The Inca Princesses E-Book

Stuart Stirling

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 384

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

Stuart Stirling tells the history of the Inca princesses and of their conquistador lovers and descendants. The detailed human stories of the princesses bring to life the world of the Incas and their conquerors and shed new light on the darker corners of colonial history.

Leseprobe

First published in 2003 by Sutton Publishing

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © Stuart Stirling, 2003, 2013

The right of Stuart Stirling to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9493 7

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Map of Peru

One

The Galleons of Seville

Two

The Kingdom of the Snow Mountains

Three

The Marquis of Las Charcas

Four

The Nephews of Doña Inés

Five

The Child Empress

Six

The River of the Holy Ghost

Seven

The Old Soldier

Eight

The Haunting

Nine

The Requiem

Ten

The Blind Man of La Mota

Eleven

The Emperor’s Daughter

Twelve

The Mestizo Prince

Thirteen

The Bride of Santa Clara

Fourteen

The Lost Treasure

Fifteen

The Sacristan of Córdoba

Sixteen

The Last of the Conquistadores

Seventeen

The Torture of Doña Catalina

Eighteen

The Bishop’s Legacy

Nineteen

The Imperial City

Twenty

The Prisoner of Cusco

Twenty-one

The Last Inca

Chronology

Genealogy:

Children of the Emperor Huayna Cápac

Concubines

Glossary and Place Names

Notes

Bibliography

For my parents, and to the memory of my uncle Alfredo Peláez Díez de Medina and Fernando Díez de Medina

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peter Clifford of Sutton for encouraging me to write this book, and Christopher Feeney, my commissioning editor, for his steadfast support. I am grateful to Doña Magdalena Canellas Anoz, Director of the Archivo General de Indias at Seville, for her constant assistance, and the directors of the Archivo General de la Nación at Lima, and the Archivo Regional at Cusco. I would also wish to thank the following museums and collections: the Archivo General de Indias, Seville; the Museo Inka, the Museo de Arte Religioso, the Church of La Compañía, Cusco; the Museo Pedro de Osma, Lima; the Museo Casa de la Moneda, the Church of San Francisco, Potosí; the Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz; and the librarians at the British Library, the Institute of Historical Research and Canning House.

Preface

On the morning of 22 October 1822 an elderly Augustinian friar was seen accompanying an Andean Indian, not much older than himself, along the gangway of the British barque Retrieve, and stepping onto the landing quay at Buenos Aires. The two men soon lost themselves in the crowd of passengers who had made the seventy-day sailing journey from the Spanish port of Cádiz to the Argentine capital. No one, not even the ship’s captain, an Englishman called Hague, knew who they were, nor what fate had befallen the old Indian, now dressed in the peasant clothes of a Spanish labourer, his frail figure wrapped in a black threadbare cloak. Some of his fellow passengers had thought him an oddity, while others imagined him to be a freed slave or possibly the servant of his companion.

Five years later, on 5 September 1827, an obituary notice appeared in the Argentine newspaper Crónica Política y Literatura de Buenos Aires, stating: ‘Don Juan Bautista Túpac Amaru, fifth lineal grandson of the Incas of Peru, died in this city of Buenos Aires on the second of this month, at the age of eighty, having suffered forty years of imprisonment in Spain.’1 The old Indian was the last Inca of Peru, but the empire of his ancestors was by then little more than a distant memory.

From the Inca princesses of Cusco, who were the mistresses of the conquistadores, to their eighteenth-century descendants, some of whom played a part in the winning of South America’s independence, are to be found the seeds of this book and its depiction of the Andes in colonial times. Its writing owes a debt both to the Peruvian scholar Ella Dunbar Temple, who carried out research into the Inca dynasty in the 1940s and to Josefa García Tovar, who transcribed for me innumerable manuscripts of eyewitness accounts of the Conquest and of the Inca royal family from the Archives of the Indies at Seville, some of which are published herein for the first time.

Map of Peru.

ONE

The Galleons of Seville

5 December 1553

At first they thought it a trick of the light, flickering on the distant horizon, until at last they could see the great galleon, its small shadow cast across the open sea, its sails stretched and its worn wooden frame blackened and scarred by a voyage of over a thousand miles. Soon after, a second vessel appeared on the horizon, its bows beating into the wind and its fluttering pennant also bearing the scarlet and gold arms of Castile and León, and within the hour both ships had entered the sound of San Lúcar de Barrameda. All along the estuary of the River Guadalquivir the news of the arrival of the vessels spread, and in the nearby villages and hamlets men stared in wonder or ran to catch a closer glimpse of the returning conquistadores, laden with the treasures and booty they had brought back with them from the New World.

