The Last Conquistador
Page 1
The Last
CONQUISTADOR
MANSIO SERRA DE LEGUIZAMÓN
AND THE CONQUEST OF THE INCAS
STUART STIRLING
First published in 1999
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Stuart Stirling, 1999, 2013
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Original typesetting by The History Press
To the memory of
María Díez de Medina de Peláez,
my grandmother,
and Ofelia Díez de Medina,
descendants of the conquistador
At the time the Spaniards first entered the city of Cuzco the gold image of the sun from its temple was taken in booty by a nobleman and conquistador by the name of Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, who I knew and who was still alive when I came to Spain, which he lost in a night of gambling, and where, according to the Father Acosta, was born the refrain: He gambled the sun before the dawn.
Garcilaso de la Vega,
Comentarios Reales de los Incas
CONTENTS
Prologue
Acknowledgements
Map of Peru
1Heirs of the Cid
2The Realm of the Hummingbird
3The Killing of the Great Turkey Cock
4The City of the Sun God
5The Fall of Tahuantinsuyo
6The Wars of the Viracochas
7The Devil on Muleback
8The Coya of Cuzco
9The House of the Serpents
Appendix 1 Mansio Serra de Leguizamón’s Will, Cuzco, 1589
Appendix 2 Probanza de Méritos, Lima, 1562
Appendix 3 Inca Testimonies, Cuzco, 1561
Genealogies
Glossary and Place Names
Notes
Further Reading
PROLOGUE
On 1 August 1619, a small caravan of horses and mules, accompanying several wagons and escorted by outriders, could be seen making its way across the mountains to the city of Arequipa, its white-washed buildings, monasteries and churches lying at the foot of the snow-capped volcano of the Misti. On that morning, His Grace the Friar Bishop Don Pedro de Perea y Díez de Medina finally entered his see and formally took possession of the newest of all the bishoprics of the Indies of Peru.1 Aged sixty-three and worn down by the years of political intrigue that had robbed him of any one of the great episcopates of Spain, a scholarly and austere figure, his only known work was a treatise supporting the contention of the Immaculate Conception he dedicated to the theologian Agustín Antolínez, Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela. His talents, so greatly admired in his youth, at Rome and at the university of Pavia, appeared almost meaningless among the faces that greeted him in the city’s council chamber: whose distrust and condemnation he would within the years earn by his high handed and authoritarian manner in a dispute with regard to the building of his cathedral church, in which even the King would be forced to intervene.
Arms of the Friar Bishop Pedro de Perea y Díez de Medina, Capilla del Sagrario, sculptured by Domingo de Arregui, Briones. (Author)
Among the presbyters who had supported the Friar Bishop was an Andalusian, Miguel Pérez Romero, whom he appointed to administer his diocese when he was later forced to travel to the viceregal capital at Lima to face the censure of both the Viceroy and the colony’s Archbishop. The relationship had further been strengthened by the subsequent marriage of the presbyter Romero’s daughter to the Bishop’s nephew Don Pablo Díez de Medina, a hidalgo and lawyer from his native township of Briones, in La Rioja. On 28 May 1630, the Friar Bishop died at Lima. His will shows him to have left much of his considerable fortune to the Augustinian convent at Burgos and to the church at Briones for the founding of a chapel, and where his sculptured features can still be seen under a grill awning of his coat of arms, bearing the ten Moors heads and title name of his family, awarded his ancestor for killing single handed ten Moors in the medina, citadel, of the castle of Tíscar, in the reconquest of Andalusia.2
Sculpture of the Friar Bishop by Juan Bazcardo, Capilla del Sagrario, Briones. (Author)
Shortly before the Friar Bishop’s death a manuscript had come into his possession, which, because of its antiquity and historical interest, he had entrusted to the care of his fellow Augustinian Antonio de la Calancha y Benavides. A creole from Sucre, Calancha had for several years been researching Inca history and traditions, together with his Order’s missionary role in Peru. The manuscript, written a year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, was addressed to King Philip II, and was the last will and testament of the Conquistador Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, the grandfather of the presbyter Romero’s wife.* The preamble of the will Calancha included in his history Corónica Moralizada del Orden de San Agustín en el Perú, published in Barcelona in 1639.3
Among the other papers in the possession of Romero’s wife was a copy of her grandfather’s probanza de méritos,† his testimonial of his past service to the Crown, also addressed to King Philip II. The 154 folio pages record the testimony of twenty witnesses, six of whom had been present with him at the killing of the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca, and several of whom had been pardoned for their part in the rebellions against the Crown which had lasted intermittently for seventeen years. The text, published for the first time, forms the basis of a portrait of an almost unknown soldier, who had been the last conquistador to die in Peru, and, as his will demonstrates, one of the very few of Pizarro’s veterans to have expressed his remorse for his role in the conquest of the Incas.
* See Appendix 1.
