The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (28 page)

142 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

demands of the system put tremendous strain on
ayllu
leaders, whose

authority depended on reciprocity. The Spaniards would replace them

if they failed to deliver suffi cient labor tribute, but they risked their

positions and even their lives if they placed unreasonable demands

on their followers.

More grasping
encomienderos
made the
kurakas
’ situation even

more precarious by abusing their grants. Those who fulfi lled their

dream of acquiring large estates struggled to compete with independent Andeans who could produce crops and crafts more cheaply, and

so they assigned their Indians to work as domestic servants in Spanish homes or on labor gangs hired out to employers in Lima. Some

male
encomienda
holders also exploited their power over Andean

women, and it was not unusual for
encomienderos
to keep veritable

harems on their estates. Even common Spanish men exploited this

sexual perquisite of empire, and Don Felipe complained that innkeepers forced their female servants to work as prostitutes.29

The Inkan nobility found the Spanish behavior intolerable. Initially Manqu Inka took an oath of loyalty to the Spanish Crown in

the hope that the conquistadors would help him prevent his subjects

from reasserting their independence. But the Pizarrists’ behavior in

Cuzco demonstrated conclusively that they would never accept the

Inkas as equal imperial partners. Not only did they strip the city of its

moveable treasure, but Francisco’s brother Gonzalo seized Manqu’s

own wife. In a speech to the surviving nobles of Cuzco, the Sapa Inka

unknowingly echoed Boudicca’s condemnation of Roman imperialism some fourteen centuries earlier:

They preach one thing and do another, and they give so many admonitions, yet they do the opposite. They have no fear of God or shame,

and treating us like dogs, they call us no other names. Their greed

has been such that there is no temple or palace left that they have

not looted. Furthermore, even if all the snow turned to gold and silver, it would not satiate them. They keep the daughters of my and

other ladies, your sisters and kin, as concubines, behaving bestially in

this. . . . They strive to have us so subjected and enslaved that we have

no other care than to fi nd them metals and to provide them with our

women and livestock.30

Like the British Icenian queen, Manqu concluded that revolt

was the only option. With Francisco Pizarro occupied in Lima, the

Spanish

Peru 143

Spanish garrison in Cuzco under the command of his brothers consisted of only 196 conquistadors and fi ve hundred Andean auxiliaries.

The Inkan elites, who could still muster tens of thousands of soldiers, recognized that it was time to strike before the steady stream of

Spaniards into the highlands became a fl ood.

In 1535, Manqu escaped Cuzco by promising to retrieve an Inka

treasure buried in the hinterlands. Instead, he raised an army of one

hundred thousand men that besieged the Inkan capital while his allies

attacked Lima and the other urban centers in Peru. Francisco Pizarro

brushed aside the assault on Lima relatively easily, but Manqu’s troops

wiped out the forces he sent to relieve Cuzco. The Inkans’ enormous

advantage in numbers gave them control of the countryside, placing

the isolated
encomienderos
in the highlands in real jeopardy. Nevertheless, Manqu’s army could not overwhelm the tiny Cuzco garrison.

The Spaniards’ horses allowed them to forage for supplies and terrorize the Sapa Inka’s supporters, and intimidated common Andeans,

who had no love of the Inkas, gave the conquistadors food, military

intelligence, and even extra soldiers.

Most of Cuzco burned in the fi ghting, but Pizarrists broke the

back of the Inkan assault by boldly seizing a key fortress overlooking the city. Juan Pizarro died in the attack, but as the porous siege

dragged on, Manqu’s forces drifted away to plant crops and tend to

religious obligations. More signifi cantly, many Andeans remained

neutral in the hope that the Inkan and Spanish empire builders would

destroy each other. In 1537, Almagro returned from his aborted invasion of Chile and raised the siege of Cuzco. Manqu retreated with his

remaining forces to the remote fortress of Vilcabamba, where he held

out until Spanish agents murdered him in 1545. Pizarro chose his

more pliant half-brother Paullu to be the new puppet Sapa Inka, but

Manqu’s sons continued to reign in exile in Vilcabamba until the fi nal

demise of their neo-Inkan state in 1572.

The Spaniards put down the fi nal revolt of the old regime in the

Andes by exploiting tensions in the Inkan aristocracy, but in 1538

their own squabble over the division of imperial spoils fi nally turned

violent. The confl ict pitted the Pizarrist faction that claimed the bulk of

Atawallpa’s ransom and the choicest
encomiendas
against Almagro’s

disgruntled later arrivals. The privileges of early modern empire

meant that virtually every would-be conquistador felt entitled to a

personal fortune by sole virtue of his Spanishness, but even the vast

144 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

wealth of the Inkas was too fi nite to accommodate their lust for treasure. Rumors of another lootable Andean empire lured Almagro to

Chile, but when he found only aggressive Araucanian frontiersmen

he returned to demand a more equitable division of Peru. Claiming

that Cuzco actually fell within the
capitulación
that gave him authority over the lands south of Pizarro’s realm, he attempted a coup d’état

by arresting Gonzalo and Hernando Pizarro and taking control of the

garrison.

Francisco Pizarro’s position was initially precarious, but he prevailed because he had the authority of the Crown behind him. As

the legitimate governor of Peru, he had the means and the right to

destroy his treasonous rival. However, he had little time to savor his

victory. Three years later, his death at the hand of Almagro’s avenging son restarted the civil war. Fed up with the squabbling, Charles V

took a greater role in the imperial administration. The fi rst emissary

he sent to replace Pizzaro captured and executed the junior Almagro

but was too sympathetic to the conquistadors to actually reform the

Peruvian administration.