It took almost eight hours for the ships to reach Seville, its cathedral and crenellated walls silhouetted against the fading winter light, its whitewashed convents and mudéjar palaces almost hidden by shadows. All that day its citizens, young and old alike, had awaited the arrival of the galleons, eagerly following their entry into the port as they were rowed upriver, their decks illuminated by lanterns and crowded with the jubilant figures of their passengers. Among them was the thirty-year-old conquistador Cristóbal de Mena, a native of Ciudad Real and the first of the veterans of Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire to return to Spain, bringing with him his share of the Indies treasure of Cajamarca.

It had been over a quarter of a century since Columbus’s discovery of the New World – which he had at first thought to be part of India, for which reason its indigenous people to this day are known as Indians – and three years since Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, had sailed from that very same quay in Seville to return to his newly founded colony in the continent only recently named by a German mapmaker in honour of Seville’s pilot-general, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci. Each of these men, like the returning conquistador, had knelt in the semi-darkness of Seville’s cathedral to thank its Madonna for his safe return, on the site where once the great mosque of the Calif Abu Yusuf had stood.

The city to which Cristóbal de Mena had returned after almost twenty years in the new colony of Nicaragua, in the conquest and exploration of which he had also served, had altered little in appearance: its old square of San Francisco, where on feast days the young hidalgos, astride their Arab mares, fought the finest bulls in Andalusia, and its numerous taverns and brothels, where many a returning veteran of the Indies would take his bars of gold and silver, and listen to the troubadours and gypsies singing the legends of their lost Moorish homeland.

One of the few contemporary accounts of the city was left by the Venetian ambassador Andrea Navagero, a historian and Renaissance poet whose portrait Raphael had painted. He wrote in a letter to his cousin the geographer Gian Battista Ramusio:

You find me in Seville, a city set in a plain on the left bank of the Guadalquivir river; its circumference is some four or five miles, and resembles more an Italian city than a Spanish one; its streets are wide and elegant, though the greater part of its houses are not so fine; even though there are some palaces whose beauty can not be rivalled in all of Spain, and in which there are numerous gardens.

There are also some fine churches, especially the cathedral, which is beautiful and far larger than the cathedral at Toledo, though not so richly decorated; alongside the cathedral is a cloister or patio, joined to it by a wall and which appears to be one single structure; along side of which are various porticoes and chapels, among them the chapel where the body of the saint king lies, and which is said to exude a scent when the coffin is opened for veneration.* The patio is planted with orange trees of great beauty, at the centre of which is a fountain; around the entire building there is a market place, enclosed by chains, whose steps descend into the street; here all day hidalgos, merchants and passers-by assemble, for it is the most lively place in all the city, and known as the ‘Steps’. In the street and adjoining square a great number of people can be found, and where many thefts take place and rogues abound, and which is also a type of market place; the square is both wide and large. Beside the cathedral is a bell tower of much beauty, with fine large bells; to reach its top one climbs up a ramp, and not stairs as at the tower of St Mark’s in Venice, though the climb is comfortable and steady.†

Not very far from the cathedral is the Alcázar, which is the palace that once belonged to the Moorish kings and very beautiful, its masonry richly decorated in the style of the Moors, and with magnificent marble and fountains, the waters of which pass through various chambers and bath houses. It has a patio filled with orange and lemon trees, and gardens of the greatest beauty, among which there is a wood of only orange trees, where not even the sun can penetrate, and which is possibly the most beautiful sight in all Spain.1

The city was the seat of some of Spain’s wealthiest families, many of them Jewish converts who had invested in Columbus’s expeditions and who held most of the trading concessions to the New World. Among the city’s nobility, which had also involved itself in the Indies’ trade, was Seville’s leading grandee, the Duke of Medina Sidonia. The duke was a recluse, whose every movement was subject to his wife’s control, and Ambassador Navagero recorded of him somewhat ungenerously, ‘It was necessary to teach him what to say when ever he met someone; once when a bishop visited him, he asked after his wife and children.’2 His son and heir would one day be the commander of the ill-fated Spanish Armada.

Though the official purpose of Navagero’s visit to Seville in 1526 had been to attend the marriage of the young Emperor Charles V and the Portuguese Infanta, he had been instructed by the Venetian Senate to report on Spain’s commerce with its newly established colonial empire, principally with regard to the Sevillian trade. In the two years of his embassy he collected every available manuscript and chronicle connected with the exploration and conquest of the New World, copies of which he also sent to his cousin Ramusio, himself a former ambassador to the French court and at that time secretary to the Venetian Senate. Many of these manuscripts he obtained from the Italian priest Pietro Martire d’Anghera, a keen historian who lived in Toledo and who had at one time served as Queen Isabella of Castile’s envoy to the Sultan of Egypt. They would eventually form part of his cousin Ramusio’s monumental publication Navigationi e Viaggi, an account of the discovery of the New World which to this day serves as a primary source for the history of the Americas.

