The Last Conquistador

by Stuart Stirling

  The dowry she brought her husband, an elderly soldier of fortune and native of Talavera, who was probably twice her age, was substantial for an Indian. Other than her mansion at Cuzco, which had previously belonged to the Conquistador Vasco de Guevara and was situated behind that of Garcilaso de la Vega’s father, her encomienda of Urcos possessed an annual tribute of some 400 male Indians and their families.2 She was also still regarded by her people with great reverence. The Inca Don Diego Cayo recalled: ‘since her birth till the present time she has always been obeyed and respected as daughter of that lord (Huayna Cápac), and this witness has always obeyed her and respected her as such’.3 At the time she took possession of her lands at Urcos the plight of the colony’s bondaged tribesmen had remained unchanged since the early years of the Conquest, though their numbers had been drastically reduced by recurring outbreaks of smallpox and the harshness of their servitude, principally in the mining of silver. The encomendero Antonio de Ribera recorded:

  It has been some fifteen years since the Marqués Don Francisco Pizarro ordered the counting of Indians of the encomiendas of the conquistadors, and which numbered one million and five hundred and fifty thousand Indians. And when Pedro de la Gasca was to make a similar enquiry in order to access the number of Indians to allocate and placate the complaints of the caciques who said they had not enough Indians to produce their tribute, it was discovered that in all the land there were no more than two hundred and forty three thousand Indians, as recorded by the testimonies that were made to the inspectors, and I being one of them . . .4

  In an Andean population by then consisting of probably no more than 2 million Indians and some 8,000 colonists, 346 of whom were encomenderos at the time Pedro de la Gasca left the colony for Spain, the former Inca territories had since their conquest suffered the loss of almost a third of their population.5 Their Inca lords, though not bondaged, but dispossessed of their lands and wealth, had over the years been forced to make a living as virtual servants to the settlers with only a few exceptions, chiefly the immediate members of the royal family, among them the Inca Paullu who was to die a year after Gasca’s victory at Jaquijahuana. Proud of his allegiance to his people’s conquerors, he was buried in all the finery of a Castilian hidalgo in the small chapel he had built adjoining his palace, leaving as his heir to his encomienda his twelve-year-old son Don Carlos Inca. The leadership of the royal house at Cuzco was assumed by Doña Beatriz, following also the death of her sister, whose husband the Conquistador Francisco de Villacastín had been exiled for life by Gasca for his part in Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion. ‘In Cuzco where she resided,’ the chronicler Diego Fernández recorded, ‘there was no lord, male or female, greater than she.’6

  The small court over which the Coya presided at her mansion in Cuzco would have been Indian in appearance and custom – for neither she, nor any of her close relatives, ever learned to speak Castilian. The Indian chronicler Poma de Ayala, in a series of pen-and-ink drawings produced at the end of the sixteenth century, portrayed the royal coyas and ñustas dressed in full-length embroidered mantle capes, adorned at the neck by gold pendants: costumes also depicted in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonial paintings. Like other encomenderos, by then restricted by the Crown to residing in the cities from which their encomiendas were held, she would have been obliged from time to time to make a tour of her lands and tributary Indians, travelling in a litter and accompanied on horseback by her husband Diego Hernández and her sons and yanacona servants. The administration of her encomienda would have been in the hands of Spanish stewards – landless colonists who in general were renowned for their cruelty and blatant dishonesty as foremen, and who in later years were replaced by mestizos, equally despised by the Indians of the encomiendas. The stewards were responsible for gathering the tribute and supervising the agricultural produce of the caciques which twice yearly – on the feast of San Juan (24 June) and at Christmas – would be brought to the city of the encomienda’s jurisdiction for sale in its markets: coca, maize and potatoes, clothing and livestock of llamas, alpacas and vicuñas, together with whatever gold or silver had been mined in the tributary lands. In the province of Quispicanchis, some 35 miles south-east of Cuzco, she maintained her principal hacienda at Urcos, the capital of her encomienda. In the neighbouring mountain valley of Andahuaylillas, bordering the River Vilcanota, she was probably responsible for the building of its primitive church. Later, towards the end of the sixteenth century, this was replaced by the Jesuits, but because of its mural paintings is regarded as one of the finest examples of early colonial church architecture.

