The Last Days of the Incas (36 page)

During the Inca rebillion, Gentral Quize’ warriors captured a number of spanish survivors and sent them to Manco Inca.

Pizarro had only founded the City of the Kings—so named because it had been established on the Feast of the Epiphany, also known as the day of the Three Magi Kings—four months earlier. Lying on a flat desert plain, the city was bordered by the Rimac River. Rimac, a
runasimi
word that meant “the Speaker,” would later be corrupted into the city’s eventual name, Lima. The area Pizarro had chosen had been settled for thousands of years before his arrival and was still littered with scattered adobe pyramids, constructed with millions of bricks so worn by the elements that they resembled natural hills.

Pizarro had been busy distributing
encomiendas
among his Spanish followers in Lima and supervising the construction of buildings around the town square, using the labor of Spaniards, natives, and African slaves. After his brilliant military campaign, beginning with Atahualpa’s capture in Cajamarca and ending with the crowning of Manco Inca in Cuzco, Pizarro had done everything in his power to follow up his military victories with the equally important goal of winning the peace. No one was more aware than Pizarro of the necessity of consolidating the Spaniards’ grip on the newly won empire, or of how weak that grip actually was.

Even now, four years after his arrival in Tawantinsuyu, Pizarro still had fewer than six hundred Spaniards situated in the central portion of the Inca Empire, an area roughly the size of modern-day Peru, which probably contained more than five million inhabitants. That meant that the Spaniards in Peru were outnumbered by natives in a ratio of nearly 10,000 to 1. Currently, roughly two hundred Spaniards inhabited La Ciudad de los Reyes (The City of the Kings), several dozen lived in Jauja, a small number in San Miguel and in Trujillo, and 190 were trapped in Cuzco, including
two of Pizarro’s brothers, Hernando and Gonzalo. Another force of 140 Spaniards, under the leadership of Captain Alonso de Alvarado, was currently beyond Pizarro’s reach, mired in the distant cloud forests of northeastern Peru, where they were busy conquering the Chachapoya civilization. Likewise, although Pizarro’s former partner, Diego de Almagro, had at his disposal a force of five hundred more Spaniards, these were presently far to the south in what is now Chile and were embroiled in their own desperate struggle for survival.

Pizarro’s Captain Sebastián de Benalcázar, meanwhile, commanded two hundred Spaniards far to the north, having conquered what is now Ecuador. But it would take months to convey a message to Benalcázar asking for help, and still more months before any troops could arrive. In reality Pizarro and his Spaniards controlled only tiny pockets of Peru and had relied upon their alliance with Manco Inca to extend that control into the provinces. With the collapse of the Spanish-Inca military alliance, however, Pizarro and his fellow Spaniards were now exposed for what they really were: a relatively tiny group of increasingly desperate foreign invaders. For the time being then, the only troops Pizarro had to send in relief of Cuzco were those with him in the fledgling City of the Kings.

Pizarro was as yet uncertain what precisely had precipitated the rebellion, or how widespread it was, or how many native forces were involved. The cause or causes of Manco’s uprising really didn’t matter, however. The only important thing was to put an end to it immediately, before the rebellion could spread. If Manco Inca were to seize Cuzco, then not only would Pizarro’s brothers and nearly half of his available forces be killed, but the conquest of Peru would have to begin all over again. And this time, the Incas would not be so easily fooled by Spanish promises of goodwill and brotherhood.

Within a week of receiving news of Manco’s rebellion, Pizarro had armed and dispatched the first of two relief forces. The initial column consisted of a cavalry contingent of thirty men led by a thirty-three-year-old captain named Juan Morgovejo de Quiñones. Pizarro ordered Morgovejo to head due east along the Inca road that ran from the coast up into the Andes, then to proceed south toward Vilcashuaman, a strategic crossroads that lay a little over a hundred miles to the west of Cuzco, where four Inca roads met. Seizing Vilcashuaman would prevent Inca forces in the north from moving south against Cuzco and would simultaneously prevent
Manco’s forces from moving north and spreading the rebellion.

