The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  As flaming roofs began to collapse and crash throughout the city, native warriors were now able to run along the tops of the newly exposed walls, thus gaining the advantage of height over the Spaniards and also allowing the natives to protect themselves from cavalry charges. Other warriors fought on foot in the narrow alleyways, swinging their battle-axes and mace clubs and slinging stones at the Spanish foot soldiers, at the Spaniards’ native allies and slaves, and at the metal-clad demons on horses. “The Indians were supporting one another so well,” wrote one eyewitness, “that they charged through the streets with the greatest determination and fought hand-to-hand with the Spaniards.”

  All day, as smoke poured from the city, the battle raged fiercely; only with the greatest difficulty, in fact, were the Spaniards able to prevent the tiny portion of Cuzco that they presently held from being overrun. Lords of vast Indian estates—indeed of much of the Inca Empire only a month earlier—the Spaniards now saw their future prospects collapse as abruptly as the flaming roofs throughout the city. For all the Spaniards, however—rich and poor alike—the only thing that now mattered was preserving their lives.

  As the seemingly endless day drew to a close, however, the Spaniards were granted a slight reprieve: the Incas were primarily day fighters and were reluctant to fight at night. Thus, as the sun god, Inti, finally began to sink behind the hills, the natives gradually ceased their attack. Manco’s warriors seemed content to consolidate their advance into the city by building barricades across the streets and alleys they had captured. As the exhausted Spaniards watched the barricades rise, it was clear to all that Manco’s noose around them was gradually cinching tight. That night, recalled Titu Cusi,

  As they [the Spaniards] knew of no solution, their principal help came in resorting to God, such that all that night in the [makeshift] church [of Hatun Cancha] they prayed for God to help them, on their knees and with their hands [clasped] near their mouths, which a lot of Indians saw and even those [Spaniards] who were on the plaza standing guard did the same, as well as many [Chachapoyan and Cañari] Indians who were [fighting] with them, who had come with them from Cajamarca.

  Wrote the chronicler Huamán Poma de Ayala:

  On their knees, the Christians begged for God’s mercy and called upon the Virgin Mary and all their Saints. With tears in their eyes they prayed aloud: “Bless us, St. James! Bless us, Holy Mary! God save us!” … They humbled themselves and with their weapons actually in their hands appealed to their Holy Mary.

  That evening, Hernando Pizarro—who three years earlier had helped to buoy up the Spaniards’ spirits the night before their desperate gamble to capture Atahualpa—called a general meeting. Outside and in the distance, roof beams continued to collapse, periodically sending up geysers of fresh sparks into the night air. On the square, the Spaniards’ native auxiliaries stood guard, their tunics and faces illuminated by the city’s eerie red glow. Although many of his fellow conquistadors disliked Hernando due to his arrogance, suspicious nature, and lack of generosity, he was nevertheless a natural leader who was extremely cool under pressure. For those gathered inside, waiting for Hernando to speak, all realized that their very lives now depended upon the decisions the heavyset, bearded man would make:

  “Gentlemen, I’ve asked you to meet here in order to speak to all of you together because it appears to me that … the Indians are shaming us more and more. I believe that the reason for this is because of the lack of forcefulness and timidity that some of you have shown. That is [why] we have abandoned [most of] the city.

  “I don’t want it said of me that the land that Don Francisco Pizarro, my brother, conquered and populated, was lost in any way, shape, or form because of fear…. Because anyone who really knows the Indians knows that weakness [on our parts] only makes them stronger.”

  Pacing back and forth and no doubt gesticulating with his hands, Hernando continued.

  “In the name of God and our King, and defending our houses and our estates, we will die [if we must]…. Let’s strengthen our resolve with the understanding of why we have to fight, and then we will not feel danger, because you already know that with courage one can achieve what appears to be impossible, and without it even that which is easy is made difficult. This is what I urge upon you—and I am asking that all of you agree to this, because divided we will be lost [even] without an enemy.”

