The Last Days of the Incas (26 page)

DIEGO DE ALMAGRO ARRIVED IN CUZCO IN LATE JANUARY OF
1535 having been appointed by Pizarro to take over the lieutenant governorship of the city. After nearly a year of military campaigns in the central and northern portions of the empire, Almagro had brought back with him more than three hundred of the new troops he had separated from Hernando Cortés’s second-in-command, Pedro de Alvarado. Just before he reached the Inca capital, a messenger overtook
Almagro with
news that the king was going to grant him a governorship to the south of Pizarro’s. In the year 1535, however, along the western coast of South America, only a ship’s pilot could accurately measure geographical distances—and thus far none in Peru had attempted to demarcate the boundaries of Pizarro’s territory. Exactly where Pizarro’s governorship ended and Almagro’s would begin, therefore, was anyone’s guess.

The Incas sometimes presented their women to the Spaniards as gifts; at other times, the Spaniards seized them as their own concubines.

As the new group of Spaniards rode and marched into the capital of the Incas, marveling at its setting and architecture, they soon realized that they had arrived too late to partake of its spoils or to be awarded
encomiendas
like the others. Undoubtedly, the conquistadors looked with envy at the eighty-eight
encomenderos
who had chosen to remain in the capital and who were now fabulously wealthy men. Many of the latter had already shed their armor and instead wore stockings, capes, and hats pierced by stylish feather plumes. By contrast, the newcomers wore patched and stitched clothing and scarcely had a coin to their names. This newest group of conquistadors had come to Peru in the belief that here they could instantly become rich. Abruptly disabused of this notion, they now realized that they had missed that opportunity by at least a year, if not longer; it was a realization that caused more than a few of them to become quite bitter.

With a minority of the Spaniards extremely wealthy and a majority extremely poor, political divisions between the two groups not surprisingly began to appear. Those Spaniards to whom Pizarro had granted
encomiendas
were naturally indebted to him; those who had arrived with Almagro, on the other hand, were hoping that loyalty to the aging, one-eyed conquistador who had brought them here would pay off for them in the long run. After all, if it turned out that Cuzco lay within Almagro’s new realm, then the Spaniards who had already been awarded
encomiendas
might soon have those rescinded. Almagro would then surely distribute the
encomiendas
among his own followers.

The fact that no one currently knew which conquistador—Pizarro or Almagro—the city of Cuzco actually belonged to only exacerbated an already unstable political climate. In addition, the presence of two of the youngest and most impulsive of the Pizarro brothers—twenty-three-year-old Juan and twenty-two-year-old Gonzalo—only served to create further problems. With Juan and Gonzalo determined at any cost not to let Cuzco fall into the hands
of Almagro, it wasn’t long before tensions began to simmer and then finally to bubble and boil over. Wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León:

Concluded Cieza de León: “From then on there were two factions: one bound to the Pizarros and another to the Almagros.”

Disagreements over who would control Cuzco and its surrounding area came to a head roughly a month after Almagro’s arrival. One day in March, 1535, fearing that Almagro might try to seize the capital as his own, the two Pizarro brothers and their supporters carried several cannons into their palace on the main square, barricaded it, and then “scandalously emerged onto the plaza, ready to begin a great altercation.” Their behavior so incensed Hernando de Soto—a longtime supporter of Almagro—that he and Juan Pizarro quickly came to blows. According to Juan’s cousin, Pedro,

Only through the intervention of a newly arrived royal official, Antonio Téllez de Guzmán, were the two Spanish factions ultimately prevented from killing each other. “Had the Christians fought one another the Indians would have attacked those
who survived,” Guzmán later wrote the king. As Cieza de León described it: “All of them were so frenzied and full of envy of each other that it was a wonder that they did not all kill each other…. These were the first passions in this land between the Almagros and the Pizarros, or brought about on their behalf.”

Two months later, after hearing reports of near civil war in the capital, Francisco Pizarro hurriedly went to Cuzco. Anxious to defuse the situation, yet with the precise details of the king’s division of the Inca Empire still not having arrived, Pizarro decided to try to negotiate a solution with his former partner. Both Pizarro and Almagro were by now aware that they had conquered only perhaps two thirds of the Inca Empire. Sidestepping the incendiary issue of to whom Cuzco belonged, Pizarro soon agreed to help Almagro finance a massive expedition of exploration and conquest to the south. The southern portion of the Inca Empire would clearly lie within Almagro’s future governorship. Pizarro therefore hoped that by helping to finance its conquest he would rid himself of his increasingly troublesome partner and would simultaneously defuse the current political crisis in Cuzco. With any luck, there would be enough gold, silver, and peasants in the south to satisfy both Almagro and also his hundreds of ambitious new conquistadors.

Anxious to begin exploring his future governorship, Almagro agreed to the proposal. It was certainly possible that wealthy Inca cities, peasants, and fertile lands existed to the south, yet the Spaniards knew little about the region. What Almagro now needed to do was select his own second-in-command, someone whom he could rely upon during the expedition and whose loyalty would be to Almagro—and not to Pizarro.

Thirty-four-year-old Hernando de Soto was quick to apply for the position, offering to pay Almagro a fantastic sum of gold and silver for the privilege. Such positions didn’t grow on trees, after all, and although Soto was now very wealthy, he, too, was ambitious to govern a kingdom of his own. Perhaps he might find another native empire further to the south or to the east. Who knew? As second-in-command, Soto would be in an excellent position to petition the king for a governorship. Almagro declined Soto’s offer, however, choosing instead a man named Rodrigo Orgóñez, who had proven his loyalty to Almagro during the last five years.

Manco Inca, meanwhile, faced his own set of problems, which had only been heightened by the struggle among
the Spaniards for control of Cuzco. Because the Spaniards openly flaunted their control of the city, Manco’s prestige was slowly being undermined. Even worse, within the Machiavellian world of Inca politics, rumors were now circulating in Cuzco that some of Manco’s relatives coveted the young emperor’s throne.

Manco’s most likely challenger should theoretically have been his brother Paullu; the latter was about Manco’s age and had somehow miraculously escaped being exterminated by General Quisquis during the northern army’s occupation. From the moment that Pizarro had selected Manco to rule, however, Paullu had pledged complete loyalty to his brother. Manco had so few suspicions about Paullu, in fact, that while the young emperor had been off participating in military campaigns in the north, he had left Paullu in Cuzco as the de facto emperor. Paullu had immediately relinquished the position as soon as Manco had returned. Manco
was
suspicious, however, of his cousin, Pascac, and of another half-brother, Atoc-Sopa, the two of whom formed the nucleus of a potential group of rivals. As the days passed, rumors that Pascac was scheming to replace Manco with Atoc-Sopa continued to travel from cluster to cluster of Inca nobles in the streets and within the dark interiors of elite Inca homes. Not even a foreign occupation was enough to dampen the Incas’ tradition of dynastic political intrigue.

Aware that the rivalries among the Inca elites might cause instability in his new realm, Pizarro attempted to end the power struggle by bringing the two Inca sides together to negotiate. The attempt was unsuccessful, however, so much so that Manco privately asked Almagro to help rid himself of the rival Inca faction. The year before, Manco and Almagro had spent considerable time together while on military campaigns and had become friendly. Although busy preparing for his expedition to the south, Almagro agreed to help the young emperor. The more he helped Manco, the more indebted to him the emperor would be.

One night, a small group of Spanish assassins crept along the frigid alleyways of the high Andean city, the moon causing slivers of steel to glimmer in their hands. Almagro had sent the men to exterminate Manco’s half-brother Atoc-Sopa. Finding the latter’s home in the dark and creeping into his bedroom, they located the potential Inca prince and murdered him in his bed. The assassination of Atoc-Sopa, however, only intensified the rupture within Manco’s extended family, which now began to organize themselves along the same fault lines that divided the Spaniards.
Manco and his brother Paullu allied themselves with Almagro; those of the Inca faction opposed to Manco, meanwhile, allied themselves with Pizarro.

Things continued to deteriorate to such an extent that one night Manco—fearing a reprisal for his brother’s murder—fled his house and hurried to Almagro’s palace, where he pleaded with the veteran conquistador to hide him in his bedroom. When the rival faction’s Spanish supporters learned that Manco had essentially abandoned his home, “a noisy group of them went to rob and loot his house, causing a lot of damage, without anyone being able to stop or prevent it.” Some said that Manco was so frightened of being assassinated that night that he literally crawled beneath Almagro’s bed and hid.

On July 2, 1535, Diego de Almagro departed Cuzco with 570 Spanish cavalry and foot soldiers and with twelve thousand Inca porters. His goal was to explore and conquer the southern portion of the Inca Empire, of which he was soon to become governor. In a gesture of friendship, Manco had provided not only the porters for the expedition but had also sent Paullu and his high priest, Villac Umu, to accompany Almagro as well; both apparently enjoyed wide support among the southern native chiefs. Governor Francisco Pizarro and many of the Spanish
encomenderos
gathered to see the expedition off on what many felt was a permanent parting of the ways. While the
encomenderos
stood on the wide square wearing elegant stockings and plumed hats, Almagro’s men wore pointed morion helmets, spare bits of armor, and carried carefully honed swords and lances. The two ex-partners wished each other well, then Almagro and his men marched out of the capital of the Incas, leaving behind the bowl-like city with the Inca fortress of Saqsaywaman squatting above it.

The departure of Almagro’s expedition immediately emptied Cuzco of the majority of its impoverished Spaniards, leaving only the native inhabitants and the mostly wealthy Spanish
encomenderos.
Not long afterward, Pizarro departed from Cuzco as well, determined to continue his project of founding Spanish cities along the coast. Peru was connected to Spain by sea, after all, and if Pizarro’s kingdom was going to continue exporting the raw materials of gold and silver in exchange for imported and manufactured goods from Spain, then it would need cities and ports. Besides, seaside settlements could be militarily reinforced by ship, if for some reason that should prove necessary. Cities located in the interior, on
the other hand—such as Cuzco, Jauja, and Cajamarca—were both militarily and logistically isolated.