PIZARRO
CONQUEROR OF THE INCA
STUART STIRLING
First published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Sutton Publishing Limited
The History Press
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Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
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This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Stuart Stirling, 2005, 2013
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Map of Peru
One
The Old Slaver
Two
The Conquest of Paradise
Three
The Capture of the Sun God
Four
Cuzco
Five
The Siege of the Holy City
Six
The Death of Almagro
Seven
The Frontiers of New Castile
Eight
Marqués of the Indies
Nine
The Most Magnificent Lord Gonzalo
Inca Princesses, Courtesans and Wives of Pizarro’s Conquistadores
Eleven
The Legacy of Pizarro
Genealogy
Glossary and Placenames
Notes
Bibliography
For my mother Dora-Elena,
and to the memory of her grandfather
Rubén Díez de Medina y Leguizamón,
a descendant of Mansio Serra de Leguizamón,
one of Pizarro’s horsemen.
Preface
On 18 June 1977 four workmen restoring the crypt of Lima’s cathedral discovered in one of its walls a metal casket and box containing a man’s skull and bones, together with fragments of a sword and a pair of silver spurs. The casket bore the esoteric emblem of a six-pointed star within four concentric circles, and the words: ‘This is the head of the Lord Marqués Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered and conquered these realms of Peru, and who placed them in the Royal Crown of Castile.’1 For almost four and a half centuries after his killing at his palace in Lima the remains of the conqueror of the Inca empire had remained hidden from the world, his name virtually forgotten during South America’s evolution from colonialism to independence and statehood.
Francisco Pizarro is possibly one of the most reviled figures in world history, his memory branded by the stigma of Spain’s colonial past, inspired as much by the cruelty of its conquistadores as by the envy of its European neighbours. Their own later colonisations would be no less bloody, and their economic motives not dissimilar. History, art and legend, on the other hand, have bequeathed a romanticised image of his victim the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, whose execution he had ordered at Cajamarca, and who in reality was a man equally brutal and ambitious.
In moral terms, Pizarro was no better and no worse than any other contemporary European military commander, deriving his livelihood in his service to his sovereign from booty and the sale of prisoners and slaves. Nor was the method of war he employed any more bloody than that of his Native American adversary or of the Inca warriors whose armies had subjugated the Andes in less than a hundred years. What made him exceptional was his ability to consolidate his conquest in political terms, laying the foundations of an empire whose wealth would shape the course of world history, and whose killing at the hands of his own countrymen was the sacrifice he paid for his endeavour.
Pizarro was no educated cartographer such as Columbus, or courtly adventurer like Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico. The illiterate and abandoned son of an Extremaduran army captain of probable part African ancestry, for some thirty years he had made a living as a slaver and frontiersman in the early settlements of the Caribbean and Central America – known as the Indies because of Columbus’s misguided belief that it formed part of the continent of India, and for which reason its natives were called by that name. Very little is known of those early years other than what the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo records in a few references, when Pizarro was in the service of Nicaragua’s elderly governor Pedro Arias Dávila.
Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire, however, unfolds much later, almost half a century after Columbus had first set foot in the New World, at a time when Spanish dominion over the Caribbean islands and Central America was already well established, and some ten years after the conquest of Mexico.
It is a story of how a man’s courage and endeavour led him to the discovery and conquest of one of the greatest civilisations of the New World, accompanied by no more than 200 poorly armed volunteers, with whom, and against all odds, he defeated the might of the Inca armies. It is also the story of the plight of the Inca people in the aftermath of Pizarro’s conquest, and of the succession of his youngest brother Gonzalo as ruler of his colony, who in all but name created the first independent state in the Americas: a legacy that laid the foundations of modern Hispanic South America.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Doña Magdalena Canellas Anoz, Director of the Archivo General de Indias at Seville, for her kind assistance, and to the Directors of the Archivo General de la Nación at Lima, and the Archivo Regional at Cuzco. I would also like to thank Señorita Josefa García Tovar for her invaluable help in transcribing innumerable manuscripts for me.
Chronology
1476
Francisco Pizarro born, Trujillo, Extremadura
1492
Columbus discovers the New World
1502
Possible date of his departure for the New World and the island of Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti)
1509
Arrives in the Isthmus from Hispaniola
1513
Accompanies Vasco Núñez de Balboa in discovery of the Pacific Ocean
1514
Diego de Almagro and Hernando de Soto arrive in the Isthmus in the
armada of its new governor, Don Pedro Arias Dávila, known as Pedrarias
1515
St Teresa of Ávila born
1519
Hernán Cortés conquers Mexico
1522
The Basque Pascual de Andagoya reconnoitres the Pacific coastlands
of Colombia and Ecuador, the northern empire of the Incas
1523–7
Exploratory voyages by Pizarro and Almagro to Ecuadorian coast
1527
Death of Inca Emperor Huayna Cápac
1529
Civil war between Inca Emperor Huáscar and his half-brother Atahualpa
At Toledo Emperor Charles V awards Pizarro the Capitulación de Conquista, right of conquest, of Inca empire
1532
Pizarro’s conquistadores seize Atahualpa at Cajamarca
1533
Almagro’s reinforcements reach Cajamarca
Distribution of treasure at Cajamarca
Execution of Atahualpa at Cajamarca
Capture of Cuzco
1535
Hernando de Soto leaves Peru for Spain
Almagro leaves Cuzco for conquest of Chile
Pizarro founds City of the Kings at Lima as capital of colony of New Castile
1536–7
Cuzco besieged by Emperor Manco
1537
Almagro relieves Cuzco and captures the city for himself
1538
Almagro’s forces defeated at Battle of Salinas by Hernando Pizarro’s loyalist army. Almagro executed
1539
Birth of historian Garcilaso de la Vega at Cuzco
Gonzalo Pizarro leads first invasion of Vilcabamba
1540
Gonzalo leads expedition to Amazon
1541
Pizarro killed at Lima
1542
Governor Vaca de Castro defeats Almagro’s son at Battle of Chupas
1544
Gonzalo Pizarro leads an armed rebellion in Cuzco and governs the colony for four years until his defeat at the Battle of Jaquijahuana
1545
Discovery of silver mine at Potosí
1552
Hernando Pizarro marries Pizarro’s daughter, Doña Francisca, at the
castle of La Mota in Medina del Campo
1556
Abdication of Emperor Charles V in favour of his son King Philip II
1557
Inca Sayri Túpac induced to leave Vilcabamba
1560
Young Garcilaso de la Vega leaves Peru for Spain, never to return
1561
Hernando Pizarro released from the castle of La Mota
1572
Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo orders inquiry into Inca history
Toledo orders second invasion of Vilcabamba. Capture and execution of Inca Túpac Amaru
1578
Death of Hernando Pizarro
1590
Death at Cuzco of last of Pizarro’s conquistadores
Peru
ONE
The Old Slaver
He was a tall man, with a fine face and a thin beard.
Pedro Pizarro, Pizarro’s page and kinsman
Rising above the skyline on a barren plain, Trujillo’s crenellated walls and church towers could be seen clearly from the main Extremadura road to Badajoz that winds its way to the Portuguese border. A blistering sun hung over the town’s windless approach as the old slaver and his small caravan of horses and mules entered its northern gate, by the old castle, their hooves resounding across the narrow streets. It was the autumn of 1529, sixteen years since he had accompanied his fellow Extremaduran Vasco Núñez de Balboa on a voyage that culminated in the discovery of the Pacific Ocean.
In a corner niche of one of the town’s palaces, overlooking the main square that was built over a quarter of a century later, his thin bearded features are sculpted alongside the coat of arms which the Emperor Charles V awarded him and that depict his prisoner, the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, chained by the neck. It is the only known contemporary portrait of Francisco Pizarro.
One of his conquistadores recalled that he was the strongest and bravest man he had ever known, and that ‘no man was his equal’.1 It was an opinion shared by many of the veterans of the Inca conquest, among them Nicolás de Ribera, known as ‘the old man’, who told the historian Agustín de Zárate that when crossing a river, and seeing that one of his Indian servants had been swept away by the current, Pizarro had swum to his rescue, dragging him up by the hair, an action for which the rest of his men were too terrified to volunteer.2
The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who had served with Pizarro in the Caribbean islands and isthmus of Central America, recorded his ruthlessness and stated that he had been well trained in the cruelties of the Indies. He was also, according to those who knew him, modest and reserved, a man of few words and simple tastes, preferring the matting of a floor or a hammock to the luxury of a bed. A plain-speaking man with the soft peasant accent of the Extremaduran, he possessed few social graces but would never demand anything of his men that he was not prepared to carry out himself. Others saw in him an almost secretive ambition and a vision few of his fellow slavers and veterans of the Indies could understand; it was a vision that had brought him back to Spain after an absence of twenty-seven years.
