The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  Others argued that any cavalry group attempting to break out of the city would only be partaking in a suicide mission. Long before the cavalry had reached the relative safety of the coastal plains, the horsemen would have to travel through passes where they could easily be trapped and slaughtered. If the cavalry unit were lost, that would leave those in Cuzco with fewer horses and with a much weaker force. Either they all broke out of their encirclement together, this second group argued, or they all stayed to fight. To divide their already outnumbered forces would surely result in disaster.

  Trapped without hope of relief and knowing that if he could just get word to Lima that his brother Francisco—if still alive—would send them aid, Hernando decided that the escape attempt should proceed. Hernando was unaware, of course, that far larger cavalry forces had recently been annihilated by Quizo’s army and that Manco, no doubt, was waiting for just such an opportunity. Seeing no other way out of their impasse, however, Hernando now selected fifteen of his finest riders for a mission that many of them believed would be their last.

  Yet the day before the cavalry was to depart, the Incas unexpectedly presented the besieged Spaniards with news from the outside world, in the form of five severed Spanish heads and a large pile of ripped-up letters. According to Alonzo Enríquez de Guzmán:

  One day before the Spaniards were to set out, just after Mass, many Indians on the surrounding hills began to shout … and they left five heads of Christians and more than a thousand [ripped-up] letters on the road. The Indians had seized these letters and had killed some Christians whom the Governor had sent to help rescue this city…. The Indians had brought these things so that we could see them and know what had happened and so that we would become more discouraged. [But, on the contrary,] this gave us life and rejuvenated us…. Because by way of these letters we found out what we wanted to know—that the Governor and his men were alive … and we learned about the victory that the emperor [Charles V] had had [against the Moors] in the capture of Tunis…. My letters also reached me [in this way] … both those from my native land and from Governor [Pizarro].

  Convincing Manco to send letters along with the severed heads had apparently been the brainstorm of one of Manco’s Spanish prisoners. Somehow this man had been able to dupe the Inca emperor into believing that the Spaniards would be as devastated at the sight of the “useless” [ripped-up] “talking pages” as they would be at the sight of their comrades’ severed heads. Even after three years among the Spaniards, it seemed, Manco had no more idea of how writing worked than he had had before the Spaniards’ arrival. Pages with incomprehensible squiggles on them continued to make as little sense to the natives of South America as the coded knots of their quipus did to the Spaniards. Thus, without even realizing it, Manco had delivered a treasure trove of information—letters, some no doubt covered in blood, taken from the ill-fated Spanish expeditions that had recently been annihilated in the Andes.

  Reinvigorated by the knowledge that his brother Francisco was probably still alive, Hernando canceled the attempt to reach the coast and instead decided that perhaps he and the rest of his trapped Spaniards might try to crush the Inca rebellion in one bold move. Yanacona spies had informed Hernando that Manco Inca was presently headquartered at a place called Ollantaytambo, some thirty miles northwest of Cuzco. If Hernando could strike directly at the emperor, capturing or killing him, then the trapped Spaniards might be able to break the back of the rebellion. Manco’s cousin Pascac, meanwhile, who continued to fight on the side of the Spaniards, could then be placed on the throne. Leaving fifty foot soldiers in control of Saqsaywaman and another forty in the city below, Hernando now led a force of seventy cavalry and thirty foot soldiers, together with Chachapoyan, Cañari, and Inca auxiliaries, out of the city. Hernando’s goal was a simple one: to seize or kill the leader of the native rebellion—Manco Inca himself.

  Hernando and his men soon fought their way down into the narrow, flat Yucay Valley plain, then began following the Yucay River, fording it five or six times in the process. At each river crossing, Manco’s sling throwers hurled rocks from the other side, only to be dispersed with lances and swords once the cavalry swam across. As the valley continued to become more constricted, the Spaniards’ native scouts suddenly stopped and pointed. There, on the top of an enormous stone spur jutting out from the valley wall like a buttress, the Spaniards saw for the first time the temple fortress of Ollantaytambo. Remembered Pedro Pizarro, who rode as one of the horsemen:

  When we arrived we found [Ollantay]Tambo so well fortified that it was a horrifying sight, for the place … is very strong, with very high terraces and with very large and well fortified stone walls. It has but one entrance that is against a very steep hill. And … [on the hill] were many warriors with many boulders, which they had up above in order to hurl them down whenever the Spaniards dared to enter and [attempt to] capture the [fortress] gate.

