The Last Days of the Incas (7 page)

The spectacular display had its desired effect. Although Cortés had risked conquering the Aztecs with no official permission, King Charles brushed that aside and marveled at everything he was shown, honoring the great conqueror by having Cortés sit beside him. The king then anointed Cortés with the title of marquis, named him Captain-General of Mexico, granted him an estate of 23,000 Aztec vassals, and also granted him percent of all future profits derived from his conquests. At one stroke of the royal scepter, Cortés officially became one of the richest men in Europe as well as one of the most famous. Now, after having secured royal patronage, Cortés and his conquest would also be safe from the predations of other Spaniards.

With the visit of Cortés fresh in his mind, King Charles gave Pizarro a friendly reception. Although it had taken him thirty years, Pizarro had clearly moved up in the world, for now the former peasant from Extremadura was having an audience with one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. Soon to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, King Charles V was not only the monarch of the kingdoms of Spain, but was also the ruler of the Netherlands, parts of what are now Austria and Germany, the kingdoms of the two Sicilies, an assortment of islands in the Caribbean, the Isthmus of Panama, and—with Cortés’s recent conquest—Mexico. Before the king and his court, Pizarro brought out the llamas, the native clothing, vessels, pottery, and other goods and then described what he and his men had seen in this recently explored part of the world—the well-ordered city of Tumbez, its buildings, its inhabitants, the intricately cut stones, and especially the interior walls lined with glimmering sheets of gold. The normally taciturn conquistador apparently made a good sales pitch, for in July 1529 while the king was on his way to his coronation, Queen Isabella
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signed a
capitulación
, or royal license, granting Pizarro the exclusive right
to conquer the unexplored land of Peru. The queen, however, made it very clear exactly what was expected from him:

It was an excellent contract, as good as Pizarro could have hoped for, and was duly notarized, signed, sealed, and delivered. The queen had made it clear, however, that in terms of financing, Pizarro was for the most part completely on his own. Since Pizarro was the co-CEO of the Company of the Levant, it was up to him and his partners to raise the capital to buy the means of production with which to carry out their corporation’s specialty: plunder. Ships, guns, knives, swords, daggers, lances, horses, gunpowder, provisions—all the accoutrements needed to bring a native empire to its knees—would have to be supplied by the conquistadors
themselves, just as they had supplied them during previous expeditions.

Pizarro, having formed a company, having found what he hoped would be a native empire, and having secured a royal license, nevertheless needed further help. What was crucial at this point was finding a large group of young, stout, and well-armed entrepreneurs who would be willing to travel to the New World with him and who would follow his orders. There could be no better place to find them than in Extremadura; thus, after meeting with the king, Pizarro traveled to his native town of Trujillo in order to recruit a fresh batch of conquistadors.

Pizarro had little trouble finding them, for it seemed that every young Spaniard wanted to take part in what must have seemed at the time to be the modern equivalent of a hot, new IPO. Who in this impoverished region of dry land and thin crops wouldn’t drop everything if he had a reasonable chance of acquiring instant wealth and of retiring to a great, New World estate—or of bringing that wealth home? In Trujillo, Pizarro gathered up his four half-brothers: twenty-nine-year-old Hernando, eighteen-year-old Juan, seventeen-year-old Gonzalo, and sixteen-year-old Francisco Martín. The five brothers would soon form the core of the enterprise; throughout the coming years they would remain a tight, loyal band of brothers, no matter how difficult and formidable the circumstances would become.

According to some accounts, not long after his presentation at court, rich now with titles and rewards, Hernando Cortés met with Pizarro. Thus, for a brief moment in time, the trajectories of the two men who would each conquer an empire intertwined. What was said between the two? No record of their conversation exists. But it is likely that the fabulously wealthy Cortés gave advice to his older and equally ambitious kinsman, and that after the meeting the latter was even more determined to repeat in Peru what Cortés had wrought in Mexico.

At last, in January of 1530 and with a flotilla of would-be conquistadors—none of whom had any experience in the New World—Pizarro set sail from Seville. Nearly three years would pass before in November of 1532 he and his four brothers would finally find themselves marching with 163 other Spaniards high up in the Andes, the air growing colder and sharper, on their way to a fateful meeting with Atahualpa, the great lord of Peru.

WHEN IN APRIL OF 1532 FRANCISCO PIZARRO ARRIVED
within view of the Inca city of Tumbez, ready to begin his attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Peru, he was startled by how dramatically the city had changed since his last visit. Four years earlier, Tumbez had been an orderly city with a thousand dwellings and well-appointed buildings of finely cut stones. Now, however, the city lay in ruins. Walls had been pulled down, houses destroyed, and much of the population seemed to have disappeared. What in God’s name had transpired?

The embalmed body of the emperor Huayna Capac, killed by European-introduced smallpox, being carried by native bearers to Cuzco in a royal litter.

As Pizarro wandered about the ruined city and asked
questions
of its dazed inhabitants, he relied on his interpreters, Felipillo and Martinillo, the native boys whom he had taught to speak Spanish. Through his interpreters he began to slowly piece together the story of what had happened, although many of the details would take years to uncover.

When Pizarro first arrived in Tumbez in 1528, the Inca Empire was ruled by a powerful emperor named Huayna Capac. At this particular moment in their history, the Incas had been carrying out a military campaign in the area that is now Ecuador, pacifying a local uprising against Inca rule.
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The Incas themselves were a relatively small ethnic group that hailed from a region far to the south, in the valley of Cuzco. For a two-hundred-year period, roughly from to
A.D.
1200 to 1400, the Incas had gradually been consolidating their power in the Cuzco basin, conquering or intermarrying with their neighbors and slowly developing a small state. Then, beginning in the early 1400s, the Incas suddenly launched a series of protracted military adventures, conquering tribes across the Andes and on the coast. Their martial and organizational abilities were obviously exceptional, for within the space of some sixty years the Incas had—like a supernova exploding in the heart of the Andes—transformed their tiny kingdom originally measuring perhaps less than one hundred miles in diameter into an immense empire stretching for thousands of miles.

The empire stitched together by the Incas—who as an ethnic group never numbered more than one hundred thousand individuals—was, however, only the latest in a long series of kingdoms and empires that had risen and fallen in the Andes and on the coast for more than a thousand years. Sometime between 12,500 to 15,000 years ago, the first people had arrived in South America. Their ancestors presumably had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge and had worked their way down through North and Central America. The continent was still in the grips of the last ice age, and for the next three thousand years or so men and women made a living from hunting and gathering while using a variety of stone tools. As the ice age slowly retreated, the fauna and flora gradually changed and then, around 8,000
B.C
., the first evidence of agriculture appeared—archaeologists have found the remnants of cultivated potatoes in what is now northern
Bolivia. Eventually, during a five-thousand-year period between 8,000 and 3,000
B.C.,
people in what is now Peru learned to domesticate both animals (llamas and alpacas) and food crops (potatoes, corn, quinoa, beans, peppers, squash, guava, etc.), abandoned the hunting and gathering lifestyle, and settled in permanent villages and towns. As more food was produced, local populations increased. And then something odd began occurring on the coast.

Peru’s coastal plain is a narrow strip of land about 1,400 miles long and averaging less than fifty miles wide, hemmed in on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the east by the Andes. It is extremely dry along most of its length, and in many areas rain doesn’t fall for years at a time. The desert strip is penetrated, however, by more than thirty river valleys that carry water from the Andes down to the Pacific. In these valleys both fertile soil and water are abundant—prime real estate for the first agriculturalists. The Humboldt Current, meanwhile, which sweeps northward along the coast, is also one of the richest seas in the world for fish. Beginning in about 3200
B.C.,
—roughly during the same period when the Egyptians were building their first pyramids—people on Peru’s northern coast began building terraced mounds alongside large plazas, ceremonial architecture, and large-scale settlements. The unusual thing about these people is that they farmed little and instead relied upon fish from the sea. In certain lowland coastal valleys, meanwhile, other groups who
did
farm began building their own large settlements and urban architecture.

Fast forward another three thousand years and the gradual process of population growth, competition for arable land, an erratic climate, advances in food production, and the conquest of adjacent river valleys led to the formation of the first state, or kingdom, that of the Moche (
A.D
100–800) on Peru’s northern coast.
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Life for the Moche kingdom’s inhabitants was quite different from the lifestyle of the first farmers, who by now had existed for thousands of years in Peru. The latter, for example, had originally produced only enough seed for their own use as food and for planting the following growing season. In general, they paid no taxes and were beholden to no one. By the time the first kingdoms arose, however, farmers were now required to produce a surplus of food or labor over and above their
personal needs. They were then required to relinquish that surplus in order to support a ruler and an emerging upper class. Over thousands of years, on different parts of the coast and in different areas of the Andes, a growing number of Peru’s inhabitants had gradually become peasants, or taxpayers, a new class of human being. “Civilization” had thus begun, which in its incipient form can be defined as the development of a complex social order based upon the division of labor between rulers and food-producing cultivators. Here, amid the barren deserts of Peru and high up in the Andes, a revolution had taken place, one that would form the basis of every subsequent Peruvian civilization to come. Small groups of people, or elites, had gained control over much larger masses of people.