Peru—invading the Empire of the Sun

Meanwhile other conquistadors found an empire outclassing every El Dorado fantasy: Tahuantinsuyu, the Inca state.³² Its conquest brought more proceeds to Charles V than all the previous riches from America combined.

The Incas also possessed a rudimentary form of writing based on knots, the so-called quipu, which served as mnemonic devices. There were storehouses established along the main routes at regular intervals for the Inca army and posts for the messengers. One messenger was tasked with observing the street; as soon as he spotted a colleague, he hur­ried to meet him. Once they met they ran next to each other until the fresh messenger showed that he had understood the message exactly by repeating it several times. Then the new runner continued along the way, while the other one took up his post until the next carrier arrived. Errors in the transmission of messages were punished particularly severely by Inca administrators. There was no comparable messenger service in existence in Europe at that time; the Inca one is a testimony to the sophistication of the indigenous South American empire.³⁶

The conquest of Peru very clearly shows that the Spanish conquests in America were private actions.

What had been Pizarro’s plan? How was he to conquer an empire, fielding tens of thousands of soldiers, with such a small band of men? Clearly he took his cousin, Hernan Cortes, as his role model. From his experience, Pizarro knew that he somehow had to capture the ruler of the empire; though whether this high-risk strategy, in which Cortes had already almost failed, could really be called a ‘plan’ is an open question. Similar to Cortes, two circumstances proved favourable to Pizarro, unbeknownst to him. The first was the sporadic contacts of the Spaniards with the people of north-western South America, encounters frequent enough to bring on fatal epidemics among the indigenous people; not even members of the Incan upper class could escape. Secondly, war broke out over the succession of the throne in the central Inca Empire while Pizarro was biding his time on the Isla del Gallo.

Pizarro’s small troop of soldiers met Atahuallpa at a large military camp close to the town of Cajamarca. The Inca usurper felt safe, viewing the Spaniards as nothing more than marauding thieves. He agreed to talk to them, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps in order to intimidate them or to carry out plunder. They were told to await him—within eyeshot—in Cajamarca.40 The Incan entourage’s preparations for departure to Cajamarca took the whole morning of 16 November 1532—this must have seemed an eternity to the Spaniards, who probably did not get any sleep at all the night before because of the looming Inca superiority. Finally a seemingly endless procession of courtiers started its way towards the Spaniards. When they realised that the followers of Atahuallpa were generally unarmed, they could hardly believe that fate—or, as they would have said, God’s benefi­cence—had given such a chance to them. Pizarro hid his horsemen and bowmen in houses surrounding the main square of the town. So it happened that Atahuallpa, after he arrived in the afternoon, wondered where the Spaniards were. In fact, he only saw one, a priest, Father Valverde, standing on the main square holding a Bible.

Valverde began making a prepared speech to Atahuallpa, one written in 1513 by the court lawyer Juan Lopez de Palacios Rubios.⁴¹ This message was supposed to be read out loud before any hostility against Indians who had never before been in contact with Christians. The content of this requerimiento said that the Pope, as representative of God the Creator, was the Lord of the world. With his absolute power, the Pope gave the whole of America to the Spanish kings.

Pizarro thereupon gave the sign for attack: he waved a white cloth, shots were fired and horsemen jumped out of their ambushes and launched themselves into the crowd, massa­cring each and every one. Soldiers armed with iron swords made their way to Atahuallpa’s palanquin. The Incas began to panic and tried to flee the Spanish weaponry. As one soldier attacked Atahuallpa, Pizarro stopped the blow meant for him with his bare hand, screaming that he wanted the ruler alive. The Inca was dragged out of his palanquin and abducted.

This incident was followed by a dramatic farce. Although the Spaniards now held the most powerful man in the Americas as hostage, they feared that this could provoke his followers to attack them. And, what if the Incas found a new ruler and then crushed the Europeans like lice? Atahuallpa, for his part, quickly realised that he was soon going to lose power if he were kept a captive for longer. So he proposed to Pizarro to fill the room in which he was confined with gold as high as he could reach if the Spaniards would set him free. Two further rooms would be filled with silver. This promised an incredible bounty for the Spaniards—the most recent calculations show that Atahuallpa brought together five tonnes of gold on this occasion, more than the annual gold production in Europe at the time.⁴³ The Inca paid, but it did not help him. Quite the opposite. It was much too dan­gerous for most of the conquistadors to set a ruler free who had the power to bring out such a treasure even while he was in captivity.

The Spaniards now started occupying the most important Inca power centres and to take possession of the treasures that remained. They took the capital city of Cuzco and founded their own new cities, such as today’s Lima, which they first named Ciudad de los Reyes (City of the Kings). The early Spanish regency in the former Inca Empire, however, was not as easy as their overlordship had been in Mexico. There was not only a major Inca rebellion to suppress in 1536-1537, when the new Inca ruler Manco besieged the cities of Lima and Cuzco,⁴⁴ but also the conquistadors were fighting each other for years because Diego de Almagro felt disadvantaged by his partner Pizarro. After Pizarro’s partisans killed Almagro, the latter’s followers took revenge by killing Pizarro.⁴⁵ Yet Francisco Pizarro had several brothers who were just as bold as he was. The youngest, Gonzalo, later even rebelled against the Spanish Crown and ruled what are today’s Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile from 1544 to 1548 as an autonomous ruler, wearing the traditional Borla crown of the Inca.⁴⁶ For all these ventures the support of Indian troops, who entered into such alliances for their own strategic reasons, was vital to Spanish success.

Given that the Spanish Crown stopped believing in the possibilities of a peaceful rule of the overseas provinces by the gold-hungry conquistadors, they gradually sent faithful civil servants to Spanish America to build up a trustworthy administration. The highest authority for all administrative, political and judicial issues was the Real y Supremo Consejo de Indias (Royal and Supreme Council of the Indies), which answered only to the king. All matters concerning trade and shipping were administered by the Casa de Contratacion (House of Trade). Both institutions were located in Spain. Yet one problem was not solved by this arrangement: the conduits of communication were long and until a message from Spanish America reached Spain and instructions were sent back, months could pass. This handicap did not help in buttressing the power of the Spanish Crown in America. On the other hand, the king was indispensable in Europe. No Spanish king ever visited the overseas provinces; therefore royal representatives—viceroys—had been chosen, as was already the case in the Spanish territories on the Italian peninsula. A viceroy possessed comprehensive authority and acted in America as alter ego of the monarch. This meant that the king was (almost) really present through his viceroy. Initially, there were only two viceroys in Spanish America: one for New Spain and another for Peru; two further viceroyalties were established in the eighteenth century for New Granada (1739) and Rio de la Plata (1776).