In his letter to his cousin Navagero also noted the increasing migration of Seville’s men to the Americas and Caribbean islands:

So many men abandon the city to seek their fortune in the New World that it is virtually in the possession of its women . . . all the wine and wheat that is grown here is sent to the Indies, as is soap, shirts, stockings and other such items, and which as yet are not manufactured there, and for which a great profit is made. The Casa de la Contratación de las Indias is also situated in the city, and to which are brought all the goods and produce of those lands, for no shipping is allowed to unload in any other port; on the arrival of each fleet a great quantity of gold is brought to the Contratación each year; a fifth of which is marked for the king. Some merchants say that for some time less gold is brought, but the expeditions continue and all year ships come and go there. I saw many items from the Indies in Seville and was given and eat some roots called batatas, potatoes, which have a taste of chestnuts. . . .3

Founded in 1503 as the legal and administrative authority for all trade and shipping to the Spanish colonies, the Casa de la Contratación was also the city’s school for mariners and pilots, among them cartographers and astronomers, ship builders and sea captains, some of whom had already received some training at the Portuguese naval academy at Lisbon, established by King Henry the Navigator. Mapmakers, adventurers and travellers of every persuasion had over the years made their way into the tiled and mosaic-floored chambers and gardens, created by the eleventh-century Almoravid Muslim dynasty behind the palace of the Alcázar, each bringing their proposals and diagrams for expeditions they had spent years in planning. One such proposal had been sent by the Nicaraguan conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who in 1513 discovered the Pacific Ocean. Even the preparations and maps produced for Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the world in the years 1519–22, had been submitted to its authority.

It was probably while he was waiting for the officials of the Contratación to release his share of the booty he had brought back with him from Peru that the conquistador Cristóbal de Mena, one of Francisco Pizarro’s captains of horse, finished writing his chronicle of the conquest of the Inca Empire. Just four months after his return the printing house of Bartolomé Pérez published the work in Seville.

In simple prose Mena recalled the early days of his adventures. He had first joined the expedition at the Pacific port of Panama, from where he sailed in Pizarro’s small armada of caravels, comprising 150 Spaniards, a number of African and isthmian slaves and 50 horses. At some length he described the landing on the Ecuadorian coast of South America and the year they had spent waiting for reinforcements. The foot-soldier Diego de Trujillo, who had served under Mena, recorded in his own memoir the stifling heat and the lack of food and fresh water, remarking that they had been forced to kill and eat the island’s wild dogs in order to survive and that before the winter rains ‘the sun had turned the soil into broken and withered dust’.4 His words reflect the sorry state of the Spanish encampment: many of the men were confined to their tents and hammocks because of an outbreak of skin sores which caused them excruciating pain and bleeding, made worse by the incessant number of mosquitoes, lice and other vermin that plagued them day and night. Some forty years later Pizarro’s sixteen-year-old kinsman from Toledo, Pedro Pizarro, wrote that when the slaver Hernando de Soto’s reinforcements finally joined them from Nicaragua, the new arrivals had shown ‘little joy, for they found [us] in an anguished state . . . and most of the men sickly, and no gold for them to see . . .’.5

Dressed in the extravagant and exotic manner of the Nicaraguan slaver, Soto, then aged thirty-four, cut a dashing figure amid the mainly barefooted and bedraggled men who had waded out to greet him: his ear-lobes were adorned with pearls, his coat armour decorated with gold and Indian amulets and his helmet embellished with the plumage of tropical birds. ‘He was’, recorded the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘one of the finest lances in the Indies.’6 Soto was to command the expedition’s cavalry.

The disembarkation of Soto’s reinforcements took several hours to complete, the horses and their African handlers swimming alongside the Indian rafts laden with provisions, while a long line of men and isthmian camp women waded to the shore. Among the latter was Soto’s Moorish slave Juana Hernández, reputedly the first Spanish woman to set foot on the continent of South America.7 It rained for most of the day, the rain beating across the animal-hide tents, whose exhausted occupants slumbered peacefully, already oblivious to the endless sound of the rain and the stifling heat. As night approached, a group of Soto’s African slaves, fettered by leg irons, huddled around the perimeter of the stockade and watched in silence the smouldering camp fires. A human barrier of sweating bodies, their task was to guard their master’s prized Andalusian mares, moving restlessly from side to side of their enclosure, trying to escape the approaching storm.

