Hunefeldt C., Harris B. A Brief History of Peru

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Conquest and the

Beginnings of Colonial

Life (1532–1568)

n 1532 a small group of Spanish soldiers and adventurers led by a

tough commander named Francisco Pizarro invaded the Inca

Empire, and in a stroke that combined daring and luck, the men cap-

tured Atahualpa, who had just seized power from his brother after a

destructive civil war. After wringing a fortune in gold and silver from

the Inca ruler, Pizarro executed him and moved on almost unmolested

by the Inca people to take Cuzco. The empire collapsed, and the

Spaniards seized political and economic control of Peru. Failing to take

advantage of subsequent quarrels and civil war among the Spaniards,

who were bent on grabbing as much personal treasure and land for

themselves as they could, the Inca aristocracy fell into disarray, and

attempts at resistance failed. Within a few years the far-off Spanish

Crown had asserted its authority and established an administration to

run what was to become a colonial empire.

Pizarro’s Conquest

Francisco Pizarro, the illegitimate son of a minor Spanish nobleman,

was born in the city of Trujillo in Extremadura circa 1478. He began a

career as a soldier at a very young age in Spain’s wars in Italy. He came

to the Americas in 1509 with the expedition of Alonso de Ojeda, and

he was a member of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s expedition to the Paciﬁc

in 1513. Eventually Pizarro became captain, alderman, and then mayor

of Panama City. He heard rumors about a rich civilization to the south

and made plans with his friend Diego de Almagro (he also consulted

priest Hernando de Luque) to investigate the kingdom referred to as

“Biru,” a name later modiﬁed to “Peru.”

Pizarro left Panama in Septem-

ber 1524 on his ﬁrst exploratory

voyage south, but instead of trea-

sure he found hardship for his

men, many of whom died from

starvation or were killed by

natives. A second trip followed

in 1526, and Pizarro discovered

evidence of a rich kingdom,

although he returned with little

to show for his effort. His third

expedition left Panama on

January 20, 1531, with 180 men

and 37 horses.

This time Pizarro landed on

the coast and established a base,

spending the following months

gathering intelligence about the empire of the Inca. He doubtless

learned about the war between Huáscar and Atahualpa and may have

surmised the time was ripe for him to strike. In November 1532 Pizarro

and his small group of men left Tumbes on the coast and began a difﬁ-

cult march into the highlands, aiming for Cajamarca. In the meantime

Atahualpa had received messages from curacas on the northern coast

about the arrival of white bearded men coming from the sea on ﬂoating

houses and riding huge animals. This news came as no surprise since

the ﬁrst r

eports of the Spanish presence had reached the Inca Huayna

Capac during his campaigns in the north almost a decade earlier.

Instead of confronting the Spaniards or opposing their advance,

Atahualpa, surrounded by an army of tens of thousands, decided to

wait for them to arrive at his camp. On their way from Tumbes to

Cajamarca, the Spaniards met no resistance, and in fact, messengers

brought them gifts of the alcoholic drink chicha, llamas, and food from

the Inca. The Spaniar

ds in return sent back silk shirts and glass trinkets.

Pizarro and his men arrived at Cajamarca to ﬁnd it almost deserted,

so they took possession of the town. Atahualpa’s huge army was

camped nearby, and Pizarro sent an invitation to the Inca to meet in

Cajamarca. On November 16, 1532, Atahualpa entered the town with

hundreds of retainers but few guards. Most of the Spanish soldiers,

many armed with the ﬁrearms of the day as well as their ﬁne Toledo-

made swords, were hidden in ambush. Pizarro sent a priest, Fray

Vicente de Valverde, forward to harangue Atahualpa about Christianity.

CONQUEST AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL LIFE

The Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro

(Pageant of America)

When the priest offered Atahualpa a Bible, the Inca either dropped it or

threw it aside. Perceiving this as blasphemy from a heretic, the

Spaniards unleashed a ferocious attack on the Incas, killing hundreds

of them while suffering not a single loss. Moreover, the supreme Inca

himself was captured. At the end of the day, despite fears the massed

Inca army would attack in revenge for the capture of their ruler, Pizarro

was in control.

The Inca’s army, as it turned out, was paralyzed with no one at the

top to give orders. The Spaniards were left unmolested, and as they

gained confidence, they began to exploit the situation. Pizarro

demanded a ransom from Atahualpa, who responded by issuing orders

for an entire room to be ﬁlled with gold for the Spaniards and two more

with silver. The treasure carts rolled in from the corners of the empire,

until by spring 1533, a ransom calculated at 1.5 million pesos was in

Pizarro’s hands. For his part, Pizarro reneged on his promise to spare

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERU

The Death of Atahualpa,

According to

the Chronicler

Pedro Cieza de LeÓn

When Atahualpa learned of the cruel sentence, he lamented to

God Almighty how those who had seized him had failed to keep

their word. He could not find a way to escape. If he believed

that he could do it with more gold, he would have given them

another house, even four more. He said many pitiful things: that

those who were listening to him should have mercy because of

his youth; he asked why they were killing him, even though he

had given them so much and not caused them any harm or

injury. He complained about Pizarro, and with reason.

At about seven in the evening they removed him from where

he was held. They took him to where the execution would take

place; Friar Vicente, Juan de Porras, Captain Salcedo, and some

others went with him. On the way he kept repeating: “Why are

they killing me? Why am I being killed? What have I done, and my

children and my wives?” and other similar words. Friar Vicente was

admonishing him to become a Christian and abandon his beliefs.

[Atahualpa] asked to be baptized, and the friar did it. And then

they strangled him, and to fulfill the sentence they burned some

of his hair with pieces of straw, which was another foolishness.

Atahualpa, and after condemning the Inca on trumped-up conspiracy

charges, he executed the supreme ruler on July 16. The Inca, who had

ordered the death of his imprisoned brother Huáscar from his own

prison cell, chose a last-minute conversion to Catholicism to avoid

death by burning at the stake, a fate that would have made the preser-

vation of his mummy impossible. He died by garroting. Atahualpa was

solemnly buried in the church the next day, but shortly afterward his

corpse disappeared, probably destroyed by the Spaniards to prevent his

followers from using a royal mummy as a rallying point for resistance,

or taken by his followers to rescue their Inca and bring him safely to the

hanaq pacha.

When the Spanish king, Charles V, heard about the execution, he was

deeply upset. Pizarr

o had killed a monarch, and no vassal could ever

kill a king (even if he was a foreigner and a heretic) without seriously

disturbing the monarchical order itself.

CONQUEST AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL LIFE

Some of the Indians say that before they killed him, Atahualpa

exclaimed that they should await him in Quito, that they would

see him again in the form of a snake (Cieza de León, Cook and

Cook 1998, 256–257).

A modern-day view of Cajamarca, where Francisco Pizarro captured in 1532 and

executed in 1533 the Inca Atahualpa, effectively bringing the sprawling Inca Empire

under the control of the Spanish Crown and gaining a fortune in ransom for himself

and his men

(Harryhausen/Alamy)

Civil Conﬂict and Inca Resistance

Even before the death of Atahualpa, the Spaniards began to quarrel

among themselves. Over the course of the following several years, the

early conquistadores and settlers fought so vigorously among them-

selves that the period might accurately be labeled one of civil war.

The basic conﬂict was between Francisco Pizarro—backed by his three

brothers, Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo—and Pizarro’s former ally Diego

de Almagro. Almagro and his men had arrived at Cajamarca too late to

take part in the ambush and capture of the Inca, and therefore Pizarro

refused to give them much of a share in the fabulous ransom. This was

only the beginning of the bad blood between them. Pizarro took political

control of Peru. He ruled from his new city of Lima, established on the

coast, and, more important, he handed out land grants, called encomien-

das, to himself, his brothers, and his followers with a liberal hand.

Almagr

o and his party failed to receive what they felt was their due. After

an expedition to Chile failed to produce riches, a disappointed Almagro

occupied Cuzco and took two of the Pizarro brothers captive.

There were a series of disagreements and temporary settlements over

the next several years, but since these were violent times and these men

were soldiers, the conﬂict eventually worked itself out through vio-

lence. In April 1538, at Las Salinas, near Cuzco, Pizarro’s army defeated

Almagro’s outnumbered men in a brief battle. Almagro was captured,

and on orders of Hernando Pizarro, he was beheaded in the main

square of Cuzco. (Hernando was tried and imprisoned for this execu-

tion when he returned soon thereafter to Spain.)

Three years after Almagro’s defeat and death, a group of his support-

ers led by Almagro’s mestizo son, also named Diego de Almagro, assas-

sinated Francisco Pizarro in his home in Lima. The Almagro faction

then claimed control of the colonial government, but their triumph was

short lived. The king appointed a new royal governor, Cristóbal Vaca de

Castro, in an attempt to bring order to the unruly colony. Vaca de

Castro assembled an army, defeated and captured the younger Almagro

in 1542 at the battle of Chufas, and executed him afterward.

Meanwhile, the hopes of the Incas to return to power had been

dashed several times. When Huáscar and Atahualpa died, the potential

leadership was thrown into disarray. Pizarro understood the need to

restore order and therefore named a puppet Inca, Tupac Huallpa, a son

of Huayna Capac. Tupac was poisoned only a few months later and was

replaced by Manco Inca II, another son of Huayna Capac, brother of

Huáscar. Manco Inca had initially sought an alliance with the Spaniards

in his struggle against the followers of Atahualpa, but he soon came to

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERU

understand that the Spaniards did not intend to become his allies and

was virtually a prisoner in his own palace. He bribed Hernando Pizarro

with several massive gold statues, and on April 18, 1536, Manco Inca

was freed and made his escape to the Urubamba Valley. From there, he

organized an army to ﬁght the Spaniards.

Four times between 1536 and 1537, Manco Inca’s troops laid siege to

Cuzco, hoping to dislodge the Spaniards; however, several other ethnic

groups, wishing to free themselves from Inca dominion, aided the

Spaniards. Apparently, the curacas of these ethnic groups little sus-

pected the miseries they would face shortly after

ward.

Not the least of the difﬁculties was the displacement the Spaniards

inﬂicted on much of the indigenous population. From the early days

of their control, the Spanish needed labor to create the wealth they so

craved. As a consequence the Spaniards insisted on moving and reor-

ganizing ethnic groups. The largest groups, which may have numbered

several units called guarangas, each of which had 1,000 households,

wer

e often subdivided into smaller units, called pachacas, of 100

households each. The smaller units were then assigned to work wher

the Spaniards felt the sharpest needs for labor. The organization into

CONQUEST AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL LIFE

Inca Cooperation

uring the period of disruption following the execution of

Atahualpa, some members of the Cuzco Inca nobility tried to bar-

gain with the Spaniards. Paullu Inca, for example, the younger brother of

Huáscar,Atahualpa, and Manco Inca, ﬁrst sided with Diego de Almagro.

Later he allied himself to Cristóbal Vaca de Castro and took the

Christian name of Cristóbal Paullu Inca. Soon afterward, Paullu Inca

moved on to court Gonzalo Pizarro, while at the same time secretly

helping Pedro La Gasca to mobilize against Gonzalo. In 1545 Spanish

king Charles V extended a form of recognition to Paullu by granting him

a coat of arms.

Paullu Inca’s history demonstrated the willingness of some of the

Inca elites to cooperate with the Spaniards, including participation in

Spanish civil strife. Without Indian help the conquistadores would not

have been able to subdue the empire, and without siding with Spaniards

the Indian nobility would not have had an opportunity to rescue some

of their privileges, such as obtaining larger tracts of land, collecting trib-

utes, or wearing better clothes.

thousands and hundreds was an Inca custom and thus preserved some

sense of the traditional past, but in spite of these organizational efforts,

disarray and demographic decline prevailed.

Manco Inca’s rebellion was nearly successful, but ultimately he could

not dislodge the Spanish from Cuzco or their new capital at Lima, and

his campaigns slowly faded away. By 1539 Manco Inca had retreated to

the east of Cuzco and established his headquarters in Vilcabamba

(modern-day Espíritu Pampa). For ﬁve more years Manco Inca con-

tested Spanish power with sporadic attacks but avoided direct and

large-scale confrontations. In the end he was murdered by followers of

the Almagro faction who hoped to prove themselves to the newly

appointed Spanish authorities. After stabbing Manco to death in front

of his son, the murderers were killed by Manco’s followers.

Native Chroniclers

Despite the dramatic, destructive impact of the Spanish conquest,

aspects of Inca society survived: sometimes in the original version,

sometimes in transmuted forms, and sometimes hidden from Spanish

view. A great deal of information has come down to us through the

works of native chroniclers, who made efforts to record what seemed to

the casual observer to be passing away or hidden. While the conquista-

dores and their successors ﬁlled their pockets with Inca gold and silver,

a few of the descendants of the Inca learned to use paper and pens as

tools to preserve some of their own culture.

Among those Inca who learned to read and write Spanish, at least six

became chroniclers, who wrote about the Inca past and the impact of

the Spanish conquest. Most also eventually made recommendations to

the king for better governance of the colonies. Five such chroniclers are

known to us by name: Garcilaso de la Vega, Felipe Guamán Poma de

Ayala, Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti, Yamqui Salcamaygua, and Diego

del Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui—plus the anonymous author of the

Huarochiri chronicle. They wrote the initial colonial history.

Perhaps the best known of this group is Guamán Poma de Ayala, an

Indian chronicler from Huamanga, who wrote a 1,000-page letter to the

king of Spain suggesting a radical change of royal Spanish policies.

Guamán Poma de Ayala based his ideas on his knowledge of the Inca

past and on his own observations, having witnessed the dire conse-

quences of Spanish presence among his people at the beginning of the

16th century. He advanced arguments to the king to restore the land to

the indigenous people, to keep non-Indians out of native settlements,

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERU

to reinstate and honor traditional privileges of local Indian authorities,

and to remedy personal and collective grievances. In short, he invited

the king to reassess and revise the colonial enterprise by taking Indians’

rights into consideration.

Guamán Poma de Ayala buttressed his request by demonstrating that

Andeans were not historically or culturally inferior to Europeans. To

the contrary, he argued that lower-status Spaniards had had no right to

kill an Inca. He also attempted to dismantle the religious argument for

conquest by stating it was not a “just” war against heretics for the sake

of Christian beliefs because the apostle Saint Bartholomew had visited

Peru before the Spaniards; thus, Indians had heard about the “real”

Christian god and were not pagans. He also argued that the king’s inter-

ests would be better served if the indigenous people regained lost

venues, because most Spanish emissaries were corrupt and unprepared

to serve the king well. Guamán Poma de Ayala was not entirely Inca-

friendly, and he did not want to return to Inca hegemony, but he rein-

terpreted the Inca past to make sense of a dismal present and, more

important, to advocate a change in colonial policies.

It is not known if the king read Guamán Poma de Ayala’s long letter,

or if he read it, how he understood it. Much of what followed through-

out the colonial period was, however, far removed from Guamán Poma

de Ayala’s wishes and interpretations; in fact, those who survived the

dramatic decline in numbers of the indigenous population were sub-

dued ever more ﬁrmly to Spanish interests. Indigenous struggle for

recognition and autonomy disintegrated but did not disappear. It took

time, however, before the Spanish Crown recognized that only by

upholding indigenous rights and access to land would it be able to con-

tinue exacting tribute and labor from its vassals. And the only way of

upholding indigenous rights was by restraining the power and the

greed of the Spanish population in its colonies. In a way it was self-

interest that proved Guamán Poma de Ayala right in the long run.

Spanish Colonialism

In contrast to limited sources of knowledge about the Inca Empire, the

Spanish colonial period from the 16th to the early 19th centuries was

well documented by the Spanish colonial bureaucracy. Historical docu-

mentation of speciﬁc subjects throughout the colonial period abounds,

especially for the initial stages of colonial domination in the 16th cen-

tury and for the second half of the 18th century up to the wars of inde-

pendence from Spain in 1825. Research on the colonial period is also

CONQUEST AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL LIFE

marked by regional bias because of Peru’s uneven regional development.

Researchers, for example, know more about Peru’s southern highlands

in and around Cuzco than about the northern coast, and the same is true

in the case of Lima versus other, minor cities in the country.

When Pizarro founded his new capital city of Lima on the coast in

1535, he deliberately pushed Cuzco, the former seat of the Inca Empire,

into the political background. Initially Pizarro had declared Xauxa (pre-

sent-day Jauja, located in the central Peruvian highlands) as the capital

city of the Viceroyalty of Peru; however, by 1535 the axis of power con-

nected Lima, and its port city of Callao, to the port of Seville in Spain.

Hundreds of other towns and cities were founded in Peru during the

16th century, although they were spread out over a vast agrarian land-

scape. By 1580 there were 225 populated cities within the Spanish

domain; by 1630 there were 331. U.S. historians Louise Hoberman and

Susan M. Socolow have concluded that the Hispanic culture imported

to the New World was essentially and “profoundly” urban (1986, 3, 5).

When the Spanish conquistadores reached the shores of Peru, they

were experienced in dealing with cultures and environments different

from their own. Spaniards had dealt with Arab culture for more than seven

centuries on the Iberian Peninsula, expelling the Arabs from Iberia only

just as the New World was discovered. Conquistador Hernán Cortés’s

encounter with the Aztec Empire provided a backdrop to Pizarro’s con-

quest of the Inca. In the wake of Spanish experiences with the Aztec,

much enticing information had reached the royal palace in Madrid and the

ears of Charles V. America had ceased to be regarded as a collection of

uninteresting islands and had become the focus of adventure and possible

fortune for the Spanish Crown as well as for individual Spaniards.

The men who came to Peru with Francisco Pizarro were of varied

backgrounds and status: Some were career soldiers, but others were arti-

sans or merchants. All of them claimed to be “old Christians,”

“unstained” by Judaic or Muslim blood. All of them knew how to han-

dle arms. None of the ﬁrst expeditions included women, but every expe-

dition had a priest and a scribe to bring native pagans under the

Christian god and to duly record the adventures and deeds of the group.

Conquistadores were imbued by an ideology of “blood purity,” a mind-

set directly related to their centuries-long experiences with Jews and

Muslims at home. The Spaniards extended their attitudes to the Indians of

Peru, deeming them inferior and impure heretics and thereby justifying

conquest, enslavement, and even murder without remorse. Indian women

were expropriated to meet the demands of Spanish male sexual needs and

became the mothers of a mixed-blood population, the mestizos.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERU

The Spanish conquest and religious enterprise was blessed by the

Roman Catholic Church. Pope Alexander VI entrusted America to the

Catholic king of Castile. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) sealed this

political-religious pact. Sword and Bible were the powerful instruments

of conquest. Thus, from the Spanish viewpoint the destruction of the

Inca culture and Andean sacred places blessed the perpetrators doubly:

They were doing something important to spread the belief in the “real”

god, and they also got to reap plunder.

The Encomienda

A key factor in the settlement of the Spanish colonies was the

encomienda, a grant of land by the king to loyal subjects, principally the

early conquistador

es, that carried with it the assigned labor of Indians.

The combination of land and workforce made the encomienda a potent

sour

ce of wealth and power. The more Indians an encomendero received,

the richer he was. He collected tribute payments from the Indians, and

in r

eturn for the land grant, the encomendero had two obligations to the

Crown: to turn the Indians on the encomienda into good Catholics and

to protect them. As long as the encomendero fulﬁlled these duties, he

was allowed a fr

ee hand to use Indian labor and to demand payments

for himself from the Indians.

From the point of view of the Spanish Crown, encomiendas provided

a way to account for and contr

ol the king’s new Indian vassals, to funnel

tribute to the Crown, and to limit the indiscriminate appropriation of

laborers by individual Spaniards. It was a way to protect the indigenous

populations and also a way to prevent any single individual from accu-

mulating too much power and wealth, which could lead to the feudal-

ization of the colonies and eventually to the separation of the colonies

from Spain. For the same reasons, the Spanish Crown granted encomien-

das only temporarily, initially for the duration of the lifetimes of the

encomendero and two heirs, later only to the encomendero and one heir.

Pizarr

o granted the ﬁrst encomiendas to his followers after reserving the

best sites for himself. Typically his foot soldiers received appr

oximately

3.5 acres, and his horsemen received approximately 17.5 acres, along with

their respective allotments of Indian laborers. Pizarro was interested, of

course, in revenues; however, in his reports to the Council of the Indies in

Spain, the governing body of the colonies, he also expressed his hope of

avoiding the annihilation of Indians and the theft of all their property by

putting them under the tutelage of an encomendero. In 1540 he ordered a

ﬁrst inspection (visita) of the various encomiendas in order to establish the

CONQUEST AND THE BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL LIFE