  Unanimously, the trapped Spaniards pledged that they would fight fiercely with no thought of themselves for “with the men seeing their end, they prayed to our Lord and to our Lady [the Virgin Mary] saying that it would be better to go out … and die fighting than to die there like hogs.” Outside, on the hills surrounding the city, a seemingly infinite number of campfires kept the native troops warm while they continued their campaign of unnerving the Spaniards by maintaining a continuous din of shouting and jeering. Beyond the ring of hills lay other native camps where tens of thousands of the warriors’ wives busied themselves with cooking food and where even the soldiers’ children slept. A traditional aspect of Inca military campaigns was to bring along an entourage of civilian camp followers. As many hundreds of native warriors had already been killed that day, the wails of grief-stricken women no doubt lifted up from the camps and drifted mournfully through the night air.

  Villac Umu and his generals, meanwhile—looking down upon the city from their fortress of Saqsaywaman—were busy discussing their battle plans for the following day. Below them the city of Cuzco seemed to pulse and glow in the night, like some angry, fluorescent creature that had been suddenly hauled up from the ocean’s dark depths. Fires continued to crackle, occasionally vomiting forth wreaths of sparks and flame while abrupt explosions relayed the constant, staccato-like collapse of roofs. As isolated and fervent Spaniards prayed on their knees to their lone God and the Incas made sacrifices to theirs, both sides nevertheless had to feel that they had been partially successful that day. The Spaniards because, despite the ferocious attack, no lives had thus far been lost and because they had prevented their positions from being overrun. The Incas because they had seized nearly the entire city and had tightened the noose around their enemies so severely that the latter were currently reduced to hiding within two buildings.

  Before Manco Inca went to sleep in Calca that night—this, the first night of his assault—he sent word to his commanders that with renewed efforts the following day the last remaining pocket of Spanish resistance would surely be crushed. Lying upon a thick pile of blankets, Manco drifted off to sleep, no doubt dreaming of his warriors swarming into the Spaniards’ final strongholds and then clubbing the frightened men to death.

  The next day, soon after dawn, a great roar went up from the hundreds of thousands of native warriors on the hillsides as well as from the blasts of countless conch shells and clay trumpets. Once again, hordes of native troops descended upon the city, filling the streets and marching toward the main square, where they expected the Spaniards to make their final stand. In and around that same square the Spanish cavalry and foot soldiers waited, along with their African slaves and their native auxiliaries. Manco’s troops soon began setting afire rooftops that had somehow escaped the conflagration the previous day; thus, as the city continued to smoke and burn, warriors ran along the tops of the house walls, hurling javelins and slinging stones down at their enemies. Fearing renewed attempts to set their two buildings on fire, the Spaniards had purposely posted men on both rooftops. The latter were now kept busy putting out fires as soon as the sling throwers or jungle warriors fired hot stones or flaming arrows at them. Meanwhile, in the narrow streets below, the two opposing forces met and grappled with each other in fierce mortal combat.

  With their military options now severely reduced, the Spaniards relied upon a simple strategy: in order to prevent the small area they presently held from being overrun, their three cavalry units continually charged the native warriors in an effort to disrupt their attacks. It was better, all agreed, to meet one’s end fighting on the open square or u
pon the narrow streets than to be caught cowering in one of their bunkers. No Spaniard wanted to be trapped inside either building and burned or clubbed to death. Thus, like the native warriors attacking them, the Spaniards fought savagely, stabbing and slicing at the enemy with their lances and swords, butchering native after native and leaving them on the ground in pools of blood and gore. Amid the cramped streets, however, choked as they now were with barricades, dead bodies, and with Manco’s attacking troops, maneuverability for the cavalry had become difficult. The force of the cavalry was soon even further blunted by a number of native innovations.

  When twenty-three-year-old Alonso de Toro led a cavalry charge down one of Cuzco’s narrow streets, for example—which even in the best of circumstances were only wide enough for two horses to ride abreast—a group of Manco’s warriors suddenly pushed a high wall over, which collapsed on top of Toro and his men. Knocked from their horses and stunned by the impact, Toro and his companions would have been annihilated if their own native auxiliaries had not now rushed forward, fought off their attackers, and pulled the Spaniards to safety.

