The Last Days of the Incas (37 page)
[The Spaniards] received news that they [the native warriors] were coming to kill them, but they paid no attention nor did they respect them at all, saying “let these dogs come to where we are waiting for them and we will cut them all to pieces, even if they come with twice the number they [already] have….” And for this reason, they didn’t want to take any precautions nor to fortify themselves in a central area, nor to post guards or lookouts, nor to place spies on the road so that they could be warned when the Indians were near.
While the wealthy
encomenderos
ignored the danger, Quizo’s troops secretly crept into the valley at night and surrounded the city. At dawn the next morning, the Inca general signaled his forces to attack, catching the Spaniards off guard. Finding themselves surrounded, those Spaniards who could gathered together in the town’s center for an Alamo-like last stand; others, caught isolated in their homes, were bludgeoned to death. The battle for Jauja nevertheless lasted from dawn to dusk. Slowly, one by one, the Spaniards were overcome, caught up in the maelstrom of an attack that had been fueled by years of Spanish arrogance and abuse. By nightfall, “the Indians [had] killed everyone, and their horses and their black [African] servants.” Only a single Spaniard had managed to escape, leaving the victorious warriors to “enjoy the dead Spaniards’ spoils and to cut their bodies into pieces with barbarous cruelty.” The lone survivor made his way down out of the Andes and hurried
to Lima, where he soon informed a distraught Pizarro of what had happened.
The news of Jauja’s loss came too late, however, for Pizarro had already dispatched two additional forces into the Andes to reinforce the city, unaware of the disaster that had befallen his previous column of seventy cavalry or that Jauja had just been overrun. One of the forces Pizarro sent was composed of twenty cavalry and was led by Captain Alonso de Gaete. Their mission was to escort a new Inca emperor—one of Manco’s brothers, Cusi-Rimac. Pizarro hoped that by placing a new puppet emperor on the throne he might be able to splinter the Inca elite further, thereby weakening Manco’s rebellion. Pizarro had thus conducted a hasty coronation—the third since his assassination of Atahualpa (the first being the short-lived Tupac Huallpa and the second Manco Inca)—and then had dispatched the new puppet emperor to Jauja, along with a Spanish escort and a number of the emperor’s native attendants.
Since Jauja was located well north of the rebellion in Cuzco, Pizarro felt that the city would be a secure location where the new emperor could begin gradually to assert his power. Not long after sending this group on its way, however, Pizarro began to worry that the cavalry escort was too small. He therefore ordered an additional thirty foot soldiers, under Captain Francisco de Godoy, to march in support of Captain Gaete and his twenty men. Neither Pizarro nor his two captains knew at the time, of course, that the city where they were headed had just been overrun by General Quizo, that its inhabitants had been slaughtered, or that two forces of seventy and sixty Spaniards respectively had been destroyed almost to the man.
Although Pizarro feared that the new emperor’s escort might be vulnerable, he never suspected, however, that Gaete and his men might be attacked by the very natives they were escorting. The puppet emperor, Cusi-Rimac, it turned out, far from being a turncoat against his brother Manco, had apparently been in secret communication with General Quizo’s forces for some time. In a canyon somewhere on the way to Jauja, Quizo’s army ambushed Gaete’s column. Before the Spaniards even realized what was happening, Cusi-Rimac and his followers—the very people whom Gaete and his men had supposedly been protecting—turned on them. The result was another massacre. The combined native forces killed the Spanish captain and eighteen of the twenty Spaniards. Only two
escaped—one of them with a fractured leg—riding out of the canyon on a mule.
As the two survivors fled, they soon encountered the thirty Spanish foot soldiers under Captain Godoy who had been sent to reinforce them. Listening to their story and thoroughly alarmed, Godoy abruptly decided to turn around, escorting the two survivors back to Lima “with his tail between his legs, to give Pizarro the bad news.” General Quizo, meanwhile, sent Manco a message about his recent victories, along with gifts of Spanish clothing, weapons, a number of severed Spanish heads, “and two live Spaniards, one black man, and four horses.” Pizarro’s puppet emperor, Cusi-Rimac, meanwhile, traveled southward to join his brother. He would remain Manco’s ally throughout the rebellion.
