The Last Days of the Incas (48 page)

Manco himself now returned to the Andes, traveling to the north of Cuzco, where he personally began to organize groups that would become guerrilla fighters. Eventually, small, mobile groups of warriors began ambushing Spanish
encomenderos
, merchants, and other travelers, all of whom frequented the main Inca highway above Cuzco. According to the chronicler Cieza de León, Manco also incorporated a new tactic into his campaign against the Spaniards—outright terror:

While Manco was raiding with his guerrilla forces to the west of Cuzco, Francisco Pizarro, meanwhile, was growing increasingly concerned over reports of the recent disturbances. Pizarro had been in Cuzco since roughly November of 1538, having arrived there some four months after the execution of Diego de Almagro. Informed at first by letter of his former partner’s death, Pizarro had no doubt experienced mixed emotions, as his relationship with Almagro had been a complex one. According to Cieza de León,

Whatever emotions Pizarro may have experienced, the destruction of Almagro and his force had allowed Pizarro once again to regain control of Cuzco. Now, however, after receiving reports that Manco Inca had returned to the Andes and was killing Spaniards anew, Pizarro wasted no time; he soon sent a powerful force of more than two hundred Spanish cavalry, under the command of Captain Illán Suárez de Carvajal, to capture or kill
the renegade Inca leader whom he himself had crowned.

Suárez soon rode out west from Cuzco along the Inca highway, reaching the town of Andahuaylas, about one hundred miles distant. There, he learned from native spies that Manco was currently northwest of his position, using the nearby hills as a sort of robber’s roost from which to stage his guerrilla attacks. Determined to surround the rebel emperor so that he would be unable to escape, Suárez moved his force to the west of Manco’s position in order to block any movement in that direction. He then sent a force of thirty men—including seven crossbowmen and five harquebusiers under the command of a Captain Villadiego—to circle around to the east toward the other side. There the Vilcas (Pampas) River served as a natural barricade that would prevent any escape attempt toward the Antisuyu, except over a single bridge. Villadiego and his men were ordered to seize the bridge and to remain there until Suárez had located Manco’s position and had begun his attack.

Arriving at the Vilcas River, Villadiego surprised and captured several natives guarding the bridge, whom he tortured into revealing Manco’s location. The emperor was in the nearby hilltop town of Oncoy, the prisoners told him—he was attending a festival that had been thrown in his honor. What’s more, they said, Manco had with him only eighty warriors—he was thus relatively unprotected. The young Spanish captain—eager to receive both the awards and the glory of being the first to capture the rebel Inca king—decided to ignore his commander’s orders and instead to immediately attack. Villadiego thus abandoned the bridge and began leading his men along a trail that led from the bottom of the canyon directly up to the hilltop town above.

The day was hot and the Spaniards were forced to make the steep climb on foot, leading their horses behind them by their reins. Far above, Manco’s wife and sister, Cura Ocllo, was the first to see the invaders. She quickly alerted her husband. Manco immediately ordered that the four captured horses they had in their possession be saddled and readied for him and three other Inca nobles, who, like Manco, had learned how to ride. Manco then ordered the women in the town to line up along the hillside, brandishing an assortment of captured Spanish lances, in an effort to fool the Spaniards into thinking that Manco had a much larger force with him. Climbing onto his horse and wheeling about with a long
Spanish lance in his hand, Manco now led his three horsemen down the hillside, followed by his warriors on foot.

As Villadiego’s men continued struggling up the slope, one of them suddenly shouted a warning, causing the Spaniards to look up and see the silhouettes of what appeared to be numerous warriors on the hilltop above, who now began shouting insults and shaking their lances. The Spaniards were further stunned to see racing down toward them four natives on horseback, carrying lances, with many more warriors racing behind them on foot. Caught by surprise on a steep path and with a sheer drop-off below, the seven crossbowmen raised their weapons to fire as the handful of harquebusiers desperately tried to light the wicks of their guns. As Manco’s warriors began hurling down sling stones and darts from above, a few of the harquebuses fired, felling one native, but by then Manco’s warriors were among them, smashing the Spaniards with their mace clubs, hurling sling stones, and pressing the Spaniards back down the trail so forcefully that many of the Spaniards and their horses simply tumbled off the slope, the men screaming briefly before hitting the ground far below. Manco and his four-horse cavalry, meanwhile, effectively used their lances to stab and skewer the remaining Spaniards, who presumably had never before been attacked by natives on horseback.

After a fierce struggle, the battle ended in a rout. Captain Villadiego, covered in wounds and with his arm broken by a native battle-axe, had eventually fallen to the ground. The coup de grâce was delivered to him via a flurry of mace clubs. In his eagerness to seize for himself the glory of Manco’s capture, the young captain had committed two fatal errors: first, he had allowed himself to be caught by surprise on steep terrain where he and his Spaniards were unable to use their horses; and second, he had allowed Manco’s warriors to attack them from the heights above. Of Villadiego’s thirty men, twenty-eight were either killed outright or else fell to their deaths. Only two escaped, by running back down to the river, leaping in, and then swimming desperately across. Manco’s son Titu Cusi remembered the joy of his father’s success:

Despite his success, Manco no doubt realized that his current military situation was far different from the one he had enjoyed only a few years earlier. No longer did he command the mass levies of troops he had once raised to besiege Cuzco with—the same kinds of vast armies that his forefathers had once used to carve out their empire. Instead, Manco was now reduced to leading smaller groups that, because of their reduced numbers, had to avoid direct confrontations with larger Spanish forces. Nevertheless, Manco’s warriors were by now effectively ambushing Spanish supply convoys on the Inca highways, destroying small military contingents, amassing stolen weapons and horses, and then disappearing back into the hills. If the hallmarks of guerrilla warfare are mobility, speed, knowledge of local terrain, peasant support, inflicting frequent ambushes upon the enemy and then disappearing before a larger counterinsurgency force can respond, then Manco Inca had truly transformed himself into an effective guerrilla leader.

Not long after the death of Villadiego and his men, an exasperated Francisco Pizarro led a force of seventy cavalry out from Cuzco in pursuit of the rebel emperor. Although he and his troops scoured the countryside, Pizarro was unable to find the elusive Manco amid the wild, rugged landscape of the interior. Manco’s spies, in fact, had warned their emperor of the presence of the cavalry unit; Manco had thus wisely decided to retreat back across the Apurímac River into the Antisuyu, preserving his forces to fight another day. A frustrated Pizarro eventually returned to Cuzco and dictated a letter to King Charles.

Manco Inca, meanwhile, had already sent additional messages to his followers in the south of Peru including his high priest, Villac Umu, who was still holed up in the rugged mountains in the Cuntisuyu quarter of the empire, to the southwest of Cuzco. After receiving Manco’s order, Villac Umu and his forces immediately began attacking Spaniards in the area and encouraging the local natives to rebel. Further to the south, along the altiplano west of Lake Titicaca, Manco’s messages had an equal effect upon the Lupaca tribes, which now decided to rise up. In a relatively short period of time, then, suddenly more than a thousand miles of the Inca heartland, from just below Cajamarca in the north to the shores of Lake Titicaca in the south, were once more in the throes of a native rebellion. Frightened Spanish merchants and
encomenderos
now found themselves forced to travel on the Inca highways in armed convoys for fear of deadly attacks.

Once the Spaniards realized the gravity of the situation, they immediately embarked upon a methodical counterinsurgency campaign, determined to preserve their privileged position at the apex of Peru’s newly reconfigured social pyramid. Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro now left Cuzco, leading a large Spanish cavalry force in the company of five thousand native auxiliaries, led by Paullu Inca, against the rebellious Lupacas. Ferrying horses and men across a portion of Lake Titicaca on rafts, the Spaniards soon routed the natives, capturing and killing the rebellious Lupaca chief and burning his village to the ground.

The Spaniards now began to shift their campaign northward, with Gonzalo Pizarro leading a force of seventy cavalry headed toward the Collao. After a fierce battle against a confederation of Consora, Pocona, and Chicha tribes, the Spanish cavalry once again emerged victorious, killing thousands of natives in the process. An unexpected bonus from that campaign was the surrender of the Inca general Tiso, the finest general Manco had left.

To put down the rebellion in the Cuntisuyu, to the southwest of Cuzco, Francisco Pizarro sent another Spanish force, again accompanied by native auxiliaries, to locate and destroy Villac Umu and his
army. Although the campaign would last for eight long months and would wax and wane, in the end the Spaniards succeeded in forcing Villac Umu into surrendering. The same bearded invaders who had profaned the Incas’ sacred temples now transported the Inca equivalent of the pope back to Cuzco in chains.

Although Manco’s general, Illa Tupac, continued to control a large area in the north near Jauja and would fight on for years, the Spaniards spread their own brand of terror throughout the north by dispatching repeated counterinsurgency forces to the rebellious provinces. In the fertile valley lying before the massive Cordillera Blanca, for example, in the Callejón de Huaylas, some four hundred miles northwest of Cuzco, local natives had killed two
encomenderos.
Lima’s town council sent a cavalry force under the command of Captain Francisco de Chávez to exact retribution. Chávez and his cavalry spent three months in the area, raiding native villages, slashing and spearing their inhabitants, torching their houses, and setting fire to their fields.

The marauding Spaniards made no distinction between men, women, and children in their campaign. “The war was so cruel that, fearing they would all be killed, the Indians asked for peace,” wrote Cieza de León. Before declaring his counterinsurgency campaign over, however, Chávez—a classic
extremeño
from Pizarro’s native town of Trujillo—was said to have slaughtered more than six hundred children under the age of three.

Meanwhile, further to the south, the natives in the area of Huánuco had also responded to Manco’s urgings, killing a number of Spaniards; an additional cavalry force was soon dispatched to this region as well. More than one hundred miles south of their destination, however, the cavalry entered the peaceful Inca town of Tarma, which had not rebelled. The Spaniards nevertheless spent seven months there, “eating their corn and sheep [llamas and alpacas], robbing them of all of their gold and silver, taking their wives … keeping many Indians chained and making slaves of them and … abusing, extorting, and torturing them [the Indian chiefs] so that they would reveal … [the whereabouts] of their gold and silver.” Clearly, the lines between “conquering,” “pacifying,” “occupying,” “delivering retribution,” and “marauding” had become so thin as to be invisible, much to the dismay of Peru’s native inhabitants.

In April of 1539, as the counterinsurgency campaign in the north continued, Francisco, Hernando, and Gonzalo Pizarro met in Cuzco
in order to discuss their plans for the next steps in the conquest of Peru. Because of the complications caused by Almagro’s execution, Francisco thought it best that Hernando return to Spain to exonerate himself. Hernando had too many enemies by now, Francisco believed, who could poison the king’s ear and who could thus turn the king against Hernando and the rest of the Pizarro family. If his brother took with him a newly written chronicle of events that featured Hernando as an Indian-fighting hero during the recent siege, and a new load of gold for the king, then Francisco felt that his brother should be able to successfully plead his case to the king.