The Last Days of the Incas (4 page)

ON APRIL 21, 1536, ON SATURDAY AT THE END OF EASTER
week, few of the 196 Spaniards in the Inca capital of Cuzco realized that within the next few weeks they would either die or else would come so close to dying that every one of them would ask for absolution, the forgiveness of their sins, and would entrust their souls to their Maker. Just three years after Francisco Pizarro and his Spaniards had garroted the Inca emperor, Atahualpa (ah tah HUAL pa) and had seized a large portion of an empire 2,500 miles long and ten million strong, things were beginning to unravel for the Spanish conquistadors. For the last few years the Spaniards had consolidated their gains, installed a puppet Inca ruler, stolen the Incas’ women, gained dominion over millions, and sent a massive amount of Inca gold and silver back to Spain. The original conquistadors were by now all incredibly wealthy men—the equivalent of multi-millionaires in our time—and those who had stayed on in Peru had already retired to fabulously large estates. The conquistadors were established seigneurial lords, the founders of family dynasties. Already they had shed their armor for fine linen clothes, rakish hats spiked with gaudy feathers, ostentatious jewelry,
and
sleek linen tights. In Spain and other European kingdoms, and on scattered islands and possessions throughout the Spanish Caribbean, the conquerors of Peru were already legendary figures: young and old alike dreamed of nothing more than walking in these same conquistadors’ now finely appointed shoes.

The conquistadors Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro voyaging toward the new world and Peru, by the sixteenth-century native artist Felipe Huamá Poma de Ayala.

On this crisp spring morning, however, at an elevation of 11,300 feet in the Andes, church bells of bronze had begun to clang incessantly from a structure the Spaniards had hastily erected on top of the immaculately cut gray stones of the Qoricancha, the Incas’ temple of the sun. Rumors now swirled along the streets of this bowl-like city, surrounded by green hills, that the puppet Inca emperor had escaped and in fact was about to return with a massive native army, hundreds of thousands strong.

As the Spaniards swarmed out of their dwellings, arming themselves with steel swords, daggers, twin-pointed morion helmets, twelve-foot lances and saddling up their horses, they bitterly swore that the Inca rebels were so many “dogs” and “traitors.” The air was clear, sharp, and thin, and the iron-clad hooves of the horses clattered on the cut stones of the streets. A question that no doubt arose in at least some of the conquistadors’ minds, however, was—where had it all gone wrong?

Indeed, thus far the Spaniards had enjoyed one stunning success after another. Four years earlier, in September 1532, led by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, 168 of them had made their way up into the Andes—sixty-two on horseback and 106 on foot—leaving a cluster of lanteen-rigged ships moored in the deep blue waters of the Pacific Ocean, or the “Southern Sea.” The Spaniards had eventually climbed eight thousand feet and then had walked directly into the lion’s den—where the lord of the Inca Empire, Atahualpa, with an army of possibly eighty thousand warriors, was waiting for them.

Francisco Pizarro at this time was a fifty-four-year-old, moderately wealthy landowner who had been living in Panama and who had thirty years of Indian fighting experience behind him. Tall, sinewy, athletic, with hollow cheeks and a thin beard, Pizarro resembled Don Quixote, even though Don Quixote wouldn’t be created for another seventy-three years. A poor cavalryman (until literally the last moments of his life, Pizarro preferred fighting on foot), Pizarro was also quiet, taciturn, brave, firm, ambitious, cunning, efficient,
diplomatic, and—like most conquistadors—could be as brutal as the situation required.

For better or for worse, Pizarro had been molded by the region he hailed from in western Spain—Extremadura.
^*
An impoverished, rural, backward area, Extremadura was covered in arid, Mediterranean scrub and lay marooned like a landlocked island in the midst of a relatively poor country just emerging from the feudal ages that had yet to become a nation. The region, it was well known, typically produced men who were both uncommunicative and parsimonious, men who showed little emotion and who were known to be as tough and unsympathetic as the landscape that had nurtured them.

Of such gritty material were made both Pizarro and a large number of his fellow conquistadors, many of whom had also come from the same region. Vasco Núñez de Balboa—the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean—for example, was from Extremadura. So was Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida. Hernando de Soto, the seasoned explorer who would later fight his way through what are now Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, was an
extremeño.
Even Hernando Cortés, the recent conqueror of the Aztec Empire in Mexico, had grown up within forty miles of his compatriot and second cousin Francisco Pizarro.
^†
That the conquerors of the New World’s two most powerful native empires grew up within forty miles of each other, however, is certainly one of the world’s most extraordinary facts.

