The Last Conquistador E-Book

Stuart Stirling

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 442

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999

Beschreibung

The Inca civilization of Peru was one of the gratest of the ancient civilizations of the Americas. Famous for their massive temples and fortresses built from huge blocks of stone and decorated with sheets of pure gold, the Incas also developed a system of government, capable of holding a vast area of territory together, and an extensive system of roads, connecting administrative centres, which acted as a means of colonization. Their religion of human sacrifice, worshipping Inti, the Sun God, was forcibly imposed throughout the empire. The population in 1500 numbered between six and seven million, but in the 1530s the Spanish, led by conquistador Pizarro, arrived in Peru. In their search for gold they devastated the Inca culture, destroying its treasures, killing its leaders and bringing to an end the infrastructure of its empire. By the 1570s, native American control in Peru had been completely lost and the civilization was no more. With Pizarro came Mansio Serra de Leguizamon, who became the last of the Spanish conquistadors to die. This book tells his story. After crossing the Atlantic when still in his teens, he played a central part in the conquest of the Incas, survived imprisonment and torture, took an Inca princess as his lover, abandoned his wife for the gaming tables of Lima, and spent the rest of his life in Peru. He died at the age of 78, leaving a famous apology for the conquest in his will. This book takes this document as its starting point, weaving a tale of the vicious subjugation of the Inca civilization.

Leseprobe

The Last

CONQUISTADOR

MANSIO SERRADELEGUIZAMÓNANDTHECONQUESTOFTHEINCAS

STUART STIRLING

First published in 1999

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Stuart Stirling, 1999, 2013

The right of Stuart Stirling to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, 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.

EPUBISBN 978 0 7509 5284 2

Original typesetting by The History Press

To the memory of María Díez de Medina de Peláez, my grandmother, and Ofelia Díez de Medina, descendants of the conquistador

At the time the Spaniards first entered the city of Cuzco the gold image of the sun from its temple was taken in booty by a nobleman and conquistador by the name of Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, who I knew and who was still alive when I came to Spain, which he lost in a night of gambling, and where, according to the Father Acosta, was born the refrain: He gambled the sun before the dawn.

Garcilaso de la Vega,Comentarios Reales de los Incas

CONTENTS

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Map of Peru

1Heirs of the Cid

2The Realm of the Hummingbird

3The Killing of the Great Turkey Cock

4The City of the Sun God

5The Fall of Tahuantinsuyo

6The Wars of the Viracochas

7The Devil on Muleback

8The Coya of Cuzco

9The House of the Serpents

Appendix 1 Mansio Serra de Leguizamón’s Will, Cuzco, 1589

Appendix 2 Probanza de Méritos, Lima, 1562

Appendix 3 Inca Testimonies, Cuzco, 1561

Genealogies

Glossary and Place Names

Notes

Further Reading

PROLOGUE

On 1 August 1619, a small caravan of horses and mules, accompanying several wagons and escorted by outriders, could be seen making its way across the mountains to the city of Arequipa, its white-washed buildings, monasteries and churches lying at the foot of the snow-capped volcano of the Misti. On that morning, His Grace the Friar Bishop Don Pedro de Perea y Díez de Medina finally entered his see and formally took possession of the newest of all the bishoprics of the Indies of Peru.1 Aged sixty-three and worn down by the years of political intrigue that had robbed him of any one of the great episcopates of Spain, a scholarly and austere figure, his only known work was a treatise supporting the contention of the Immaculate Conception he dedicated to the theologian Agustín Antolínez, Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela. His talents, so greatly admired in his youth, at Rome and at the university of Pavia, appeared almost meaningless among the faces that greeted him in the city’s council chamber: whose distrust and condemnation he would within the years earn by his high handed and authoritarian manner in a dispute with regard to the building of his cathedral church, in which even the King would be forced to intervene.

Arms of the Friar Bishop Pedro de Perea y Díez de Medina, Capilla del Sagrario, sculptured by Domingo de Arregui, Briones. (Author)

Among the presbyters who had supported the Friar Bishop was an Andalusian, Miguel Pérez Romero, whom he appointed to administer his diocese when he was later forced to travel to the viceregal capital at Lima to face the censure of both the Viceroy and the colony’s Archbishop. The relationship had further been strengthened by the subsequent marriage of the presbyter Romero’s daughter to the Bishop’s nephew Don Pablo Díez de Medina, a hidalgo and lawyer from his native township of Briones, in La Rioja. On 28 May 1630, the Friar Bishop died at Lima. His will shows him to have left much of his considerable fortune to the Augustinian convent at Burgos and to the church at Briones for the founding of a chapel, and where his sculptured features can still be seen under a grill awning of his coat of arms, bearing the ten Moors heads and title name of his family, awarded his ancestor for killing single handed ten Moors in the medina, citadel, of the castle of Tíscar, in the reconquest of Andalusia.2

Sculpture of the Friar Bishop by Juan Bazcardo, Capilla del Sagrario, Briones. (Author)

Shortly before the Friar Bishop’s death a manuscript had come into his possession, which, because of its antiquity and historical interest, he had entrusted to the care of his fellow Augustinian Antonio de la Calancha y Benavides. A creole from Sucre, Calancha had for several years been researching Inca history and traditions, together with his Order’s missionary role in Peru. The manuscript, written a year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, was addressed to King Philip II, and was the last will and testament of the Conquistador Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, the grandfather of the presbyter Romero’s wife.* The preamble of the will Calancha included in his history Corónica Moralizada del Orden de San Agustín en el Perú, published in Barcelona in 1639.3

Among the other papers in the possession of Romero’s wife was a copy of her grandfather’s probanza de méritos,† his testimonial of his past service to the Crown, also addressed to King Philip II. The 154 folio pages record the testimony of twenty witnesses, six of whom had been present with him at the killing of the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca, and several of whom had been pardoned for their part in the rebellions against the Crown which had lasted intermittently for seventeen years. The text, published for the first time, forms the basis of a portrait of an almost unknown soldier, who had been the last conquistador to die in Peru, and, as his will demonstrates, one of the very few of Pizarro’s veterans to have expressed his remorse for his role in the conquest of the Incas.

