VIII
But there was a sad awakening in store for the Inca on his return from that victorious campaign. He had permitted these allies of his—rapacious, recklessly daring as they were, and unscrupulous, cruel, and fanatical in their attitude toward infidels—to obtain a foothold in the very capital of the empire. And what manner of man was it of whom the great body of his subjects was made up? He was brave, yes—physically; he could fight, and conquer, too, when ably led, but also he was morally utterly irresponsible, “a slave,” as Mozans puts it, “utterly devoid of energy and individual initiative,” accustomed to look to the ruling class for guidance, to regard the Inca “with superstitious awe, as a being of a superior order.” Centuries of despotic government, rigid religious ritual, communal ownership of property, and labor, not for himself but for the commonwealth, had robbed him of all ambition and instilled into him the habit of accepting with patient resignation whatever fate might decree.
And now, after all these centuries of complaisance, what must have been his mental attitude at the end of such a succession of events? First, the late legitimate Inca Huascar, omnipotent as he was supposed to have been, directly descended from the Sun-God and Moon-Mother themselves, had been overthrown and put to death by an illegitimate rival. Then that rival, also of the Inca blood, had in his turn been captured in the very face of his army, and put to death despite another and much greater army, by a little band of mysterious strangers, against whose mail-clad bodies the battle-axes and spears of the Indians had been powerless—strangers who had made fierce, “fleet-footed monsters” (horses) subservient to their will and who carried terrible weapons that went off with a noise like thunder and vomited fire and smoke, and with which they killed their enemies before they could come near enough to get in a blow. Had not these invincible strangers, and apparently by supernatural means, overcome even the legitimate Inca’s conqueror? Surely, then, they must be some still superior order of beings, sent by the Sun-God to accomplish some wonderful purpose. Therefore they must be obeyed. Pizarro himself could not have created a people more suited to the carrying out of his designs had he had the power.
Probably realizing this, he promptly abandoned all subterfuge. As a consideration for the help he had been given in the campaign against Quizquiz, the Inca had been induced by stress of circumstances to acknowledge the supremacy of the King of Spain. It was only as a matter of form, he had been led to believe, but Pizarro now exacted the fullest compliance. As Adelantado by appointment of the overlord, he established a municipal council to govern the city, transformed the great temple into a church, made use of certain of the public buildings as officers’ quarters and barracks for the soldiers, seized all the treasure that was to be found—even the private dwellings and tombs were searched and stripped of it—and required the authorities to supply troops and carriers to accompany the exploring parties he sent out. “Pizarro, on entering Cuzco, had issued an order forbidding any soldier to offer violence to the dwellings of the inhabitants,” says Prescott:
“But the palaces were numerous and the troops lost no time in plundering them of their contents as well as in despoiling the religious edifices. The interior decorations supplied them with considerable booty. They stripped off the jewels and rich ornaments that garnished the royal mummies in the temple of Coricancha. Indignant at the concealment of their treasures, they put the inhabitants, in some instances, to the torture and endeavored to extort from them a confession of their hiding places. They invaded the repose of the sepulchers, in which the Peruvians often deposited their valuable effects, and compelled the grave to give up its dead. No place was left unexplored by the rapacious conquerors, and they occasionally stumbled on a mine of wealth that rewarded their labors. In a cavern near the city they found a number of vases, richly embossed with figures of serpents, locusts, and other animals. Among the spoils were four golden llamas and ten or twelve statues of women, as large as life, some of gold, others of silver, ‘which merely to see,’ says one of the conquerors, with some naïveté, ‘was truly a great satisfaction.’... The magazines were stored with curious commodities—richly tinted robes of cotton and feather work, gold sandals and slippers of the same material, for the women, and dresses composed entirely of beads of gold.’... In one place, for example, they met with ten planks or bars of solid silver, each piece twenty feet in length, one foot in breadth, and two or three inches thick. They were intended to decorate the dwelling of an Inca noble.... The amount of booty is stated variously by those present at the division of it. According to some, it considerably exceeded the ransom of Atahualpa.”
Fully appreciating also the desirability of establishing a capital of his own at some strategic point much more easily accessible from Panama, Pizarro made a careful study of routes and possible sites and finally chose one beside the river Rimac, on a fertile, elevated plain near the base of the Cordillera, only about three leagues from one of the best harbors on the coast, and at the point where the Inca military road began its ascent to the plateau. Here, only about a year after he entered Cuzco, he founded La Ciudad de los Reyes (the City of the Kings), so named in honor of the Three Kings or Wise Men of the East, because their feast day, Epiphany, occurred at that season of the year. Soon it became known as Lima. “Before the erection of a single house was permitted,” he had a plan drawn up, Mozans tells us, providing for large squares and streets unusually wide, “and in making this plan he had in view, not the small number (only sixty-nine) of those who were then prepared to make their homes there, but the future greatness of ‘The Empire City of the New World.’ Moreover, as the city had to be in God and for God and in His name—en Dios y por Dios y en su nombre—to use his own words, work was first begun on the church, which was named Nuestra Señora de la Asunción. The first stone and the first pieces of timber were put in place by the hands of the Adelantado himself, who wished, like the other Conquistadores, to emphasize his zeal for religion and his devotion to La Santissima Virgen, Madre de Dios.”
In the meanwhile his brother Hernando had gone to Spain with the King’s fifth of the loot, and on the way had spread the news. Once more all was excitement on the Isthmus. It was not long before Pizarro’s forces were augmented by three or four hundred soldiers that had been led into Ecuador by Pedro de Alvarado, Governor of Guatemala, who consented to abandon his expedition when persuaded by Almagro, who went at once to meet him, that he was trespassing on Pizarro’s preserves, for which act of grace the Spanish King added the province of Honduras to Alvarado’s jurisdiction, and Almagro gave him a large sum of money; and, when communication was established between Lima and Panama by sea, adventurers of every degree began to flock to the new city as they had before to Mexico and Central America.
This enabled Almagro, with an army of nearly six hundred Spaniards and fifteen thousand Indians, the latter under the command of one of the Inca’s brothers, to make an excursion into Chile for purposes of exploration, for it had been agreed that he should have the southern half of the territory they might conquer and Pizarro the northern. Sebastian de Benalcázar, another of Pizarro’s lieutenants, went to Ecuador with a force of two hundred Spaniards and a large Indian contingent and completed the defeat of Atahualpa’s adherents, took possession of Quito and founded the city of Guayaquil at the mouth of the Guayas River, which provided for that country, too, independent access from the sea.
CATHEDRAL AT LIMA, BUILT BY PIZARRO.
Also by this time any illusions the Inca may have had as to the continuance of the ancient dynasty under the protection of the Spaniards were dispelled. By this time even his complaisant subjects must have discovered that these superhuman deliverers, as they had thought them, were mere men—or else, if they were indeed a different order of beings, that order, they must have concluded, was infernal rather than divine. The sovereignty of the Inca had become little more than a fiction. As in the islands of the Caribbean and elsewhere, the fairest lands in the country had been divided into vast estates and great numbers of natives practically reduced to slavery and set to work them for the benefit of their new masters. With respect to their treatment in general, though Pizarro himself seems to have been guilty of few acts of wanton cruelty, he either could not, or did not if he could, restrain the oppression of them by his followers. If their behavior was not quite as atrocious as that of other Spaniards toward the tribes in the north, there was an utter lack of considerateness in it and disregard of their property and rights that galled even them.
Roused at last, the Inca took advantage of the opportunity afforded by the scattering of the Spanish force and made his escape from Cuzco, where Hernando Pizarro and his younger brothers Juan and Gonzalo were in command, and, finding his subjects ripe for revolt, had no difficulty in raising two large armies. One he sent against the Adelantado, who was in Lima; with the other he returned to Cuzco and took the great citadel of Sacsahuaman, overlooking the town, and began a siege that was to last more than six months, and during which Juan Pizarro was killed in an attempt to recapture the citadel. The army that went to the coast was ambushed and defeated by the Spaniards and their local adherents before ever it reached Lima. All that what was left of it could do was to prevent the sending of reinforcements to Cuzco despite the desperate straits to which the Spanish force there was reduced. Pizarro was himself compelled to send to the Isthmus for help. Just before it was too late, however, he managed to get away two hundred and fifty men to the relief of his brothers, and just at that juncture also, Almagro, on his way back from Chile, turned up with his followers, and, caught between Cuzco and these two new detachments of the enemy, the Inca was overwhelmed and concluded to retire into the wild region of Vilcabamba, where the Spaniards could not follow with any hope of success, and there held out for some years. But with his retreat all that remained of the Inca dominion came to an end. There were a few other attempts, but neither he nor his descendants ever succeeded in recovering the throne.
As for Almagro, he had had a frightful experience during his excursion into Chile and had met with nothing but disappointment and disaster. The route unwittingly chosen had been over the bleak Bolivian plateaux and across the mountains where the Cordillera reaches its highest, at a season when the passes are buried in snow and swept by furious storms, and his men had perished by thousands, some of the best of his Spaniards among the number. When he had at last made his way to the beautiful central valley between the Cordillera and the coast range and down to the river Maule, he had found nothing of the opulence of Peru, but only a poor but brave, warlike people who in a fierce battle had succeeded in checking his advance. And now, disgusted with this country of his to the south, he returned and made claim to Cuzco as being within his half of the conquered territory and demanded of the Pizarros its surrender. On their refusal, he promptly carried it by assault, made Hernando and Gonzalo his prisoners, and went out to meet the troops that had been sent to their relief by the Adelantado and defeated them.
And then, as Hawthorne puts it, “had he cut off the heads of both of these gentlemen on the spot, he would have saved himself years of struggle, with a death on the scaffold at the end of them. But he was not of the right fiber for the work that was laid upon him; he was not what the English would call ‘thorough’”; he temporized and listened to his wily associate. “Civil disturbances went on for eleven years,” continues Hawthorne, “‘in the course of which,’ as Professor Fiske remarks, ‘all the principal actors were swept off the stage as in some cheap blood-and-thunder tragedy. It is not worth while to recount the petty incidents of the struggle—how Almagro was at one moment ready to submit to arbitration and the next refused to abide by the decision; how Hernando was set at liberty and Gonzalo escaped; how Almagro’s able lieutenant, Rodrigo de Orgoñez, won a victory over Pizarro’s men at Abancay but was totally defeated by Hernando Pizarro at Las Salinas and perished on the field; how at last Hernando had Almagro tried for sedition and summarily executed. On which side was the more violence and treachery it would be hard to say. Indeed, as Sir Arthur Helps observes, “in this melancholy struggle it is difficult to find anybody whom the reader can sympathize much with.”’”
Then, once more Francisco Pizarro entered Cuzco in triumph, this time wearing an ermine robe that had been presented to him by Hernando Cortés, and again he devoted himself to organizing his government and extending the Spanish dominion over the distant provinces. The number of his compatriots had increased to eight thousand. Gonzalo was appointed Governor of Quito, from whence he strayed to make a disastrous journey down the eastern slope of the Andes in search of the mythical Eldorado, which he did not find, but which resulted in the discovery of and voyage down the Amazon, from the mountains to the sea, by Francisco de Orellana, his second in command. Hernando went to Bolivia to search for the mines from which the Incas were supposed to have gotten their wealth, a labor that was rewarded by the discovery of Potosí, which has yielded more than two billions of ounces of silver—and silver and gold were of equal value in Europe in those days. Pedro de Valdivia undertook the conquest of Chile and Alonso de Alvarado, one of the most generous and humane of the Conquistadores, that of the mountains of northern Peru. The Adelantado himself traveled over most of the empire, founding cities at strategic points in the more populous and fertile valleys, among them Arequipa, and here in Bolivia as in the country about Cuzco he divided the most desirable of the lands into repartimientos and apportioned them among his favorites.