Few of the 228 conquistadores on the equatorial island of Puna had any experience of soldiering, let alone of Indian fighting. Armed with home-made pikes and shields fashioned from the wooden staves of discarded isthmian wine casks, the majority of them comprised a motley collection of diehard adventurers, more accustomed to labouring in the farmlands of their homeland or eking out a living in the crowded slave markets of Panama. Most of them, as their testimonials and wills prove, were Andalusians or Castilians. Of the 168 men who would march to Cajamarca only 36 were from Estremadura and only 58 of them could read and write.8

For a further four months, until the end of the winter rains, Pizarro’s small army was forced to remain on the island, encountering sporadic hostility from the native Indians. In the first week of April the entire contingent of men finally crossed to the mainland aboard Soto’s two caravels and Pizarro’s remaining ship, accompanied by a small flotilla of canoes and rafts. Three men were killed by the Indians during the initial stages of the crossing; their naked bodies, skewered and hacked to pieces, were left on the shore for their companions to see, as their scalps fell prey to the small colony of sea crabs. They arrived at the coastal township of Túmbez, where Pizarro in his last voyage had left two of his men, Morillo and Bocanegra, but the town was deserted and bore no evidence of their presence. The ruins of the mud-and-thatch buildings sheltered hundreds of unburied corpses, riddled with flies, and everywhere they encountered the smell of death and human misery. It was a pitiful sight – and the first evidence they would find of the civil war then being waged by the Inca lords of the empire they had come to conquer.

Nothing, it seemed, could raise the men’s spirits, not even the arrival of a provision ship from Nicaragua bringing a further twenty volunteers. The Greek Pedro de Candia, who had accompanied Pizarro in his last voyage and had so openly boasted of the settlement’s great riches, now became the butt of ridicule. Not even Pizarro’s purported discovery of a note written by the unfortunate Gines, claiming that more gold and silver could be found in the land than all the iron of Vizcaya,* lessened the hostility and ill-feeling among the conquistadores, many of whom, principally the Nicaraguan contingent, felt justifiably deceived by the lack of any evidence of gold and by the desolation that surrounded them.

Shortly before leaving the settlement Pizarro ordered the executions of thirteen caciques who had been captured in the vicinity of Túmbez and who had refused to assist him in transporting his men on to the mainland. They were to be garrotted and then burnt before the entire encampment in reprisal for the deaths of two of his conquistadores. It was as much a demonstration to his own men as to the Indians.

Few doubted Pizarro’s resolve. Fear soon diminished the rumours of rebellion, and once more the small contingent of men struck out into the endless swamp and equatorial forest, their leather and steel-coated armour soaked with their sweat, their bearded faces burnt by the sun, as they marched alongside the columns of African and isthmian slaves – men and women alike – carrying on their heads the provisions and tents, their chains beating against the mud and undergrowth as they struggled forward under their heavy burdens. A number of men and horses fell prey in the mangroves to the caymans, their bodies dragged down into the depths of the waterpools, their passing marked only by traces of blood in the water. Each day the conquistadores’ difficulties mounted as they searched desperately for food and fresh water, and the fevers and dysentery from which most of the men suffered gripped ever harder.

It took them almost two months to reach the southern coastal lands of Tangarara, a distance of almost 100 miles. On 15 July 1532 Pizarro founded there the settlement of San Miguel. Abandoning the original encampment because of its oppressive climate, he soon moved his settlement further inland, to the banks of the River Piura. Among the fifty Spaniards who were to remain there were Soto’s Moorish slave Juana, whose freedom he had granted, and the future chronicler Pedro Pizarro.

Two months later Pizarro led a column of men out of the settlement, among them Mena, who commanded a squadron of cavalry. In total, the force numbered 62 horse and 106 foot-soldiers, together with a number of African and isthmian slaves. Their march took them across some 70 miles of treeless desert until they reached the village of Serrán. Here Pizarro again heard reports from the local tribesmen that much of the northern coastal region had surrendered to the army of one of the warring Inca princes, Atahualpa, who had declared himself sovereign of the empire. In order to clarify the situation Pizarro ordered Soto and a squadron of horse to ride inland to the township of Cajas. After riding for two days and a night, stopping only for food and to rest their horses, de Soto’s forty horsemen finally reached the township, where they made contact with its cacique and one of the Inca warrior chiefs, who had some two thousand men under his command.

Mena and Diego de Trujillo, who both accompanied Soto’s squadron, recorded the events that followed:

[The township] was greatly destroyed because of the war . . . and many Indians could be seen hung [from the buildings] . . . the Captain [Soto] sent for the cacique of the township and soon he came, complaining bitterly about Atahualpa, and how his warriors had killed so many of his people, some ten or twelve thousand, and that no more than three thousand were left . . . and he said he had no gold, for Atahualpa’s warriors had taken it all . . . even though he gave four or five bars of mined gold. It was then one of Atahualpa’s lords came: and the cacique was greatly frightened, and he stood up in his presence, but the Captain made him sit beside him. This lord had brought us a present from Atahualpa of stuffed ducks: and which made us imagine a similar fate; he also brought us two small fortresses made of clay, saying that there were many such as them in his land. There were three houses of women, called mamacunas, virgins of the sun. And as we entered their houses and took the women into the square, some five hundred of them, the Captain gave many of them to us Spaniards, something which greatly infuriated the Inca lord, who said: ‘How dare you do this? With Atahualpa only twenty leagues from here? Not one of you will be left alive. . . .’9

No single eyewitness describes the mass rape of the mamacuna by Soto’s men, recording only that Soto ordered his harquebusiers to fire into the air, causing the trembling women to fall to their knees from fear of being killed.

Cajas offered the Spaniards the first real indication of the grandeur of the empire they had come to conquer: its streets and buildings, though gutted and burnt, were built of stone and laid out in an orderly and geometric manner, with the large square and temple forming a central point. The rich dress and evident authority of the Inca lord were a far cry from the primitive clothing of the caciques of the coastal region, whose villages were constructed in wood and mud.

Having inspected the neighbouring village of Huancabamba, which also possessed some fine stone buildings, Soto led his men back to Serrán, taking with him the Inca lord and the women. The booty from Cajas and the rich clothing they had also found, woven with gold thread and plumes, prompted Soto’s horseman Gavilán to note that ‘great merriment was had by all, for the Adelantado [Soto] declared he had discovered a land as rich as Castile!’10 After meeting Pizarro, who presented him with a lace shirt and some Venetian glass, the Inca lord left the camp, taking Pizarro’s message of friendship to his master Atahualpa. He left behind a number of guides to lead the Spanish to Atahualpa’s encampment in the valley of Cajamarca.

In early October the conquistadores broke camp and began their march into the Andes, the foothills of which they reached in the first week of November. Mena recorded their journey:

We were only to find the roads destroyed, also their villages, whose caciques had fled . . . and as we approached the mountains Hernando Pizarro and Hernando de Soto went on ahead with some men, swimming across a great river [the Saña], for we had been told that in a village beyond we would find much treasure . . . before we reached the village we captured two Indians in order to get information about Atahualpa: the Captain [Soto] ordered them tied to two poles, for they were scared and would not speak; one of them said he knew nothing of Atahualpa, and the other said he had only left his encampment a few days before, and that he was waiting with many of his people for us in the valley of Cajamarca. He also told us that many warriors were guarding two passes in the mountains ahead, and that for their banner they now used the shirt the Governor [Pizarro] had sent Atahualpa: but neither by the torch nor any other inducement did they tell us more.11

In small groups, and at times reduced to single file, they began their ascent of the great cordillera, climbing to an altitude of some 13,000 feet above sea level, almost to the very tops of the mountains. Here, for the first time they gazed in wonder at the huge condors that hovered above them, drifting in the changing air currents above the snow-capped peaks. Exhausted by the thinness of the air, some of the men doubtless resorted to chewing the coca leaves their guides carried with them to counter their dizziness and lack of oxygen.* Mile after mile they hauled their frightened horses and mules along the stone trails of the Inca highway; chiselled out of the bare mountainside, at times these trails were no wider than a few feet. Climbing even higher, they crossed the cordillera’s great canyons on the few reed bridges that had survived the Indian fighting. These flimsy structures seemed barely able to take a man’s weight, let alone a horse. They inched forward, some of the men crawling on hands and knees, as the bridges swayed thousands of feet above the rivers and ravines far below, and only the occasional scream of a man falling to his death pierced the silence. The seemingly endless march exacerbated their sense of abandonment, but they tried to lift their spirits by praying, led by the black-and-white-robed Dominican friar Valverde, their voices resounding across the giant snow-clad mountains that seemed to engulf them at every turn. Even the most hardened of the isthmian veterans had never witnessed such human misery, their frostbitten hands and feet numbed by the bitter cold of the Andean nights, but after almost a week they finally reached the great valley of Cajamarca, its green and lush pastures enclosed by the cordillera. Here the Inca Emperor Atahualpa awaited them, his tents spread across a distance of almost 2 miles.

For several hours Atahualpa had awaited their arrival, staring across the valley towards the northern hills and the blackened winter sky. The first indication of their coming was a noise that sounded like the recurring beat of rain, but his scouts told him this was the sound of horses; soon he could see their plume-helmeted riders moving along in a cloud of dust, their lances sloped across their shoulders. Marching behind them at some distance was the tall black-bearded figure of Pizarro at the head of his foot-soldiers; he was accompanied by the friar Valverde, the large wooden cross he had brought with him from Panama strapped to his mule.

The following is an account of the events that took place that day, recorded by Mena and by the foot-soldier Diego de Trujillo:

It was six o’clock in the evening and it began to rain, and huge hailstones were falling, forcing the men to shelter in the buildings . . . then the Governor [Pizarro] entered with the infantry, all of whom were much frightened . . . for we could now count on no other rescue other than from God . . . the Captain Hernando de Soto asked the Governor for permission to go with five or six horsemen and an Indian to speak with Atahualpa . . . and against his better judgement the Governor agreed to his going. All the area near the encampment was guarded by squadrons of warriors with lances and archers . . . the Spaniards rode through their ranks without any hindrance until they reached the Cacique: seated as he was in front of the door of his lodging, and with many of his women . . . and then Hernando de Soto rode right up to him, and so close to him that his horse’s nose touched his headdress: and not once did the Cacique make a movement. The Captain de Soto then took off a ring from his finger and gave it to him, as a sign of peace and friendship, and which he took with little mark of esteem. . . .

And as he did not return and suspecting that he may have been killed, the Governor ordered [his brother] Hernando Pizarro to take with him horsemen and foot-soldiers, and I [Trujillo] among them, to discover what had taken place. When we reached his camp we found the Captain de Soto with the men he had taken, and Hernando Pizarro said to him, ‘My lord, what is happening?’ And he replied: ‘As you can see, we are still waiting’, and then said: ‘Soon Atahualpa will come out’ – who was still in his lodging – ‘but until now he has not.’ Hernando Pizarro shouted at the interpreter: ‘Tell him to come out!’ The man returned and said: ‘Wait, he will see you shortly.’ And Hernando Pizarro said to him: ‘Tell the dog to come out immediately!’ . . . and then Atahualpa came out of his lodging, holding two small gold cups in his hands that were filled with chicha [maize wine], and gave one to Hernando Pizarro and the other he drank.

And Hernando Pizarro said to the interpreter: ‘Tell Atahualpa that there is no difference in rank between myself and the Captain Soto, for we are both captains of the King, and in his service we have left our homelands to come and instruct him in the Faith.’ And then it was agreed Atahualpa would come the following day, which was a Saturday, to Cajamarca. Guarding his camp were more than forty thousand Indian warriors in their squadrons, and many principal lords of the land. And on departing Hernando de Soto reared the legs of his horse, near to where were positioned the first of these squadrons, and the Indians of the squadrons fled, falling over each other. And when we returned to Cajamarca Atahualpa ordered three hundred of them killed because they had shown fear and fled, and this we discovered another day when we found their bodies. . . .

The following day Atahualpa came with all his people in procession to Cajamarca, and the league they travelled took them until almost an hour before sunset . . . it was as if the entire valley was in movement . . . six hundred Indians in white and black livery, as if pieces of a chessboard, came ahead of him, sweeping the road of stones and branches . . . wearing headdresses of gold and silver . . . and the Governor, seeing they were taking such a great time, sent Hernando de Aldana, who spoke their language, to ask him to come before it was too dark. And Aldana spoke to him, and only then did they begin to move at a walking pace . . . in Cajamarca there are ten streets that lead from the square, and in each of these the Governor placed eight men, and in some, fewer number, because of the few men we had, and the horsemen he positioned in three companies: one with Hernando Pizarro, one with Hernando de Soto with his own men, and one with Sebastián de Belalcázar with his, and all with bells attached to their bridles, and the Governor positioned himself in the fortress with twenty-four of his guards; for in all we were a hundred and sixty: sixty horsemen and a hundred on foot.

As Atahualpa entered the square of Cajamarca, and as he saw no Christians he asked the Inca lord who had been with us: ‘What has become of these bearded ones?’ And the Inca lord replied: ‘They are hidden.’ And he asked him to climb down from his throne litter on which he sat, but he refused. And then the Friar Vicente de Valverde made himself seen and attempted to inform him of the reason why we had come on the orders of the Pope and one of his sons, a Christian leader who was the Emperor, our lord. And speaking of his words of the Holy Gospel Atahualpa said to him: ‘Whose words are these?’ And he replied: ‘The words of God.’ And Atahualpa said to him: ‘How is this possible?’ And the friar Vicente told him: ‘See, here it is written.’ And he showed him a breviary which he opened, and Atahualpa demanded to be given it and took it, and after looking at it he threw it on the ground and ordered: ‘Let none of them escape!’ And the Indians gave a great cry, shouting: ‘Inca, let it be so!’ And the shouting made us very frightened. And the friar Vicente returned and climbed to the wall where the Governor was and said to him: ‘Your Excellency, what will you do? Atahualpa is like Lucifer!’

And then the Governor climbed down and armed himself with a shield and sword and put on his helmet, and with the twenty-four men who were with him, and I [Trujillo] among them, we went directly to Atahualpa’s litter, pushing our way through the crowd of Indians, and as we tried to pull him off his litter the horsemen charged to the great sound that was made from their bridle bells, and there in the square fell so many people, one on top of the other, that many were suffocated, and of the eight thousand Indians who died, over half died in this manner. The killing of those who fled continued for half a league and into the night. . . .12

In less than an hour, and without the loss of a single man, Pizarro’s conquistadores changed for ever the course of world history and laid the foundations of South America’s Hispanic heritage. Native accounts recorded by missionaries and Crown officials almost half a century later offered a more damning insight into the massacre. The Indian Sebastián Yacobilca recalled that twenty thousand warriors were killed and claimed that he personally witnessed Pizarro and his brother Hernando ‘and his other brothers, and various Spaniards, who were with them, take from Atahualpa’s encampment to their lodgings in the township all his treasures of gold, silver and jewels, which he kept for his use and for the use of his women and children’.13 The smell of death hung over the township for days, and all that could be heard was the wailing of the Indian women, many of whom had witnessed the dramatic end of the Inca lords. To the last man the escort had held aloft the litter of their emperor; some of them had lost their arms, and used instead the bleeding and mutilated stumps of their shoulders to support him. Others had stood by in silent disbelief, mesmerised by the sight of their living god, naked and chained like an animal, pleading with his captors for his life and promising to fill two chambers with gold and silver in exchange for his freedom. ‘With a white line,’ recalled Trujillo, ‘he marked the height of two men,’ in each chamber.14

Several conquistadores left descriptions of Atahualpa. Pizarro’s notary, the Sevillian Francisco López de Jerez, recorded that he was ‘some thirty years of age . . . somewhat stocky, his face imposing, beautiful and ferocious, his eyes bloodshot’.15 The conquistador Miguel de Estete recalled that during his captivity Atahualpa ‘let it be known what he had planned to do with us, for it had been his intention to take our horses and mares, which was what had impressed him most, for breeding, and to castrate some of us for his service to guard his women, as was their custom, the rest of us he would have sacrificed to the sun’.16

Pedro Pizarro, who later served as one of Atahualpa’s guards, wrote that during his captivity the Inca emperor

was served by his women, who were his sisters; each spending eight or ten days with him, and who were also served by a great number of the other women, daughters of his lords . . . he also had a number of caciques with him, who remained outside in the courtyard: and if any one of them were called by him he entered barefoot and in homage carrying a burden on his back. . . .

On his head he wore a llautu, which are braids of coloured wool, half a finger thick and a finger in width, in the manner of a crown . . . on his forehead he wore a fringe attached to the llautu, made of fine scarlet wool, evenly cut and adorned with small gold strings. His hair, like that of his lords, he wore cut short . . . the clothes he wore were very thin and fine . . . over his head he wore a mantle which partly covered his neck: so as to hide the wound to his ear he had suffered.

One day when he was eating the food his women had brought him, and which they placed on fine green leaves on the floor, seated on a wooden stool, a foot in height, and made of reddish and very pretty wood, he pointed as was his custom at whatever food he wished and it was brought to him by his women, and from whose hand he ate. On one occasion, as he was being fed by his sisters and when he raised some food to his mouth, a particle fell on his clothing, and giving his hand to one of the women to lick clean, he stood up and went into his chamber to put on new clothing, and when he came back he wore a shirt and dark brown mantle. I felt the mantle which was smoother than silk, and I said to him: ‘Inca, of what is this cloth made?’ And he said to me: ‘It is made of birds who fly at night in Puerto Viejo and Túmbez and who bite my people.’ And on my asking him what he kept in his chests, he showed me they contained the clothing he had worn and all the garments that had touched his skin. And I asked him: ‘For what purpose do you have these garments here?’ He answered that it was in order to burn them, for what had been touched by the sons of the Sun must be burnt to ashes, which none was allowed to handle, and scattered to the wind.17

Cajamarca also marks the first recorded mention of the Inca princesses, the sister-wives and royal concubines of the Emperor Atahualpa, numbering possibly several hundred women, who had formed part of his harem at his encampment. Their faces hidden behind masks of beaten gold and their gowns adorned with precious stones, they would have presented a fabulous sight that few of Pizarro’s men could ever have envisaged in the poverty and squalor of their homeland. Pedro Pizarro recorded:

