The Last Days of the Incas (22 page)

Before he and his Spaniards had left Cajamarca, however, Pizarro had decided to crown the eldest surviving brother of the emperor Huayna Capac, a royal prince called Tupac Huallpa. Pizarro hoped that by doing so he would be able to continue controlling the Inca aristocracy and hence the empire, much as he had done with Atahualpa. The new Inca emperor’s reign, however, was short-lived. Within two months, Tupac Huallpa sickened and died. A disappointed Pizarro had him buried in the town of Jauja, midway between Cajamarca and Cuzco. Once again, the Inca Empire was without a ruler.

Pizarro and his Spaniards had nevertheless been able to gain a rough idea of the Incas’ current deployment of military forces before heading south. There were three Inca armies, Pizarro had been told: one in the north in what is now Ecuador with about thirty thousand soldiers and led by a general called Rumiñavi; another in what is now central Peru, with about 35,000 soldiers; and finally, General Quisquis’s army
of
occupation in Cuzco with some thirty thousand troops. Pizarro, however—even before leaving Cajamarca—had decapitated the central army by luring its general, Chalcuchima, to visit the imprisoned Atahualpa. After seizing Chalcuchima, Pizarro had decided to bring the Inca general along on his journey. Pizarro had grown suspicious, however, that the general might be trying to incite local natives to attack and thus had burned Chalcuchima at the stake. That meant that now there was only General Quisquis’s army standing between the Spaniards and their goal of capturing the capital of the Inca Empire.

The seventeen-year-old puppet emperor Manco Inca’s coronation.

In November 1533, as the Spaniards left the Inca town of Jaquijahuana, only a day’s march from Cuzco, they encountered a seventeen-year-old, boyish-looking native who wore a yellow tunic and who was accompanied by a group of Inca nobles. Pizarro’s interpreters soon learned that the young native was the son of the emperor Huayna Capac and thus was of royal descent. Pizarro also learned that the teenager’s name was Manco Inca and that, although he was the brother of both Atahualpa and Huascar, he was also one of the very few survivors of Huascar’s royal lineage. As Pizarro and his captains listened intently to their interpreter translating, the young prince explained how he had been living as a fugitive and had spent much of the previous year “fleeing constantly from Atahualpa’s men so that they would not kill him. He came so alone and abandoned that he looked like a common Indian.”

Pizarro quickly realized that not only was Manco Inca a possible heir to the throne, but that the royal prince also belonged to the Incas’ Cuzco faction, precisely the faction that Pizarro wished to be perceived as allying himself with. Since Pizarro had already executed Atahualpa, nothing could be better than for him to arrive in Cuzco with a member of the same faction that had suffered under Atahualpa. Pizarro and his troops could thus position themselves as liberators, a perception that they hoped would forestall any native resistance from developing. The chronicler Pedro Sancho de la Hoz wrote:

Pizarro hoped that by allying himself with the young Inca prince he could fool the Cuzco faction into thinking that the Spaniards’ only interest was to place those who had recently been oppressed by Atahualpa back in power. Pizarro was also quick to realize that the seemingly naive young son of Huayna Capac might serve perfectly as a puppet king—one that could easily be controlled by the Spaniards.

Before he could attempt to install Manco as the new emperor, however, Pizarro first had to capture Cuzco, which was still occupied by a large and hostile Inca army. General Quisquis intended to torch the city, Manco told the Spaniards, and to burn it to the ground rather than hand it over to the foreigners. In the distance, the Spaniards could already see smoke on the horizon: perhaps the destruction of Cuzco had already begun. Pizarro immediately ordered his twenty-three-year-old brother, Juan, and Hernando de Soto to lead forty horsemen to try to prevent the burning of the capital. While Pizarro and the rest of the horsemen, foot soldiers, auxiliary natives, and the supply train of llamas resumed their journey, Juan Pizarro, Soto, and their cavalry galloped off and disappeared over a rise.

After eighteen months of conquest and despite another potentially large battle looming, Pizarro and his Spaniards were by now, however, quite confident. The attrition rates of native and Spanish troops had
thus far been decidedly in the Spaniards’ favor. Beginning with the capture of Atahualpa, the Incas had lost more than eight thousand warriors, many high-ranking nobles, one of their three key generals, and of course their emperor. The Spaniards, by contrast, had thus far lost but a single African slave. Though relatively few in number, the Spaniards nevertheless possessed a number of advantages over the Incas in terms of military technology. Perhaps their greatest was their monopoly on horses—animals that could carry a fully armored Spaniard and still outrun the fastest native. The mobile tanks of the conquest, horses not only instilled fear in the natives but also provided a high platform from which the Spaniards could use their twelve-foot, metal-tipped lances or from which they could strike downward with their swords with brutal efficiency. Pizarro’s conquistadors also possessed gunpowder, a limited number of cannons, and an assortment of harquebuses.

In terms of defense, the Spaniards often protected themselves with steel helmets, armor, and chain mail. In addition, Spanish footmen carried
escudos
—wooden shields about two feet in diameter—while horsemen carried
adargas
—larger shields made from doubled-up hides stretched over a wooden frame. Even the Spaniards’ horses wore protection—thick cotton padding that made the powerful animals difficult to wound or kill. A mounted and armored Spanish knight, with a shield in one hand and a lance or a sword in the other, represented the height of European killing technology. Only a similarly armed knight, a soldier firing a harquebus at close range, or a knowledgeable European pike man on the ground stood a chance against a mounted attack.

Atahualpa’s nephew Titu Cusi later described how he and his fellow natives viewed an attacking Spanish army, with their harquebuses firing invisible darts that miraculously killed their warriors at a distance, with their trumpets blaring, with the pounding of their horses’ hooves, and with the glint of their steel blades:

Besides their armaments, the Spaniards possessed other advantages: they could communicate much more efficiently through writing, thus being able to send and receive complex information between their often divided forces; they had ships and access to an international trade network through which they could resupply themselves periodically with more weapons, horses, and men from afar; and they had the experience of having successfully battled Moorish knights, armed like themselves, on the Iberian peninsula for centuries.

The Spaniards had also just spent more than thirty years conquering other native groups scattered throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, and different parts of the Americas, while Hernando Cortés had only recently conquered the Aztec Empire in Mexico. Pizarro had thus arrived knowing how, like Cortés, he might use native political divisions to his advantage and might incorporate native allies into his ranks. In addition, the Spaniards possessed two native interpreters they had trained in Spain and whom they could now rely upon to receive and transmit information.

Another potent weapon in the Spaniards’ military arsenal was completely unpremeditated yet nevertheless was an extremely important one: a plague of what was probably European smallpox. The epidemic had arrived just prior to Pizarro’s third and final voyage to Peru and had not only killed the ruler of the Inca Empire, Huayna Capac, but had also set off the brutal and devastating civil war that had fractured the empire in two. Only five years earlier, during Pizarro’s second voyage, the Inca Empire had been united and strong. What Pizarro and his men found during their third voyage in 1532 was an empire that had been severely weakened both by disease and violent civil war.

In contrast to Spanish armaments, which were based upon the mixture of carbon and iron to make steel, Inca armaments were based upon
bronze, copper, and stone. The Spaniards, therefore, found in Peru what was technologically speaking a Bronze Age culture, similar to what they would have found in Egypt a thousand years before Christ—if the Egyptians had been without horses. Although the Incas mined copper, tin, gold, silver, and mercury ores, iron ore within the realm of Tawantinsuyu was unknown (the first commercial iron ore was actually not discovered in Peru until 1915). Thus, even had the Incas been granted hundreds of more years of development, it is unlikely that they would have ever entered what the Old World knew as the Iron Age and, without iron, they could have never entered the Age of Steel. Confronted by steel-armored invaders from across the seas, the Incas’ own stone and soft-metal weapons were simply no match.

For the most part, Inca weapons were designed for hand-to-hand combat with other similarly armed foot soldiers and consisted of an assortment of clubs. The largest, which required two hands to operate, the Spaniards called a
porra
and consisted of a long wooden handle with a ball of copper or stone that had five or six protruding points. Designed to crack open human skulls, the clubs, however, were incapable of penetrating a Spanish steel helmet. Only a direct blow to the face of a Spaniard not wearing a visor could inflict a fatal blow. The Incas also used battle-axes—with blades of copper, bronze, or stone—in a similar fashion, but none was sharp enough to dismember an enemy’s limbs. While Spanish swords could slice through flesh and arteries like so much butter, Inca axes were designed to break bones and/or inflict contusions.

In addition to their clubs, Inca troops also used lances with tips of copper or bronze or sharpened wooden points. They also used darts with wooden or bone tips that could be propelled with a hand thrower. One of their most dangerous weapons, from the Spaniards’ point of view, was the Inca sling—
warak’a
—made of wool or some other fiber. By twirling the sling rapidly with an egg-sized stone fitted in its center, a warrior could hurl a stone with such force and accuracy that it could snap a Spanish sword in two. Unless a Spaniard was not wearing a helmet, however, the hurled stones were almost never lethal.

Another weapon the Inca armies sometimes used, although sparingly, was the bow and arrow. Because only natives from the eastern jungles knew how to use such weapons, however, bows and arrows
could only be used by incorporating into the Inca army natives from the Antisuyu, or Amazon region of the empire. Amazonian natives were few in comparison to the average peasant conscript from the highlands, however. Bows and arrows therefore had limited use—and were also unable to penetrate steel armor.

Despite their much greater number of troops, the Incas operated under a variety of other disadvantages: they possessed no writing, only their
quipus
, which allowed them to send less information back and forth than did the Spaniards. They also had little knowledge of the world beyond their frontiers; the Incas were thus unaware of the Spanish conquests of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, nor did they know anything about the history of Europe or the rest of the world. Another disadvantage the Incas labored under was that while native warriors sometimes used copper breast or back plates, they generally wore only cotton armor, which protected them adequately against the weapons of other native armies but did little to protect them from the Spaniards’ deadly lances and swords. Finally, of course, the Incas had no horses; they were thus constantly faced with having somehow to defend themselves against a charging group of massive, alien animals ridden by armored Spaniards who almost always had the advantage of striking downward from above.