  Meanwhile, on the hillsides around the city, Manco’s troops had been busy implementing additional strategies in an effort to neutralize the Spaniards’ powerful horses. On the flat agricultural terraces that the Incas called andenes, and which they had used to transform the sloping hillsides in certain areas into a series of giant staggered platforms, native warriors now dug pits in the ground in order to prevent a cavalry charge. Elsewhere in the surrounding hills, other natives disrupted the aqueducts leading into the city, flooding the flatlands above the rim of the valley and making it impossible for horses to gallop on the marshy ground. Within Cuzco itself, Manco’s troops continued building more wicker barricades, using these to block off entire streets and thus to restrict their enemy’s maneuverability.

  As the cavalrymen wheeled on their horses and attempted to cope with so many new obstacles, Manco’s warriors now unleashed another weapon against them, one that they had previously used only when hunting deer and other large game. Wrote one of the siege’s survivors:

  They have many offensive weapons … [such as] lances, arrows, clubs, axes, halberds, darts, and slings, and another type of weapon that they call ayllus, which are made from three round stones placed and sewn up in leather bags and attached to a cord … a yard long…. They throw these at the horses and [thus] bind their legs together and sometimes they will hit the rider and will bind a man’s arms to his body [in the same way]. These Indians are so good at this that they can bring down a deer in the countryside.

  The Spaniards soon began calling the Incas’ strange weapon bolas, or “balls.”

  In response to the Incas’ latest tactics, the Spaniards were forced to quickly come up with counterstrategies of their own. Because of the bolas, the cavalrymen now needed foot soldiers to accompany them in order to cut them free when they became entangled. Parties of Spanish horsemen and infantry, meanwhile, worked on destroying the barricades in the streets, although they were often forced to do so under a dense hail of stones. Cañari and Chachapoyan natives, meanwhile, when not fighting alongside the Spaniards, worked on filling the anti-horse pits Manco’s warriors had dug in the ground; they also worked on demolishing the stone terraces on the hillsides so that the cavalry and foot soldiers could more easily counterattack.

  Although no Spaniards had yet been killed, many had nevertheless received wounds of varying severity on their arms, hands, legs, and faces; all of them realized that their desperate situation would have been even more so without the help of their native auxiliaries. Wrote Garcilaso de la Vega:

  The friendly Indians were of great help in curing their wounds and in ministering to all their other needs, bringing healing herbs and food to eat…. On seeing this, many of the Spaniards themselves said that they were in such straits that they did not know what would have happened to them if it had not been for the help of those Indians who brought them corn, herbs, and everything they needed to eat and to cure their wounds, and went without food themselves so that their masters might eat, and served them as spies and watchmen, warning the Spaniards day and night of their enemies’ intentions by secret signs.

  Despite the Incas’ best efforts, the Spaniards were still able to kill several hundred native warriors while suffering no fatalities themselves, although it is likely that many of their native auxiliaries did lose their lives. Manco’s generals quickly learned that although their troops could apparently wound the Spaniards, it was nevertheless extremely difficult for their warriors to kill them. Only by surrounding a cavalryman and pulling him from his horse did they have a chance at killing an armored Spaniard in hand-to-hand combat. They soon noticed, however, that the Spanish horsemen were increasingly careful to remain together at all times, rode to each other’s aid, and were careful to avoid obvious ambushes or traps.