For almost an entire year Pizarro had prolonged his stay in Spain at court in Toledo. There he had been granted an audience with the young Emperor Charles V, to whom he had presented part of the small booty of gold, and the llamas and tropical birds he had brought back from his exploration of the equatorial coast of South America. This land had been discovered some seven years previously by the Biscayan Pascual de Andagoya, who had mistakenly given it the name of a local tribe, known as Birú or Perú. Impressed by the gifts and artefacts the old slaver had brought with him, and by the animals and birds he had ordered placed in his small zoo outside the city walls, the emperor neither denied nor granted his subject’s request for permission to raise an expedition of conquest of those lands. Instead, he instructed his private secretary to forward the matter to his Council of the Indies, the body that controlled Spain’s sole governance of the newly founded American empire of the New World.
The appearance at court of the plain and ill-dressed Indies veteran, who could neither read nor write, accompanied by two Indian boys and a Greek mariner from the small settlement at Panama, had met with some initial curiosity and even a certain acclaim. However, it had elicited none of the euphoria demonstrated the previous year on the return to Spain of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico. He had entranced the emperor and his court with the lavishness of the wealth and treasure he had brought, and the magnificence and plumed apparel of his train of native princes. Possessing neither a recommendation of any note nor the patronage of any grandee or court official, the future conqueror of Peru in contrast presented an insignificant, if not impoverished figure. Lodged in one of the poorer boarding houses hidden in the labyrinth of narrow streets of the city’s Jewish quarter, he began a routine that would last for several months. Each day he joined the long line of petitioners to the chambers of the Council of the Indies, where he eventually presented his plans for conquest to its chief minister, the count of Osorno, a member of the powerful Manrique family. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that the emperor, who soon after Pizarro’s arrival left Toledo for Barcelona on his way to his coronation in Bologna, had readily acceded to his petition; or that Cortés, a distant and possibly unacknowledged relative of Pizarro, had influenced any such decision. (Years later it would be Cortés’s secretary who discredited Pizarro’s achievements and belittled him by inventing the story that as a foundling he had been raised by swine.)
The only recommendation the virtually unknown colonist had been able to count upon other than the small quantity of gold he had brought with him was that of a minor Crown official from the port of Panama, Gaspar de Espinosa. He would later be one of the principal investors in his expedition, and it was he who attested to Pizarro’s character and years of service in the founding of the Central American territories of Nicaragua and Panama. While Espinosa’s correspondence may have added some insight into Pizarro’s past service, it was Pizarro’s simple logic and plain words, and his quiet and unassuming belief in his ability to succeed at such an undertaking that attracted the count of Osorno.
Though Pizarro had proposed a dual command for the expedition, to be shared with one of his principal partners, such a notion was rejected, if not simply on military grounds. Months were spent on further meetings covering every aspect of the Crown’s share of the proposed expedition’s booty and of the rights of its volunteers, who in exchange for their service were to be rewarded equally. Both Osorno and Pizarro knew that what had been agreed at worst would cost his life and those of his men, but at best would open up for Spain a wealth and a continent as great as Cortés had discovered in Mexico. Neither man, however, harboured any illusion that the expedition’s success was assured, or believed without reservation that the
riches Pizarro’s Greek companion Pedro de Candía had sworn he had seen on his solitary journey into the hinterland of the equatorial coast were an indication of even greater wealth, rather than simply representing an isolated discovery. Osorno, nevertheless, was persuaded to gamble simply on the strength of the character of the man who stood before him.
A decision was finally taken and Osorno was received by the Empress Isabel at her Council of Ministers. His recommendations were accepted by the empress, and befitting a royal command, Pizarro was awarded the knighthood of Santiago. The articles of the decree, known as the Capitulación de Conquista and signed by the empress in July 1529, stipulated that the name New Castile be given to the conquered territories, of which Pizarro would be governor and captain-general. His partner Diego de Almagro, who had remained behind at Panama, was awarded the future governorship of the coastal settlement of Túmbez which they had founded, and the rank of hidalgo. His other partner, the priest-merchant Alonso de Luque, also then at Panama, was awarded the bishopric of the future colony. The evangelical purpose of the enterprise was emphasised by the inclusion of several Dominican missionaries. Provision was also made for the limited purchase of artillery in the Isthmus of Panama and the award of twenty-five horses from the island of Jamaica and of thirty African slaves from the island of Cuba.