the aging, one-eyed conquistador who had brought them here would pay off for them in the long run. After all, if it turned out that Cuzco lay within Almagro’s new realm, then the Spaniards who had already been awarded encomiendas might soon have those rescinded. Almagro would then surely distribute the encomiendas among his own followers.

  The fact that no one currently knew which conquistador—Pizarro or Almagro—the city of Cuzco actually belonged to only exacerbated an already unstable political climate. In addition, the presence of two of the youngest and most impulsive of the Pizarro brothers—twenty-three-year-old Juan and twenty-two-year-old Gonzalo—only served to create further problems. With Juan and Gonzalo determined at any cost not to let Cuzco fall into the hands of Almagro, it wasn’t long before tensions began to simmer and then finally to bubble and boil over. Wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León: