VERTICAL EMPIRE

The General Resettlement of Indians in the Colonial AndesBy Jeremy Ravi Mumford

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5296-9

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………..ixIntroduction…………………………………..11. The Cities………………………………….132. The Mountains……………………………….273. The Grid……………………………………414. Lords………………………………………535. “That So-Qualified Assembly”………………….756. The Viceroy…………………………………857. Tyrants…………………………………….998. On the Ground……………………………….1199. In and Out of the Reducciones…………………14310. Four Hundred Years………………………….157Epilogue………………………………………175Appendix………………………………………187Notes…………………………………………197Glossary………………………………………255Bibliography…………………………………..259Index…………………………………………285

Chapter One

THE CITIES

At the center of Cuzco, capital of the Inca empire, was Hawkaypata, “Terrace of Leisure,” a plaza of about thirty thousand square meters. Its surface was a layer of fine sand carried by hand from the Pacific coast, in which were buried small figurines of gold, silver, and copper. Within it stood the ushnu, a gold-covered stone on a stepped platform, surrounded by a pool. Forming an almost continuous wall around the plaza, and rising high above it, were the palaces of the kings, living and dead. There were towers twenty-four meters tall, with most of that height in lofty thatched roofs, resting on wooden beams that projected as much as two meters past the external stone walls. Inca masons fit large stone blocks together without mortar, so closely, as Spanish observers noted, that a knife blade could not fit between them.

Early in 1534 Francisco Pizarro and his companions witnessed the ceremonies by which a new Inca king received his office. For days Hawkaypata filled with singing, dancing and drinking from morning till night. The new king, one Spaniard wrote, brought “to the said fiestas all his dead grandfathers and relations … seated in their chairs, with much veneration and respect.” Mummies of the dynasty’s later kings, along with statues or objects representing the earliest members of the dynasty, sat under canopies in the plaza, surrounded by men and women who sang of the kings’ exploits while living. A small fire burning in front of each dead king consumed the food he was given to eat. On the ushnu sat the living king along with a figure representing the Sun. Serving women carried jugs across the square to fill cups with chicha, or maize beer, “the dead toasting each other, and the dead the living, and the living the dead.” So the Spaniards saw and recorded.

Cajamarca

Cuzco was the greatest of the Inca cities, but not the only one. For the Spaniards who first glimpsed, then invaded, then conquered the Inca empire, Peru was a landscape of mountains and cities. Following tentative explorations of the Pacific coast in the 1520s, Francisco Pizarro and 168 companions marched inland into the mountains in 1532, entering the previously unknown Inca empire as it endured the last stages of a civil war. The Incas, a relatively small ethnic group from the region of Cuzco, had conquered and built the New World’s largest empire, called Tawantinsuyu, over little more than a century. On the death of the last king, two princes had fought each other to succeed him; the winner, Atahualpa, had conquered and captured his brother Huascar and was now consolidating his victory, vindicating the royal title, “The Only Inca.” The Spaniards set out to meet him. The earliest Spanish accounts of the conquest dwelt on the marvels they saw along the way: great herds of llamas, fine roads, monumental buildings, cities “made in the manner of those of Spain, and the streets well laid-out.” Like other Mediterranean peoples, the Spanish considered cities a chief index of civilization.

Andean cities were notable for their grid-like layout and large plazas. Francisco de Xérez, Pizarro’s secretary, wrote that Cajamarca’s plaza was larger than that of any city in Spain. We do not know exactly how large it was, but excavations in a comparable Inca regional center, Huánuco Pampa, reveal a rectangular plaza measuring about 350 3 550 meters. Since Roman times, large plazas were one of the marks of a true city. The broad plaza of Cajamarca—gated and lined with stone houses, each two hundred paces wide, with running water—was something a Spaniard might admire.

The conquerors certainly admired the Incas’ imperial infrastructure. At the entrances to cities were officials who kept precise records of all cargo that entered and left. They noted that Inca roads were wide enough for six horses to ride abreast and were equipped at intervals with shade trees and piped-in water; in the uneven Andean landscape, the roads’ engineering was impressive enough for a later Spanish author to compare them to the pyramids of Egypt. At the end of every day’s journey was a state-run house for travelers; over the rivers were bridges with officials to register way farers. The towns had enormous deposits of stored supplies—food, shoes, salt—for armies on the move. The Spaniards themselves relied on these supplies as they traveled. Xérez reported that when they had taken all they could (with Inca officials meticulously registering the seizures in their records), the storage deposits still appeared full, as if nothing had been taken. Inventories of stored goods were recorded in knots on cords called quipus. The conquerors knew how to appreciate such efficiencies: Spanish armies in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands were plagued by problems of logistics and supply.

When they reached Cajamarca, the Spaniards found it nearly empty; Atahualpa was camped some distance away with his army. Pizarro sent a few men and an interpreter with gifts. The Spaniards rode tensely through a silent, massed army to where Atahualpa was seated in the middle. Atahualpa maintained the posture considered appropriate to his office, eyes fixed on the ground, hearing the Spaniards without answering. Through interpreters, the Spaniards asked him to come the next day to return the visit. Atahualpa’s passivity at this moment is a mystery. He apparently had little respect for their tiny contingent—one of his generals had described them to him as runaways and highwaymen—but in the moment he may have been intimidated by their horses (the first ever seen in the Andes), then felt it necessary to prove he did not fear the newcomers.

In Cajamarca, the Spaniards prepared for Atahualpa’s arrival. They hid cavalry in the large halls that lined the plaza and placed cannon on the ushnu in the plaza’s center. When Atahualpa’s litter and his guards entered the plaza, the Spanish friar Vicente de Valverde met him with a Christian book (some accounts say a Bible, others a breviary); Atahualpa glanced at the book and, according to most accounts, threw it on the ground. The friar ran back to his companions, shouting; guns blazed from the tower and horses leapt from darkened doors. The flat, enclosed plaza was ideal for artillery and horsemen. Within minutes, the Spaniards had killed thousands and imprisoned the king.

In captivity, Atahualpa agreed to pay Pizarro and his companions his ransom: a room filled with gold and another with silver. He called in precious vessels and ornaments from the far-flung provinces; forges burned night and day in Cajamarca to melt and recast them into bars. The invaders had made free use of stored supplies even before reaching Cajamarca, and after taking the king prisoner they appropriated the full authority of Atahualpa’s command. One conquistador wrote that with the king a hostage, “a man can travel 500 leagues alone without anyone killing him—instead they give him everything he needs and carry him in a hammock.” Kidnapping an Indian leader was a favorite strategy of Spanish invaders in the New World; by controlling a kingdom’s head, the attacker could command its extensive body, at least for a while. The Spaniards, empire builders themselves, felt at home in the Inca empire and its cities.

Cuzco

In August 1533 the Spaniards left Cajamarca, traveling the royal road to Cuzco. They had held Atahualpa hostage for eight months, receiving his ransom in stages, but finally garroted him in spite of their promises to restore him to power. In the Inca civil war before the Spaniards’ arrival, Atahualpa’s base of operation was the northern end of the empire, where he had been born (what is today Ecuador), while Huascar’s was the southern Inca heartland around Cuzco. When the Spaniards arrived, Atahualpa had just conquered the Cuzco region and was consolidating his control there. The Spaniards’ intervention reopened the contest and allowed both northern and southern armies to regroup under their generals, who waited to see what would happen next. Pizarro’s ransom agreement with Atahualpa represented a de facto alliance between the Spanish and the northern army, which was tasked with delivering gold and silver to Cajamarca. In charge of the logistics, Atahualpa retained control over his chain of command; he took the opportunity to have Huascar, held captive at a distant location, quietly killed. But when Pizarro in his turn executed Atahualpa, it freed the Spaniards to make a new alliance with the dead Huascar’s generals, joining forces against the northerners and opening the doors to the fabled city of Cuzco. A Cuzco prince named Manco Inca now claimed the royal office and joined the European invaders, welcoming their help in turning the tables against his northern enemies. Manco Inca and Pizarro entered Cuzco at the head of an Andean army on November 15, one year to the day after their arrival in Cajamarca.

The urban splendor of Cuzco impressed Spaniards even more than what they had already seen. The friar Valverde estimated the population at twenty thousand (archaeologists today estimate as many as forty thousand), and another Spaniard wrote that the city would be worthy of admiration in Spain for its stone buildings, solidly paved streets, and stone-lined sewage drains. Next to the city stood a monumental stone complex named Sacsayhuaman, which the Spanish called a fortress but which was probably a religious center. In the city center were two linked central plazas, Hawkaypata and Kusipata.

Most of the palaces lining Hawkaypata belonged to the dead kings, and housed their descendants, in royal kin-groups called panacas. Excluded from each king’s panaca was whichever of his sons or brothers became the new king, who would build a new palace and found his own panaca. Each group of descendants cared for the mummy of its founder and administered the wealth he had owned in his lifetime. The most impressive palace was that of Huayna Capac, Atahualpa’s and Manco Inca’s father, the last uncontested king of Tawantinsuyu. It was large enough to hold three thousand people, with a great red and white door, plastered and painted. In the compound surrounding it were an artificial pond and two tall, round towers facing the plaza. One Spaniard wrote that the higher tower was taller than any in Spain except for the great bell tower of Seville’s cathedral.

Early in 1534, unopposed by Manco Inca, Pizarro performed a ceremony to refound Cuzco as a Spanish municipality. He began by reminding the Spanish settlers that humans, “not being able to live separately, each man by himself,” had founded towns and cities since the creation of the world. This being so, Pizarro declared:

I found in this great city [ciudad] of Cuzco … a town [pueblo] of Spaniards …, finding it to be in the best region of the land, and as such the past lords made in it their seat …, populated it with the greatest nobles of their land, and built in this town rich buildings…. [Therefore] let the plaza of this town, which I found, be this [plaza] which was made by the natives, and let the house lots where the householders [vecinos] are to build their houses be laid out and arrayed all around it.

Pizarro marked his symbolic possession of the spot by cutting a notch in the wooden picota, or pillar of justice, which the Spaniards erected in the sand of Hawkaypata, at a distance from the ushnu. The act of foundation stated that the Spaniards would build themselves houses, but in fact they simply moved into the stone palaces already surrounding the plaza. Three days after the ceremony, Pizarro ordered his men not to alter these buildings in any way, since the Andean populace venerated the palaces and showing disrespect for them might cause a rebellion.

A few months later, the newly established town council (cabildo) assigned house lots (solares) to the citizens. They assigned four lots to Pizarro, two or three to each of the other leaders, and a single lot each to the rest of the ninety-some founding Spanish householders. Leaders received lots fronting the plaza; the rest got ones farther back, in descending order of prestige as the distance from the plaza grew. The Spanish documents generally identified these solares by reference to streets and other Spanish lots, once again implying that Cuzco was an empty space being marked out by surveyors. But the council went on to note that “most of the lots … have been in the area already built by the native Indians,” and that the existing “blocks and courtyards” had dimensions other than the prescribed ones for Spanish solares. Therefore they resolved to fit the solares to the dimensions of the existing blocks “so that they make up in length what they lack in breadth in the same block” or in a neighboring block or space. If it was not possible to make up the square footage one way or another, the grantee would have to settle for the existing building as it was. Thus an imaginary map of Spanish solares was superimposed on a concrete map of Inca buildings; the flesh-and-blood Spaniards inhabited the latter.

The conquerors shared the city uneasily with the Inca nobility and the new king whom they had helped bring to power. Manco Inca’s name did not appear among the householders of Spanish Cuzco, nor did he receive a house lot when the cabildo distributed them. But he controlled an area of the city that the cabildo tacitly respected: the council described one of the assigned solares as adjoining “the new houses which the cacique [i.e., Manco Inca] is building,” houses that they did not attempt to grant to Spaniards. 24 Since each Inca king traditionally built himself a new palace, Manco Inca had no personal claim on the splendid palaces that already filled Cuzco—but he may well have resented the Spaniards for seizing them.

Yet the Cuzco aristocracy, associated with the panacas of the earlier kings, maintained a toehold in the old palaces. A Spaniard named Ulloa received title to “the courtyard where the palla of teniente Hernando de Soto lives.” Ulloa had received a small part of a palace compound, of which the greater part was assigned to Hernando de Soto, one of Pizarro’s principal lieutenants; Soto’s mistress was living there, a palla (Inca princess) named Colla Quillor, whom the Spaniards called doña Leonor. She was Huascar’s daughter, who in the natural course of things would have lived in that very palace as a leading member of his panaca—an illustration of the ways that the earliest days of Spanish Cuzco were an uneasy compromise with the traditions of the Inca capital. Such alliances offered advantages to both sides but only partial protection for the rights of Inca nobles. The cabildo instructed each householder to respect the tenancy of “native Indians who may be [living] in his solar,” such as Colla Quillor. But redefining Andeans’ homes as Spaniards’ property scarcely promoted comity between the two groups.

Cuzco’s Spaniards pushed ever harder on their Andean neighbors, and their efforts to extend their control over the city finally precipitated a crisis. In April, 1536 two-and-a-half years after entering Cuzco at the Spaniards’ side, Manco Inca slipped out of the city and organized the surviving Inca armies to lay siege to the occupied Inca capital. They burned the city’s wood-and-thatch roofs with torches, a conflagration the Spaniards survived by huddling in the plaza. The few Spanish, along with non-Inca Andean soldiers (especially Cañaris, an ethnic group traditionally hostile to the Incas) and African slaves (recently transported from the Caribbean), fought daily against their besiegers in the smoking ruins. Andean soldiers used the tops of the stone walls of Cuzco’s interconnecting courtyards, their roofs destroyed by fire, as a mazelike walkway into the heart of the city and fired stones from slings, out of reach of Spanish cavalry below. The Spaniards and their allies responded by pulling down parts of the walls at night, disassembling the city around them even as they took refuge in its center. They used the towers of Huayna Capac’s palace to hold prisoners; in the raging fires of the siege, the towers’ roofs took eight days to burn.

(Continues…)

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