* See Appendix 1.

† See Appendix 2.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Principally I acknowledge my mother, without whose encouragement this book would never have been written. I would also like to thank Luis Roldán Jordán and Josefa García Tovar, of the Seminario de Historia Local de Pinto, Madrid. I am grateful to my brother Alexander Stirling and Nicholas du Chastel for taking photographs for me in La Paz, Potosí and Cuzco. I am also grateful to Dr Barry Taylor, of the British Library, for his advice and the staffs of the Archivo General de Indias, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, Seville, the Archivo Nacional de la Nación, Lima, Canning House, the British Library and the Institute of Historical Research, London.

Map of Peru.

1

HEIRSOFTHE CID

When in ancient or modern times has so great an enterprise been undertaken by so few against so many odds, and to so varied a climate and seas, and at such great distances, to conquer the unknown?

Francisco López de Jerez

Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú

The history of Spain’s conquest of the Inca empire of Tahuantinsuyo is as much a history of the destruction of a civilization as it is of its protagonists and victims: conquistador and Indian alike, some of whose names are recorded by history, and others forgotten in the faded parchments of some distant archive. As with much of colonial history, it was a history of a conquered people written by its conquerors, and revised in part by the chronicles of later missionaries and Crown officials. Almost nothing in any great biographical detail is recorded of their lives. As illiterate as the people they had conquered, their silence was to prove their greatest defence of the wealth they accumulated, and of the inhumanity with which they had established their empire: a social and economic infrastructure which would still be evident in Andean America until the agrarian reforms of the present century.

That each of the conquistadors of the New World was tainted with the blood and brutality of their conquest is without dispute. Neither was their role any different from that of their forefathers who had fought in the reconquista of Muslim Spain and shared in the booty of its destruction, nor can their undoubted courage be denied them. Their story is not of a great religious crusade but of explorers and would-be mercenaries, whose treatment of the natives they subjugated was possibly no more bloody than the crusading armies which had ransacked their fellow Christians at Constantinople on the way to the Holy Land three hundred years previously, or in any of the later religious wars of Europe. With scant knowledge of handling the arms they purchased or borrowed, and united solely by their poverty and the dream of riches that had brought each of them to the Indies, they were to conquer one of the greatest empires of the Americas. Nor as colonists did they differ in their sense of racial superiority to any other latter day European colonist; nor was the plight of the people they conquered any less humane than that of an African, North American Indian or Aborigine. Neither was their racism dissimilar to that of any other European, nor even of the humanist Erasmus who chided the Spaniards for having too many Jews in their country.1

The legacy of their cruelty would transcend the centuries, inspired in part by the writings of the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, whose condemnation of the treatment of the natives of the New World would later be revived by Protestant pamphleteers in elaborating the leyenda negra, black legend, of Spain’s conquest. ‘There are many who were never witnesses to our deeds, who are now our chroniclers,’ the Conquistador Mansio Serra de Leguizamón complained in his old age, ‘each one recording his impressions, often in prejudice of the actions of those who had taken part in the Conquest . . . and when they are read by those of us who were the discoverers and conquistadors of these realms, of whom they write, it is at times impossible to believe that they are the same accounts and of the same personages they portend to portray.’2

The homelands and social hierarchies the conquistadors left behind in their poverty stricken villages of Castile, Estremadura and Andalusia had evolved in the feudalism of the Middle Ages: an era that had transformed Spain from an amalgamation of semi-autonomous Visigoth and Arab kingdoms into a nation of imperial power. It had also been an age that had seen the throne of Spain inherited by the Flemish-born grandson of Queen Isabella of Castile and her consort King Ferdinand of Aragón, who as Charles V would be elected Holy Roman Emperor and succeed to the great Burgundian inheritance of the Low Countries and to the kingdom of Naples: a legacy which would divide the political and religious map of Europe, and in time witness Spain’s hegemony of the New World.

The realm the young Austrian Prince Charles of Habsburg inherited from his Spanish mother and grandparents was a land steeped in the exorcism of its past Arab and Judaic civilization, the last symbolic vestige of which had been the surrender of the kingdom of Granada in 1492. This was the same year his grandmother’s Genoese Admiral Columbus had first set foot on the Caribbean island of Guanahaní he had believed to be the gateway to India, and for which reason the Americans would be known as Indians. In the eighth century possibly 1 million Arabs and North African Berbers had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and had settled in the Iberian Peninsula, three-quarters of which by the eleventh century had been under Muslim rule,3 populated not only by Christians but by a large urban Jewish community. It was a land separated as much by its geographical contrasts as by its racial division.

Only in the mid-thirteenth century had Spain’s Christian armies re-established its former Visigoth capital, at Toledo. The reconquered territories were placed under the protection of encomiendas, lands entrusted by the Crown to families of old Christian lineage, Cristianos viejos, and held in lieu of feudal service. Evangelical as well as territorial in its purpose, it was a system that would dominate the social structure of a vanquished people, destroying both their identity and traditions. With similar effect it would be introduced by the conquistadors to the colonies of the New World, and which in all but name would become a licence for slavery. The fate of the country’s Jews had followed a similar course of persecution. The tax returns of Castile in the year 1492, whose kingdom comprised three-quarters of the Peninsula’s populace of an estimated 7 million people, record some 70,000 Jews, almost half of whom would refuse to accept conversion and face exile in Portugal4 or North Africa.5 Those who remained, known as conversos, as in previous centuries, would be assimilated into a society governed by the tenets of a religious Inquisition, in which they would face the stigma of their race in the proofs of limpieza de sangre, racial purity – an anachronism that would perpetuate unabated well into the nineteenth century.6 Even St Teresa of Avila, venerated by king and courtier alike, would never disclose the ignominy shown her grandfather, a converso, who had been publicly flogged in Toledo at an auto-da-fé for his apostasy.7

It was an image of a people in every level of their existence: of a predominant and mainly destitute peasant society governed by its Church and feudal nobility, which owned 95 per cent of the land;8 and of a small urban middle class, of tradesmen, artisans and clerks, many of them incorporated in the Hermandades, guilds, dependent on the Crown for their privileges. The hidalgo – hijo de algo, son of a man of rank – represented an untitled nobility which for generations had served the Crown as soldiers, or as warrior monks in the Military Orders modelled on the crusading Orders of the Holy Land. Bound by their distinct codes of chivalry, they had traditionally derived their livelihood from the booty of war and from the rents of their small country estates, regarding trade and any form of commerce as below their dignity; a stance that brought many of them to penury, and which Cervantes satirized in the characterization of the hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Some were landless and lived in townships or in the garrison castles of the Orders: Calatrava, founded in 1158 for the defence of Toledo by Ramón Sierra, Benedictine abbot of the Navarre monastery of Santa María de Fitero; Alcántara, founded in about 1170 for the defence of Estremadura; and Montesa, founded in 1317 by King James II of Aragón as the result of the disbandment of the Templar Order, whose lands he acquired.

The Order of Santiago, founded in about 1160, was however the most prominent of all the Orders, owning some quarter of a million acres of land. It was established by knights of León for the protection of pilgrims to the shrine of St James the Apostle, at Compostela in Galicia, where, according to tradition, his body was buried. Proclaimed patron of Spain and its armies because of his legendary apparition at the Battle of Clavijo in the ninth century, his image as Santiago mata moros, slayer of Moors, mounted on a white horse in full armour would emblazon its banners during its wars in Europe and in the conquest of both Mexico and Peru. St James’ emblem of the cockleshell owes its origin to the legend that at Clavijo a Christian knight discovered his chain mail studded with cockleshells after making his escape across the River Ebro: a symbol synonymous with pilgrimage to his shrine at Compostela. With the demise of Muslim Spain the Orders would witness the end of their crusading role, their lands and wealth prey to the political and financial demands of the Crown.9 It would also symbolize the end of the hidalgo as a crusader knight, relegating him to the romances of a bygone age, and his title to a mere appendage of nobility.

Mansio’s signature. (Patronato 126, AGI, Seville)

The conquistador Mansio Serra de Leguizamón was one of the few hidalgos to have taken part in the discovery and conquest of Peru,10 most of whose 330 known volunteers were from the humblest backgrounds, the sons of yeomen and tradesmen. He was born in the year 1512, three years before the birth of St Teresa of Avila, in the township of Pinto in the realm of Toledo, in an age that could still recall the reconquest of Granada and had witnessed the discovery of the New World. He was the son of Juan Serra de Leguizamón, a Vizcayan,11 and of María Jiménez, whose Castilian family had lived in the township for generations.12

Mansio’s father, who probably typified the plight of the impoverished hidalgo at the turn of the century, was descended from the families of Serra, of Ceánuri and of Leguizamón, of Echévarri near Bilbao, the arms of which the Conquistador bore, and whose faded carving can still be seen on the portico of his mansion in Cuzco. From time immemorial Iberia’s northern province on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, bordering the Basque lands and Pyrennean kingdom of Navarre, had possessed its own language and fueros, privileges, as subjects of its feudal lordship, which only in the fourteenth century had been assimilated into the Crown of Castile. The Victorian writer Richard Ford, who travelled widely across its mountainous land, referring to the language of its people, quotes a common saying that the Devil had studied Vizcayan for seven years and had accomplished only three words. ‘A people,’ he wrote, obsessed by their independence and lineage, ‘. . . whose armorial shields, as large as the pride of their owners, are sculptured over the portals of their houses, and contain more quarterings than there are chairs in the drawing rooms or eatables in the larder . . . and well did Don Quijote know how to annoy a Viscayan by telling him he was no gentleman’.13 According to the fifteenth-century Vizcayan chronicler and genealogist Lope García de Salazar,14 the Leguizamón were descended from Alvar Fáñez de Minaya, a cousin of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known to history and legend by his Moorish title of el Cid, the Lord: both of whose names would embellish the ballads of the Middle Ages and inspire the epic poem of that name.