With three Spanish forces wiped out, only a single, isolated Spanish force of thirty cavalry now remained in the central Andes. This was the column that Pizarro had originally sent in relief of Cuzco, led by Captain Juan Morgovejo de Quiñones. General Quizo, however—zeroing in on his goal of wiping out all Spaniards in the region—soon trapped Morgovejo’s men in a pass and applied to them the same treatment he had applied to the others. Only a remnant of Morgovejo’s force—practically the only survivors of four separate Spanish columns—made its way back to Lima to report to Pizarro the additional bad news. In two short months—May and June of 1536—Spanish military fortunes had plummeted while those of the Incas had dramatically risen. For the first time since the Spaniards had arrived in Peru four years earlier, an Inca general had successfully eliminated not one but
four
Spanish columns, three of which were composed of cavalry. General Quizo, in fact, had thus far succeeded in eliminating nearly two hundred of the “invincible”
viracochas
—a number nearly equal to those currently besieged in Cuzco and more than were present at the capture of Atahualpa in 1532.
Only two months earlier, Francisco Pizarro had been in command of around five hundred Spaniards and had a puppet Inca emperor on the throne. Now that puppet led a growing native insurgency that had already wiped out more than a third of Pizarro’s forces. Five Spanish captains were now dead—among them Francisco’s own brother Juan. In addition, more than one hundred horses had been either captured or killed, Jauja had been sacked and its inhabitants massacred, Cuzco was under siege, and nearly every Spanish
encomendero
between Cuzco and Lima had
been systematically hunted down and slaughtered. Wrote one chronicler:
The Governor was greatly troubled [after] seeing all of the bad things that had happened, because he already had four [sic] dead Captains and almost two hundred [dead] men and many horses, and he also knew for certain that this city [Cuzco] was either in great danger or was already lost, and [if the latter] that his brothers and all of the others in it were dead; and for this reason and seeing himself with so few people he was very distraught, fearing the loss of this land, for there wasn’t a day when someone didn’t come to tell him that “such and such a chief has rebelled,” [or] “in such an area so many Christians have died who had gone looking for food.”
Too late, Pizarro learned that the Incas had figured out a way to destroy columns of cavalry that only months before appeared invulnerable to attack. Realizing now that he had just sent more than a hundred cavalrymen to their deaths, Pizarro was forced to face the unpleasant fact that he had no more than a hundred Spaniards left with which to defend Lima. In addition, rumors were swirling in the city almost daily about Inca armies that were on their way to attack the city, intent on slaughtering all those who lived here—whether natives, Spaniards, or slaves.
Fearing that his brothers Hernando, Gonzalo, and Juan might be dead, a now desperate Pizarro sent an emergency appeal to the various Spanish governors living elsewhere in the Americas. On July 9, 1536, two months into Manco’s rebellion, an uncharacteristically chastened Pizarro wrote a pleading letter to Pedro de Alvarado, Hernando Cortés’s former second-in-command in Mexico and now the governor of Guatemala:
Most Magnificent Sir,
… The Inca [emperor Manco] … has the city of Cuzco besieged, and I have heard nothing about the Spaniards in it…. The country is so badly damaged that no native chief now serves us and they have won many victories against us … It is causing me such great sorrow that it is consuming my entire life, as well as [the fear of] losing the Governorship…. I beg of you to send me some help, because
not only would it be doing His Majesty a very great service, but it would [also] be doing me a favor and would save the lives of those … who are here [in Lima]…. You can be sure that if we are not rescued then Cuzco will be lost … and then the rest of us will be lost, because we are few and have almost no weapons and the Indians are fearless…. I will not say more except that it will cost you little to perform this service for our Royal Majesty and [to grant] the favor that both this realm and myself request. And even if it costs a lot to help [us] Christians, everyone will be very grateful for it.
May the Lord grant your magnificent person as prosperous a life as you desire,
Francisco Pizarro
Pizarro’s letters, bearing the news of the massive Inca rebellion, gradually made their way across the Isthmus, into the Caribbean, and on to Spain itself. There, Emperor Charles V was eventually informed of Manco’s revolt. The unsettling news meant that the king’s lucrative 20 percent share of all the gold and silver that had been streaming out of Peru was, for the moment at least, ended—like water from a faucet that had suddenly been switched off. Sending the alarming news both to the Council of the Indies in Santo Domingo and also to the king, the Spaniard Pascual de Andagoya
*
wrote the following from Panama:
The Lord of Cuzco and of the entire realm has rebelled. The rebellion has spread from province to province and suddenly they are all rising up. Rebellious chiefs have already arrived forty leagues [140 miles] from The City of the Kings. Governor [Pizarro] is asking for help and will be given everything possible from here. We will send someone there with as much money as will be needed, and we are asking that as many people come as are able, [along with] the greatest amount of artillery, harquebuses, and crossbows.
With Pizarro desperately sending out the equivalent
of SOS messages while simultaneously preparing Lima’s defenses for the anticipated assault, Manco Inca, meanwhile, was busy celebrating General Quizo’s victories at his new headquarters, located about thirty miles northwest of Cuzco. Manco had abandoned his previous headquarters in Calca, which was situated only a dozen miles from the capital, feeling that it was too vulnerable to attack. The rebel emperor had therefore moved another twenty miles further down the Yucay/Vilcanota River, to a fortress-temple complex called Ollantaytambo.
*
Here the flat-bottomed Yucay Valley, with its terraced hillsides and numerous royal estates, narrowed as the river continued its descent down the eastern side of the Andes toward the Amazon Basin. On the valley’s northern side, crowning a rising series of more than a dozen steep agricultural terraces, rose the walled complex of Ollantaytambo, a stronghold that commanded the entrances of both the Yucay Valley and a tributary valley that led up over the Panticalla Pass and then down into the eastern jungles.
After relocating to Ollantaytambo, Manco had assembled his chiefs and captains for an important meeting about their collective failure to hold the fortress of Saqsaywaman. During the three months since Manco had escaped from Cuzco, the young emperor had matured rapidly. Wearing the royal fringe across his forehead and dressed no doubt in a soft vicuña wool tunic, Manco now addressed his audience of native chiefs and military officers:
[My] sons and brothers,
In past talks … you already know how I prevented you from inflicting harm on those evil people who—through the deceit of saying they were the sons of [the creator god] Viracocha and were sent by Him—had entered my realm, which I permitted and for this [reason] helped them, giving them what I had—silver and gold, clothing and corn, llamas and alpacas, men, women, and children and innumerable other things. They seized me, beat me, and mistreated me, without my having merited it, and then they tried to kill me…. It has caused me grief that, you being so many and they being so few, they escaped from your hands. Perhaps Viracocha helped them for
you have told me that they were on their knees every night [praying]…. For if He did not help them—then how did they escape from your hands, with so many of you? What is done is done…. From now on, beware of them for … they are our worst enemies and we will perpetually be theirs. I want to strengthen my position in this town and to make a fortress here that no one will be able to penetrate. Do me this favor because one day we may need to make use of it.
While Manco’s craftsmen busied themselves reinforcing the fortress’s walls,
chaski
runners continued bringing him reports of General Quizo’s string of victories to the north. Recalled Titu Cusi:
During this period … messengers arrived … [with news] of the destruction that had been carried out in … Lima and … Jauja, where battles had occurred between the Indians and the Spaniards in which the Indians were victorious. And they brought my father many heads of the Spaniards and two live Spaniards and a black man and four horses, which arrived amid great rejoicings for those victories, and my father accepted these [gifts] very honorably and infused everyone [with the desire] to fight with equal vigor.
With full knowledge now that General Quizo had wiped the central Andes clean of the Spanish invaders and had successfully crushed four separate forces of both Spanish foot soldiers and cavalry, and with Pizarro’s two brothers virtually powerless in Cuzco and in no danger of being relieved, Manco now sent orders to General Quizo to proceed to Lima to seize the city. Spies in Lima no doubt had already informed Manco that the city was defended by around one hundred Spaniards and eighty horses—roughly half the number of Spaniards presently holding out in Cuzco—and that all the inhabitants—Spaniards and traitorous natives alike—were very much afraid. Once General Quizo had eliminated Pizarro and his forces on the coast, then he and his army could return to the Andes and could help Manco exterminate the remaining Spaniards in Cuzco. Manco could then restore the burned-out capital to its former magnificence and could begin restoring the power, glory, and dominion of his ancestors’ empire.