The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (29 page)

guns, and wear Spanish clothing. In effect, they were to become the

princes of the Republic of the Indians.

Similarly, Toledo hoped to remake common Andeans into more

dependable and obedient laborers by concentrating the scattered
ayllu

settlements into supervised villages. Laid out on a Renaissance-style

grid template, these
reducciones
included a central plaza, church,

administrative buildings, and a jail. A council of appointed Andean

elites was to run each village, with individual
ayllus
occupying

assigned neighborhoods under the jurisdiction of their
kurakas
. The

Andeans rightly viewed the
reducciones
as prisons, and
ayllu
leaders

hired sympathetic Spanish lawyers to challenge Toledo’s plan before

the imperial court in Spain. Lacking the status of imperial citizenship, the Andeans of course stood little chance of convincing Philip to

overrule his viceroy. Ultimately, their mass fl ight to the countryside

was more effective in scuttling the resettlement scheme.

The popular rejection of the
reducciones
was symptomatic of the

growing informal resistance to Spanish rule in late sixteenth-century

Peru. As the brutal but haphazard
encomienda
system gave way to

Toledo’s far more intrusive Indian republic, surviving Andeans began

to experience the full implications of early modern Spanish imperial rule. The Spaniards’ emphasis on blood rather than culture as a

marker of citizenship meant that Hispanicization offered no escape

from subjecthood, even if Andeans converted to Christianity. While

the conquistadors respected Inkan nobility, if only to appropriate it for

themselves, Spanish colonists and creoles never viewed the descendants of the Inkans as anything more than mere Indians. Paullu Inka,

a close Pizarrist ally and prince of the royal line, became a Christian

and gave his sons a western education, but common Spaniards still

beat and insulted him on the street. This stands in striking contrast to

the Roman embrace of British chiefs and the Umayyads’ respect for

defeated Visigothic nobles.

It was too early to attribute discrimination against Inkan nobles to

modern racism, but it is clear that the Spanish colonists guarded their

privileged status far more jealously than their Roman or Umayyad

predecessors had. They came to the New World to enrich and remake

themselves, not to defer to faded and impotent barbarian nobles. As

the historian James Lockhart aptly observed: “Getting Spaniards to

respect an Indian lord was apparently like getting a cat to respect a

148 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

canary.”35 Pizarro’s victory at Cajamarca made the Spaniards the true

lords of the Andes, regardless of their original social station.

While ennoblement and social advance were some of the greatest

rewards of empire, they did not bring security. The Spanish settlers and their creole descendants never ceased to feel vulnerable

as a favored minority living among a sea of subjects. Apart from

the viceregal guard in Lima, there were no regular military units in

Peru until the eighteenth century. Spanish imperial authority in the

highlands rested primarily on armed
encomienderos
and the
cor-

regidors
’ militias, which were often made up of Andean conscripts.

While Inkan nobles and wealthy
kurakas
sought relief from imperial abuses in the courts, common Andeans were more dangerous.

They occasionally murdered
encomienderos
and lone Spanish travelers and quickly mastered the western weapons that had proved

so effective during the original wars of conquest. In the 1560s, the

authorities uncovered hidden arms caches, including guns and pikes

to deal with Spanish horsemen. As a result, rumors fl ew among the

Spanish community of a pending mass insurrection. The neo-Inkan

refugee state in Vilcabamba was another constant source of anxiety until Toledo’s forces captured the fortress and executed Tupac

Amaru, the last true Sapa Inka, in 1572.

The children of the conquistadors and royal Inkan mothers posed

an even greater threat. This fi rst generation of mestizos, which came

of the age in the 1540s, initially enjoyed the privileges of full imperial citizenship. Although metropolitan Spanish women eventually

made their way to Peru in large numbers, the early Pizarrist state

was a predominately male society. The conquistadors, who aspired

above all else to become a hereditary nobility, needed Andean women

to provide them with heirs. Hispanicized mestiza girls made suitable

wives once they reached adulthood, and the Pizarrists founded the

Convent of Santa Clara in Cuzco to ensure that they become proper

Spaniards away from the contaminating infl uence of their Inka mothers. Some of these mestizas, including Francisco Pizarro’s daughter

Ines, even inherited their fathers’
encomienda
grants. Their brothers

were harder to assimilate. Essentially, mestizas could become Spanish, while mestizos could not. This was the reverse of the situation in

Al-Andalus. The male offspring of marriages between Muslim men

and Iberian women tended to become Arab and Muslim; their sisters

adopted the Christian faith of their mothers and remained Iberian.

Spanish

Peru 149

The mestizos grew restless and rebellious waiting to inherit from

their conquistador fathers as the arrival of Spanish women undermined their status as honorary Europeans. Fearing that the resulting

generation of locally born European (creole) children would consign

them to the Indian republic, in 1567 the Cuzco mestizos hatched a

conspiracy to seize control of Peru. The Spanish authorities quickly

uncovered the plot and exiled all mestizos in Cuzco over the age

of twenty. This was over the wailing protests of their Inka mothers, who, according to the Inkan chronicler Garcialaso de la Vega,

declared that Spain owed them a debt for betraying “their [Sapa]

Inka, their caciques, and their lords” by helping their Pizarrist lovers

conquer Peru.36

Other mestizos adopted more subtle forms of resistance. Blas Valera, the son of Pizarro’s captain of crossbowmen and an Inkan noblewoman, joined the Jesuits a year after the Spaniards discovered the

conspiracy in Cuzco. As one of the few religious orders willing to

admit mestizos, the Jesuits hoped that the sons of Inka women would

use their cultural expertise and linguistic skills to convert the wider

Andean population to Christianity. At fi rst, Valera appeared to live

up to expectations. He worked through the highlands as a priest and

evangelist before returning to Lima to help with the translation of

the Catholic catechism into Quechua. But much to his superiors’ dismay, the mestizo priest became an advocate for Andean rights. Even

more serious, Valera found inherent similarities between Andean religions and Christianity and even went so far as to depict the murdered

Atawallpa as a saint. The Jesuits covered up his heresy by convicting him of fornication, and they joined the other Catholic brotherhoods in banning mestizos from their order until the late eighteenth

century.

In hindsight, the mestizos were too few in number to be a real

danger to Toledo’s new Peruvian state. Similarly, the Andean majority was too disorganized and demoralized by the imperial conquest

and resulting epidemics to mount a direct challenge to Spanish rule.

Lacking the means to resist militarily, many followed Valera’s path

in turning to their faith to oppose the new imperial order. Spanish

missionaries often complained that “native witches” hindered their

efforts by urging the population not to take part in Catholic rituals.

Just as Toledo sought to move them into supervised
reducciones
, the

Jesuits and the other Spanish churchmen worked to turn Andeans

150 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

into disciplined Christians. Parish priests, who used the confessional

to watch for signs of political or religious subversion, soon became

alarmed at discovering that the
wakas
had more infl uence than the

Church in most
ayllus
. Certain that the devil spoke through these

protective spirits, the Church council in Lima ordered parish priests

to destroy the shrines,
khipu
string records, and other manifestations

of the blasphemous preconquest Andean culture.

While some Andeans plotted to revolt in the 1560s, others resisted

by returning to the spiritual comfort of the
wakas
. Longing for the

security and salvation of an idealized preconquest past, community

religious leaders concluded that the Spanish had conquered them

because they had abandoned their protectors. These
taquiongo
mediums were not part of the formal Inkan priesthood. Rather, they were

respected local religious experts who gained a wide following in the

central Andean highlands by promising that the
wakas
would return

to drive out the Spanish if Andeans united to reject Christianity and

western culture. Their movement came to be known as Taki Onqoy

(dance sickness) because the
taquiongos
were taken over by the
wakas
,

who formerly had inhabited only natural features such as hills and

bodies of water. While possessed, they trembled and shook as they led

their followers in songs and dances. It might be tempting to dismiss

Taki Onqoy as primitive superstition, but it had much in common

with later millenarian crusades such as the Sioux Ghost Dance, the

Chinese Boxer Rebellion, and the Tanzanian Maji Maji revolt, which

also sought a spiritual solution to western empire building after conventional methods failed.

Imperial conquerors ignored charismatic religious resistance at

their peril, for these were potent popular movements that mobilized widespread support against foreign domination. The Spanish

where shocked to discover the scope of Taki Onqoy in the
ayllus
.

Toledo depicted it as the satanic product of Inkan devil worship, and

the clergy attacked the movement directly by fl ogging the
taquion-

gos
and sending thousands of their followers to work under priestly

supervision on Church estates. Many
kurakas
aided the crackdown

because Taki Onqoy’s pan-Andean appeal undercut their authority

as local leaders.

The Church’s fumbling efforts to eradicate Andean “idolatry”

continued off and on into the seventeenth century without any real

success. The campaign began again in earnest in the 1610s when an

Spanish

Peru 151

opportunistic priest named Francisco de Ávila won release from jail

for a host of crimes, including embezzlement, exploiting Andean

labor, and illicit sex, by sounding the alarm over Andean idolatry.

Goaded by Avila’s reminder that the
wakas
were still potent, Church

leaders tried again to reorder Andean society. This was not the formal

Inquisition, which focused on the Protestant threat from Europe.

Instead, it was a program of “extirpation” that sought to force Andeans to embrace Catholicism. In 1617, teams of extirpators heard

5,694 confessions, captured 669 “ministers of idolatry,” confi scated

603 “principal huacas” (
wakas
), and scourged sixty-three “witches.”37

They punished Andean religious experts with public humiliation,

forced labor, and detention in a special jail in Lima. In time, the whole

exercise devolved into an expensive series of witch hunts that overtaxed the resources of the parish clergy. Most
ayllus
continued to

venerate their
wakas
, even after the Spanish destroyed their physical

shrines. As one disciple told a frustrated Jesuit, “Father, are you tired

of taking our idols from us? Take away that mountain if you can,

since that is the God I worship.”38

The extirpation campaigns failed because imperial rulers cannot tell their subjects what to think, but they can exploit them. The

encomienda
system lasted into the early eighteenth century, but the

Peruvian state shifted to direct taxation to force
ayllu
members into

the labor market. The Spanish justifi ed this obligation as the price

of Spain’s gift of civilization to the Indians. Toledo’s administrative

reforms made systematic tribute collection feasible by keeping better track of common Andeans, a prerequisite for effective imperial

extraction. Based on a 1569 census, all males had an obligation to pay

roughly fi ve or six pesos per year to their
kuraka
, who then passed on

the funds to the
corregidors
. Only
kurakas
and Inkan royalty were

exempt from this head tax. Furthermore, Andeans also owed tithes to

their parish priests.

Toledo’s primary aim in remaking Peruvian government and society was to generate revenue for the Crown. The true wealth of Peru

was locked up in the labor of its people, but the Spanish struggled to

fi nd ways to force Andeans to work on imperial projects. Under what

was known as the
repartimiento de mercancías
, Spanish offi cials, clergymen, and settlers tried to monetize the highland economy by forcing Andeans to buy imported goods at infl ated prices. But European