  The Spaniards, however, took little consolation from the fact that none of them had died yet. After two days of successive native attacks, their prospects still remained grim. The Spanish defenders continued to be hugely outnumbered; they remained isolated and cut off from the outside world and thus from reinforcements; they possessed dwindling supplies of food; and they were now also tired, wounded, and suffered from fierce, unrelenting onslaughts from a determined enemy. What had become increasingly clear to Hernando and his captains was that if they wished to survive this ordeal, they must somehow dislodge Manco’s warriors from the nearby fortress of Saqsaywaman. Not only was the fortress the obvious command and control center of the Incas’ military campaign, but from the heights around it Manco’s warriors staged their most ferocious attacks. Native troops routinely descended the steep hillsides below the fortress and entered directly into the city, without having to worry about cavalry attacks. Elsewhere, in the open valley to the south, for example, flat ground made it difficult for Manco’s generals to mount major assaults because their troops were exposed to cavalry charges. If the Spaniards could recapture the fortress, then they would be able to eliminate direct attacks on their most exposed flank and would also hold the most strategic military area on the surrounding heights.

  After consultations with his captains, Hernando finally decided that seizing Saqsaywaman was the only means of reducing their vulnerability, despite the obvious dangers that a frontal attack on the heavily guarded fortress would entail. Recalled Pedro Pizarro:

  Hernando Pizarro agreed that we [should] go and [try to] capture the fortress, for it was from there that we were receiving the most damage…. Because at the very beginning an agreement was not reached to take it before the Indians laid siege, nor was the importance of holding it realized. This being agreed upon, we of the cavalry were given the job to ready our weapons and to go and take it, and Juan Pizarro was put in charge.

  For twenty-five-year-old Juan, his appointment as the leader of such an important mission was evidence of his older brother’s confidence in him. Unlike Hernando, Juan was popular among the Spaniards. Affable, approachable, generous, and an excellent horseman, he was also fearless. Juan’s only weaknesses were impetuosity and, like many of the other Spaniards, a certain brutality in his relationships with the natives. Juan’s and his brother Gonzalo’s abysmal treatment of Manco Inca, after all, had served as one of the prime motivations for Manco’s uprising in the first place.

  Earlier that day, Juan had been fighting on horseback when another cavalryman, Pedro del Barco, was struck on his helmet with a large stone. Barco had fallen to the ground, unconscious. Spotting the danger, Juan had ridden over, leapt from his horse, and gone to Barco’s aid. As Juan was dragging his fallen comrade to safety, a native sling thrower unleashed a stone that struck Juan squarely in his jaw.* Although stunned, Juan managed to pull his companion to safety. By evening, however, Juan’s jaw had become so swollen that he was no longer able to wear a helmet. Nevertheless, the twenty-three-year-old was ready and willing to lead an attack on Saqsaywaman, as Hernando had asked. Helmet or no helmet, Juan
realized, their lives no doubt depended upon the outcome.

  The fortress Juan’s cavalry was expected to storm was a formidable one. Built upon a rocky hill on the northern edge of the city, Saqsaywaman was protected on three of its sides by steep slopes, which prevented a direct attack. On its northern side, and facing away from the city, the fortress fronted a grassy plain that the Incas frequently used for festivals and processions. Since the fortress was pregnable only from this direction, the Incas had built a series of giant walls there with which to defend it. As the notary Sancho de la Hoz wrote:

  On the … side [of the fortress] that is less steep there are three [walls], one above the other…. 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 … and they have a height of thirty palms [twenty-one feet] and a length of as many more…. These walls twist [zigzag] in such a way that if they are bombarded (with cannons) it is impossible to do so from directly in front, but only obliquely…. The whole fortress was a warehouse of weapons, clubs, lances, bows, axes, shields, vests thickly padded with cotton, and other weapons of various sorts … gathered from every corner of the realm that was subject to the Inca lords.

  Conferring with Manco’s cousin Pascac, who had sided with the Spaniards, Juan and Hernando had decided that the only way to storm the fortress was to first break through the legions of warriors to the north of the city, gaining the road that led to Jauja, and then, if successful, to wheel about and ride east around the hills until they reached the grassy plain fronting the fortress. Once there, the Spaniards would have to somehow launch a frontal assault against the Incas’ colossal walls. To many of those who listened to the plan, the mission seemed suicidal. Still, unless they were able to seize the initiative, all realized that they were doomed to remain in the city and gradually be worn down by attrition. With the grace of God, thought some, the desperate plan just might work.