Some weeks before this, Almagro had joined the Conquistadores at Cajamarca with reinforcements that brought the Spanish force up to about five hundred. As soon as Atahualpa had been disposed of, the commander, with all his men, began his advance, by forced marches, on Cuzco, an advantageous position near which he was fortunate enough to secure without having encountered Quizquiz, though some of the cavalry under De Soto were engaged by a detachment on the way; all efforts to interpose the main body of the Indian army were frustrated by their speed. However, though “the true heir to the crown was a second son of Huayna Capac, named Manco, a legitimate brother of the unfortunate Huascar,” says Prescott, “Pizarro had too little knowledge of the disposition of this prince and he made no scruple to prefer Toparca, a young brother of Atahualpa and to present him to the Indian nobles as their future Inca.” So, to make assurance doubly sure, he did not, before he set out, announce his purpose of driving off the enemies of the rightful heir, but took the boy with him, “attended by a numerous retinue of vassals and moving in as much state and ceremony as if in possession of regal power.” Before they reached Cuzco, much to Pizarro’s chagrin, the boy fell sick and died.
But the misfortune was soon repaired, for, sure enough, when the adventurers went into camp outside the walls of the capital, no less a personage than Manco Capac II himself called on the commander in person and proposed the hoped-for alliance; and, just a year from the day he had taken Cajamarca, he entered Cuzco as the protector of the real Inca, whose coronation he permitted to be celebrated with all the splendor of the ancient rites. The Indians of central Peru hailed him as their deliverer from the tyranny of the usurper. Manco Capac, for his part, soon assembled a great army, and, with the help of some of the Spaniards, decisively defeated Quizquiz and drove him back to Ecuador.
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.