The Last Days of the Incas (24 page)

The Spaniards were unaware that the Incas’ heavy drinking was actually a ritualized form of worship, and instead interpreted their behavior as some sort of perverted, bacchanalian devil worship. Taking advantage, however, of the large audience of native chiefs and nobles who had arrived to honor their new Inca lord, Pizarro arranged to address the important gathering. The coronation ceremony was, after all, designed to herald the transmission of royal power. There would thus be no better moment for Pizarro to make it clear to the assembled elites that with this particular coronation there would be some fundamental changes made—and that the Spaniards intended to create a new power structure.

Using the Spaniards’ now ritualized ceremony of conquest, Pizarro soon made it clear to all those gathered that they were now part of a larger world order than they had been used to and that henceforth they would be subservient to an empire even more powerful than their own. Wrote Pedro Sancho de la Hoz:

The Requirement was the same document that Friar Valverde had paraphrased for Atahualpa that fateful afternoon in the square of Cajamarca a little more than a year
ago. As Manco and his chiefs listened to Pizarro’s interpreter—the mummies of the dead Inca emperors being fanned for flies and presumably listening along with all those assembled—Pizarro’s notary read the final paragraph, pausing now and then for the words to be interpreted into the Incas’
runasimi.

According to another notary in the group, Miguel de Estete, the message seemed to have been understood, for the natives “sang many songs and gave thanks to the Sun for having allowed their enemies to be driven from the land and for allowing the Christians to rule them. This was the substance of their songs, although I do not believe,” Estete noted suspiciously, “that … [the songs] reflected their true intentions. They only wished to make us think that they were pleased with the words of the Spaniards.”

Whatever the natives may actually have been thinking, each native chief was now made to come forward, was instructed to raise the Spanish standard two times, and then to embrace Francisco Pizarro to the sound of Spanish trumpets. Manco Inca then “stood up … and handed the Governor and the Spaniards a vase of gold to drink from and then all went off to eat, for it was already late.” The coronation complete, the teenaged Manco Inca was now the new lord of the Inca Empire. He was the fifth Inca emperor in roughly six years, the last four having been his father, Huayna Capac; his two warring brothers, Atahualpa and Huascar; and, briefly, another brother, Tupac Huallpa, who had died three months earlier in Jauja.

Undeterred by the presence of a new Inca emperor, Pizarro and his Spaniards continued plundering and looting the Inca
capital and its environs, a process they had begun immediately after their arrival a month earlier. For Pizarro, this was the fulfillment of a dream he had harbored ever since he had first arrived in the Americas: to one day become the leader of an expedition that would sack and loot a wealthy, previously undiscovered native empire. This was one of the few times in the history of the world, in fact, that a small band of invaders was able to plunder the capital of a major empire literally at will.

Pizarro soon took over the royal palace of Pachacuti, located on the main square, as his own residence. Perhaps this was fitting, as Pachacuti was the Inca ruler who had envisioned and founded the Inca Empire, just as Pizarro had envisioned and carried out that same empire’s conquest. Pizarro’s younger brothers Juan and Gonzalo, meanwhile, quickly occupied residences alongside Francisco’s palace that had belonged to Atahualpa’s father, Huayna Capac. Diego de Almagro likewise took over a palace that Huascar had completed just before he was captured and executed by Atahualpa’s men. Another palace was set aside for Hernando Pizarro, who was currently in Spain, and which was to be shared by Hernando de Soto. Having once belonged to Huayna Capac, it was the finest of the palaces and had a gateway of marble as well as two towers roughly thirty feet in height. Seventeen-year-old Manco Inca, meanwhile, began constructing a new palace for himself.

In March 1534—nearly two years after the Spaniards’ arrival in Peru—Pizarro distributed the gold and silver looted from Cuzco. The haul was even larger than that of Cajamarca. Although less gold had been collected than for Atahualpa’s ransom, the amount of silver was four times greater. Those Spaniards who had arrived late in Peru with Almagro—and who had missed the capture of Atahualpa and hence their chance of becoming instantly wealthy—now found that their patience had finally paid off. Those who had already become the equivalent of millionaires in Cajamarca were now doubly so. Pizarro also set aside individual shares “for himself and [his] two horses and the [two native] interpreters and for his page, Pedro Pizarro.”

As each Spaniard walked away from Pizarro’s palace, relying no doubt upon a combination of natives and llamas to help him carry away the fortune of a lifetime, all of the Spaniards assembled must have realized that a milestone had been reached in the conquest of Peru. The Company of the Levant, which Pizarro and Almagro had created some
ten years earlier, was now officially dissolved, as all of its accumulated profits had now been distributed. Its shareholder-participants—at least those who participated in the Cajamarca and/or Cuzco campaigns—had made such fantastic profits that they could all retire. Pizarro now presented his fellow Spaniards with two choices: they could either leave the country and return to Spain, where they could retire to lives of luxury, or else they could remain in Peru as that country’s first Spanish citizens and thus could help found the new Spanish colony called the Kingdom of New Castile.

Pizarro, who had struggled and fought for more than thirty years to create precisely such a situation for himself—governor of a native empire—had no intention of leaving. Peru was the prize he had coveted and it was in Peru that he would stay. Since Pizarro couldn’t rule an empire on his own, however, he needed as many Spaniards as possible to remain. There were, after all, currently fewer than five hundred Spaniards in an empire that contained ten million native inhabitants and that stretched for some two and a half thousand miles. To say that the Spaniards were stretched “thinly” would have been a gross understatement. Pizarro thus offered to any Spaniard who promised to remain in Peru an
encomienda.