In the meanwhile Almagro’s adherents, helpless and impoverished, were burning with envy of their more fortunate comrades, who were, by favor of the successful rival, rapidly enriching themselves with Indian tribute and gold and silver taken from the mines. At last, unable to stand it, they sent the news of their leader’s illegal execution to Spain, with a demand for justice against the Pizarros. The rest of the story is told by Dawson as follows:
“The Spanish government was not unwilling to secure a selfish advantage from the disputes among the original conquerors and sent out Vaca de Castro to investigate and report. When the Royal Commissioner arrived at Panama early in 1541, the latest news from Peru was tranquilizing. Pizarro was busily engaged in enlarging and beautifying Lima, in regulating the revenue and the administration, in distributing ‘encomiendas,’ and in restraining the rapacity of his Spaniards. However, Lima was full of the ‘men of Chile,’ as Almagro’s adherents were called, all bitter enemies of the Governor. They passed him in the street without saluting, and their attitude was so menacing that Pizarro received repeated warnings and was urged to banish them. Absolutely incapable of personal fear, magnanimous when his passions had not been aroused, he only replied: ‘Poor fellows. They have had trouble enough. We will not molest them.’ He even sent for Juan de la Rada—the guide, counselor, and guardian of the young half-breed who was Almagro’s heir—and condescended to try to argue him into a better frame of mind, saying, at parting: ‘Ask me frankly what you desire;’ but the iron had entered too deeply into Rada’s soul. He had already organized a conspiracy to assassinate Pizarro.
“At noon, on Sunday, the 26th of June, 1541, Pizarro was sitting at dinner in his house with twenty gentlemen, among them his half-brother Francisco Alcantara, and several of the most illustrious knights who had taken part in the conquest. The great door into the public square was lying wide open. The conspirators, to the number of a score, had assembled in a house opposite. All of a sudden they rushed into the square fully armed and carrying their swords naked in their hands. A young page standing in front of the Governor’s house saw them and ran back shouting: ‘To arms! All the men of Chile are coming to kill the Marquis, our lord.’ The guests rose in alarm from the table and all but half a dozen fled to the windows and dropped into the garden. Pizarro threw off his gown and snatched up a sword, while the valiant Francisco Chaves stepped forward through the ante-room to dispute the passage at the staircase. The ferocious crowd of murderers rushed up and laid him dead on the stairs. Alcantara checked them for a few moments with his single sword, but was soon forced back into the dining-room and fell pierced with many thrusts. The old lion shouted from the inside: ‘What shameful thing is this! Why do you wish to kill me?’ and, with a cloak wrapped round one arm and his sword grasped in the other hand, he rushed forward to meet his assassins and strike a blow to avenge his brother before he himself should fall. Only two faithful young pages remained at his side. Though over seventy years of age, his practiced sword laid two of the crowd dead before he was surrounded. The two boys were butchered, and, in the mêlée, Pizarro received a mortal wound in his throat, and, falling to the floor, made the sign of the cross on the boards” (with his blood) “and kissed it. One of the ruffians had snatched up an earthen water jar and with this pounded out the old man’s brains as he lay prostrate, disdaining to ask for mercy.
“Thus perished by the sword this great man of blood. The measure he had meted out to Atahualpa and Almagro was measured to him again. He who had shamelessly broken his oath times without number to gain his own high ends was slain by treacherous, cowardly assault. But his great vices should not blind us to his greater virtues. Courageous, indomitable, far-sighted, patriotic, large-minded, public-spirited, possessing a God-given instinct to see straight into the center of a problem and the energy to strike at the psychological moment, he was equally great as an explorer, a soldier, a general, a diplomatist, and an administrator. Even his shocking moral delinquencies lose something of their turpitude when we consider the greatness of his aims and the baseness of his origin.... But that his real nature was magnanimous, generous, and truthful is proven by the many instances in which he forgave his enemies and kept his word to his serious loss, and that his ambition was not too sordid is shown by his self-sacrificing devotion to the public good during the later years of his life. Formed in nature’s grandest mold, circumstances and environment had much deformed his character, but the original lineaments are plain.”
Pizarro thus disposed of, young Almagro assumed the governorship and transferred his headquarters to Cuzco, where his father’s party was stronger than at Lima, and the Royal Commissioner, appointed Governor by the King, sailed from Panama, got together an army with the help of Pizarro’s friends, and proceeded to Guamanga, to which point the usurper was advancing with his forces from Cuzco. The battle that ensued was more hotly contested than any that had theretofore been fought. Of the twelve hundred Spaniards engaged, less than five hundred escaped death or wounds. Almagro’s troops were practically annihilated. Two days afterward those of the Adelantado’s murderers who had survived were executed in the public square and young Almagro himself, who had succeeded in making his escape, was recaptured and put to death. Then for the time being Vaca de Castro administered the office without further opposition.
