Greeted with a jewel sent to meet him half-way, the viceroy reaches the bay of Callao. Throughout Lima, the City of the Kings,—founded “with God, for God, and in His name,"—the streets are hung with rugs and tapestry and adorned with green boughs and triumphal arches. (On the arrival of the Duque de la Plata, in 1682, eighty million piasters were spent to pave the streets with bars of silver.)
“First comes a host of Indian warriors in feather pomp. The city militia with pikes and weapons glittering, the stocks of their guns embossed with gold, the noble guard on horseback, ... university professors in brilliant gowns, the royal council and officials, the magistracy in crimson velvet lined with brocade of the same color ... the chamber of accounts, the audience on horses with trappings, the scepter-carrier, heralds in armor with uncovered heads, the master of the horse with drawn sword, accompanied by four servants in livery, pages with the captain of the watch, and lastly, on a throne of red velvet whose silver staffs are carried by the members of the corporation, while the alcaldes hold the cords, all in velvet caps and gowns of incarnation color, rides the viceroy under the royal banner and a canopy of cloth of gold. Officers of the royal household, the royal guard in full armor with spear and shield, bring up the rear on horseback.”
The procession moves between companies of halberdiers in a blaze of trumpets, bells, and drums, under showers of flowers thrown from carved balconies.
“When they reach the plaza the whole company faces the cathedral and is received by the archbishop and by the superiors of the religious orders; trumpets cease, knights dismount, and the multitude sings a Te Deum.
“The procession again mounts and accompanies the viceroy to the palace gates.”
“Five days of bull-fights follow, and prizes are bestowed upon those who make the most ingenious compositions in praise of the viceroy. The rector of the university prepares a poetical contest, at which the viceroy presides, seated upon the rectoral chair, which for this occasion glitters with the magnificence of an Eastern throne. The nunneries entertain him with music and present him with curiosities.”
The churches of Lima were hung with velvet and tapestry, with fringes of gold and silver and plates of gold hung in design, so that the walls were nowhere to be seen. Spanish and Flemish paintings surrounded altars of wrought silver. The sacred vessels were of gold, covered with pearls and precious stones. Santo Domingo, the oldest of the brotherhood, possessed a set of thirty candelabra of massive silver, man-high, placed in a double row along the nave of the church. The cloister contained a famous orange garden with wrought-iron waterways and life-sized paintings of Dominicus. In its center was a fountain, whose delicious drip belied its hidden presence under feathery vines. Indeed, why should the church not claim vast riches? One sixth of the population was in the monasteries, and those who were not of the number bought the dress of a religious order in which to be buried. The whole city took part in the sacred feast days, as many in the procession as looking on: legions of monks and thousands of nuns, priests, orders, religious societies, and brotherhoods with their standards, holy pictures, silver crosses, scepters, and biers.
II
But what was happening to the silent people among the mountain-tops who had stripped the Sun Temples of their offerings to enrich the adventurers from the Isles of Pearls?
Their irrigating canals had been destroyed, the roads and the whole system of government broken up, the people killed in chronic fighting or by hardship in distant campaigns. Ten thousand of the fifteen thousand in Almagro’s Chilean army had died of cold in the mountains, or of heat and thirst in the desert. The people were starved, villages at a time, by the destruction of their crops. Moreover, the villages were given as fiefs to the Spaniards, who received all the tribute. Many were exhausted by dragging heavy artillery over the precipitous mountains. Garcilasso describes the immense beams that crushed the Indians staggering beneath their weight, who were relieved, only on account of necessity, at every two hundred paces. When Gonzalo Pizarro in coat of mail covered with cloth of gold made his triumphal entry as governor into the City of the Kings, the twenty-two pieces of cannon which saluted as the procession advanced through the streets, were carried on the shoulders of six thousand Indians. All these Indians were well trained in morality and sound doctrine by the clergy of Spain.