  Dwarfed by the valley’s high walls and with tens of thousands of native warriors clustered on the tops of more than a dozen enormous, staggered terraces that led up to the fortress’s command center, Hernando’s men gathered on the plain below. They soon noticed that, side by side with the usual native warriors, stood what appeared to be legions of bow-and-arrow-wielding natives from the great forests to the east, people their native auxiliaries referred to as the Antis.

  Although the Incas had always incorporated Amazonian warriors into their armies, as only those from the jungle knew how to use bows and arrows, the Spaniards were surprised to see that so many of these warriors had suddenly appeared. Unlike the inhabitants of the Andes, many of the Antis painted their faces with dyes; others more than likely had various feathers from tropical birds sprouting from the skin around their noses or mouths, or incorporated into headbands that added bright splashes of color to their long black hair. When the Spaniards rode too close to the fortress’s walls, slews of arrows immediately arced into the sky, bearing sharpened bamboo and palm wood points, many of which hit the armored men and their horses. The Antis’ aim, Hernando soon discovered, was very, very good.

  Thirty miles from Cuzco, in hostile territory and with enemy warriors howling, hurling, and shooting sling stones and arrows down at them, Hernando Pizarro wheeled his horse around and rode over to talk with one of the few gray-haired conquistadors in the group. Wrote one eyewitness:

  Hernando … said to an old man whom he was with, “Well, the young men don’t dare approach or do anything, so let us old men go try it out [the Indians’ defenses].” And he took the old gray-haired man with him and they assaulted the walls until their horses’ chests were up against them [the enemy’s walls] and, lancing two Indians, it was amazing to see the arrows that rained down upon them as they returned [galloping] and to hear the [Indians’] roar.

  While Hernando’s qualities of arrogance, greed, and selfishness had made him generally unpopular among the Spaniards, no one had ever accused him of not being brave. Hernando’s sudden display of that latter quality, in fact, apparently shamed the other Spaniards so much that now a group of the younger riders spurred their horses and attempted to reach the single stone doorway leading up to the fortress, one that the natives had filled in with stones. The native defenders, however, quickly repulsed the attack, for, as Pedro Pizarro described, they “hurled down so many boulders and fired so many [slingshot] stones and arrows that even had there been many more of us Spaniards than there were, they would have killed us all.” During these initial skirmishes, Manco’s warriors killed many of the Spaniards’ native auxiliaries, wounded several Spaniards, and broke the leg of one of the horses so badly that the horse wandered about, alternately tripping and falling to the ground.

  As Hernando’s men fell back and regrouped, Manco’s warriors now began to descend from the fortress in order to pursue the harried Spaniards. “There is one thing about these Indians,” recalled Pedro Pizarro, “that when they are following up a victory they chase after you like demons, and [yet] when they flee the
y are like wet hens. And since here they were following up a victory, and seeing us in retreat, they pursued us with great determination.” The Spaniards found that the Amazonian archers, especially, fought ferociously: “There were among the Incas many … [Amazonian natives] who do not know what it means to flee,” marveled one Spaniard, “for they continue to fire arrows [even] when they are dying.”

  Hernando’s cavalry continued to circle and skirmish while the Spanish foot soldiers and native auxiliaries tangled with the ever-bolder Inca troops. As the two forces grappled with each other, the Spaniards suddenly noticed that the plain they were fighting on had mysteriously begun to flood with water. Manco Inca, it turned out, had devised a secret weapon and had chosen this precise moment to unleash it. Along the nearby Patacancha River, which emptied into the Yucay, Inca engineers had built a series of canals. Manco had now given the signal to open them, flooding the only plain upon which the Spanish horsemen could maneuver. According to one account, Manco Inca himself now emerged, riding a Spanish horse and urging his warriors to attack. Soon, the water had risen so high that it reached the bellies of the Spaniards’ horses, paralyzing their ability to attack. According to Pedro Pizarro:

  The Indians, without our knowing it, turned the river into the plain where we were, and had we waited longer, we would have all died. Yet when he understood the trick the Indians had played on us and that it was impossible to take this village at that time, Hernando Pizarro ordered us to retreat. And as the night grew darker he sent all the foot soldiers ahead and the baggage with some mounted troops to guard it, and he himself with other troops took the middle, and he ordered his brother, Gonzalo Pizarro, along with a few more of us cavalrymen to bring up the rear, and in this way we retreated.

  Through the long, black night the Spaniards carried out a forced retreat, their native auxiliaries helping them to fight off hordes of warriors who continually appeared out of the darkness with no warning, shouting and swinging their mace clubs, then disappearing from the circles of jumping, chaotic light of the Spaniards’ torches. Somehow, Hernando and his men managed to struggle across the valley and reach the heights on the opposite side. There they camped for the night in an abandoned Inca village. The next day, tired, wounded, and discouraged, the Spaniards fought their way back to Cuzco, rejoining their embattled countrymen whom they had left behind. Despite their best efforts, their bold military attack had resulted in a number of lost horses and a multitude of wounded men. If anything, the Spaniards’ failed campaign and desperate retreat only seemed to have emboldened Manco and his warriors.

  Four hundred miles away and roughly eleven thousand feet lower in elevation, Francisco Pizarro anxiously waited for reinforcements from abroad and wondered whether his brothers in Cuzco were still alive. Pizarro was still receiving reports from frightened yanacona spies that a massive Inca army was assembling nearby for an attack. This was the same army, his spies no doubt told him—led by a General Quizo—that had wiped out Pizarro’s relief forces and had massacred the Spaniards in Jauja. General Quizo, they said, had vowed to destroy every bearded invader on the coast, exactly as he had done in the mountains.

  Pizarro had been living in the City of the Kings for the last year and a half. Living with him was his seventeen-year-old Indian mistress, Doña Inés—the daughter of the great Huayna Capac and a sister of Manco Inca—as well as a two-year-old daughter, whom Pizarro doted upon, and a one-year-old son. The city Pizarro had founded, laid out around a traditional Spanish town square, currently consisted of a hodgepodge of recently constructed and in-construction buildings, along with an amalgam of tents, lean-tos, and native dwellings that were inhabited by the servants of the Spaniards and by a recent consignment of African slaves.

  Now, because of their recent losses, however, only about a hundred Spaniards were available to defend Los Reyes, or “The Kings,” as it was called colloquially. The latter were divided into a force of eighty cavalrymen and twenty foot soldiers. In addition, Pizarro was relying upon at least several thousand native auxiliaries, mostly Chachapoyan, Cañari, and former members of the yanacona, or Inca servant class. Rounding out the assemblage were fourteen Spanish women—the only Spanish women in Peru—together with the Spaniards’ numerous native mistresses, and a sprinkling of female morisca (Islamic) slaves. Constructed upon barren sands, the City of the Kings lay some twelve miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. To the east, northeast and southeast rose a number of dry, steep, and rounded brown hills, the last vestiges of the Andes, which tumbled down from their icy heights and eventually sank beneath the windswept coastal sands.

  A general atmosphere of fear and anxiety now gripped the city’s inhabitants, given the rumors about the approach of hostile enemy armies, the relatively small number of defenders, and the knowledge that roughly half of the city’s Spanish forces had already been wiped out. A giant native rebellion, meanwhile, was rumored to be gathering in the nearby Andes like some catastrophic storm that was slowly headed their way. Spanish-occupied Jauja, Lima’s inhabitants knew, no longer existed; its encomenderos had been wiped out. Cuzco had possibly suffered the same fate. In addition, nothing had been heard from Diego de Almagro, whose five hundred men had left to explore the Kingdom of New Toledo, as his new realm was called, over a year earlier. They, too, might have been exterminated, for all anyone knew. Nor had any ships with relief forces arrived in response to Pizarro’s desperate pleas abroad. Thus far, in fact, Pizarro had not received a single reply.

  Finally, late in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, as the omnipresent mist, or garúa, clung to Los Reyes like a cold damp cloth, the news that everyone had been dreading now arrived in the form of a lone Spaniard galloping across the plain.

  [The conquistador Diego de Agüero] presently arrived, having fled to the [City of the] Kings, [and] who reported that the Indians were up in arms and had tried to set him on fire in their villages. A great army of them was approaching, the news of which deeply terrified the city, all the more so because of how few Spaniards were in it.

  Almost immediately, more unwelcome news followed.

  [Auxiliary] Indians from outside of the City of the Kings arrived, complaining that great quantities of Indian warriors were coming down from the mountains to destroy them, killing their women and children. The Governor sent Pedro de Lerma with twenty cavalry in order to find out what was going on and to scout out the area, for [this was happening] not more than three leagues [ten miles] away and on the plain…. [Lerma] left that night, and only two leagues [seven miles] from the city he [suddenly] found himself besieged by fifty thousand Indian warriors.

  The rumors of an impending attack, the city’s inhabitants realized, had indeed been true. Unbeknownst to Lima’s defenders, General Quizo had just spent months gathering his forces and raising additional levies of warriors from along the western flanks of the Andes. By now Quizo had plenty of practical experience in combating Spanish troops, both foot soldiers and cavalry. By using the Andes’s rugged topography to his advantage, and by collecting accurate intelligence on the disposition and movements of enemy forces, he had been able to destroy previously invincible Spanish cavalry detachments of up to eighty men, with negligible losses of his own. Still, Manco’s veteran general clearly knew his own limitations: thus far, neither he nor any other Inca commander had discovered an effective defense against Spanish cavalry on flat ground, no matter how great the numerical superiority of their own forces might be. Quizo’s ultimate commander, however—Manco Inca—had yet to learn this lesson.

  Months earlier, after hearing the welcome news of his general’s unbroken string of victories, Manco had sent Quizo one of his own sisters, “who was very beautiful,” to be the general’s wife. Manco had also sent Quizo numerous gifts, including high-status royal litters that lent the general even more authority and prestige. In effect, Manco had just promoted his most successful general and was now tied to him through matrimony. The gifts, however, were delivered along with firm instructions: Quizo was t
o attack Pizarro’s coastal city “and destroy it, not leaving a single house standing, and to kill as many Spaniards as he could find.” Pizarro himself was to be taken alive, if possible, and was to be brought to Manco as a prisoner. Any natives found helping the Spaniards were to be summarily executed. Once having sacked and destroyed the city, Quizo was to return with his army to Cuzco, where he and Manco would complete the extermination of the remaining Spaniards in Peru.

  General Quizo fully realized that the strength and speed of the Spaniards’ horses could only be neutralized by steep topography. Horses, it turned out—even more so than men—simply were no good at running up steep hills. As long as his men controlled the heights, Quizo had the advantage. In the case of the Spanish city on the coast, however, which Quizo’s scouts had no doubt built small clay models of for him to study, the general quickly saw that his troops would be forced to abandon the protection of the hills and would have to attack the Spaniards on flat terrain. There, they could certainly expect to be attacked by Pizarro’s cavalry. As the Inca general studied the clay models and examined the protuberances representing the hills around the city, he undoubtedly realized that Manco’s order to attack Pizarro’s coastal city was going to be the most difficult challenge of his life.

  Meanwhile, Pedro de Lerma, who had found Quizo’s advance forces massing some seven miles from the city, decided to attack. Despite suffering numerous casualties, however, Quizo’s warriors continued to advance, new ones immediately taking the place of those who had been slain. Quizo’s troops eventually killed one Spaniard, wounded a number of others, and then with one well-placed sling stone broke most of the teeth in Captain Lerma’s mouth, leaving the captain’s face a bloody mess. Lerma broke off the engagement soon afterward and retreated with his troops to Lima.