Before this, the great-hearted Padre Bartolomé de las Casas, the Indians’ indefatigable champion and friend, had written his famous book exposing the horrors of their treatment and had so successfully appealed to the King in their behalf that it had been decided to abolish native slavery and gradually do away with the system of repartimientos and encomiendas (allotments of land and Indians); and, since manifestly such a course would result in trouble with the Conquistadores, it seemed best to appoint a viceroy who would not be subject to their influence and invest him with absolute power. This dangerous office was bestowed upon Blasco Nuñez de Vela, whose integrity, piety, and rigid obedience to the King had already gained for him high positions. Arriving in Peru early in 1544, he promulgated the new laws abolishing personal service by the Indians, providing that encomiendas might not be sold or descend by inheritance, and, worst of all, that those granted to participants in the war between Pizarro and Almagro should lapse. To set the example, in his journey down the coast, the Viceroy sternly insisted that no Indian be compelled to carry a burden against his will.
To the Spaniards this seemed an outrageous violation of the natural order of things. The whole fabric of their fortunes was based on enforced Indian labor. Without it how could they work their mines and estates or transport their goods? In the general dismay, armed resistance was decided on, and Gonzalo Pizarro was called from his estate in southern Bolivia and induced to take the lead. He seized the artillery and stores at Cuzco and was soon at the head of some four hundred desperate men, well armed and provided. “The Viceroy retreated north beyond Quito to Popayan,” says Dawson—
“But, being joined by more recruits, rashly returned to the neighborhood of Quito to offer battle. He was defeated and killed. Pizarro went back to Lima, while his lieutenant, Carbajal, hunted down and put to death every loyalist who remained under arms in southern Peru. Gonzalo’s administration lasted three years. They were golden ones to the Spanish adventurers. The marvelous silver mines of Potosí and the gold washings of southern Ecuador were discovered. Encomiendas were lavishly granted; the Indians were sent back to their fields; the mining industry began that marvelous development which soon made Peru the treasure box of the world and Potosí the synonym for limitless wealth. But the dazzling sunlight of prosperity was dimmed by the shadow of Pizarro’s scaffold slowly creeping across the Atlantic and down the coast. His chief lieutenants, knowing that they had sinned past forgiveness, urged him to declare himself King of Peru, but he was at once too proud and too patriotic to fling away his right to die a loyal Spaniard. Philip, the leaden-eyed, close-mouthed despot, was regent of Spain. Bitterly chagrined that the stream of Peruvian gold had ceased to flow into the royal treasury, his vindictive heart had no mercy for the gallant soldier whose sword had helped win the riches now temporarily diverted. He selected a man after his own heart—Pedro de la Gasca, an ugly, deformed little priest, hypocritically humble, though astute and untiring, whose success as an inquisitor was a guarantee that he would be as pitiless and cruel as even Philip could wish.”
This man, says Hawthorne, was—
“A real diplomatist, with a tongue capable of making the worse appear the better reason and of winning support from the ranks of the enemy. He was endowed with official powers, but chiefly with brains and with the tongue aforesaid. His first step was to repeal such parts of the abolition laws as were hardest upon the colonists, and thereby he won their favor. Not until after these good news had been promulgated did Gasca venture to leave Panama for Peru. The captains of Pizarro’s fleet had been despatched to Panama to meet and watch the new emissary and either stop or bribe him, as might seem most expedient. But allowance had not been made for that tongue. Gasca wagged it with such good effect that they thought perhaps they were not Pizarro’s captains after all; at all events they put their fleet at his disposal and to Peru he came, landing at Tumbez in June, 1547.... Captain Diego de Centeno, acting for Gasca, captured Cuzco, but was defeated in the battle of Huarina. Hereupon Pizarro pressed on, nothing doubting—and indeed one can hardly blame him for his confidence, since it lay not in human foresight to anticipate the magical seductiveness of this Gasca’s conversation. The armies met, but Gasca did but open his mouth and Pizarro’s soldiers began deserting by troops. The thing was inexplicable; it was uncanny. We would call him a magnetic man nowadays, and Pizarro’s men were the iron filings. Even those who stood by him could not be induced to fight. By great efforts fifteen men contrived to get themselves slain, and then Pizarro, losing patience, got on his horse, rode over to Gasca’s camp, and gave himself up.”
With his execution, Spain’s conquest of Peru was complete.