The Last Days of the Incas (56 page)

If Ortiz’s previous journey to Vilcabamba had been a miserable one, his present march was inconceivably worse. It was the rainy season again, thus the exhausted and wounded friar tried to stumble as best he could along the slippery trail on bleeding feet, repeatedly falling to his knees and exclaiming “Oh God!,” or wading through water as he was pulled forward by the rope fastened through his skin. For two days the natives dragged the man who they were certain had killed their emperor over the rugged trail, stopping only at night to rest. If ever there were an instance of a Christian being tortured for the sins of others—in this case for the sins of every conquistador who had ever harmed a native in Tawantinsuyu—then this was certainly it. Finally, however, on the third day, in the village of Marcanay, just a few miles from the capital city, the procession stopped; the natives now sent messengers ahead to confer with Tupac Amaru, in order to determine the fate of their prisoner.

Tupac Amaru—whose name means “Royal Serpent”—was at the time around twenty-seven years old. He was both very conservative and religious. He had never agreed with his older brother Titu’s policy, for example, of allowing foreign missionaries to enter their kingdom. When informed that the Spaniard who had killed his brother had been brought to nearby Marcanay, Tupac Amaru refused to see him, essentially sealing the friar’s fate. The messengers now returned to the village where Ortiz was still enduring attacks from the crowd. Once Tupac Amaru’s message had been received, a warrior stepped up and finally put the unlucky friar out of his misery with an Inca axe. As Ortiz’s body lay twitching on the ground, it was no doubt clear to all those assembled that neither the teaching of Christianity nor the presence of Spaniards would ever again be allowed into the Kingdom of Vilcabamba.

One hundred miles away and roughly seven thousand feet higher in elevation, the Spaniards in Cuzco were unaware of the recent changes that had occurred in the nearby rebel kingdom—that Titu Cusi had died, that a Spanish friar had been killed, or that another son of Manco Inca had just become emperor. A new Spanish viceroy, Francisco
de Toledo, had arrived in Cuzco some three months earlier, after having already spent roughly a year and a half in Peru. At fifty-six years of age, Toledo was a firm, no-nonsense disciplinarian, a man the king had entrusted to reorganize the affairs of his distant colony and to settle the problem of the rebellious natives in Peru.

For the previous half century, Spanish ecclesiastics and philosophers had debated one another over what rights, if any, the natives in the New World should enjoy. Some had argued that Spain had no right to despoil native rulers of their kingdoms and empires and to conquer the inhabitants of the New World. A few had even argued that Spain should
return
the empires they had already conquered to their original rulers or to their heirs. Others felt that the inhabitants of the New World, being pagan, were both morally and intellectually inferior to Europeans and that, like wayward children, they needed to be ruled by Christians. The latter could then not only bestow upon them the word of God, but also the refinements of European civilization.

Viceroy Toledo belonged firmly to this last group. The natives of Peru were inferior peoples, he believed; their destiny was thus to be ruled by a superior civilization—that of the Spaniards—who were entitled by God to organize and dictate the natives’ activities for the benefit of all concerned. The inhabitants of Peru should therefore be converted to Christianity, the one true faith, and without question should be forced to give up their idolatrous religious beliefs. Just as important, Toledo felt, was the necessity of neutralizing the influence and power of the natives’ previous masters, the Incas, who continued to rule a small kingdom and who still influenced, both morally and spiritually, many of the natives now under Spanish rule. The Incas’ independent Kingdom of Vilcabamba, Toledo had concluded, remained a pernicious influence that had caused untold problems in the past. If left unchallenged, it would surely cause many more in the future.

In order to understand the natives’ previous rulers better—and thus his enemies—Toledo had begun a series of investigations into the oral history of the Incas soon after his arrival in Peru. Toledo did so by systematically interviewing older natives and the
quipucamayocs
—the native specialists who could still read the Inca
quipus
, the knotted string records. Discovering that the Incas had conquered their vast empire only relatively recently, Toledo concluded that the Inca elite had no more right to rule the various ethnic groups of Peru than did the Spaniards, who had
thus been justified in defeating the Incas by force of arms. The only solution to the current “Inca problem,” Toledo finally concluded, was to eliminate or neutralize the Incas’ remaining monarch—whom the Spaniards still believed to be Titu Cusi.

Such was the state of affairs in July 1571, just a few months after the death of Titu Cusi, when Viceroy Toledo sent an official envoy to Vilcabamba. The envoy soon arrived at the banks of the Apurímac River with a group of native chiefs, then sent four of the chiefs across the river to arrange for permission to enter the kingdom. Although the chiefs dutifully crossed over, all four mysteriously disappeared. Three weeks later, the envoy made a second attempt, this time sending two natives ahead. Only one of the two returned, however, wounded and bleeding, and reported that they had been attacked.

To the Spaniards in Cuzco, a strange and unusual silence seemed to have descended upon the Kingdom of Vilcabamba; messages no longer arrived from the Inca emperor nor were any envoys allowed to enter. An impatient Toledo finally sent a second envoy, his close friend, Atilano de Anaya, this time with a letter that the viceroy had written directly to Titu Cusi:

Toledo simultaneously sent a letter to King Philip, sounding out the monarch on how he felt about the possibility of launching an unprovoked war on the last independent remnant of the Inca Empire.

As the viceroy’s letter made its way slowly to Spain, the envoy Anaya arrived at the banks of the Urubamba River, at the hanging bridge of Chuquichaca, where Gonzalo Pizarro had once battled Manco’s defenders. Spotting native warriors on the other side, Anaya shouted for permission to come across. The warriors replied that the Spaniard could proceed. But once he arrived on the other side of the river, they killed him. The Incas had apparently feared that the envoy might learn of Titu Cusi’s death and that the Spaniards would thus learn of their kingdom’s weakened condition.

For Viceroy Toledo, Anaya’s murder was the proverbial final straw. Not wishing to wait another eight months for a reply from the king, Toledo soon began making preparations to invade the Incas’ kingdom and to seize or kill Titu Cusi, intending this time to succeed where two previous Spanish expeditions had failed. By May of 1572, Toledo had assembled a formidable army composed of two forces: the first, consisting of 250 armored Spaniards and some two thousand native auxiliaries, Toledo ordered to enter Vilcabamba via the Chuquichaca bridge and fight its way to the capital. The second force, which was comprised of some seventy Spaniards, he ordered to invade Vilcabamba from the opposite direction, across the Apurímac River, in a sort of pincer movement. Toledo was determined that this time the Inca emperor would have no chance to escape.

Sometime in early June, the main expeditionary force under the command of General Martín Hurtado de Arbieto crossed the Chuquichaca bridge and began heading up into the Vilcabamba Valley. Three elderly conquistadors, now in their sixties, who had fought alongside Francisco Pizarro, accompanied them as guides: Alonso de Mesa, Hernando Solano, and Mansio Serra de Leguizamón. The rest of the participants were of a younger generation, many of them owners of
encomiendas
that had been handed down to them by their conquistador fathers. All, however, had a mutual interest in extinguishing the Incas’ final remaining stronghold.

Despite a valiant native resistance, the outcome of the campaign was a foregone conclusion. The invading army was well equipped, well armed, and determined; it also had the advantage of plentiful cannons, horses, harquebuses, and swords. While the emperor Tupac Amaru’s forces dutifully gave battle, ambushing the Spaniards on
the treacherous trails and often delaying their progress, once again the natives found that their wooden maces and clubs and even their bows and arrows were no match for the Spaniards’ horses and steel weapons. The only real question for the invaders was: would the Inca emperor escape and, in so doing, live to fight another day?

The Spaniards quickly captured Vitcos, the city that Diego Orgóñez had pillaged and where Manco Inca had almost been captured. They then crossed over the Colpacasa Pass before beginning to head down alongside the Pampaconas River, giving battle to Inca defenders along the way. Finally, on Tuesday, June 24, 1572, just outside the capital of Vilcabamba,

The Spaniards found that the hidden capital Gonzalo Pizarro had sacked thirty-three years earlier now lay desolate, smoldering, and empty. In a report the Spanish general later submitted to Viceroy Toledo, Arbieto stated that he and his men “found [Vilcabamba] abandoned [with] around four hundred intact houses and their shrines and idolatries were here just as they had been before this city was captured. We found the houses of the Inca [emperors] burned … and all the … Indians, warriors as well as peasants, had fled to wherever they could.” The chronicler Murúa marveled at how, when the Spaniards arrived,

By now the Spaniards had learned that Titu Cusi was dead, and that a new emperor, Tupac Amaru, had been crowned. But neither the new emperor nor his attendants, nor the temple priests, nor the priestesses, nor anyone else who had inhabited the city could be found. Stone fountains spurted water and streams gurgled nearby as brown and green lizards scrambled across the cut stones of the Incas’ deserted palaces. As the Spaniards searched the smoldering city, they also noticed that not all the gabled houses were covered in traditional thatch; instead, a few had rooftops of tile, in imitation of the roofs in Cuzco, which in turn were in imitation of those in Spain. Despite the Incas’ sacking of their own capital, Murúa described some of what the Incas had left behind:

General Arbieto sent out a number of small, mobile forces in different directions, hoping to capture the Inca leaders and especially their new emperor, Tupac Amaru, who was rumored to be fleeing with his pregnant wife. One unit was formed under the command of a young, ambitious captain, Martín García de Loyola, a man eager to prove himself and who picked a select company of forty men. In a petition he later submitted to the king, García de Loyola made clear what had motivated him and many of the other Spaniards to join Arbieto’s expedition: