WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (7 page)

Pizarro Destroys The Inca State

1532

Christopher Columbus returned to Europe from his first voyage of discovery across the Atlantic in 1493. His enthusiastic report to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain of his findings and his assessment that the New World had vast riches ready for the taking could not have come at a better time. Spain had recently ended several centuries of struggle to rid their country of the infidel Moo. It was full of religious fervour and had a good supply of soldiers and fighting men willing to risk their lives for the sake of those riches in gold and silver that Columbus had described.

In Central and South America, the Spanish conquistadors found two great, rich empires. Although they had witnessed years of burnings in the name of religion in their own country – Torquemada’s years as Inquisitor General in Castile and Aragon had seen some 10,000 people sentenced to death by the dreadful
auto de fe
– the Spanish used their shock and horror at the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice in the name of religion in Mexico as an excuse for their ruthless suppression of the Aztecs and the looting of the empire’s wealth.

Two decades later, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire of Peru was every bit as rapacious and murderous as that of his fellow Spaniard, Hernan Cortés, in Mexico. However, unlike Cortés, Francisco Pizarro was a rough, uneducated man, unable to read or write and totally unversed in the social graces or the ways of diplomacy. He was nearly 40 years old when he arrived in the New World in 1509. He helped Balboa found a colony on the Darien isthmus, and in 1515 he crossed the isthmus to the Pacific side of America, to trade with the native Americans there.

Pizarro made three great voyages of discovery down the Pacific coast of South America, setting out each time from or near the little colonial capital of Panama. On each, he put in at various points on the coast, exploring a little inland and getting to know something of the nature of the vast Inca empire, most of which lay hidden on the high plateaux of the Andes.

THE INCA EMPIRE

Although the Inca empire had reached peaked only about 100 years before Pizarro arrived on the scene, it had been in existence for several centuries, built on much older civilizations about which little is now known. This is partly because the earlier peoples of Peru had not developed any form of writing or picture writing and partly because the Spaniards’ indoctrination of the Indians they conquered was so thorough.

Archaeologists and historians have discovered that the states of South America that preceded the Incas, who pulled them all together into one vast empire, were as advanced as anything in Mexico. They had highly bureaucratic societies, well-developed agricultural techniques, including the use of irrigation, and rich cultural bases, as demonstrated by their finely woven and designed textiles, fine pottery and metalwork, and jewellery. They had also developed a sophisticated building technique that allowed their stone buildings, made without mortar, to withstand the strong earthquakes regularly experienced in the Andes. All this, the Inca Empire inherited and built upon.

The first Inca, or emperor, appeared in Peru some time in the 13th century. He and his successors gradually melded together the various states and peoples in that part of South America, creating a vast empire that stretched for 3,200 km (2,000 miles) down one of South America’s coasts, contained one of the world’s greatest mountain chains and reached inland as far as the rain forests of the Amazon. It was ruled by the absolute Inca, aided by a highly organized governing bureaucracy, many of whose members were his blood relatives and children. The capital of the Inca Empire was Cuzco, in the central highlands. The empire’s huge army, whose officers, like the government bureaucrats, came from the Inca’s extended family, expanded its operations through the empire by using an amazing network of roads which, by the time the Spaniards arrived, stretched 5,230 km (3,250 miles) from Quito in the north to Talca in central Chile. This road network was to make the Spanish conquest of Peru relatively simple and speedy.

The Inca was the divine symbol on earth of the sun god whom the Peruvians worshipped. Unlike the Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas were not bloodthirsty in their religious observance. Captives were sometimes sacrificed and in times of difficulty, such as drought, parents might sacrifice a child, but the usual sacrifice was a llama or an alpaca. Offerings to the gods were often as simple as a cone of spun wool, set down on the temple steps. Pizarro and his men did not know this when they arrived in Peru and expected to deal with people as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs. This perhaps explains the cold-blooded violence with which Pizarro conducted his first meeting with the Inca.

FALL OF AN EMPIRE

Pizarro’s third expedition to the Andes sailed out of Panama in January 1531. He had under his command three small ships carrying 180 men, 27 horses, arms, ammunition and stores. By September 1532, Pizarro had established a garrison settlement at a place he called San Miguel on the river Chira.

Far away in the heart of Peru, the last Inca, Atahualpa, had just concluded the victory over his brother that gave him control of the whole Inca Empire, not just the northern part of it bequeathed to him in 1527 by his father, Huayna Capac. Historians have puzzled over the question of why this Inca should have divided and thus weakened his kingdom. They have come to the conclusion that Huayna Capac, hearing about the tall, bearded strangers from across the sea who were becoming such a strong presence in the north, while mounted on strange and enormous animals the South American people had never seen, decided to put the more vulnerable part of his country in the hands of his son Atahualpa, a strong and ruthless warrior. Whatever the reason, the fact was that the great Inca Empire was not as fully united and strong as it needed to be to meet this unprecedented crisis in its history.

At San Miguel, Pizarro heard that the Inca was not in his capital, Cuzco, but resting at Cajamarca, a town with hot springs much nearer than Cuzco. The way across the Andes to Cajamarca was difficult and dangerous, but on 24 September, 1532 Pizarro marched his small force out of San Miguel into the mountains to the heart of the Inca Empire. The march took seven terrible weeks, during which Atahualpa sent two embassies to welcome Pizarro to his kingdom and try to judge his intentions. These embassies threatened no violence and, indeed, seemed ready to treat the Spaniards with correct formality and hospitality.

When Pizarro and his men finally emerged from the high Andes on 15 November and made the relatively easy descent to Cajamarca, they found the town deserted. Atahualpa, his attendants and his army were a couple of leagues away in a tented settlement set up by the hot springs that had brought the Inca to the town in the first place. The town, a neat and orderly place with its steets and alleys laid out in straight, intersecting lines and with a triangular courtyard at its heart, had been handed over to Pizarro as a place for him and his men to stay in comfortably. Once settled in, Pizarro, having waited long enough for word from the Inca, sent a messenger with 20 horses to ask that the Inca visit him in the town.

Next day, Saturday, 16 November, 1532, Atahualpa told Pizarro that he would visit the Spaniard in the town. He said that he would come armed because the Spaniards had come armed to him the previous day. It was not until late in the afternoon that the Inca’s state procession appeared in front of the town. It was an impressive sight. First came a squadron of men in coloured livery, who swept the road in front of Atahualpa. Then came men in different costumes, some singing and dancing, others bearing large metal plates and crowns of gold and silver. Atahualpa’s litter was born by 80 officers, all richly dressed. The litter was lined with plumes and macaws’ feathers, and Atahualpa was seated on a gold throne covered with a feather-lined palanquin, richly clothed and adorned with gold and turquoise, as befitted the [divine] symbol of the sun god on earth.

This procession entered Cajamarca and proceeded to the central courtyard. There was no sign of the Spanish force. A priest holding a bible and crucifix confronted the Inca and made a long speech about the Christian faith. When this man had the effrontery to thrust the bible at Atahualpa, he rejected it.

It is possible that, as he sat on his litter high above the crowd of his people, the Inca actually saw the handkerchief dropped by Pizarro as a sign that his men should open fire. Their cannon, dragged across the Andes, began cutting swathes through the crowd in the courtyard, while the sharp sound of firing from the soldiers’ arequebuses combined with the pounding of the hooves of the charging cavalry raised a hellish storm of choking smoke and noise over the scene.

The ceremonial weapons carried by a few of the Inca’s men into Cajamarca were useless against the Spanish arms. The Inca’s men were butchered as they fought with their bare hands to save the Inca. Soon, every way of escape from the courtyard was blocked by the bodies of the fallen. Those remaining inside were hacked to bits by the Spanish soldiers, in the grip of a terrible bloodlust. Only the intervention of Pizarro and several of his officers saved the Inca. As the sun set and darkness fell, the Inca was led away in chains.

The Inca Empire collapsed. No effort was made to save the Inca, for there was no one with the authority to make the attempt. In the months that followed, while Atahualpa remained a prisoner of Pizarro, his empire was looted of its gold, silver and precious stones. Eventually, after a ‘trial’ that was in reality a farce, Atahualpa was sentenced to death by burning: his fate was to be a true
auto de fe
. When Atahualpa saw the stake and realized that his body was to be consumed by fire, which would damn him completely in his life after death, he agreed to become a Christian in return for being garrotted. The sentence was carried out on 16 July, 1533.

Ivan The Terrible Destroys Novgorod

1570

Ivan IV, the first ruler of Russia to take the title ‘Tsar of all the Russias’, was only three years old when he became ruler of the Russian state in 1533. Ivan was the grandson of Ivan III, called ‘the Great’ because he had rid Russia of the Mongols, united all the Russian principalities and states under his own rule and laid the foundations for the great state of Russia.

Ivan IV, who was born in 1530, came to the throne less than 30 years after Ivan III’s death. He inherited a country that was geographically ill-defined and racially disunited and was still a state in the making. Most of its influences – cultural, religious and social – as well as its most likely enemies, came from the Asiatic east and Byzantine south, not from Europe. So irregular, distant and ill-defined (and tinged with suspicion) was Russia’s relationship with Europe, that a 17th-century king of France wrote to a tsar of Russia not knowing that the man had been dead for ten years. Even the title ‘tsar’, was an Asiatic word, and the great Imperial double-headed eagle that Ivan III included in his emblem came from Byzantium.

Ivan IV spent most of his reign building on his grandfather’s work, establishing the Russian state on a more firm administrative footing, and subduing surrounding states, such as Astrakhan and Kazan, where 60,000 died during the siege and capitulation of the city of Kazan in 1552. He contributed much to his country’s cultural and commercial development. However, Ivan carried out much of this work, especially later in his reign, with such a savage, ferocious cruelty that even in his own time he was called ‘Terrible’, and it is as Ivan the Terrible that he still figures in Russia’s history.

Ivan’s childhood had not been a happy one. His mother, who acted as regent during his babyhood, was poisoned when he was eight years old, and responsibility for his care was taken over by a group of men from the ruling class, or nobility, called ‘boyars’, of whom Ivan lived in constant fear. From the time he grew to manhood and began his personal rule, Ivan the Terrible seems to have constantly suspected conspiracies against him everywhere. He always carried a long wooden stave, which he would lash out with when enraged, killing many people in his entourage.

THE OPRICHNINA

To control the Russian people, Ivan established a sort of secret police, or military force, called the Oprichnina, which he founded early in the years of his personal rule in a determined effort to eliminate all villains and traitors from his land. The Oprichnina operated through a corps of 6,000
oprichniki
. These men, above the law, tortured, raped, murdered and looted from the people of Russia in their ferocious loyalty to the tsar.

Ivan was fanatically religious, spending hours on his knees in church (always after he had killed someone), and he saw the Oprichnina as something akin to the Spanish Inquisition. The
oprichniki
wore black garments like a monk’s robe and rode black horses, carrying a broom and a severed dog’s head on their saddles as symbols of their role as purifiers of the state.

A CITY MASSACRE

Among Ivan the Terrible’s many appalling actions, often ordered by him in fits of destructive rage and carried out by the
oprichniki
, the destruction of Novgorod and the massacre of the city’s citizens in 1570 stands out for its sustained cruelty.

In the centuries before Ivan III subjugated Novgorod territory in 1478, the city of Novgorod had grown from a trading post, dealing in furs, and an Orthodox Christian city into the overlord of a great state stretching across northern Russia as far as the Urals and as far north as the White Sea and the Arctic Circle. In the 15th and early 16th centuries, the Peterhof in Novgorod was one of the four great, and most distant, trading posts, or kontore, of the Hanseatic League. Thus, Novgorod had stronger connections with Europe and the West than most parts of Russia. Although Ivan III deprived Novgorod of its independence, of its wealth and of its links with Europe, the city was still the third largest in Russia, after Moscow and Kiev, in the time of Ivan the Terrible.

Ivan’s increasingly paranoic attention was drawn to the city in the far north-west of his territory in the late 1460s, after General Kurbsky, the hero of Russia’s war against Kazan and a leading counsellor of the tsar, fled the country. Kurbsky was escaping from the escalating horrors of Ivan’s bloodthirsty ten-year reign of terror against the boyars, which saw many boyars and their families either murdered or ordered by the Oprichnina to be deported to Siberia. But when General Kurbsky became a commander in the Polish army, Ivan began to see Polish conspiracies everywhere, not least in Novgorod, with its long history of dealings with Europe.

Believing that Novgorod was a hotbed of conspiracy and intended defection to Poland, Ivan the Terrible sentenced the whole population of the city to death. With a large force of
oprichniki
, Ivan marched north to Novgorod, arriving outside the city on 2 January, 1570. The
oprichniki
immediately began throwing a cordon round the city, building a great wall to prevent its citizens escaping.

When the wall was complete, Ivan and his entourage, which included his son, Tsarevitch Ivan, attended a great banquet in the house of the Archbishop of Novgorod. The next day, 9 January, the massacre began. Every day for five weeks, up to 1,000 men and women of Novgorod were gathered up by Ivan’s men and paraded before him and the tsarevitch in the city’s main square. With their own children looking on, the men and women were tortured and then killed, many by being pushed under the ice of the frozen river Neva and drowned. Every day, after Ivan and his son had witnessed this dreadful spectacle, Ivan, clad in a monk’s robe, went into church and prayed to god – not for forgiveness, but to give thanks.

About 60,000 people were killed during the Novgorod massacre. Many thousands more were deported. When the killings ceased, the
oprichniki
sacked the city and then laid waste to the surrounding countryside. Novgorod never regained its former greatness.

Ivan the Terrible followed the destruction of Novgorod with more bloodletting during a ‘Great Festival of Blood’ in Moscow, in which the main event was more murdering of ‘traitors’. However, the reign of the Oprichnina was soon to be over. Its fighting men failed so utterly to protect Moscow from an invading force of Tartars from Crimea in 1571 that the city, like Novgorod, was reduced to ashes, with only the Kremlin still standing. The following year, Ivan disbanded the Oprichnina and the reign of terror it had overseen came to an end.

Not that Ivan the Terrible’s own actions became any less terrible or his rages less murderous. He killed his son Ivan, whom he loved and admired – and with whom he shared a delight in torturing animals – in the course of an argument with him. This was one killing that
even
Ivan the Terrible could not forget, and when he died three years later, in 1584, it was said that sorrow for his dead son had caused his own death.