Vasco Núñez de la Vela, the fi rst true viceroy of Peru, was

more respectful of royal authority, but he provoked the remaining

Pizarrists by trying to enforce the provisions of the 1542 New Laws

that reformed the
encomienda
system. Led by Gonzalo Pizarro, they

murdered Vela and declared their independence. Yet although it was

in a separate hemisphere, Peru was not as far from Spain in political

terms as Al-Andalus was from the seat of Umayyad power in Damascus. Gonzalo could not emulate Emir Abd al-Rahman I by transforming an imperial province into an autonomous state. The Spanish

Crown would never surrender the Andean silver, and Charles’s next

viceroy, Pedro de la Gasca, arrived in Peru in 1547 at the head of a

royalist army that brought the Pizarrist era to an end by capturing

and killing Gonzalo one year later.

Thus, few of the Peruvian conquistador leaders lived long enough

to enjoy the fruits of empire. Hernando Pizarro consolidated his family’s wealth by marrying his niece Francisca, who was the daughter of

an Inkan princess and was his brother Francisco’s sole heir, and buying

land in Spain. But he spent most of his later life in a Spanish prison

for his role in the death of Almagro. The rest of his brothers all died

violently, as did most of the Almagrist faction. To an imperial critic

such as Cieza, the conquistadors had answered for their crimes: “God

Spanish

Peru 145

has punished our men, and most of these leaders have died miserably

in wretched deaths, a frightening thought to serve as a warning.”31

Cieza may have been grimily satisfi ed with Pizarro’s fate, but the

passing of the conquistador generation meant relatively little in Peru.

The populations of Britain and Iberia actually increased under the

Romans and Umayyads, but the fi rst century of Spanish rule was

devastating for the people of the Andes. The realities of virgin-soil

epidemics meant that there was no escaping Wayna Qhapaq’s poisonous butterfl ies, and the Pizarrists’ merciless imperial rule and the

exploitive
encomienda
system made things even worse. Their pillaging of the Inkan warehouses wiped out important food reserves, and

the sexual abuse of Andean women led to high rates of infant mortality. Early modern population estimates are notoriously unreliable,

and some regions were more hard hit than others, but it appears that

the Andean population fell from nine million to one million between

the 1520s and the fi rst Spanish census in 1569. In the seventeenth

century it reached a low point of approximately six hundred thousand people, and gradually recovered thereafter.32

The conquistadors certainly did not intend to cause this demographic disaster; their
encomiendas
depended on the exploitation of

Andean labor. Some
encomienderos
even promoted motherhood in a

vain effort to stem the decline of tributary populations, but the fact

remains that the Pizarrist conquest state was unsustainable because

it consumed people. The demise of so many Andean societies during this imperial catastrophe opened the way for the resettlement of

Peru by Spanish colonists, African slaves, and the offspring of unions

between members of these groups. The approximately 250,000 settlers of European descent in Peru in the mid-seventeenth century

were at the pinnacle of this new society.33 The surviving Andeans

became “Indians,” a misnomer originating from European explorers’ confusion of the Americas with Asia. Yet Indianism was far more

than a Spanish geographical mistake; it was a new subordinate identity that transformed Andeans into perpetually backward imperial

subjects with no rights as individuals under Spanish law.

The value of this Indian labor far outweighed the Crown’s initial

one-fi fth share of the Pizarrists’ plunder. Consequently, the emperors could not allow one of Spain’s richest overseas domains to be

run as a private enterprise. In the long term, silver production was

much more important than the conquistadors’ crude looting or the

146 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

encomienderos
’ fumbling efforts to monetize Andean tribute. Moreover, the growing Spanish colonial population of nobles, small farmers,

merchants, professionals, and craftsmen demanded access to Andean labor

and more representative and responsible government. Embarrassed by

the conquistador civil wars and
encomienda
scandals, the metropolitan

authorities sought to bring Peru under greater control.

Viceroy Pedro de la Gasca suspended the New Laws to undercut

popular support for Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion, but he also moved

against the most abusive
encomienderos
. His investigators uncovered

horrifi c stories of
encomienda
holders torturing their tributaries to

produce silver and brought the most fl agrant transgressors to trial.

It was much harder, however, for the Council of the Indies to reform

the overseas empire. Gasca’s crackdown was short-lived, and many of

his viceregal successors became enmeshed in embezzlement, bribery,

and smuggling scandals.

It fell to Don Francisco de Toledo, Philip II’s viceroy from 1569

to 1581, to stamp out the systematic corruption of the Pizarrist

era. The younger son of a Spanish noble family, he had the infl uence and authority to remake the original conquest state. Tellingly,

he and his successors made sense of the Inkan Empire by comparing it to ancient Rome and used Roman models in fashioning

an orderly and coherent system of imperial rule for the Andes.34

Toledo imposed a more regular administrative geography by dividing the region into eighty provinces encompassing 614 districts

(
repartimientos
). The
encomienderos
lost their political infl uence,

and Toledo used the segregated Republic of the Indians to rule the

surviving Andean population. To this end, the
corregidor de indios
,

who was the equivalent of a provincial governor, supervised the

kurakas
, collected tribute, organized tribute labor, and commanded

the provincial militia.

Even with these reforms, the Spaniards lacked the linguistic and

cultural understanding to rule the Indian republic directly. Toledo

therefore sought greater control at the local level by transforming

cooperative
kurakas
into a hereditary Indian nobility. Ignorant of the

reciprocal nature of authority in the Andes, Spanish offi cials imagined them as
caciques
with total power over their
ayllus
. By this

wishful thinking they hoped to turn the
kurakas
into minor imperial

functionaries that would extend Spain’s reach into local communities.

As such, these imperial allies acquired full individual legal status in

Spanish

Peru 147

the Spanish courts and rights to call themselves
don
, own horses and