† See Appendix 2.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Principally I acknowledge my mother, without whose encouragement this book would never have been written. I would also like to thank Luis Roldán Jordán and Josefa García Tovar, of the Seminario de Historia Local de Pinto, Madrid. I am grateful to my brother Alexander Stirling and Nicholas du Chastel for taking photographs for me in La Paz, Potosí and Cuzco. I am also grateful to Dr Barry Taylor, of the British Library, for his advice and the staffs of the Archivo General de Indias, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, Seville, the Archivo Nacional de la Nación, Lima, Canning House, the British Library and the Institute of Historical Research, London.
Map of Peru.
1
HEIRS OF THE CID
When in ancient or modern times has so great an enterprise been undertaken by so few against so many odds, and to so varied a climate and seas, and at such great distances, to conquer the unknown?
Francisco López de Jerez
Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú
The history of Spain’s conquest of the Inca empire of Tahuantinsuyo is as much a history of the destruction of a civilization as it is of its protagonists and victims: conquistador and Indian alike, some of whose names are recorded by history, and others forgotten in the faded parchments of some distant arch
ive. As with much of colonial history, it was a history of a conquered people written by its conquerors, and revised in part by the chronicles of later missionaries and Crown officials. Almost nothing in any great biographical detail is recorded of their lives. As illiterate as the people they had conquered, their silence was to prove their greatest defence of the wealth they accumulated, and of the inhumanity with which they had established their empire: a social and economic infrastructure which would still be evident in Andean America until the agrarian reforms of the present century.
That each of the conquistadors of the New World was tainted with the blood and brutality of their conquest is without dispute. Neither was their role any different from that of their forefathers who had fought in the reconquista of Muslim Spain and shared in the booty of its destruction, nor can their undoubted courage be denied them. Their story is not of a great religious crusade but of explorers and would-be mercenaries, whose treatment of the natives they subjugated was possibly no more bloody than the crusading armies which had ransacked their fellow Christians at Constantinople on the way to the Holy Land three hundred years previously, or in any of the later religious wars of Europe. With scant knowledge of handling the arms they purchased or borrowed, and united solely by their poverty and the dream of riches that had brought each of them to the Indies, they were to conquer one of the greatest empires of the Americas. Nor as colonists did they differ in their sense of racial superiority to any other latter day European colonist; nor was the plight of the people they conquered any less humane than that of an African, North American Indian or Aborigine. Neither was their racism dissimilar to that of any other European, nor even of the humanist Erasmus who chided the Spaniards for having too many Jews in their country.1
The legacy of their cruelty would transcend the centuries, inspired in part by the writings of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, whose condemnation of the treatment of the natives of the New World would later be revived by Protestant pamphleteers in elaborating the leyenda negra, black legend, of Spain’s conquest. ‘There are many who were never witnesses to our deeds, who are now our chroniclers,’ the Conquistador Mansio Serra de Leguizamón complained in his old age, ‘each one recording his impressions, often in prejudice of the actions of those who had taken part in the Conquest . . . and when they are read by those of us who were the discoverers and conquistadors of these realms, of whom they write, it is at times impossible to believe that they are the same accounts and of the same personages they portend to portray.’2
The homelands and social hierarchies the conquistadors left behind in their poverty stricken villages of Castile, Estremadura and Andalusia had evolved in the feudalism of the Middle Ages: an era that had transformed Spain from an amalgamation of semi-autonomous Visigoth and Arab kingdoms into a nation of imperial power. It had also been an age that had seen the throne of Spain inherited by the Flemish-born grandson of Queen Isabella of Castile and her consort King Ferdinand of Aragón, who as Charles V would be elected Holy Roman Emperor and succeed to the great Burgundian inheritance of the Low Countries and to the kingdom of Naples: a legacy which would divide the political and religious map of Europe, and in time witness Spain’s hegemony of the New World.
The realm the young Austrian Prince Charles of Habsburg inherited from his Spanish mother and grandparents was a land steeped in the exorcism of its past Arab and Judaic civilization, the last symbolic vestige of which had been the surrender of the kingdom of Granada in 1492. This was the same year his grandmother’s Genoese Admiral Columbus had first set foot on the Caribbean island of Guanahaní he had believed to be the gateway to India, and for which reason the Americans would be known as Indians. In the eighth century possibly 1 million Arabs and North African Berbers had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and had settled in the Iberian Peninsula, three-quarters of which by the eleventh century had been under Muslim rule,3 populated not only by Christians but by a large urban Jewish community. It was a land separated as much by its geographical contrasts as by its racial division.
Only in the mid-thirteenth century had Spain’s Christian armies re-established its former Visigoth capital, at Toledo. The reconquered territories were placed under the protection of encomiendas, lands entrusted by the Crown to families of old Christian lineage, Cristianos viejos, and held in lieu of feudal service. Evangelical as well as territorial in its purpose, it was a system that would dominate the social structure of a vanquished people, destroying both their identity and traditions. With similar effect it would be introduced by the conquistadors to the colonies of the New World, and which in all but name would become a licence for slavery. The fate of the country’s Jews had followed a similar course of persecution. The tax returns of Castile in the year 1492, whose kingdom comprised three-quarters of the Peninsula’s populace of an estimated 7 million people, record some 70,000 Jews, almost half of whom would refuse to accept conversion and face exile in Portugal4 or North Africa.5 Those who remained, known as conversos, as in previous centuries, would be assimilated into a society governed by the tenets of a religious Inquisition, in which they would face the stigma of their race in the proofs of limpieza de sangre, racial purity – an anachronism that would perpetuate unabated well into the nineteenth century.6 Even St Teresa of Avila, venerated by king and courtier alike, would never disclose the ignominy shown her grandfather, a converso, who had been publicly flogged in Toledo at an auto-da-fé for his apostasy.7
It was an image of a people in every level of their existence: of a predominant and mainly destitute peasant society governed by its Church and feudal nobility, which owned 95 per cent of the land;8 and of a small urban middle class, of tradesmen, artisans and clerks, many of them incorporated in the Hermandades, guilds, dependent on the Crown for their privileges. The hidalgo – hijo de algo, son of a man of rank – represented an untitled nobility which for generations had served the Crown as soldiers, or as warrior monks in the Military Orders modelled on the crusading Orders of the Holy Land. Bound by their distinct codes of chivalry, they had traditionally derived their livelihood from the booty of war and from the rents of their small country estates, regarding trade and any form of commerce as below their dignity; a stance that brought many of them to penury, and which Cervantes satirized in the characterization of the hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Some were landless and lived in townships or in the garrison castles of the Orders: Calatrava, founded in 1158 for the defence of Toledo by Ramón Sierra, Benedictine abbot of the Navarre monastery of Santa María de Fitero; Alcántara, founded in about 1170 for the defence of Estremadura; and Montesa, founded in 1317 by King James II of Aragón as the result of the disbandment of the Templar Order, whose lands he acquired.
The Order of Santiago, founded in about 1160, was however the most prominent of all the Orders, owning some quarter of a million acres of land. It was established by knights of León for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of St James the Apostle, at Compostela in Galicia, where, according to tradition, his body was buried. Proclaimed patron of Spain and its armies because of his legendary apparition at the Battle of Clavijo in the ninth century, his image as Santiago mata moros, slayer of Moors, mounted on a white horse in full armour would emblazon its banners during its wars in Europe and in the conquest of both Mexico and Peru. St James’ emblem of the cockleshell owes its origin to the legend that at Clavijo a Christian knight discovered his chain mail studded with cockleshells after making his escape across the River Ebro: a symbol synonymous with pilgrimage to his shrine at Compostela. With the demise of Muslim Spain the Orders would witness the end of their crusading role, their lands and wealth prey to the political and financial demands of the Crown.9 It would also symbolize the end of the hidalgo as a crusader knight, relegating him to the romances of a bygone age, and his title to a mere appendage of nobility.
Mansio’s signature. (Patronato 126, AGI, Seville)
The conquistador Mansio Serra de Leguizamón was one of the few hidalgos to have taken part in the discov
ery and conquest of Peru,10 most of whose 330 known volunteers were from the humblest backgrounds, the sons of yeomen and tradesmen. He was born in the year 1512, three years before the birth of St Teresa of Avila, in the township of Pinto in the realm of Toledo, in an age that could still recall the reconquest of Granada and had witnessed the discovery of the New World. He was the son of Juan Serra de Leguizamón, a Vizcayan,11 and of María Jiménez, whose Castilian family had lived in the township for generations.12
Mansio’s father, who probably typified the plight of the impoverished hidalgo at the turn of the century, was descended from the families of Serra, of Ceánuri and of Leguizamón, of Echévarri near Bilbao, the arms of which the Conquistador bore, and whose faded carving can still be seen on the portico of his mansion in Cuzco. From time immemorial Iberia’s northern province on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, bordering the Basque lands and Pyrennean kingdom of Navarre, had possessed its own language and fueros, privileges, as subjects of its feudal lordship, which only in the fourteenth century had been assimilated into the Crown of Castile. The Victorian writer Richard Ford, who travelled widely across its mountainous land, referring to the language of its people, quotes a common saying that the Devil had studied Vizcayan for seven years and had accomplished only three words. ‘A people,’ he wrote, obsessed by their independence and lineage, ‘. . . whose armorial shields, as large as the pride of their owners, are sculptured over the portals of their houses, and contain more quarterings than there are chairs in the drawing rooms or eatables in the larder . . . and well did Don Quijote know how to annoy a Viscayan by telling him he was no gentleman’.13 According to the fifteenth-century Vizcayan chronicler and genealogist Lope García de Salazar,14 the Leguizamón were descended from Alvar Fáñez de Minaya, a cousin of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known to history and legend by his Moorish title of el Cid, the Lord: both of whose names would embellish the ballads of the Middle Ages and inspire the epic poem of that name.