They were carried in litters or in hammocks, which were blankets tied at each end to thick poles, the thickness of one’s arm, and finely designed, and in these the princesses lay, their bodies shaded and hidden by canopies attached to their litters or hammocks. They were attended by a multitude of servants, who treated them with great reverence, and they were of a very fine appearance . . . their robes of a very delicate and soft cloth . . . their hair, which was black, they wore long, over their shoulders . . . almost all of them were very beautiful.18

Several princesses were allowed to remain with Atahualpa during the eight months of his captivity until his execution in the township, among them his half-sister Quispe Sisa, then aged possibly no more than twelve, whom he gave to Pizarro. Another of the princesses was his niece Cuxirimay, formerly his favourite wife; she was later raped by the Indian interpreter Felipillo. Only recently has the identity of several of the other princesses at Cajamarca been made known, principally from the evidence they gave in their petitions to the Spanish Crown; most had become the mistresses of Pizarro’s principal captains and bore them numerous mestizo children.

Four weeks after the conquistador Cristóbal de Mena’s arrival at Seville – and almost a year after the Emperor Atahualpa’s capture at Cajamarca – another of the Indies ships, the small galleon Santa María del Campo, piloted by Pedro Bernal, docked at its quay amid even greater fanfare than that which had greeted the two previous Indies ships; it was carrying the Crown’s initial share of the Cajamarca treasure, which Pizarro’s brother Hernando had brought with him from Peru. It took almost an entire day for the labourers of the Contratación to unload the wooden crates of gold and silver, amounting to some 100,000 gold pesos, and pile them onto the oxen carts waiting to make the short journey to the depository at the back of the palace of the Alcázar.*

Records show that Pizarro had ordered the smelting of the Cajamarca treasure in nine separate forges. Over seven days and seven nights 11 tons of gold and silver artefacts had been fed into the furnaces, yielding some 13,420 lb of 22.5 carat gold in ingots and 26,000 lb in silver. The distribution of the treasure – which included 700 sheets of gold removed from the Inca temple of Coricancha at Cusco – had taken a whole month to complete. A document bearing Pizarro’s mark recorded the full amount of treasure smelted at Cajamarca as 1,326,539 pesos of gold and 51,610 marks of silver.19 Neither of these figures included the gold and silver artefacts and jewels that the conquistadores seized as personal booty, nor Atahualpa’s gold throne which Pizarro appropriated for himself. Years later the conquistador Diego Maldonado, known as el rico, the rich, married a Spanish nobleman’s daughter and gifted her an Inca necklace of emeralds, together with a gold statue of a puma, which he probably looted either at Cajamarca or at the sacking of Cusco four months later.

Each of Pizarro’s horsemen was awarded approximately 8,800 pesos of gold and 362 marks of silver, each of his foot-soldiers 4,440 pesos of gold and 181 marks of silver. His own share of the booty was 57,740 pesos of gold and his principal captains also received a far greater share of the treasure than the other men. Hernando de Soto was awarded 17,740 pesos of gold – the fact that some years later he would bring with him to Seville a personal fortune of 100,000 pesos of gold demonstrates the enormous discrepancy between the official records and the actual amount of booty seized by the conquistadores at Cajamarca and later at Cusco – booty that was never declared to the Crown.

The notary Francisco López de Jerez recorded that a reckless spending spree followed the distribution of the few available goods to be found in their encampment, all paid for with bars of gold and silver: a jug of wine cost 60 pesos of gold; a pair of boots or breeches from 30 to 40 pesos; a cape 125 pesos; a clove of garlic ½ peso; a sword 50 pesos; and a sheet of vellum paper 10 pesos.20 The foot-soldier Melchor Verdugo purchased a horse, two isthmian slaves (one male, one female) and twenty chickens for 2,000 pesos. A horse in poor condition was valued at 94 pesos and one in good condition at 3,000 pesos. Juan Pantiel de Salinas, one of the farriers, is recorded to have spent several days shoeing horses with silver.

For a number of weeks the treasure was left on public display at Seville in the courtyard of the Contratación. Many of the ornaments had been looted from the Inca coastal city of Pachacamac, and the Indian Sebastián Yacobilca recalled: ‘A great quantity of gold and silver vessels, jugs, pitchers, images of the puma and of foxes, of men and women, of maize, frogs and snakes was taken to a great chamber and given to Hernando Pizarro, and which he took to Cajamarca with him, and it was carried by more than ten thousand Indians.’21 Among the items listed was a life-size gold statue of a young man and a huge silver eagle.