The Spanish verb,
encomendar
, means “to entrust.” The basic idea of the
encomienda
was one derived from the medieval manorial system, in which a king granted a benefice—the right to tax the local peasantry—to various lords, who pledged their allegiance to the king in return. Just as European peasants had “entrusted” themselves to a manorial lord and had paid him a portion of their produce in return for protection, New World natives were now expected—upon threat of punishment or death—to labor for Spanish conquistadors who theoretically were charged with “protecting” and “Christianizing” them.

The conquistadors could thus settle down in native cities and live off the produce and other goods supplied by the native population in the countryside. Because in Spanish society both manual labor and trade were considered activities of the lower classes, by receiving the power to tax local peasants the conquistadors were immediately vaulted into the ranks of the Spanish aristocracy. In essence, a restructuring of the Inca Empire’s social pyramid had begun, in which the Inca elite—exempt from manual labor due to their own elevated social status—was now being replaced by a rag-tag group of largely uneducated,
lower-class Spaniards, all of whom aspired to identical, laborless lives.

Whether the average conquistador realized it or not, this was one of the few times in Spanish history during which rank-and-file commoners were suddenly presented with the opportunity of becoming feudal lords, practically overnight. In the end, eighty-eight Spaniards chose to accept
encomiendas
and to take up permanent residence in Cuzco.

Unaware of the Spaniards’ plans, the new Inca emperor, Manco Inca, nevertheless had a number of problems on his hands. He first had to take up the reins of an empire that had originally been ripped from the hands of his brother Huascar and then from the hands of his other brother, Atahualpa. Manco’s immediate task was to try to reestablish the authority of the
Sapa Inca
, or “Unique Emperor,” even while Atahualpa’s two remaining generals—Rumiñavi and Quisquis—continued to maintain hostile armies in the north. While portions of Tawantinsuyu had continued to function on automatic, other areas had reverted to the rule of local warlords and chiefs. These had taken advantage of the civil wars and of Pizarro’s campaign of conquest in order to throw off the yoke of Inca dominion. Seated on his royal stool, or
duho
, attended by his royal court, and with the scarlet sash of royalty hanging across his forehead, Manco now set about restoring the Incas’ imperial authority as best he could. Soon, the young emperor began receiving visits from his provincial governors, began appointing new ones where they had gone missing, and slowly undertook the laborious task of reestablishing the intricate governing mechanism that his ancestors and thousands of years of cultural development in the Andes had produced.

The Spaniards, meanwhile, still had a very weak grasp of just how complex the empire that they had only partially conquered was. While they had immediately recognized the overall similarities with the Old World’s culture of kings, nobles, priests, and commoners, they knew little of the actual mechanisms that enabled the Inca Empire to function. The Incas’ genius—like that of the Romans—lay in their masterful organizational abilities. Amazingly, an ethnic group that probably never exceeded 100,000 individuals was able to regulate the activities of roughly ten million people. This was in spite of the fact that the empire’s citizens spoke more than seven hundred local languages and were distributed
among thousands of miles of some of the most rugged and diverse terrain on earth.

As with many of the world’s earlier civilizations, the economy of the Inca Empire depended largely upon agriculture. Indeed, it was the Incas’ skillful management of agriculture—with the building of canals, mountain terraces, and with the careful attention paid to the planting, harvesting, and the improvement of crops—that allowed them to maintain such dense populations of peasants in mountainous terrain that was generally inhospitable to cultivation. Because of good management and a vast campaign of building terraces, however, the amount of available agricultural land steadily increased during the Incas’ reign. Even if crops did fail in one area, the network of state-controlled food storage systems and the ability to transport food from one part of the empire to another made famine virtually impossible. Whatever else may be said of life in the Inca Empire, every one of its citizens was guaranteed sufficient food, clothing, and shelter.

Unlike the Spaniards, however, the citizens of Tawantinsuyu owned no land privately and were not allowed to own luxury goods. While individual citizens did own their own homes, only the Inca rulers and some of the aristocracy owned their own private estates. The Inca Empire, in fact, was predicated upon one fundamental assumption, an assumption that was driven home, if necessary, by armies wielding bloody mace clubs: that all land and natural resources belonged to the state, which in turn was controlled by the Inca emperor. The latter’s divine right to such resources derived directly from the sun. Just as a century later the French king Louis XIV would be said to proclaim
“L’etat, c’est moi
,” (I am the state), so, too, did the Inca emperor claim to be the empire’s ultimate landlord and custodian.

The principle of state ownership, in fact, was a fundamental premise in the social contract that bound the empire’s subjects together. Since the state owned all arable lands, by granting land rights to peasant communities for them to farm, the state by definition was owed something in return. That reciprocal obligation—the granting of land rights in return for the assumption of a debt—was the fundamental agreement upon which the empire was founded. Because the state had granted land rights, the state could demand taxes in return. The Incas, however, chose to collect their taxes not in units of goods, but in units of labor.

All male heads of households between the ages of roughly twenty-five to fifty were required to pay taxes. Since this group made up about
15 to 20 percent of the empire’s total population, that meant that the Inca elite could siphon off the labor of roughly two million workers at any given time. Each year, the government required the heads of households to donate two or three months of work to the state and to the sun religion. The Incas called their labor tax the
mit’a
, a word meaning “to take a turn.” If one considers that the average U.S. taxpayer pays a 30 percent tax on income received during a twelve-month period, then that same citizen actually “donates” roughly 3.6 months of work each year to keep the various federal, state, and local government bureaucracies functioning. The average U.S. citizen, therefore, ironically pays a greater amount of taxes in the twenty-first century than a typical sixteenth-century native did living in the Inca Empire. The head of an Inca household, however—unlike his U.S. counterpart—didn’t necessarily have to work the entire two or three months himself; instead, he could distribute his tax burden among the members of his own family. The larger the family a native citizen had, the more easily his tax burden—the building of roads, the weaving of cloth, the making of pots, and so forth—could be paid.