The Last Days of the Incas (16 page)

Upon further questioning, Atahualpa presumably stated that while Cuzco was quite distant, it was located perhaps only at the midway point in the length of his empire. Couriers racing in relays from one end of the empire to the other, from sunup to sundown, Atahualpa indicated, would take nearly twenty days, or forty days for a round-trip. For the first time since his arrival, Pizarro began to realize just how immense the empire was whose ruler he had seized.

Twelve notaries had traveled with Pizarro, men who were both literate and versed in verifying signatures and in drawing up basic legal contracts. Like their companions, they had volunteered to accompany the expedition, hoping to share in any of the plunder acquired. While notaries by profession, their current occupation was conquistador. Since sixteenth-century Spaniards lived in a litigious culture, lawsuits, writs, and legal documents were the stuff of everyday life.
^*
A nicely produced document, handsomely signed with an elegant flourish of the pen, besides serving as a legal instrument also seemed to carry a certain cachet, especially for those who were either illiterate or only partly literate.

Pizarro, who never learned to read or write and thus for whom carefully penned Spanish texts could just as well have been written in Chinese, immediately ordered one of the notaries to draw up a document
outlining
the basic points of Atahualpa’s offer. While the notary busied himself, Pizarro promised Atahualpa that if the latter produced the gold he had promised, then he, Pizarro, would afterward allow him to return to Quito, where he could rule his own kingdom in the north.

MAP BY PAUL PUGLIESE

It was a blatant lie, of course. Pizarro had no intention of ever letting Atahualpa go free, let alone of restoring him to a position of authority. First, he wanted Atahualpa to provide his part of the bargain—the roomfuls of gold and silver. If Atahualpa proved useful after that, then Pizarro might keep him alive. If not, then he would certainly have no qualms about killing him.

Just as Pizarro had understood little of the size of the Inca Empire and next to nothing about its culture or about how it functioned, Atahualpa equally failed to grasp that Spanish culture contained ideas that were utterly alien to him. The Inca emperor failed to understand that the Spaniards were not interested in his gold and silver tableware because they desired better drinking goblets or because they were dazzled by the tableware’s shininess like other barbarians, but because the
materials
the cups and plates were made of coincidentally happened to consist of the exact same rare elements that formed the basis of money in the Old World. The only real requirement for a monetary system, after all, was that the material used be scarce and that everyone agree on the unit of exchange. In the emerging nations of sixteenth-century Europe, gold, silver, copper, and nickel were the widely used standards. Any Spaniard lucky enough to receive a pound of gold—whether as a payment or through plunder and conquest—could sell it to a merchant or banker with no questions asked and would receive roughly 120 golden ducat coins in return.

To get an idea of what this was worth, the average salary of a Spanish sailor in the 1530s, who risked his life at sea, was fifty or sixty ducats a year, equivalent to half a pound of gold. With four pounds of gold, one could buy an entire caravel ship in Spain. Ten pounds of gold could be converted into 1,200 ducats, the equivalent of twenty backbreaking years of labor at sea. It was no wonder then that the Spaniards’ eyes widened so much when Soto and his men returned with their loot of gold and silver goblets, plates, and statues. If this was what Atahualpa possessed in a mere temporary camp, then what riches did the rest of the empire hold?

The Incas, too, were aware of the idea of monetary
systems, even though their empire relied upon the bartering of goods, whose exchanges were nevertheless standardized. One ethnic group the Incas had conquered, the Chincha, who lived on the coast to the south of what is now Lima, were specialized traders possessing fleets of rafts they used to trade up and down the coast as far north as Ecuador. It was probably a Chincha trading vessel, in fact, that Pizarro’s expedition had seized during their second expedition. Due to their constant business transactions, Chincha traders relied upon copper as a type of money, which they used to exchange for other goods. The standard unit of exchange was copper cast into the form of a blunt axe head.

But the Inca Empire never adopted a monetary system. Gold, the color of the sun, was considered by the Incas to be sacred, as the sun was the principal god in their religious pantheon. It was never, however, used as an item of exchange. Similarly, silver was considered to be the tears of the moon goddess, or
mama-kilya
, and was thus used in temples devoted to that god. Since it was from the sun god, Inti, that Atahualpa and his ancestors were descended, gold was inextricably linked with both the sun and with its incarnation on earth, the Inca emperor. Mined and sluiced from different regions of the empire, gold and silver were transported to the capital along the empire’s arterial roads in a kind of one-way system: the sacred metals traveled to Cuzco and to the empire’s other main cities and rarely did they leave. Instead, native artisans and jewelers fashioned the two metals into symbolic forms that reflected the divine nature of the moon, the sun, and the emperor, which is why Atahualpa dined from cups and plates made not of clay, but of the purest silver and gold.

The Inca economic system, meanwhile, was not a capitalist one, in which private individuals owned their own land, labor, and other resources and endeavored to make a profit. Instead, the Inca elite relied upon a redistributive economy. In it, a large part of the production of the countryside was controlled by the state, which in turn redistributed this wealth according to its own needs and the needs of the population. Nearly all land, for example, belonged to the state, which divided the land into church, state, and communal use. The Inca elite required peasant communities to sow and harvest both state and church lands, the produce of which went to support the teeming bureaucracies of the government and clergy and to fulfill a variety of other needs. Implicit in their social contract with
the government was the peasants’ right to work their own communal lands, which the state, however, continued to own.