Pizarro’s native city of Trujillo, which had a population while he was growing up of only about two thousand
vecinos
, or citizens who had full rights, was divided into three sections. Each corresponded to the social stratification of the city’s inhabitants. The walled town, or
villa
, rested on top of a hill with a view of the countryside. Here rose the turreted houses of the knights and of the lower nobility, with their coats of arms, or lineages, prominently displayed over their doorways. It was here, too, that Francisco’s father and his father’s family lived. The second section of the city, formed around the town’s plaza, lay on flat land beside the hill. Here
lived the merchants, notaries, and craftsmen, although, somewhat later, more and more of the hilltop nobility moved to homes occupying prominent positions on the plaza, including Francisco’s father. The final section of the city lay along its outer periphery, along the roads that led off toward the fields. Referred to derogatorily as the
arrabales
, a connotation that combined both the notion of “outskirts” and “slums,” it was here that the peasants and artisans lived in homes that were as far physically as they were socially from those at the town’s center. It was amid the outer section of this rural yet highly stratified city, which mirrored Spanish society at large, that Francisco Pizarro grew up with his mother, a common maid. A person who grew up in an
arrabal
was called an
arrabalero.
The latter referred to a person who was “ill-bred,” or, in modern parlance, a person who has grown up on “the wrong side of the tracks.” Such was the social stigma that Francisco Pizarro labored to escape from long before departing for the New World.

Pizarro, however, was not only stigmatized by growing up in an
arrabal
, he was also stigmatized by the fact that his father had never married his mother. That meant that not only would he be unlikely to inherit any part of his father’s estate (even though he was the eldest of four half-brothers), but that he was also illegitimate, meaning that he would forever be regarded as a second-class citizen. In addition, Pizarro had received little if any schooling and thus remained illiterate for his entire life.

Pizarro was only fifteen years old (and Cortés eight) when Columbus returned in from his first voyage across the unexplored ocean. In announcing his supposed discovery of a new route to India, Columbus wrote a letter to a high-ranking official describing his voyage that was quickly published and became a runaway bestseller for the age.

It is likely that Pizarro overheard Columbus’s fantastic tale, either as part of an eager group of listeners to whom the story was read, or else as the story was passed along by word of mouth. In any event, it was an extraordinary account, a tale as rich as any fiction, one that told of the discovery of an exotic world where riches could literally be plucked like so much ripe fruit from a landscape similar to the Garden of Eden. And, like the popular novels that had started circulating since the printing press had been invented two decades earlier, Columbus’s
Letter
, or
Carta
, hit Europe like a thunder-bolt:

Columbus’s enthusiastic report no doubt fired the imagination of the teenaged Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro, of course, was already well aware of the fact that his future on his native peninsula would probably be a bleak one. The world that Columbus described, by contrast, must have seemed to offer so many more possibilities than his own.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the class system in the kingdoms of Spain had been in place for centuries and was a very rigid one. Those at the top—the dukes, the lords, the marquis, and the earls—owned vast estates on which peasants worked. It was they who enjoyed all the
privileges and social prestige that the late fifteenth-century Spanish kingdoms had to offer. Those at the bottom—the peasants, artisans, and, generally speaking, all those who had to perform manual labor for a living—usually remained in the same class to which they were born. In the kingdoms of Spain, as else-where in Europe, there was little upward social mobility. If one were born poor, illiterate, and had no family pedigree, then one could read one’s future as plainly as a geographer could read one of Columbus’s finely drawn maps. There were only two ways to gain entrance to elite status: either through marriage to a member of the elite (which was exceedingly rare) or else by distinguishing oneself in a successful military campaign.

Thus, in the year 1502, at the age of twenty-four, the impoverished, illiterate, illegitimate, and title-less Francisco Pizarro had perhaps not surprisingly found his way onto a ship that had set out from Spain for the Indies—the islands Columbus had declared were located in Asia (known at the time as the “Indies”) and thus were inhabited by “Indians.” The fleet was the largest yet to cross the Atlantic; it carried 2,500 men and a large number of horses, pigs, and other animals. Its destination, in fact, was the very same island that Columbus had described only nine years earlier: Hispaniola. As Pizarro’s ship arrived and set anchor before the lush green island rising up from a turquoise sea, a small boatload of Spaniards came out to meet them, soon informing the excited passengers that “You have arrived at a good moment [for] … there is to be a war against the Indians and we will be able to take many slaves.” “This news,” recalled one young passenger, Bartolomé de Las Casas, “produced a great joy in the ship.”
^*

Whether Pizarro participated in that particular
war against the local natives is unknown. By 1509, however—some seven years after his arrival—Pizarro had risen to become a lieutenant in the local military of the governor, Nicolás de Ovando, a loosely knit force that was frequently used to “pacify” native rebellions. While Pizarro’s exact duties are unknown, he was working for a governor who at one point had rounded up eighty-four native chiefs and then had them massacred—simply to send an unmistakable message to the island’s inhabitants to do as they were told.