  The Coya’s marriage to an almost unknown conscript of Gasca’s army was however indicative of the reluctance of the more prominent conquistadors or Spaniards of hidalgo rank to marry the Indian mothers of their children. It was a racism bred in the psychology of men, irrespective of their own humble origins, whose sense of racial purity, limpieza de sangre, dominated their attitude to the lineages they wished to establish as grandees of a new order, and who like their countrymen in Spain were at pains to distance themselves from any stigma of mixed blood. The early years of the Conquest, when the veterans of Cajamarca had lived openly with their Indian mistresses, had given way to a semblance of moral conformity imposed on the colony by successive missionaries and by the Crown itself, who publicly criticized the failure of the by then middle-aged conquistadors to marry and set an example to both colonists and Indians alike: something to which they had previously turned a blind eye during Pizarro’s governorship. The conquistadors’ general refusal to wed their Indian concubines led to a gold rush of women fortune hunters from Spain and from the Isthmus, more than willing to trade their youth and white skin for the fortunes of the gout-ridden and battle-scarred soldiers, most of whom were disfigured by syphilis and the facial warts from which the elder Almagro, among others, was recorded to have suffered. The influx of women, from the noblest families of the Peninsular to the humblest prostitutes, would lay the foundations for the future creole aristocracy of the colony. It would also deprive the mestizo children of the conquistadors of any legal right to their elderly fathers’ fortunes, and who would be seen by their young Spanish stepmothers as a threat to their own children. It was a cycle from which few of the conquistadors would be immune, as in the case of Lucas Martínez Vegazo who in his old age married a creole young enough to be his granddaughter, and who would eventually inherit his encomienda.

  The Coya’s eldest son Juan had been born in 1534 at Cuzco and had been raised by her, together with her two other sons from her later marriage. Though recognized by his father Mansio, he would never be legitimized by him. It was a fate he shared with his cousin and childhood companion Garcilaso de la Vega, both of whom by blood were Inca princes and in turn hidalgos of Spain – a racial and social ambiguity which would encompass them all their lives. ‘The children of Spaniards and Indians are called mestizos,’ Garcilaso wrote in his old age, ‘which is to say we are of mixed race, and a term invented by the early Spaniards who had children by Indians; and as it was a name given us by our fathers I was proud to call myself as such . . . though now in the Indies it is regarded as a term of inferiority . . .’.7 The chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León recorded that he knew of encomenderos who had fathered some fifteen children by Indian women.8 As mestizos the Coya’s children were deprived of the legal rights of even the humblest colonist, based on the premise that their divided loyalty would represent a potential political threat in the future, and reflected in a decree issued at Valladolid in 1549 by the Emperor which prohibited mestizos from holding public office, and also denying them the right of inheriting their father’s encomiendas or carrying arms. Their exclusion from the wealth of the colony would also be apparent in its social hierarchy and racism – a prejudice Garcilaso suffered at the hands of his father’s Spanish wife, who reduced his Inca mother to the role of almost a servant before she eventually married an obscure immigrant called Pedroche.9

  There is
, however, little evidence to suggest in the various testimonials of the conquistadors that they regarded their mestizo children with anything other than affection, as is evident in the will of Alonso de Mesa, all of whose children were mestizos. Though maintaining their Spanish identity, the surviving veterans of Cajamarca after years of cohabitating with their Indian women were themselves by then as Indian as their mestizo children, speaking with fluency both quéchua and aymara, the principal languages of their tributary vassals, and participating in many of the native customs. Judging by the various petitions made to the Crown by the mestizos and their Inca relatives it would be the conquistadors, rather than the colony’s missionaries, who would testify on their behalf. On three occasions Mansio testified in petitions to King Philip II. ‘I know and well understand,’ he declared in one of the petitions on behalf of Doña Beatriz’s niece María, one of the Inca Manco’s daughters, ‘that the royal person of the King Don Felipe, our lord, is a Christian king and prince . . . and the merits of the said Manco Inca at the time of the conquest are known to this witness when we made much of this realm’s discovery . . . and being, as I am, informed of the poverty of his daughter Doña María Coya who has not sufficient income to sustain her . . . I ask you grant her your benevolence, as it is something she deserves and in which Your Majesty will be well served . . .’.10 On behalf of Atahualpa’s two sons, Francisco and Diego, he declared that should the King award them an encomienda with which to support themselves, ‘it would be a just and saintly thing’.11

  Other than her three sons the Coya’s immediate family consisted of two daughters of her half-brother Manco, the ñustas Usezino and Ancacica whom she had sheltered and brought up as her own children after his flight from Cuzco.12 The Conquistador Francisco de Illescas, a frequent visitor to her mansion, recalled that apart from the two young princesses various other relatives of hers were also lodged there.13 Among her numerous relatives also residing at Cuzco was her cousin Don Diego Cayo Yupanqui, who had been responsible for betraying her husband Bustinza to Gasca’s men, and who as a reward had received the encomienda of Sóndor.14 Also living in the city were the ñustas Cuxirimay Ocllo (Doña Angelina) and Chimpu Ocllo (Doña Isabel). Doña Angelina, a niece of Atahualpa, had at one time been Pizarro’s concubine and was the mother of his sons Francisco and Juan. It appears, however, that because of her past affiliation with Atahualpa she was regarded with hostility by Doña Beatriz and other members of her panaca. It was a rivalry evident in the writings of Garcilaso de la Vega whose mother belonged to the Coya’s panaca, and who was responsible for maligning the origins of Atahualpa’s mother by claiming quite falsely that she was a subject princess from Quito. A counter-assertion can be found in the chronicle of Doña Angelina’s husband Juan de Betanzos, who omitted Huáscar from his list of Inca monarchs, and who referred to his mother the Empress Rahua Ocllo as a concubine. It was an allegation also made by the Inca Titu Cusi Yupanqui, an illegitimate son of the Inca Manco, in his attempt many years later to impress the Spaniards as to his right to the Inca throne. Betanzos, however, on the strength of his wife being the mother of two of Pizarro’s sons, obtained for her a rich encomienda in the Yucay valley, which he later appropriated for himself.15

  Nothing for certain is known of Betanzos’ background, other than his apparent birth at Valladolid and service to Francisco de Carbajal at the time of Gonzalo’s rebellion, and his ability as a translator. His history Suma y Narración de los Incas is one of the earliest accounts of the Inca people and of their culture, most of the information for which he obtained from his wife’s relatives and by acting as interpreter to the enquiry the licentiate Vaca de Castro held at Cuzco. The first part of his manuscript was discovered in the library of the Escorial and was published in 1880. A second section, which had been in the library of the Duques de Medinaceli, was discovered in Mallorca and first published in 1987. A dictionary of quéchua he wrote as a foreword to his history has never been found.

  It would, though, be through the writing of the Coya’s nephew Garcilaso that much of the history of the Inca people would be made known to seventeenth-century Europe. For most of her early adult life his mother Doña Isabel had been the concubine of the Estremaduran hidalgo Sebastían Garcilaso de la Vega, who had arrived in Peru at the time of the siege of Cuzco. After serving under Gonzalo Pizarro in the conquest of the Collasuyo he had been awarded an encomienda at Tapacarí in the valley of Cochabamba, and though he had initially been opposed to Gonzalo’s rebellion he had later served under him until his desertion at Jaquijahuana. Pardoned by Gasca, he subsequently became corregidor of Cuzco and married a Spaniard. His mestizo son Garcilaso was born in Cuzco in 1539 and baptized with the family name of Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, though he would later adopt his name. His education, together with that of his cousin Juan Serra de Leguizamón, who was five years older than him, was entrusted to Juan de Cuéllar, a canon of Cuzco, who in 1552 established a small school in the city. Among their fellow students were the sons of the conquistadors Pedro del Barco and Pedro de Candía and Pizarro’s son Francisco. So proud was the canon of his charges, Garcilaso recalled years later, that he had wished he could have sent each of them to the University of Salamanca.

  Arms of Garcilaso de la Vega, engraving, from Comentarios Reales de los Incas, Lisboa, 1609. (Private Collection)

  A year after his father’s death in 1559, by then aged nineteen, Garcilaso left Cuzco for Spain and was never to return. After serving against the Morisco uprising in Andalusia in 1570, in the army of Don Juan of Austria, who a year later destroyed the Turkish fleet at Lepanto, he settled in the township of Montilla, and then at Córdoba. Far removed from his homeland, the former pupil of canon Cuéllar’s small school at Cuzco wrote one of the greatest narrative histories of the Americas, Comentarios Reales de los Incas, a work that influenced the conception of Inca civilization for centuries afterwards. Though at times historically unreliable in anything that would veer from his projection of an heroic and almost utopian Incaic society – denying for example the existence of human sacrifice – his history nevertheless presents an epic account of a people, their religion and customs, portrayed in a literary style unequalled by any of Peru’s chroniclers with the exception of Pedro de Cieza de León. Much of what Garcilaso wrote was based on the stories and legends he had heard as a child from his mother’s relatives, and from what he had himself observed during his adolescence. As he records in his history many of the veterans of Cajamarca were known to him, including Mansio, and from whom he would have been given first-hand accounts of the Conquest. He also relied on the existing published histories and an unpublished manuscript in Latin by the Jesuit mestizo Blas Valera.

  After writing a literary work of translation from Italian, entitled Los Tres Diálagos de Amor, in 1605, and a genealogical essay of his father’s family, Garcilaso wrote a history of the conquest of Florida by Mansio’s former cavalry commander, Hernando de Soto. Four years later he published the first part of his history of Peru, seven years before his own death at Córdoba at the age of seventy-seven. Bequeathing the little he possessed for a chapel dedicated to the Holy Souls of Purgatory in the city’s cathedral mosque where he would be buried, he left in his will to his Negro slave Marina de Córdoba an annuity of 50 ducats and a mandate for her freedom.16 Ignorant of the universal fame the history of his mother’s people would bring him, little would Garcilaso have imagined that some three-and-a-half centuries after his death his remains would be brought back to the city of his birth by his sovereign’s descendant King Juan Carlos of Spain to be buried in state at Cuzco’s church of el Triunfo. His mother Doña Isabel, defrauded by the Spanish husband she had later married, was to die a virtual pauper, leaving a debt of ‘one single peso’,17 as she recorded in her will.

  In October 1555 when Emperor Charles V announced his abdication in the great hall of the palace at Brussels, bestowing the crown of Spain and of the Indies on his son Philip II, the Coya Doña Beatriz was thirty-four years old. One of the l
ast decrees the Emperor had signed before travelling to his self-imposed exile in Estremadura had been the appointment of a viceroy for his Peruvian territories. At the time of the Marqués de Cañete’s arrival at Lima, in 1556, bringing with him one of the largest retinues of officials and attendants ever seen, the only nominal resistance that existed to Spain’s sovereignty of her colony was in the Andean region of Vilcabamba – virtually an independent Inca kingdom. Since the Inca Manco’s death, his 23-year-old son Sayri Túpac had ruled the remnants of his army of warriors in his fortified mountain enclave, and had repeatedly refused to negotiate a peace agreement with the Spaniards. The presence of his warriors in the vicinity of Cuzco had led to a number of attacks on travellers on the roads from the city to Lima. The Conquistador Juan de Pancorbo recorded:

  . . . at one time I left the city with a number of men in order to ambush Sayri Túpac’s warriors who had waylaid many people in the road of the Apurímac, for his Indians had killed a number of Negroes, burning houses and committing other acts of violence on the road; and together with our troop I went in search of them to a mountain station where we learned that Sayri Túpac had some eight hundred warriors, all well armed, and that some two hundred or three hundred of them had taken part in the raids . . . and as I did not possess a commission to go further in search of them I returned to the station, and by order of the justices of the city I later kept guard of the road with the men I was with for several days . . .18