The Last Days of the Incas (27 page)

Cuzco’s former lieutenant governor, Hernando de Soto, now prepared to depart from Peru as well. Unsuccessful in his attempt to accompany Almagro’s expedition as second-in-command, Soto left Cuzco with a pack train carrying a fortune in gold and silver ingots, intent on finding passage on the next ship headed toward Spain. The dashing cavalry officer who had led the Spanish advance down the Andes would now leave Peru forever. Once in Spain, Soto would use his share of Inca treasure to win a royal license to conquer the little known land of Florida. Soto hoped to find and conquer an Indian empire there—similar to the ones Cortés and Pizarro had already discovered—and to rule over it as governor. Eight years later, however, after having wandered and fought his way for three years through what are now Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Mississippi, Soto would die destitute and delirious on the banks of the Mississippi River, which he was the first European to discover. The man who had befriended two Inca emperors—and who had lanced and ridden his way through Peru and had found wealth beyond his wildest dreams—was ultimately consigned to the same river, which carried his rag-covered and emaciated body gently downstream. He was forty-two years old at the time.

With Francisco Pizarro, Almagro, Soto, and most of the recently arrived Spaniards gone, the city of Cuzco was now left in the hands of Manco Inca and Pizarro’s two younger brothers, Juan and Gonzalo. Although twenty-four-year-old Juan Pizarro had a reputation for being impetuous, he nevertheless was popular among the rank-and-file conquistadors. An excellent horseman, Juan had become a captain at the age of twenty-two and had ridden with Soto in the cavalry vanguard down the Andes. In the absence of Soto and Almagro, Francisco had appointed Juan as the new
corregidor
, or lieutenant governor, of the city.

One year younger than Juan and thirty-five years younger than his brother Francisco, Gonzalo Pizarro was tall, graceful, black-bearded, extremely handsome—and had a reputation as a womanizer. The twenty-three-year-old was also a “fine horseman and … a great shot with the harquebus,” wrote sixteenth-century historian Agustín de Zárate. Though illiterate, “he expressed himself well although with great vulgarity.” Gonzalo, however, suffered from a tendency to view other Spaniards
either as good friends or bitter enemies. It was a decidedly negative characteristic that would ultimately deeply affect the history of both the Pizarros and Peru. Unlike Juan, who was the only Pizarro who had a reputation for being generous, Gonzalo was also known as the stingiest member of a family already infamous for its parsimony.

With Cuzco now in the hands of the two young Pizarro firebrands, and the ameliorating influence of Francisco Pizarro having disappeared, the relationship between the Spaniards in the city and its native inhabitants not surprisingly began to deteriorate. The Spanish citizens of Cuzco, well aware that Manco’s brother, Atahualpa, had collected a stupendous amount of treasure, were convinced that Manco must know the location of more gold and silver. They soon began pressuring the young emperor to divulge its whereabouts. For a while, Manco did his best to give the Spaniards what they asked for, revealing cache after cache of gold and silver figurines, statues, and other objects. The more he revealed, however, the more the Spaniards clamored for more. “As the greed of men is so great,” Manco’s son Titu Cusi later commented, “it controlled them to such an extent that … one after the other they came to pester my father and to try and take from him [even] more silver and gold than had already been taken.”

The Spaniards, however, weren’t interested in only the power, the status, and the life of ease that gold and silver provided—they were interested in satisfying their sexual desires as well. From the moment of their arrival in Peru, in fact, the Spaniards had eagerly pursued native women. Since both the Inca and Spanish societies made a clear distinction between nobles and commoners, however, many of the Spanish leaders insisted on taking native mistresses only from the Inca royalty. Francisco Pizarro, for example, a fiftysix-year-old bachelor who had never married, soon took a daughter of the emperor Huayna Capac, whom he called Inés, as his mistress. Even the squat and ugly Almagro—fifty-nine years old and with one eye reduced to a pink pulp—began to sleep with a beautiful, royal-blooded sister of Manco Inca, called Marcachimbo,

Since these particular Inca women were unmarried, their becoming the mistresses of the Spaniards apparently did not unduly bother the Inca elite. When Gonzalo Pizarro started taking an interest in Manco Inca’s young and beautiful wife, Cura Ocllo, however, the twenty-three-year-old Pizarro quickly discovered that his advances completely scandalized Inca society. Impetuous, arrogant, and with no existing law or authority in Peru to rein in his more outlandish impulses, Gonzalo did as he pleased. More and more, he treated Manco Inca and the rest of the native elite with contempt, insisting that the Inca emperor give him even more gold and silver
and
give up his wife. When a high-ranking Inca general rebuked Gonzalo for coveting the emperor’s wife, Gonzalo turned on him, his face flushing, grabbed the hilt of his sword, and threatened to kill the man on the spot.

Although the Inca nobility, not the peasantry, was polygamous, every emperor, chief, or noble nevertheless had a “principal wife.” The latter was a woman with whom a ritual marriage ceremony had been performed and who had a guaranteed and permanent status. Additional wives, by contrast, were called “secondary wives,” or concubines. In the case of certain emperors, such as Huayna Capac, the concubines numbered in the thousands. Only children born of the principal wife had the “purest” blood and hence were deemed legitimate. Those born of a concubine were
considered illegitimate. While members of the Incas’ high aristocracy were allowed to marry their half-sisters, only the emperor himself was allowed to marry his full sister. Once married, she became the
coya
, or queen, thus preserving the purity of the royal blood lineage. Cura Ocllo, therefore, was both Manco’s principal wife
and
his full sister. It was thus inconceivable that anyone else in the empire, let alone a foreigner, should dare to ask the emperor to give up his queen. That twenty-three-year-old Gonzalo Pizarro did so shocked not only the Inca elite, but also Manco Inca.

Hoping to placate the brother of the powerful Francisco Pizarro, however, Manco ordered that a large quantity of gold and silver be gathered. He soon arranged for it to be delivered and personally accompanied it to Gonzalo’s palace. “Come on, Mr. Manco Inca,” Gonzalo is said to have exclaimed, examining the treasure with interest yet not forgetting his demand, “let’s have the lady
coya.
All this silver is good, but [she] is what we really want.”

Recognizing how serious Gonzalo was, Manco now became desperate. Having already had to suffer the humiliation of hiding in Almagro’s bedroom to escape assassination, having had his palace ransacked, and presently being harassed on a daily basis for more gold and silver, Manco was now being ordered to hand over his very own wife and sister to an arrogant foreigner. Searching for a way out of his dilemma, Manco finally hit upon a seemingly reasonable solution: how about giving Gonzalo a beautiful woman other than his
coya
? An Inca woman even more beautiful than his queen? Recalled Manco’s son Titu Cusi:

Not willing to give up, Manco assembled twenty more beautiful women, hoping that Gonzalo would choose one or more of them and would eventually forget about his wife. Gonzalo, however, showed no interest;
he insisted even more vehemently on possessing only the Inca queen. With mounting desperation, Manco finally sent for another of his sisters, Inguill, who resembled his wife closely. Making sure that she was dressed and coiffed identically to his
coya
, Manco led his latest decoy out to the Spaniards. The emperor then pretended to be dismayed that he had finally been forced to relinquish his very own queen. “When the Spaniards saw her come out … so elegant and beautiful, they shouted with much enthusiasm and joy, ‘Yes, she’s the one, she’s the one. She is the Lady
coya
—and not the others.’”

Gonzalo Pizarro, completely obsessed with having no other woman than the queen of the Incas, by this time could scarcely restrain himself. In Titu Cusi’s recounting:

In the end, however, the deception didn’t last. Gonzalo eventually realized that he had been deceived, then discarded the sister and seized Manco’s wife as his own. “Gonzalo Pizarro … took my wife,” Manco later said bitterly, “and [still] has her.”

If Manco still had any doubts about the price he had to pay in order to become the emperor of the Incas, those doubts were soon accentuated when the high priest, Villac Umu, unexpectedly arrived back in Cuzco. Manco had sent Villac Umu to accompany his brother Paullu on Almagro’s expedition to the south. Yet three months into that expedition Villac Umu had escaped; he now regaled Manco with horror stories of
all that he had witnessed. Everywhere they had gone, Villac Umu recounted, the Spaniards had been consumed with finding objects of gold and silver. If the local chiefs didn’t immediately produce what they demanded, then the Spaniards treated them with brutality. Even if gold and silver were produced, the Spaniards nevertheless demanded that the native villagers accompany the expedition as servants. “Those [natives] who did not want to go voluntarily with them [the Spaniards] were taken along bound in ropes and chains,” wrote Cristóbal de Molina, a young priest who had accompanied the expedition.

Even the native porters Manco had provided Almagro with, the high priest explained, were routinely treated in a violent fashion.

Disgusted by what he had seen, Villac Umu had escaped from the expedition in what is now southern Bolivia, and then had hurried back to Cuzco. Not long afterward, all the remaining servants and porters Manco had sent along with Almagro abandoned the expedition as well, leaving the Spaniards to fend for themselves. Nevertheless, Almagro and his men would continue on into what is now Chile, pillaging native towns and killing
any who resisted their demands. The Spaniards soon began suffering numerous deaths of their own, however, due to the freezing mountain passes they had to cross and also due to frequent attacks by increasingly hostile natives.

Coinciding with Villac Umu’s graphic descriptions and with Manco’s own recent humiliations, various reports began gradually filtering in from other areas of Tawantinsuyu of gross mistreatment by the Spaniards. Natives who had attractive sisters, daughters, or wives, it was said, now had to begin hiding them from the bearded foreigners, “for no woman who was good-looking was safe [even] with her husband [around and] it would be a miracle if she escaped from the Spaniards.” Everywhere the Spaniards went, the anger of the natives “was smoldering and this was because the Spaniards were not satisfied with the service of the natives but tried to rob them in every town. In many areas the Indians would not put up with this and began to rise up and to organize themselves for their defense. The Spaniards certainly went too far in their abuse of them.”