The Last Days of the Incas (54 page)

The Battle of Jaquijahuana, as it was later called, was ultimately decided, however, not military but politically. At the critical hour most of Gonzalo’s men—many of whom had been secretly offered pardons by the king’s new representative—deserted and went over to the royalist side. Stubborn, impetuous, and brave, Gonzalo refused to flee, however, even though he knew that if he were captured he was likely to be executed. Instead, once it was obvious that he had been defeated, the veteran conquistador calmly walked his horse over to the royalist forces and surrendered.
The following day, “they sentenced him to be beheaded, and ordered that his head should be displayed in a frame that was made for the purpose and hung on the royal gallows of the city of Los Reyes.” The thirty-six-year-old Pizarro, who for three and a half years had tasted the power only kings normally enjoyed, looked around for the last time at the country that he had helped conquer, then laid his head quietly against a wooden block. An executioner now lifted a steel axe high, then brought it down, neatly separating the bearded man’s head from his body, so that it rolled heavily onto the ground. Later, in his brother’s City of the Kings, the head of the most handsome of the Pizarros was

Some sixteen years after arriving in the New World, the last of the four Pizarro brothers to lose his life in Peru was now dead. Together, he and his brothers had beaten the odds by conquering a fabulously wealthy native empire with only the tiniest of military forces. Yet, ultimately, they had unleashed in the process a powerful native rebellion and then their own civil war—and had died amidst the chaos they had created. Yet the Pizarros’ taste of wealth and power was short-lived. Francisco Pizarro’s reign in Peru, after all, had lasted roughly eight years, a good portion of which had been taken up by Manco Inca’s rebellion; Gonzalo, meanwhile, had ruled his brother’s kingdom for just three and a half years—a period of constant and bloody turmoil. On the day that Gonzalo Pizarro was executed, in fact, only one of the Pizarro brothers, Hernando, was still alive. And he would remain in prison for another thirteen years. Meanwhile, as the king’s men in Cuzco salted the earth surrounding Gonzalo’s palace and hung up a placard for all to read—
that here dwelled the traitor and rebel Gonzalo Pizarro
—far to the north, in the tiny rebel kingdom of Vilcabamba, the Incas watched and listened—and patiently bided their time.

IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING THE ASSASSINATION OF MANCO
Inca and the execution of Gonzalo Pizarro, Spain’s control of the Incas’ former empire of Tawantinsuyu gradually increased as a succession of governors, administrators, and other Spaniards continued to pour into the distant colony, so far removed from their homeland. The enterprise of conquest that had been launched by a small, independent group of entrepreneurs—many of whom later became
encomenderos
—had by now been taken over by their mother country, whose tentacles of control continued to multiply, swell, and to wrap themselves around the new resource. In 1532 the Inca Empire, with roughly ten million inhabitants, had been faced with an invasion by a mere 168 Spaniards. Four years later, when Manco Inca rose in revolt, some 1,500 Spaniards were present in different corners of the empire, of whom Manco was able to exterminate less than 15 percent. By the time of Manco’s death in 1544, the number of Spaniards had grown to roughly five thousand, and these had imported some two to three thousand African slaves to help with the process of colonization. By 1560, less than twenty years later, the Spanish population had doubled once again to ten thousand while the African slave population had doubled to five thousand. Peru, meanwhile,
continued to be
administered by a viceroy under the supervision of the Spanish crown.

The final Inca emperor, Tupac Amaru, being led out of Vilcabamba in chains.

As more and more Spaniards poured into Peru, they continued to construct cities and towns and to supervise the extraction of precious metals, the cultivation of crops, and the collection of tribute. The much larger native population, meanwhile, labored on, having exchanged one master, the Incas, for another, the Christian
viracochas.
The exchange wasn’t an equal one, however, as the natives who now paid tribute to the Spaniards had far fewer rights, paid far greater tribute, and received far less than they had while under the control of the Inca elite. In fact, the native inhabitants of Tawantinsuyu now received virtually nothing from their new overlords—the roughly five hundred Spanish
encomenderos
who made up a mere 5 percent of the total Spanish population in Peru. Wrote one observer:

Wrote another:

As the natives continued to herd their flocks, to till the land and to work in the mines, they delivered the surplus they produced directly to the new Spanish elite, who in turn used at least a portion of these raw materials to purchase manufactured goods from Spain. The
encomenderos
also used the money derived from their native tribute to purchase more African slaves and to buy products or services from the various Spanish merchants,
doctors, lawyers, notaries, and artisans who had followed them into Peru. As under the Incas, the entire colonial superstructure was predicated upon a foundation of endlessly toiling native workers—the control of which was the original motivation for the Spanish conquest of Peru.

Far to the east of the coastal cities with their tall-masted ships now noisily off-loading and on-loading passengers and goods, far beyond the central Andes with their new Spanish colonial towns and their majestic white peaks, and down amidst the remote jungles to the east, the independent Inca kingdom of Vilcabamba continued to carry on. Here, amid the warm, moist forests laced with troops of chattering monkeys, the inhabitants of Vilcabamba continued their traditional practice of worshipping the sun god, or Inti, and his representative on earth, the
Sapa Inca
, or Unique Emperor.

Theirs was a tiny kingdom, to be sure, nothing more than a small collection of tropical valleys, remote mountains, and a handful of towns and cities. Still, within these isolated confines Inca temples continued to be cared for by the
mamaconas
, or “virgins of the sun,” traditional festivals continued to be held, astronomical observations made, obeisances given, sacrifices offered, and the life-sized, golden
punchao
, or golden disk of the sun, continued to be removed from its temple every morning and at night laid back to rest. While the original empire of “the four parts united”—the immense Tawantinsuyu—was no longer under the control of a free Inca emperor, the tiny kingdom of Vilcabamba continued to contain within it the blueprint of that much larger Inca state. All that was needed for expansion was that the Andes and coast be wiped clear of the bearded white foreigners and their slaves.

In 1559, some fifteen years after the death of Manco Inca, King Charles died in Spain after a reign of forty years. Now his son, Philip II, was king. Similarly, in 1560, Manco’s son Titu Cusi—whose twin names mean “magnanimous” and “fortunate”—was crowned emperor of the Incas. Although Titu Cusi’s brother and predecessor, Sayri-Tupac, had inherited the throne after Manco’s death, Sayri-Tupac had been only nine years old at the time. Thus Vilcabamba had been ruled by regents for a dozen years. When Sayri-Tupac was finally crowned at the age of twenty-two, however, he made the fateful decision of leaving Vilcabamba and returning to Cuzco, where he had been promised by the Spaniards a number of
encomiendas
and a life of relative ease. By that time Manco’s brother Paullu Inca had died of natural
causes in Cuzco; thus, for the first time in decades, no longer did two competing Inca emperors wear the royal fringe. Only a year after relocating to Cuzco, however, Sayri-Tupac had fallen ill and had died, possibly having been poisoned by a jealous native chief. The question now was: who would succeed him?

Much to the disappointment of the Spaniards, Titu Cusi inherited the throne, resuming rule over the remote Inca kingdom that the Spaniards thought they had finally stripped of its emperor. Even worse, the new emperor had every reason to hold a grudge against them: the Spaniards had, after all, murdered his father, Manco Inca, and had kidnapped both Titu Cusi and his mother in Vitcos.
^*
For four years, the boy who would eventually become a king had lived in Cuzco, where he no doubt had later seen his captor Diego Orgóñez’s head on display. Eventually, Titu Cusi and his mother somehow managed to escape from Cuzco and fled to Vilcabamba. Some years later, Titu Cusi was at his father’s side when his father was assassinated; the young prince was only fourteen years old at the time yet would bear on his leg the scars of that attack until the day he died. When Titu Cusi was finally crowned in Vilcabamba in 1560 at the age of thirty, the heads of the seven Spaniards who had murdered his father were still on display in nearby Vitcos, where the assassination had taken place.

^*
Although Titu Cusi’s father was Manco Inca, his mother was not Manco’s
coya
, Cura Ocllo, but one of Manco’s many concubines.

A heavyset, emotional man who some observers said bore scars, possibly of smallpox, on his face, Titu Cusi wasted no time in resuming the guerrilla war with the Spaniards that his father had begun but that had lapsed during the time of the regents. Soon, along the Cuzco–Jauja road, and in the area of Huamanga to the northwest of Cuzco, native guerrilla forces once again began launching a series of raids against Spanish travelers and settlements. According to one chronicler, Titu Cusi

The new emperor was soon linked as well to deadly rebellions that erupted in what is now Chile and to a plot near Jauja, in central Peru, where the Spaniards discovered a secret native weapons factory that had produced tens of thousands of clubs, battle-axes, and pikes. The weapons, apparently, had been carefully prepared for use against the Spaniards in a planned insurrection. Whether Titu Cusi was actually involved in the Jauja plot, under his rule Vilcabamba once again became a guerrilla sanctuary—the sixteenth-century equivalent of a modern-day state that foments rebellion and exports terror for political ends. The Spaniards, of course, had waged their own campaign of terror and brutality in order to conquer the Inca Empire. Now, a tiny remnant of that empire continued to fight back, resisting the Spanish invasion and the occupation of their land. Eventually, the Spanish government in Peru—receiving increasing reports of attacks—realized that it had no other choice but to neutralize or destroy both Titu Cusi and his Inca kingdom.

Peru’s Spanish government soon sent a series of emissaries to the new emperor, offering him rich
encomiendas
if he would only abandon Vilcabamba and relocate to the Yucay Valley near Cuzco. Fully aware of the fact that his kingdom didn’t possess enough warriors to repel a serious Spanish invasion, Titu spent years expertly negotiating with the Spaniards, always offering the Spaniards hope that he might at any moment accept their terms, yet inevitably refusing to follow through in the end. In the meantime, he made sure that no Spaniards other than occasional emissaries were allowed into the kingdom.