After dispatching Morgovejo, Pizarro’s next move was to send a second relief force of seventy cavalry, this one led by his relative Gonzalo de Tapia, but by a different route. Tapia’s column was to follow the Inca road south on the coast for nearly a hundred miles, then to take a branch heading east that climbed into the Andes. Eventually, the cavalry unit would turn south onto the same main Inca highway, or
capac ñan
, that Morgovejo had taken; it would then ride in relief of the capital.

What neither Pizarro nor his two captains realized, however, was that Manco had already sent a native army north from Cuzco under the command of one of his generals, Quizo Yupanqui. Quizo’s orders were to pin down Pizarro’s forces in Lima and thus to prevent Pizarro from relieving the besieged mountain capital. That would leave Manco free to deal with “the Spanish problem” in Cuzco as he chose. The two captains of the relief columns, meanwhile, were also completely in the dark about the extent of the Inca rebellion. Neither was aware that they had actually entered enemy territory as soon as they had left Lima. Manco’s uprising—like ripples spreading out from the center of a pond—had already progressed from Cuzco south to the Collao near Lake Titicaca and north into central Peru, as far as Jauja. As soon as the two Spanish columns had departed from Lima, therefore, native runners had begun carrying information on their whereabouts to General Quizo, who was kept continually informed of their movements. Undoubtedly, Quizo was also shown clay topographic maps of the area the Spaniards were traveling in. Inca commanders routinely used such models in order to devise their battle plans.

By now, the Spanish forces in Lima, Jauja, and Cuzco were operating in a virtual information blackout, completely unable to communicate with one another. Not only had the Incas succeeded in severing the Spaniards’ lines of communication, but they had also been busy redesigning their military tactics. After three and a half years of occupation, Manco’s generals knew by now something about the strengths and weaknesses of Spanish military techniques. Attacking Spanish cavalry while on level ground was tantamount to suicide, no matter how many native troops they brought to bear. They also knew that the only successes their troops had thus far enjoyed had been when they had attacked Spaniards in terrain so rough that the superior mobility and speed of the Spaniards’ horses had been neutralized.
Now, with advance knowledge of two Spanish columns moving slowly between the jagged heights and narrow passes of the Andes and taking into account everything he knew about the invaders, General Quizo carefully made his plans. “[Their strategy] was the following:” wrote the sixteenth-century chronicler Agustín de Zárate, “they would allow the Spaniards to enter a deep, narrow gorge and, seizing the entrance and the exit with a great mass of Indians, they would then hurl down such a quantity of rocks and boulders from the hillsides they would kill them all, almost without having to come to grips with them.”

The tactic was one designed by the Incas to harness the jagged contours of the Andes as their ally, while turning that same topography into an enemy of the Spaniards. It was soon to become the central strategy in General Quizo Yupanqui’s campaign.

Gonzalo de Tapia’s force of seventy men, meanwhile, riding due south from Lima and then eastward up into the Andes, was the first to experience the Incas’ new military tactics. Until now, the Spaniards had assumed that mounted cavalry were practically invincible when confronting native armies, no matter how many natives were arrayed against them. Crossing a fifteen-thousand-foot pass, Tapia’s column soon came upon the royal Inca road that stretched down along the spine of the Andes from above Quito in what is now Ecuador southward for nearly three thousand miles into Chile. Turning south onto the main highway, the Spaniards next crossed the high, treeless grasslands, or
puna
, of Huaitará, dotted with herds of thickly fleeced alpacas, wisps of quickly moving clouds, and the occasional mountain lion, which the Incas called
puma.
^*
High above the column soared occasional condors, black with white markings and naked yellow heads, whose seven-foot wingspans were nevertheless dwarfed by the immensity of the nearby snow-covered peaks. The relief column next crossed the Pampas River on an Inca bridge, then entered a narrow canyon with high jagged walls, the noise of the river filling the canyon, punctuated only by the clopping of the horses’ hooves.

Both the Spaniards and their mounts were tired by now and were feeling the effects of the high, thin Andean air, which is alternately warm by
day and cold by night. Half drowsing in their saddles and climbing slowly up the canyon toward a pass, the Spaniards were abruptly jolted awake when masses of native warriors suddenly appeared ahead, seemingly out of nowhere. Quizo’s troops charged toward the column, launching a volley of sling-driven stones that slammed into the cavalrymen at the front. Caught by surprise, Tapia and his men turned their horses around and raced back down the canyon, only to find that the bridge over the river they had just used had disappeared; native warriors had dismantled it soon after the Spaniards had ridden across.

Surrounded now by sheer canyon walls and with an impassable river behind them, the Spaniards were trapped. As the men shouted to one another, wheeling their horses around and trying to decide what to do, a noise as loud as a cannon suddenly erupted in their midst. A huge boulder had smashed into the ground from above, crushing a number of riders and horses and spraying others with a deadly shrapnel of rocks. Looking up, the Spaniards saw in horror that natives lining the canyon walls were pushing more boulders over the edge and that others were already crashing down. Amid the noise and confusion and the cries of the wounded the Spaniards knew one thing for certain: they had just been caught like rats in a carefully prepared trap.

Two, three, and now four more boulders hit the ground, exploding on impact and taking groups of horses and their riders down with them. Uninjured horses neighed, wounded horses screamed, and the Spaniards shouted hoarsely in the mounting confusion as more boulders continued to crash down upon them. Some riders tried to escape, bolting with their horses either forward or back down the canyon, but these immediately ran into a hail of sling stones and arrows shot by jungle archers. A few slammed their horses into the masses of warriors, slashing at the natives with their swords, but soon a sea of hands surrounded them and pulled the Spaniards from their mounts. Thrown to the ground, the armored invaders immediately disappeared beneath a thicket of copper-, bronze-, and stone-tipped clubs that rose up and then came down again, again and again.

General Quizo more than likely witnessed his carefully designed ambush from a perch high on top of the canyon rim. The general would have watched with satisfaction as wounded
Spaniards crawled on the ground, pursued by native troops who used their heavy wooden
porras
to mash in their heads. Other warriors grabbed the now riderless horses by the reins, a few of which reared up on their haunches but were unable to escape. Within less than half an hour a force of seventy Spaniards—only ten fewer than the entire cavalry contingent currently fighting in Cuzco—had been reduced to a few crawling survivors.

While natives busily hacked off the fallen Spaniards’ heads, an aide approached the Inca general and presumably showed him a leather bag full of the invaders’ strange
quipus
—the magical papers (letters) that were said to have the power of speech. Surveying the carnage below, Quizo now ordered that the few Spaniards who had survived the slaughter be bound and that they—along with five severed Spanish heads and the magic
quipus
—be sent to Manco Inca as a gift from their victory.

General Quizo, meanwhile, had already learned from
chaski
messengers that another Spanish force was in the area and was marching south toward them. This was a detachment of sixty Spanish foot soldiers under a captain named Diego Pizarro who, despite his name, was no relative of the Pizarro brothers. The foot soldiers had marched from the town of Jauja—located about three hundred miles north of Cuzco—in pursuit of Manco’s other great general, Tiso, who had been inciting natives in the region to rebel. Quizo’s scouts reported that the sixty Spanish soldiers were currently marching south alongside the Mantaro River, toward the Inca town of Huamanga, about midway between Jauja and Cuzco. None of the soldiers was aware of the fact that an entire Spanish cavalry column had just been annihilated nearby.

In another high narrow canyon, similar to the one where Tapia’s men had been crushed, Quizo staged his next ambush, just north of Huamanga. There the Inca general caught the entire force of sixty Spaniards by surprise and quite literally crushed them with an avalanche of boulders; Quizo’s legions then clubbed the survivors to death.

Determined to continue his methodical campaign of extermination, General Quizo now marched his army north toward the city of Jauja, which was still inhabited by a community of perhaps several dozen
encomenderos.
Years of military successes and natural arrogance had lulled Jauja’s Spanish inhabitants into a false sense of security. Assuming that their force of sixty foot soldiers was still in the area, the
encomenderos
ignored reports by their frightened
yanacona
servants that a large native army was now approaching the city. As the chronicler Martín de Murúa describes: