The Last Days of the Incas (23 page)

Thus it was that on November 14, 1533, Captains Juan Pizarro and Hernando de Soto and their forty fully armored cavalry found themselves approaching the outskirts of the Incas’ capital of Cuzco. The road to the city was blocked by the combined forces of the central and southern armies, however, which had somehow managed to join with each other. Completely outnumbered, the Spaniards nevertheless decided immediately to attack—a tactic that they by now relied upon almost instinctively. Whenever in danger, the Spaniards’ natural reflex was to charge directly at whatever they perceived to be their largest threat. It was a strategy that thus far in the Andes had brought repeated success.

The native warriors, “in the greatest numbers … came out against us with an enormous shout and much determination,” wrote Miguel de Estete. With their backs against the city and the experienced General Quisquis in charge, the northern army fought fiercely, driving the Spaniards back in an onslaught of sling-fired stones, arrows, and battering mace clubs. “They killed three of our horses, including my own, and that had
cost me 1,600
castellanos
,” wrote the notary Juan Ruiz de Arce, “and they wounded many Christians.”
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Protected by their armor and fighting from their mobile platforms, however, the Spaniards exacted a tremendous toll; hundreds of natives fell that day in fighting that continued until late in the afternoon with human limbs and no doubt even heads lying on the ground after having been severed with sharpened steel. The Spaniards, by comparison, with stones and mace heads bouncing off their steel armor, no doubt received wounds, but they didn’t suffer a single mortality; fighting on fairly level ground, they were able to rely alternately upon the battering ram effect of their horses and also upon their horses’ greater speed. If one Spaniard were in trouble, others on horseback would charge toward him. If the Spaniards needed to escape a difficult situation, then they spurred their horses and were able to outrun even the fastest of native warriors. Late that day, Francisco Pizarro and the rest of his troops arrived, but only after the Spanish cavalry force and Quisquis’s troops had ceased their fighting. With darkness now falling, the Inca and Spanish forces camped within sight of each other, the native campfires illuminating a nearby hillside. Wrote Sancho de la Hoz:

“We began marching towards the city,” wrote Ruiz de Arce, now forced to walk after the loss of his horse, “with a lot of fear, thinking that the Indians were waiting for us at its entrance. And so we … entered the city, which [no longer] had
defenders.” Apparently realizing that on level ground his native troops, although numerous, were no match for the mounted Spaniards, General Quisquis had decided to save his army to fight another day. Just after midnight, Quisquis had given the order for his troops to retreat and to give up the fight for Cuzco. They did so quietly, leaving their campfires lit behind them to fool the Spaniards into thinking that they were still there. The next day, at around noon, the Spaniards marched victoriously into the city. “The Governor and his troops entered that great city of Cuzco,” wrote Sancho de la Hoz, “without any other resistance or battle on Friday, at the hour of high Mass, on the fifteenth day of the month of November of the year of the birth of our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ, 1533.”

As the Spaniards marched and rode cautiously in full battle order, the city’s inhabitants turned out onto the stone paved streets to watch them. It had only been that morning that the surprised citizens had learned that the northern army from Quito, which had occupied the city for the last year, had suddenly melted away and was now nowhere to be found. The citizens already knew, of course, that Atahualpa—the emperor whose generals had seized the capital and had killed their ruler, Huascar—was dead and had been executed by the same group of foreigners who were now entering their city. More than a few of them were surprised, however, to see Manco Inca, the young prince who most of them had not seen in a year, walking with the strange bearded men and surrounded by giant animals that made guttural noises and that none of the city’s inhabitants had ever seen before. Manco was obviously very much alive and through his behavior and speech the young prince made it known that the foreigners were friendly, not dangerous, and that they were to be treated as honored guests. For the weary inhabitants of Cuzco, the sudden disappearance of the hated northern army came as a relief. The question no doubt uppermost in their minds now, however, was—who were these strangers and why had they come?

For Pizarro and his men, their entry into the capital was a military triumph, the culmination of a long and difficult journey that had begun nearly three years earlier, when they had first set off from Panama. And although the Spaniards may not have been welcomed on this, their first day, with the Inca equivalent of rose petals, clearly their strategy of allying themselves with Huascar’s faction and of presenting themselves as liberators, not as occupiers, was so far paying dividends. The city’s inhabitants stood quietly
in the streets, well dressed in colorfully patterned cotton or alpaca tunics and with sandals on their feet. None of them appeared to be carrying weapons. To their relief, the Spaniards found that not a single sword had to be unsheathed nor a single harquebus ball fired. For the rank-and-file conquistador, their unopposed march into the finest city any of them had ever seen in the New World seemed nothing short of miraculous. “The Spaniards who have taken part in this enterprise are amazed by what they have done,” wrote Sancho de la Hoz. “When they begin to think about it, they can’t imagine how they can still be alive or how they were able to survive such hardships and such long periods of hunger.” “We entered [the city] without meeting resistance,” wrote Miguel de Estete, “for the natives received us with goodwill.”

In all, only six Spaniards had lost their lives on the six-hundred-mile, three-month-long journey from Cajamarca to Cuzco; by contrast, the Spaniards had probably killed several thousand native warriors.

Seventeen-year-old Manco Inca, too, was happy. Ever since Cuzco had been captured by Atahualpa’s forces and Huascar seized and taken north as a prisoner, Manco had been in fear for his life. After most of his brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, and the rest of his family had been rounded up and exterminated, Manco, a fugitive, must have known that he, too, would probably suffer a similar fate. No one, therefore, could have been more surprised than Manco that his brother Atahualpa had been killed, that the powerful Quitan army had been suddenly expelled from Cuzco, or that this small but powerful band of foreigners had arrived and wanted to place him on the throne. Now, with these fierce, light-skinned
viracochas
by his side, Manco suddenly found himself plucked from relative obscurity and placed alongside the Spaniards at the very pinnacle of power. To Manco, the long black period of the Quitan occupation appeared finally to be over.

Pizarro, meanwhile, was quick to consolidate his latest military triumph. Since General Quisquis’s army could still mount a counterattack, Pizarro ordered his troops to quarter themselves in the larger of Cuzco’s two main squares. He then commanded those with horses to keep their mounts ready at all times, day and night, in case of an Inca assault on the city. Not one to waste time, Pizarro also informed Manco the day after his arrival in Cuzco that the latter would soon become the new Inca emperor, for as Sancho de la Hoz described,

Pizarro instinctively understood both power and politics; he therefore tried to forestall any local resistance to the Spaniards’ authority from developing by making it appear that he had granted full sovereignty to Manco, which of course Pizarro had no intention of doing. Well aware that the Spaniards were too few in number to control a vast empire and that they would need native allies, Pizarro urged Manco to quickly begin recruiting an army. With a native army they could control, the Spaniards would more easily be able to crush insurrections and would also be able to rid the country of Atahualpa’s two remaining armies. Manco was only too happy to oblige, as raising an army would not only increase his own power but would also allow him to exact vengeance on the hated General Quisquis, who had exterminated nearly his entire family.

Manco soon departed from the capital in a campaign against General Quisquis, along with Hernando de Soto, fifty Spanish cavalry, and ten thousand native warriors. Together, the combined Spanish-Inca assault inflicted enough damage on Quisquis’s forces that both the general’s officers and peasant conscripts finally decided that they had had enough. Having been away from their homes now for nearly two years, the troops eventually forced their proud general to begin the long, thousand-mile retreat northward back to Quito.

With General Quisquis on the run, Manco wasted little time in preparing for his coronation, first retiring to the mountains for the traditional three-day fast, and then returning to Cuzco for his crowning as emperor.

According to Xerez: “They then received him as their lord with
great respect and kissed his hand and cheek and, turning their faces to the Sun, they gave thanks to it, holding their hands together and saying that it had given them a natural lord…. They then placed a richly-woven fringe on him, tied around his head … which almost reached the eyes and that is the equivalent of a crown among them.”
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Manco’s coronation was unfurling in a city that not only had served as the capital of the ethnic group known as the Incas for hundreds of years, but that also housed its previous divine emperors, each carefully mummified and clothed and kept in his respective temple along with his attendants. Here dwelled the great Huayna Capac—the father of Manco, Atahualpa, and Huascar—felled presumably by smallpox after he had conquered the province of what is now Ecuador; here, too, rested Tupac Inca Yupanqui, whose legions had conquered a thousand miles of what is now Chile and who had pushed the already massive frontiers of the empire eastward into the Amazon; here resided the great Pachacuti, the Alexander the Great of Tawantinsuyu, the ruler whose grand vision had transformed a once small kingdom into a vast, polyglot empire. Here, too, dwelled a host of even earlier rulers who had governed the small, primordial Inca kingdom, long before their descendants had seized control of the resources of much of western South America.
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The presence at Manco’s coronation of his ancestors’ mummies—still venerated as gods by the empire’s inhabitants—was the Spaniards’ first real glimpse of the Incas’ ancestor cult, a tradition common to native South American cultures. The sight of the dead emperors’ shriveled remains being consulted by the living must have horrified
the Dominican friar, Vincente de Valverde, who undoubtedly perceived the Incas consorting with their dead as the work of the devil. Nevertheless, the Spaniards watched the ceremonies for Manco’s coronation—attended by a retinue of dead Inca emperors—with what could only have been a mixture of both awe and disgust. In the words of the chronicler Miguel de Estete: