The Last Days of the Incas (52 page)

While some of Almagro’s supporters had returned to Spain in numbers sufficient to turn the king against Hernando, most of the men of Chile—called
Almagristas
—were currently eking out a living in Peru. Spaniards who had only recently arrived in Peru could justify their poverty by saying that they had arrived too late to share in the empire’s spoils; those who had supported Almagro, by contrast, could claim no such thing. Most had wasted two years in Chile with Almagro on an expedition that had brought them nothing but hardship and poverty. Later, after the
Almagristas
had successfully seized Cuzco and had reason to believe that they would soon become wealthy
encomenderos
themselves, they were abruptly disabused of this notion by their defeat at the Battle of Las Salinas. Even worse, Diego de Almagro—the leader they had risked their lives for in the expectation of future rewards—was now dead. Only Almagro’s son—Diego de Almagro the Younger, whom the elder Almagro had sired with his native mistress from Panama—remained. Yet, although the younger Almagro was nineteen years old, he was “so boyish that he personally wasn’t mature enough to govern people, nor [to command] a troop.”

Clearly, the
Almagristas
had backed the wrong horse. Unable to hold political office and with no employment or other traditional means of support, Almagro’s several hundred followers found themselves barely able to scrape together a living. Even worse than their current situation, however, was their realization that their poverty was likely to persist. They had, after all, fought
against
the Pizarros—and the Pizarros were well known for neither forgetting nor forgiving. Spanish Peru was a tiny world, after all; hence, if you had fought against the Pizarros, you might as well have walked about with the mark of Cain on
your forehead. “The citizens [of Lima],” wrote Pedro de Cieza de León, “were so indifferent that, even though they saw them dying from hunger, they did not help them with a single thing, nor did they want … to give them any food.”

So bitter were the
Almagristas
toward the Pizarros that many didn’t even bother taking their hats off when passing the governor on the street—a clear and unmistakable insult. Pizarro, in turn, wearing his plain black coat with his white hat and shoes, behaved as if Almagro’s followers didn’t exist. “Poor devils,” he was sometimes heard to say, and which he always used in a pejorative manner, “They’ve had such bad luck—and now they’re destitute, defeated, and ashamed. Best to leave them alone.” For all Pizarro cared, the men of Chile could rot in hell before he would ever grant them an office or a favor. Of one fact the
Almagristas
were certain: for as long as Francisco Pizarro governed Peru, they would remain impoverished with no hope of a better future.

In June of 1541, nearly three years after the death of Almagro, a group of
Almagristas
in Lima made a fateful decision. The only way their fortunes might improve in Peru, they had decided, was if they removed Francisco Pizarro from power—and that unequivocally meant killing him. If Pizarro were dead, then the seemingly inevitable prospect of a lengthy Pizarro dynasty would almost certainly disappear. The king would then be forced to appoint a new governor and surely, under a new governor, the
Almagristas
reasoned, they would have a better chance of improving their lot.

Approximately twenty in number, the conspirators chose June 26 as the date of their assassination attempt: this would be the date of their liberation from the Pizarros’ unjust tyranny, they devoutly believed, and from all their endless envy and want. Hernando Pizarro had warned Francisco of precisely this danger: “Do not allow [even] ten of … [Almagro’s followers] to gather together at one time,” he had advised, urging his brother to be generous with them so that they wouldn’t cause any trouble in the future. Francisco Pizarro, however, had done precisely the opposite, allowing the
Almagristas
to gather as they wished and making no effort whatsoever to bridge the great divide that separated the two camps.

Because the
Almagristas’
hatred and discontent were difficult to hide, rumors about possible assassination plots had been circulating in Lima for years. Yet Pizarro had typically paid little heed to them,
walking about the city confident in both his own authority and in his physical powers to protect himself. Wrote Cieza de León,

June 26, the day selected for the assassination, was a Sunday. Pizarro would normally leave his house in the morning and walk across the plaza to attend mass. Of great importance to the
Almagristas
was the fact that Pizarro would most likely be unarmed at that time. What the plotters didn’t know, however, was that one of their number—a man named Francisco de Herencia—had already divulged the assassination plot the day before, during his confession to a priest. The priest, in turn, had warned Pizarro. Although Pizarro had dismissed the story as mere “Indian gossip,” he nevertheless decided not to attend mass the next morning and had asked a priest to come to his house instead. Pizarro decided to go ahead, however, with his typical noonday meal, one that would be prepared for him and for a number of previously invited guests.

The morning of June 26 dawned cold and gray as was normal for this time of year. June is the beginning of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, and Lima in particular is normally blanketed day and night by a fine drizzle of a fog, called a
garua
, that can last up to six months. During the shorter winter days, the sun appears more like a moon over the city, a silver disk that is constantly shifting in opacity as it slowly moves through the cool gray mist. All night long the conspirators waited, nervous and impatient for day-light to begin. By the time a dim gray dawn appeared, the would-be assassins had already finished fastening on their steel breastplates and their coats of mail and had also finished sharpening their knives, daggers, and swords. Later, as the single bronze bell that Pizarro had helped to forge began to reverberate above the cathedral, summoning the town’s citizens to gather and consume the blood and flesh of Christ,
Almagrista
spies suddenly arrived at the house of the assassins and breathlessly
informed them that Pizarro had not left his house for mass. The governor was said to be ill, the spies said, thus Pizarro would probably remain in his house for the entire day.

The conspirators, quite naturally, immediately suspected that someone had revealed their plot. Now a quick decision had to be made, for if their plan
had
been exposed, then they would surely be apprehended and either imprisoned or killed. Gathered in the house of Diego de Almagro’s son, the assassins turned toward the leader of the group, Juan de Herrada, who now offered them a stark choice:

The
Almagristas
agreed that they had but one choice—to carry out the assassination of Pizarro as they had originally planned. Throwing open the door and armed with an assortment of halberds, two crossbows, a harquebus, and a variety of swords, they now swarmed out onto the street and began heading to the central plaza, shouting “Long live the King!” and “Death to Tyrants!” A number of the town’s startled inhabitants no doubt watched them as the men burst out onto the plaza and headed directly for Pizarro’s home. The latter—a two-story structure with ample rooms for the governor’s servants, guards, secretary, majordomo, pages, chamberlains, children, and his native mistress—lay behind two courtyards and fronted the square directly across from the cathedral.

Pizarro, meanwhile, having already heard mass, was presently dining with his half-brother Francisco Martín de Alcántara and with about twenty others in the large dining room upstairs. As the sounds of men shouting began to be heard in the distance, Pizarro’s page abruptly burst into the room shouting, “Grab your weapons! Grab your weapons! Because all those men from Chile are coming to murder the Marquis, my lord!” Almost immediately, the guests lurched up from their chairs, unsure about what to do. In the confusion that followed, Pizarro and some of his companions
rushed to the stairway that descended to the inner courtyard to see what was going on, just as the mob of
Almagristas
began entering the outer courtyard, brandishing their weapons.

One of Pizarro’s pages, who had been working in that area, was the first to encounter the assassins; they stabbed him and left him for dead on the ground. Those of Pizarro’s guests who had witnessed the attack now realized that their own lives were in danger and rushed back into the dining hall, showing “great cowardice and fleeing in an abominable way,” as Pedro Cieza de León would write more than a dozen years later in his
La Guerra de Chupas.
As the
Almagristas
began ascending the main stairway, shouting for Francisco Pizarro to show himself, Pizarro’s lieutenant governor—a man who had recently boasted to Pizarro about how the latter could count upon him in any crisis—climbed through a window, clambered down the balustrade, and then fled through the garden below. Some guests followed suit while others even tried hiding beneath large pieces of furniture.

Pizarro and his brother Francisco Martín, however, along with two of Pizarro’s pages and one of his guests, were determined to fight; they quickly rushed into one of the adjoining rooms in order to arm themselves. As the five of them hurried to strap on their breastplates, Pizarro shouted to another guest, Francisco de Chávez, to shut the door to the dining room, in order to prevent the entry of the mob. Chávez, however, apparently hoping to change the minds of the conspirators, walked through the door and left it open behind him. Only two years earlier, Chávez had led a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against rebellious natives in the Callejón de Huaylas, a campaign in which he had allegedly slaughtered some six hundred native children. Now, in deciding to try to speak with the assassins, Chávez had made a fatal error. His last words were reported as being “Don’t kill your friends!” before, according to Pedro Pizarro, “they killed him half way up the steps, stabbing him many times with their swords.” Chávez’s crumpled body soon lay sprawled on the governor’s stairs, soaked with blood.

The
Almagristas
had by now reached the dining hall, where they quickly began searching for Pizarro, brandishing their swords and shouting, “Where is the tyrant? Where is he?” Still in the adjoining room, Pizarro was unable to finish fastening on his breastplates and thus was forced to leave them half buckled. He quickly seized a large sword, then turned to face his attackers, along with his two pages, his brother,
and the only guest from among the twenty who had chosen not to flee, Gómez de Luna.

A fierce battle now ensued, constrained by the narrow doorway, with fifteen to twenty
Almagristas
on one side and Pizarro and his four companions on the other. Two of the
Almagristas
fell, run through with swords, and now lay clutching at wounds that spurted blood onto the floor. Their fellow conspirators, meanwhile, found themselves unable to breach the doorway, protected as it was by the defenders’ five swords. Frustrated by their inability to reach Pizarro, the
Almagristas
now resorted to a desperate measure, shoving one of their own attackers through the doorway as a kind of shield, while the rest pushed forward behind him. Pizarro impaled the man, but in so doing he tied up his sword at precisely the moment that the
Almagristas
pushed their way into the room on either side. As the sharp, slicing twang of sword upon sword filled the air along with the sounds of men’s shouts and the scuffling of boots, the attackers finally succeeded in impaling Francisco Martín, Pizarro’s brother. Mortally wounded, he now fell to the ground. Pizarro’s other three companions soon followed suit, staggered by sword thrusts until, one by one, they crumpled to the floor.

Pizarro now found himself surrounded by a circle of stabbing daggers and swords, receiving wound after wound until he, too, fell heavily to the floor. On his back now and bleeding severely, the governor is said to have used a finger from each hand to make the sign of the cross over his lips, then to have gasped the word “confession,” meaning that he wanted time to confess his sins to God. One of the attackers, Juan Rodríguez Barragán, however, is said to have picked up a large vase full of water, to have lifted it high over Pizarro’s head, and then to have shouted “You can go to Hell … to make your confession!” before bringing the vase down and crushing Pizarro’s head. There on the floor, amid a pool of blood and water—in the city he had founded and in the country he had conquered—the sixty-three-year-old conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, expired.

News of Pizarro’s death, and of subsequent political events—the arrival in Peru of a representative of the crown, Vaca de Castro; the representative’s defeat of Diego de Almagro the Younger’s forces at the Battle of Chupas; and the general chaos that descended upon Peru after the deaths of both Almagro and Pizarro—gradually made its way down to Manco
Inca in his rebel redoubt of Vilcabamba. Manco had followed the Spaniards’ shifting fortunes closely, ever hopeful that his enemies might eventually massacre one another and save himself the trouble. At the Battle of Chupas, in 1542, in fact, a number of Manco’s followers had watched as at least twelve hundred Spaniards had done their best to slaughter one another in an effort to determine who would ultimately rule Peru. Once again, however, the followers of Almagro were defeated: more than two hundred died during the fighting and many more were hanged afterward. In the battle’s aftermath, as the king’s representative hanged the rebel
Almagrista
leaders, chronicler Cieza de León observed that “The ditch beneath the gallows was full of dead bodies…. [This gave] considerable pleasure to the natives, although they were amazed when they realized that many of … [those killed] had been captains and men holding posts of honor. They took news of all this to their king, Manco Inca.”