The Inca elites also required that every inhabitant of the empire donate a specified sum of labor each year to the emperor. Called the
mit’a
, such labor was used by the emperor in any way he saw fit. Each male head of a family household thus had to supply up to three months of labor to the emperor per year, whether that be used in constructing roads, buildings, weaving, working as a
chaski
runner, carrying royal litters, fighting in wars, or some other useful activity. With millions of families annually harvesting the produce from church and state lands in addition to paying their labor taxes, the revenues of the empire were enormous. The surplus created by the taxed labor was stored in great warehouses located throughout the empire, repositories of goods so vast and richly stocked that they astonished all the Spaniards who encountered them. The gross domestic product of the Inca Empire was so great, in fact, that periodically the warehouses simply had to be emptied and their contents gifted to the inhabitants of nearby provinces, in order to make room for the constant production of goods. Wrote the conquistador Pedro Sancho de la Hoz:

The emperor normally used the state-owned goods as gifts for his lords, chiefs, and other retainers, in order to secure their loyalty to the Inca state. The lords in turn gifted their own followers in a long descending chain that continued down to the peasants who had created all of the surplus in the first place. Through redistribution, the Inca elites—representing only a fraction of an ethnic group that made up less than one percent of the empire’s total population—were able to maintain the loyalty of local rulers and hence were able to retain control of the vast empire they had created.

Just as Atahualpa periodically gifted his lords, why couldn’t he gift Pizarro and expect something from
him in return? If the Spaniards wanted shiny tableware, then Atahualpa wanted his
life.
If he needed to exchange a roomful of gold in order to continue living, then he would gladly provide that and more. Atahualpa hadn’t fought for the last five years to win an empire only to suddenly lose it to a small band of marauders. Perhaps reciprocity was the key.

Chaski
runners now fanned out through the empire, carrying a desperate message from their ruler: send all available gold and silver objects to Cajamarca, including those from the temples of the sun and moon. Pizarro, meanwhile, sent his own message to the eighty Spaniards he had left behind in San Miguel, the new coastal town he had established to the south of the ruined city of Tumbez. Pizarro’s message informed the Spaniards of the victory they had wrought and also urged them to send to Panama for reinforcements. Only with additional Spaniards, Pizarro realized, would he ever possess a sufficient force with which to subdue such an obviously large and populous empire. Pizarro’s one-eyed partner, Diego de Almagro, in fact, had purposely stayed behind in Panama with the understanding that he would continue gathering more men, ships, and supplies and would join Pizarro at a later date. Pizarro could only hope that Almagro would arrive soon, before Atahualpa divined his true intent: that he and his men were here to stay and had no intention whatsoever of leaving.

Weeks passed before finally a slow trickle of gold and silver objects began to arrive, which each day continued to grow larger. Wrote the notary Francisco de Xerez:

The Spaniards carefully weighed each object and converted the weight into pesos, one of the Spaniards’ standard units of measurement for gold. Since one peso weighed a sixth of
an ounce, thirty thousand to sixty thousand pesos meant that between three hundred and six hundred
pounds
of gold were arriving each day. For the rank-and-file conquistador, whether literate or illiterate, it didn’t take a Renaissance mathematician to figure out that all of those present were about to become extremely wealthy men.

Not long after Atahualpa had sent out his first messengers—instructing his subordinates not only to help in the gathering and transport of the sacred objects but also that his generals not attempt to rescue him for fear that any such efforts might cost him his life—native chiefs and lords from throughout the empire began to arrive in Cajamarca. They came to pay their respects, both to their Inca lord and to the leader of the powerful bearded foreigners who had captured him.

“When the chiefs of this province heard of the arrival of the Governor and of the capture of Atahualpa, many of them came peacefully to see the Governor,” wrote Xerez. The chronicler Estete recorded that “they came from each province to visit him and to see the Spaniards, and each one brought presents of what there was in their land such as gold, silver, and other things.” Continued Xerez, “Some of these chiefs were lords of thirty thousand Indians, and all of them were subject to Atahualpa. When they arrived before him they paid homage to him, kissing his hands and feet. He received them without looking at them.” According to Estete, “he behaved towards them in a most princely manner, showing no less dignity [despite being] defeated and imprisoned than he had before that had occurred.”

The Spaniards, none of whom other than Pizarro had actually ever laid their eyes on a real emperor, had no real understanding of the reverence the Inca subjects had for their lord. Atahualpa was not the equivalent of a European king, as he was both secular
and
divine. In approaching Atahualpa, the natives in essence were entering the presence of a god, for Atahualpa was the equivalent of the king, the pope, and Jesus Christ all rolled into one. In this one, medium-sized native leader were concentrated all the legislative, judicial, executive, and religious powers of an empire ten million strong.

The Inca Empire was a theocratic monarchy; hence all dispensations emanated directly from its emperor—justice, divine intervention, wealth, titles, status, food, drink—even life and death itself. Just as Atahualpa had ordered the slaughter of the battalion of soldiers who had bolted from their ranks due to their fear of Soto’s charging horse, so, too, could Atahualpa grant life.

While he was in captivity, Atahualpa was asked on one
occasion by the lord of the province of Huaylas if that lord could go visit his native territory. Atahualpa granted him permission, but gave the lord a specific amount of time in which to go and return. “He delayed somewhat longer,” Pizarro’s cousin Pedro remembered, “and while I was present he returned and arrived with a present of fruit from his province. [Yet] once before the Inca Emperor, he began to tremble to such an extent that he could no longer remain standing. Atahualpa raised his head a little and, smiling, he made a gesture for him to leave.”