Seigneurial families of Vizcaya at Guernica, El Besamanos, Francisco de Mendieta, 1609. (Diputación Foral de Vizcaia)

Of the lineage of Alvar Fáñez de Minaya, cousin of the Cid of Vivar, succeeded a knight who came to settle the lands known as Leguizamón, and there founded the House of Leguizamón the old many years before Bilbao was populated, and from father to son was succeeded by Diego Pérez de Leguizamón, a fine knight and held as the noblest of his name, who bore for arms horizontal bars as borne by the said Alvar Fáñez de Minaya in his sepulchre at San Pedro de Gumiel de Hizán where he is buried, and which this lineage bears, and who in turn was succeeded by Sancho Díaz de Leguizamón who was killed in the vega of Granada . . .15

What history records of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar is that he was born in the mid-eleventh century and that for several years he had served King Sancho of Castile as his constable until his murder at Zamora in 1072.16 Exiled from Castile by Sancho’s heir and brother Alfonso VI, for eighteen years he commanded the armies of the Emir al-Mu’tamin of Saragosa and his own Castilian and Moorish mercenaries, eventually capturing the Muslim city and kingdom of Valencia, where he died in 1099. His exploits and life were recorded in the twelfth-century poem chronicle Carmen Campi Doctoris, Song of the Campeador, and then later by a prose chronicle Historia Roderici, and in the epic medieval poem Mio Cid.17 Though Alvar Fáñez de Minaya is depicted in Mio Cid as his trusted commander, there is no evidence that he ever accompanied him in his exile as the poem purports. In the Poema de Almería, written in about 1152, Minaya is described as the most renowned of the Christian warrior knights, second only to the Cid: Mio Cidi primus fuit, Alvarus atque secundus.18 In 1091 he is recorded as commanding one of the armies of Alfonso VI against the Berber Almoravides which was defeated at Almodóvar del Rio. Six years later, Alfonso appointed him governor of the fortress of Zorita and then of Toledo, which he defended against the Berber siege. In 1114, while in the service of Alfonso’s sister, the Infanta Doña Urraca, he was killed in the defence of the castle city of Segovia.

Arms of Leguizamón: Azure, three bars Or, Palacio de Leguizamón, Echévarri, Bilbao. (Author)

The pride of the Leguizamón in their descent from Minaya was personified by the boastfulness of their motto: ‘Let none doubt my lineage nor dispute me in combat, for my arms recall my descent from the Cid.’ As one of the seigneural families of Vizcaya, parientes mayores, the Leguizamón for several centuries had governed the fueros of Vizcaya and of the Basque provinces, which the kings of Castile and León traditionally swore to uphold at Guernica, a city which was raised to the ground during the Spanish Civil War, and whose destruction is depicted in Picasso’s painting of that name. García de Salazar records the family’s recurring involvement in Vizcaya’s turbulent civil wars, in which one of the Conquistador’s forbears met his death.

In this year [1443] Tristán de Leguizamón, the younger, and Martín de Zaballa, entering the township of Bermeo at dead of night and armed with their swords, Boda en Begoña, Francisco de Mendieta, c. 1600. (Diputación Foral de Vizcaia) killed in the street of the fishermen Ochoa López de Arcayche and Pedro de Arna, who were partisans of the Zurbarán . . . in the year of Our Lord, 1446, the Leguizamón and Zurbarán fought in the square of Bilbao, and Tristán de Leguizamón, the younger, who had been asleep in his house, and armed with only a shield entered the square and was struck by an arrow in the chest, dying shortly after he was taken to his house . . .19

Boda en Begoña, Francisco de Mendieta, c. 1600. (Diputación Foral de Vizcaia)

Since 1382 the family had also held the patronage and lordship of Vizcaya’s shrine of the Virgin of Begoña, awarded by the illegitimate son and heir of the last feudal lord of Vizcaya to his uncle, as recorded in his deed of gift:

Be it known that We, Don Pedro Nuñez de Lara y Leguizamón, Conde de Mayorga and Lord of Castroverde, donate to thee Martín Sánchez de Leguizamón, my uncle, in recompense of your loyalty and the many services you have rendered me, and continue to render me each day, in free gift and in perpetuity to you, your wife, children and heirs, the monastery and sanctuary of Santa María de Begoña and its lordship, and all its goods, lands, fruit trees, waters and mountains and fields . . .20

Nuestra Señora de Begoña. (Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao)

Established as a centre of pilgrimage in about 1300 in the mountain above Bilbao, the shrine and its adjacent tower and later palace dominated the approach to the city. It remained in the family’s patronage for several generations until its partial destruction by Napoleon’s troops, who stabled their horses in its monastery church and desecrated the Leguizamón tombs – a pillage the shrine and palace would again suffer in the Carlist wars of the nineteenth century.

No record survives as to the year the Conquistador’s father left Vizcaya and settled in the Castilian township of Pinto, lying a few miles south of Madrid, and which was held in the lordship of the Carrillo family.21 Neither, due to the loss of its early church archives, is there a record of his parents’ marriage, nor whether they had any other children. An agricultural region, renowned for its wheat, olives and wine, Pinto had for centuries formed part of Toledo’s north-easterly defence, its medieval tower, silhouetted in the cold Castilian winters against the backdrop of the snow-clad mountains of the Sierra de Guadaramma, was surrounded by its sombre mansions, market square and church of Santo Domingo de Silos. In a census in 1571 its population was recorded as 836 persons, nine of whom were hidalgos.22 Mansio’s companion in arms Alonso de Mesa, who had been born in Toledo, recorded that in his youth he had known Mansio’s relatives, who presumably would have been the senior branch of his family who resided at court in the city: Don Sancho Díaz de Leguizamón and Don Tristán de Leguizamón.23 Don Sancho, one of Bilbao’s grandees and patron of its church of San Antón, was for several years chamberlain to the Emperor Charles V. Don Tristán, a son of a former page of King Ferdinand, would later serve as a captain of lancers in Italy, where he was awarded the knighthood of Santiago by the Emperor at Bologna the day before his coronation. Nothing, however, is known of Mansio’s education or upbringing, nor of his father’s relationship with his relatives. Judging by the wording of his various petitions and testimonials he possessed the rudiments of a classical education that most children of his hidalgo rank would have received. His future, nevertheless, was decided neither at court nor in the farm lands of Pinto, but in the neighbouring township of Torrejón de Velasco, the lordship of which was held by the Conde de Puñonrostro, whose younger brother Don Pedro Arias Dávila was Governor of the colony of Nicaragua in the Indies.24

Romeria en Begoña, Sanctuary of the Virgin of Begoña. (Drawing by G.P. Villamil; Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao)

The dream of riches, inspired by the tales of the returning conquistadors of Mexico and from the islands of the Caribbean, the isthmian settlements of Castilla del Oro, at Panama and Nicaragua, had taken hold of the imagination of the entire country. Between the years 1520 and 1539 some 13,000 men and 700 women sailed for the New World: townsmen, merchants and yeomen, some of their names hispanicized to hide their converso origins, prostitutes and penniless daughters of government officials, friars of the Orders of St Dominic and Merced, driven by the zeal of their mission or charged to live out their penances in the exile of an unknown world, former criminals and conscripts of the Italian wars, peasants and hidalgos with only their black capes to hide their penury, queuing in their hundreds for their passage to the Indies and the fortunes each believed awaited them.25 It was a dream few would ever realize. Some time before 1529, aged no more than sixteen, the future conquistador of Peru left his native township never to return.26 It was a journey that would take him across the world and eventually to the great cordillera of the Andes, where he would live for the remainder of his life.

The Tower of Pinto. (Author)

The small flotilla of caravels in which he sailed from the Andalusian port of San Lúcar de Barrameda took a route by then well established in the crossing of the Atlantic: of some thirty days to the Canary and Windward Islands and a further twenty days to the Caribbean port of Nombre de Dios in the Isthmus of Panama. It was a route Don Pedro Arias Dávila, the Governor of Nicaragua, had himself taken when he had led an armada of 17 ships and 2,000 men in the conquest of the Isthmus 15 years previously, piloted by Juan Vespucci, nephew of the Florentine navigator Amerigo whose name would be given to the continent of the New World. The right of Spain’s claim to the Indies had been established by the Valencian Pope Alexander VI in his bull Inter Caetera, issued in May 1493, in Castile’s favour, and amended a year later to include Portuguese rights of conquest – 300 miles to the east of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. During his tenure as Governor of the Pacific port of Panama, whose colony he had founded in 1519 as the settlement of Our Lady of the Assumption, Arias Dávila had succeeded where most men would have failed in the exploration and conquest of its tropical terrain, and of its westerly region of Nicaragua and Veragua. A veteran of the reconquest of Granada, he had imposed his authority on a ruthless and often corrupt administration, and had been responsible for ordering the executions of the conquistadors Hernández de Córdoba and the elderly Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who was his son-in-law. Córdoba, an Andalusian, had commanded his expedition in the conquest of Nicaragua in 1523, founding its capital at León and exploring the Desaguadero River as far as the Atlantic coast. His subsequent appeal to the Crown for his recognition as governor of the territories was intercepted by Arias Dávila, who ordered his hanging on a charge of sedition. Nuñez de Balboa had met a similar fate. An Estremaduran and one of the early colonists, he had founded the township of Darién, in 1513, commanding that same year an expedition that had made the discovery of the Pacific, and among whose sixty-seven volunteers had been the then relatively unknown slaver and future encomendero of Panama: Francisco Pizarro.

The explorer Vasco Ñúñez de Balboa. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

In the years of his governorship Arias Dávila had transformed what had been little more than an outpost on the borders of the great Mayan empire of Central America into one of the most lucrative settlements in the Indies. The commodity that had enabled him to achieve his ends had been neither the by then diminishing deposits of gold for which the Isthmus had earned its name, of Castilla del Oro, nor the spices its early explorers had believed existed in its hinterland, but in the human gold of slavery. In an age when scholars at the universities of Salamanca and Bologna were deliberating on the theological implications of recognizing the natives of the New World as human beings, while others were advocating the theory that they were one of the lost tribes of Israel, slavery under the guise of evangelization would become the labour force of Spain’s colonial wealth.27

Francisco Pizarro. (Antonio de Herrera, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierrafirme del Mar Océano: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

Queen Isabella had prohibited the enslavement of the Isthmians unless they were prisoners of war – a code to which her grandson Charles V would also in principle adhere – but it was a mandate that would never be implemented with any rigour, nor possess any real validity. Its irrelevance had been marked even further by the introduction of the encomienda system, which would be far more apparent in its function as a slave labour force than in the Muslim land enclosures of southern Spain, whose subject people would rise in rebellion in the later part of the century. It was a trade from which both the Crown and the colonists would acquire their principal revenue, enhanced over the years by the importation of Africans from Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, and which would eventually dominate the society and economy of Central America and the Caribbean. The natives of the early Spanish settlements, moreover, faced an even greater threat to their survival because of their vulnerability to disease from Europe and Africa, principally smallpox.28 Within fifty years the epidemic would kill nine-tenths of the indigenous people of Mexico and Central and Andean America. Malaria and syphilis,29 which had been introduced to Spain by Columbus’ mariners, and which had spread to King Ferdinand’s army in Italy between the years 1494 and 1495, had also taken its toll on the lives of the Isthmian colonists.

The settlement at León, in the Isthmus’ western region of Nicaragua, to which the young Mansio made his way, following the mule packs from the Atlantic port of Nombre de Dios, was little more than a stockade of wooden buildings. Its markets were filled with its Spanish traders, many of them barefoot and dressed in tafetta and lace, accompanied by their manacled Indian slaves, men, women and children, which they would sell to one another for the labour of their land or the solace of their sexuality. The world he would have witnessed was far removed from the austere landscape of Castile: deafened by the colour and sounds of its tropical vegetation and native markets, with its stalls of exotic fruit and cane alcohol, parrots, caged monkeys and newly arrived African slaves, who had also made the long journey across the Isthmus from the caravels that had brought them from the islands of the Spanish Main. At the time of his arrival in the township, armed possibly with little more than the letters of recommendation he carried from the Conde of Puñonrostro to his brother the governor, an expedition was being organized by Arias Dávila for the conquest of the westerly region of Veragua under the command of the captains Juan de Pánes and his treasurer the slave merchant Juan Téllez.30 Its purpose was ostensibly to search for mineral deposits and to found further settlements, though in all likelihood it was to supplement the growing loss in numbers of Indian slaves due to the smallpox epidemic. The few facts to survive of the expedition, in which the by then seventeen-year-old Mansio had enlisted, record that its volunteers were devastated by the oppressive climate and disease. In his testimonial Mansio recalled he had ‘experienced great risk’ to his life and the ‘loss of many pesos of gold’.31 The hardship he undoubtedly endured in the three years he spent in Veragua was confirmed by his witness the Conquistador Nicolás de Ribera, who had first met him there: ‘. . . as for what [he] says of the province of Veragua, so devastated by rain and with such bad aspect, it would have been impossible for him, and for those who were with him in its conquest, not to have suffered greatly’.32

Ribera had two years previously returned from an expedition led by Pizarro along the equatorial coast of the southern Pacific, the lands of which an earlier explorer Pascual de Andagoya had mistakenly called Peru. It had also been three years since Pizarro and his partner Diego de Almagro had reached an agreement with the priest Hernando de Luque to share in the conquest of the empire they knew to exist in the hinterland of its continent. It had been a contract to which Pánes, one of the commanders of the Veragua expedition, had been a signatory on behalf of the illiterate Pizarro, as recorded by Panama’s notary:

I, Don Hernando de Luque, priest and vicar of the Holy Church of Panama, and the captains Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, who are citizens of this city of Panama, declare our agreement to form a contract33 that will forever be binding: in as much as the said captains Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, who have been granted permission by the Governor Pedro Arias Dávila to discover and conquer the lands and provinces of the kingdoms known as Peru . . .34

Charles V, by Eneas Vico from the title page of The Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V by William Stirling.

The tales of their discovery had by now spread across the Indies, and the proofs they had brought back with them to Panama, of gold and silver artefacts, emeralds and other jewels, together with several natives, llamas and equatorial birds, Pizarro had taken with him to Spain in order to obtain the Crown’s permission for the right of conquest – a request Arias Dávila had later denied the partners. Pizarro nevertheless had arrived in Spain to a hero’s welcome in 1528, and had been received by the Emperor Charles V at Toledo. Awarding him the habit of Santiago and the rank of a hidalgo, the Emperor authorized his expedition of conquest, leaving the details of his decree to be finalized by his Portuguese Empress after his departure to Italy. What would be known as the Capitulación de Conquista, dated 26 July 1529, would carry the name of Queen Isabella’s daughter Doña Juana, titular monarch of Spain and mother of the Emperor, who had spent most of her life incarcerated because of her madness. The presence at court of the conqueror of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, had possibly influenced the Council of Castile in authorizing Pizarro’s sole command of the expedition: an appointment that would cause the understandable enmity of his partner Almagro who had remained in Panama. The articles of the decree stipulated that the name New Castile be given to the conquered territories, of which Pizarro would be governor and captain-general.35 Almagro was only awarded the future governorship of the coastal settlement at Túmbez and the rank of a hidalgo. The priest Luque was awarded the bishopric of the future colony. Various clauses were added, among them the prohibition of any conversos or moriscos enlisting in the expedition: a clause that would have been met with some incredulity by Nicaragua’s colonists in view of the fact that Arias Dávila was of converso stock, and which highlights the paradox of racism in contemporary Spain.

Map of Peru, engraving by Bleau. (Private Collection)

The evangelical purpose of the expedition was emphasized by the inclusion of several Dominican friars. Provision was also made for the limited purchase of artillery in the Isthmus and the award of twenty-five horses from the island of Jamaica and of thirty African slaves from the island of Cuba. Though each of the partners was awarded an annual pension from the Crown’s future revenue from the territories and booty of their conquest, they were in effect to receive no direct financial backing for its implementation other than an advance on their future incomes. Nor were they compensated for what they had already spent in out-fitting and manning their earlier voyages of exploration, as the Conquistador would recall some forty years later in an address to King Philip II:

. . . in the desire to serve Your Majesty and to enhance the Crowns of Castile and León, the said Francisco Pizarro determined on the discovery and conquest of these realms of Peru at his own cost and mission, for which this witness neither saw, nor heard it said, that Your Majesty nor the Royal Treasury did aid him for the expense of the discovery and conquest, and that this witness, being one of the discoverers and conquistadors, would have known had it been thus . . . for the said Francisco Pizarro set on the conquest at his own cost, and there spent the patrimony of his years of labour, for it was known to me that he was a man of wealth in the realm of Tierra Firme [Panama] . . .36

Pizarro, by this time middle aged, was described by his kinsman Pedro as dark featured, ‘tall and spare, and having a good face and a thin beard’.37 The illegitimate and abandoned son of a minor hidalgo from the Estremaduran township of Trujillo, he had spent his childhood in the peasant household of his mother’s family before leaving to serve in Spain’s army in Italy.38 In his early years in the Isthmus he had made a name for himself as a woodsman and Indian fighter, amassing a considerable fortune as a slaver, planter and trader: the principal sources of income open to the colonist encomenderos of Panama. A man of simple tastes, who preferred the company of his Indian slave women to the social pretensions of his fellow merchants and the hidalgo wives they imported from their homeland, he appears to have possessed no wish ever to go back and live in Spain, where, whatever his achievements or wealth, he would always be regarded as little more than a peasant. On his return to Panama he brought with him his four half-brothers, who were almost half his age. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo recorded that they were as ‘arrogant as they were poor’.39 The eldest was Hernando, the only legitimate son of their father, who Oviedo described as ‘of great stature and girth, his lips swollen, his nose veined’,40 who of all the men who would accompany his brother in the Conquest would prove to be the catalyst of his downfall and eventual murder.

Diego de Almagro, who was from an equally humble background as Pizarro and was also illiterate, was older than him and had at one time been the foreman of his encomienda. Disfigured by the loss of an eye from an Indian javelin wound and by the facial warts that scarred the bearded features of many of the early colonists, he had been born in the township of Almagro in the Mancha of Castile, and had lived in Panama for almost as long as Pizarro. An Indian tracker by trade, it was said of him ‘he could follow an Indian through the thickest forests merely by tracing his tracks, and in the event the Indian might have a league’s advantage on him, yet would he catch up with him’.41

Diego de Almagro. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

The partnership of the two men had, however, virtually been dissolved after Pizarro’s return from Spain, and had further been hampered by the belated intervention of Arias Dávila, by then an elderly invalid, who prohibited any volunteers from Nicaragua or Veragua enlisting on their expedition. The behaviour of Pizarro’s brother Hernando, who had publicly referred to Almagro as a ‘circumcized Moor’,42 had done little to improve relations between them. Almagro, who had every reason to feel defrauded by his exclusion from joint command of the expedition, after a great deal of discussion agreed to serve under Pizarro with the promise of an independent governorship in the conquered territories. Due to his ill-health, though, he decided to remain in Panama and to recruit a second expeditionary force as a reinforcement, which he would command. Most of the men who had already been enlisted, including the volunteers Pizarro had brought back with him from Spain, were in their early twenties and had never had any conventional military experience or training. Only a handful, among them Pizarro’s brother Hernando, had ever served in Spain’s regular army, though many of them would in their old age describe themselves as ‘soldiers’, as is made evident in the Conquistador’s probanza. Each volunteer had been recruited with the promise of a share of booty, some were given captaincies because of their past experience as Indian fighters. More accustomed to labouring in the fields of their homelands than to soldiering, they presented a motley collection of unemployed slavers and die-hard adventurers, only a few of whom had taken part in the conquest of the Isthmus.

The Spaniards arriving at the Bay of San Mateo. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

In the last week of the year 1530, a few months before Arias Dávila’s death at the age of eighty in his capital at León, the first of the three caravels that would transport the 180 men and horses of the expeditionary force shed its mooring and sailed out of Panama’s small harbour. Among the colonists of Nicaragua who had already been recruited for the expedition, but who had yet to sail, was the wealthy slaver Hernando de Soto, a hidalgo from Estremadura, who like Almagro had arrived in the Isthmus in Arias Dávila’s armada. Though aware of Arias Dávila’s opposition to the expedition, he had nevertheless accepted Pizarro’s offer to command his horsemen also with the promise of a governorship, and had agreed to provide him with two of his slave ships for his expeditionary force, which he would join the following year after the departure of Sebastían de Benalcázar, another of the Nicaragua colonists. Six months after Soto had sailed from Nicaragua, Almagro and the witness Ribera entered the province of Veragua to enlist more men to supplement their reinforcements. Among the volunteers they recruited was the eighteen-year-old Mansio, who records in his testimonial he brought with him his own ‘horses, armour and servants’.43 Almost two years after Pizarro’s departure, the small armada of caravels, carrying some 150 volunteers and a small contingent of Negro and Isthmian slaves and 50 horses, finally set sail from the port of Panama.44 It was December 1532.

2

THE REALMOFTHE HUMMINGBIRD

I was born as a flower of the field,

As a flower I was cherished in my youth.

I came to full age, I grew old;

Now I am withered and die.

Inca memory poem1

The Inca empire of Tahuantinsuyo, containing some 7 million people, comprising the Andean regions of the present day republics of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, northern Chile and southern Colombia, had been established by military conquest in less than a hundred years.2 It was a society ruled by an hereditary nobility of the Quéchua tribe, known as Inca, which by their prowess had dominated the central Andean cordillera, instilling in their conquered tribes a cult of sun worship, from whom they claimed they derived their divine origin.3 The chronicler Agustín de Zárate recorded that at Cajamarca the Inca Atahualpa told the Dominican Friar Vicente de Valverde that he believed in the deities of the sun, the Pachamama, earth mother, and Pachacámac, the creator.4 Three Indian elders, in a testimonial on behalf of the descendants of their royal house, recorded of their rulers:

The Incas of the eleven ayllu [clans of the dead emperors] never laboured for any one, for they were served by the Indians of all Peru . . . and they were lords who commanded all others . . . for none of their caste and tribe, poor or rich, nor any other who was a descendant of the Incas of the eleven ayllu were servitors in any manner, for they were served in all the four provinces of this realm . . . their sole office being to assist in the court of the Inca [emperor] where he resided, to eat and walk and to accompany him, and to discharge his commissions in war and peace, and to inspect the lands as great lords with their many servants . . .5

The civilizations whose distant vestiges the Incas had inherited had left only the remnants of their monuments and artwork to mark their existence: the Chavín of the central Andes (1200–400 BC), the image of whose puma god ornamented their pottery and masonry; the Nazca of the mid Pacific coast lands (400 BC–1000 AD), who portrayed their religious iconography in the giant linear earth – carvings of sacred animals, insects and birds; and the Tiahuanacu of the highland plateau on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca (AD 400–1000), whose monolith building and monuments had been erected some thousand years before the advent of the Incas. Of all the ancient Andean cultures the Tiahuanacu, a military religious community, had held the greatest influence in the evolution of their people. All that remains of Tiahuanacu’s former lake city, part of which lies under the colonial township of that name, near La Paz, are its ruined wall enclosures and giant stone figures and Gateway of the Sun.

Map of Peru, engraving by Bleau. (Private Collection)

The lake of Titicaca, situated 12,725 ft above sea level and covering an area of some 3,500 square miles, bordering Peru and Bolivia, had been the spiritual epicentre of Tiahuanacu and was held sacred by the Incas as the birthplace of the progenitors of their dynasty. It was also the region from where their bards, that the Spaniards interviewed, recorded the existence in their legends of white-bearded gods, known to them as Viracocha, and because of which they had at first believed the conquistadors to have themselves been gods. The chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León recalled that when he had visited the ruins at Tiahuanacu he had asked the Indians there whether the lake city had been built during the time of the Incas, ‘but that they had laughed at him, saying they had been told by their forebears it had been constructed overnight from one day to the other, and that they had seen bearded white men on one of the islands of Titicaca’.6 The Spanish missionaries were to capitalize on the legend by equating Viracocha, also known as Thunupa, with a bearded Andean Christ, and even St Thomas, the apostle of India: an iconography still evident in the colonial mestizo church carvings and paintings of the Cuzco and Titicaca region. The myth of the white man was also evident in the northern Andean region of the Chachapoyas, whose tribesmen various chroniclers recorded were as white as any Spaniard, and which may possibly prove a far earlier connection between Andean America and the Caucasian world.7

Archaeology has established the traces of Inca government in the Huatanay valley at Cuzco in the central Andes in about AD 1200, and which would later expand across the southern and northern cordillera, introducing to their subject tribes a totalitarian government and a social structure of communal wealth. Though possessing neither the wheel nor the written word, by their mastery of masonry and engineering, their road building and collective system of farming, their craftsmanship of metal, textiles and pottery, their understanding of astronomy and medicine, and in the oral traditions of their poetry, they created one of the greatest civilizations in the Americas. It was a regime as enlightened in its social welfare as it was despotic in its totalitarian adherence to its ruling Inca nobility and Emperor, Sapa Inca. It also shared with other Amerindian civilizations, such as the Maya of Central America and the Aztec of Mexico, the practice of human sacrifice, which the few surviving elderly conquistadors, among them Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, would recall at an enquiry held in Cuzco almost half a century after the conquest: ‘[The Incas] instructed them [their subject tribes] in the veneration of their idols of the sun and of the stars, teaching them how to make sacrifices in the mountains and holy places of each province . . . forcing them to kill their sons and daughters to this effect . . . and to sacrifice their women and servants, so that they could serve them in the afterlife . . .’.8

Viracocha, silverwork, late nineteenth century, Potosí School. (Private Collection)

Statue at Tiahuanacu. (Author)

Tiahuanacu figure. (Author)

The Inca practice of human sacrifice, as in pre-Christian Europe, was in effect a ritual worship of nature and part of a code of a religion governing every aspect of their lives. It also affected the laws by which they lived, as recorded by the Jesuit mestizo chronicler Blas Valera: ‘. . . from the detailed instructions given to each province’s need of supplying artisans and agricultural workers for its sustenance, to the distribution of its land, to the punishments inflicted on adulterers, rapists and thieves, punishable in most cases by death’.9 It was an image of a morality the Conquistador would depict in his last will and testament, which he addressed to his sovereign King Philip II.10

It was a society integrally linked to the spiritual life of its people and its belief in the supernatural: a world with which they communicated in their worship of nature and venerated in their huacas, holy places, of their mountains and valleys, and which brought them in communion with an invisible world. The mystical pre-eminence of their capital at Cuzco, cacooned in a valley 10,500 ft above the level of the sea, was reflected in the person of their Emperor, and maintained in the afterlife by the panacas, houses of the dead, of each Emperor, the living shrine to his immortality. Each Emperor in his life time established his panaca in one of the city’s palaces, numbering some thousand of his relatives and attendants, to oversee his personal wealth and lands after his death. At the time of the Conquest eleven panacas were venerated at Cuzco, to which all the princes and higher nobility belonged through their maternal or paternal descent, entitling them to privileges and a prestige among the Quéchua and their subject tribes that the Conquistador compared to the nobility of his homeland:

Mansio’s Will. (Patronato 107, AGI, Seville)