The Last Days of the Incas (55 page)

Finally, in 1569, nine years into Titu Cusi’s rule, the hermetically sealed door to Vilcabamba opened just a crack. Due to increasing Spanish threats, Titu Cusi had finally agreed to sign a peace treaty with the Spanish authorities two years earlier. In return for being allowed to rule an independent Vilcabamba without the threat of a Spanish invasion, Titu Cusi had agreed to allow missionaries to enter into his kingdom and had also agreed to end his guerrilla war.

The two friars selected—Marcos García and Diego Ortiz—were aware that no Spaniard was known to have set foot in the capital of Vilcabamba since Gonzalo Pizarro had sacked the city in 1539. Here was a chance
to visit the untouched sanctuary of the Incas’ religion, where no Christian missionary had yet been able to venture. With any luck, the friars realized, they would soon have the chance to destroy the false idols and the devil worship that they believed constituted the Incas’ religion. According to the Spanish priest Bernabé Cobo:

Because the Incas practiced a religion different from the Spaniards’ Christian faith, in other words, by definition they were pagans, and as such were actually believed by the Spaniards to be worshipping a character the Spaniards called
el demonio
, the devil. Now, two humble Spanish missionaries had a golden opportunity to change all that.

The two friars had very distinct personalities. Friar García took a fire-and-brimstone approach to preaching, had a short temper, and was extremely intolerant. Discovering, for example, that the native boys he had begun preaching Christianity to were secretly praying to their other gods as well, the friar “punished them … with ten or a dozen lashes,” an act that understandably angered the boys’ fathers. The latter complained to the emperor and García soon found himself forced to apologize, under threat of being thrown out of the kingdom. On other occasions, horrified by the seemingly bacchanalian festivals and copious drinking associated with Inca religious festivals, the abstemious friar often delivered to groups of drunken
native revelers a fiery lesson on the Christian concepts of hell and eternal damnation—then threatened them with both. Nor was Titu Cusi immune to the friar’s zealous onslaughts: when Friar García learned that the emperor had more than one wife, “the servant of God castigated him [Titu Cusi] with apostolic zeal.” Apparently, the zeal of the apostles not only went unappreciated by the emperor, but greatly annoyed him as well.

Friar Diego Ortiz, by contrast, was much more relaxed in his missionary style and, as a consequence, Titu Cusi is said to have taken an immediate liking to him. Unlike his compatriot, Ortiz was affable and flexible and generally more congenial. Within a short while, two tiny Christian churches began to operate in the Incas’ hidden kingdom: Friar García’s in the small town of Puquiura and Friar Ortiz’s in Huarancalla. Situated roughly eleven miles from each other, the churches were located two to three days’ journey from the capital of Vilcabamba, which neither friar had as yet been allowed to enter.

One day, however, Titu Cusi surprised the friars by inviting them to visit what they had long been hoping to see: “I want to take you to Vilcabamba,” the emperor told them, “since neither of you have seen that town. Go with me, for I want to entertain you.” In early 1570, then, at the height of the rainy season, Titu Cusi, his entourage, and the two friars set out, the emperor carried in his traditional litter and the two friars accompanying him on foot. According to the Augustinian chronicler Antonio de la Calancha, both friars had previously “tried to go to Vilcabamba to preach, because it was the largest town, and in it was the University of the Idolatries, and the witch doctors [who were] masters of the abominations.” Neither friar, however, had succeeded in achieving their goal. Now at last, after packing their clothes, Bibles, and crucifixes, they were about to reach the Incas’ final religious stronghold—the place where Satan himself must surely dwell.

For the next few days, the friars struggled up and down steep, wet trails, many of them so flooded by rivers that the fathers had to pick their way amid submerged rocks. Wrote Calancha:

Finally, after following an Inca road alongside a river and then through thick rain forest, the two friars arrived at the outskirts of Vilcabamba. As the two prepared themselves to enter the capital, they received a piece of unsettling news. The emperor had changed his mind, they were informed. Titu Cusi now forbade the two friars from entering the capital; instead he insisted they remain beyond its view. Titu Cusi later explained:

The chronicler Calancha, however, who did considerable research on the subject, had a different explanation for the emperor’s sudden change of mind, believing that Titu Cusi had prevented the friars from entering Vilcabamba simply because he did not wish them to see “the worship, rites and ceremonies that the Inca [emperor] and his captains practiced each day with their witch-doctors.” Perhaps anticipating that the friars would react angrily to the city’s numerous idols and temples in the Inca capital and perhaps also wishing to avoid a confrontation between the friars and his own priests, Titu Cusi once again declared the Inca capital off limits.

Disappointed, the two missionaries soon trudged back to the village of Puquiura, where Friar García had his church. Frustrated by the emperor’s refusal, the friars apparently decided that now was the opportune moment to cleanse their local parishes of the false gods the natives still worshipped. At a place nearby called Chuquipalpa, the friars had been told, there emerged from the ground a giant, light-colored rock that was located next to a spring of water. The Incas worshipped many springs, rocks, hills, caves, and other natural features of their landscape; apparently, they held this site, too, to be sacred, having built a temple of the sun alongside it. According to Calancha, however, the site was obviously devoted to devil worship, for it included

Convinced that Satan and his minions were purposely blinding the natives from the word of God, the two friars now led some of their congregation to the sacred Inca shrine, uttering prayers and carrying a large cross before them. The friars soon set fire to the complex, doing their best to destroy it and using various solemn incantations with which to banish Lucifer, the fallen archangel, from the area. Their work done, the friars then returned to the village of Puquiura, leaving the smoldering ruins and a group of shocked natives behind.

Word of the friars’ blasphemy soon spread throughout the tiny kingdom, however, and the reaction was nearly instantaneous. “The Inca emperor’s captains were furious and planned to kill the two friars with their spears, thinking nothing of tearing them to pieces,” wrote Calancha. “They arrived at the town [of Puquiura] wanting to give vent to their fury.” The two friars, having unleashed a storm of anger, would have immediately lost their lives if it had not been for the intervention of their local congregation. So great was the outrage, in fact, that the emperor Titu Cusi soon arrived, having hurried to the site on his royal litter; he quickly took charge of the situation. The emperor now banished García from the kingdom, no doubt fed up with the friar’s messianic fervor. Titu Cusi allowed Friar Ortiz to remain, however, who now meekly returned to his church in Huarancalla.

Although he had escaped unpunished, Ortiz had nevertheless made permanent enemies in Vilcabamba, many of whom would never forgive the friar for the sacrilegious nature of his actions. The displaced residents of Vilcabamba, after all, were well aware of the fact that they had been forced by the Spaniards from their highland empire and had been basically at war with them for the last thirty-four years. Now a Spaniard who was living as a guest in their kingdom had just committed an act equivalent to burning the local church to the ground. It would take considerable
skill on Ortiz’s part to regain the natives’ trust.

During the following year, Titu Cusi did his best to steer his small ship of state safely through the tempestuous waters of post-conquest Peru. The emperor continued to exchange diplomatic letters with the Spanish government in Cuzco, always dangling before them the hope that he might one day abandon Vilcabamba, while Friar Ortiz presumably continued to preach the bearded invaders’ religion in Huarancalla. In May of 1571, twenty-six years after Manco’s assassination, his now forty-one-year-old son decided to pay a visit to a sacred shrine in Puquiura, located just outside Vitcos, where Manco had been killed. Titu Cusi, in Calancha’s description,

That night, the emperor suddenly began to bleed from his nose and mouth while complaining of severe chest pains. The next morning he was even worse. When two of his assistants gave him a medicinal beverage to try to stop the bleeding, to their horror Titu Cusi stiffened. Then, suddenly, he died.

Grief-stricken and angry at their emperor’s abrupt death, a number of natives soon seized upon the notion that Friar Ortiz must have somehow been responsible. Ortiz was a Spaniard, after all, and it had been almost in this same spot that other Spaniards had murdered Titu’s father. The bearded friar had also profaned one of their sacred shrines only the year before. Although Ortiz had not been with Titu Cusi when the emperor had become ill, that fact had little significance among a population where illness was often related to witchcraft and where it was known that sorcerers could kill from a distance. Ortiz often ministered to the sick, performing what appeared to be bizarre rituals and speaking in a language or languages
(Latin and Spanish) that the natives didn’t understand. Ortiz was therefore no doubt considered by the natives to be a sorcerer, or
omo.

An angry mob soon seized the friar, tying his hands together behind his back so forcefully that they dislocated a bone. Stripping away the friar’s clothes, the crowd began shouting that Ortiz had killed the
Sapa Inca;
they then began clubbing and beating him. That night, the natives left the naked and bruised friar outside on the ground in the cold, periodically pouring water on the cords binding his hands in order to ensure that the cords swelled and caused the friar even greater agony.

The next day, Ortiz’s captors dragged him to Puquiura, to the church that Friar García had built. Since the two friars had often claimed that their god had the power to restore the dead to the living, the angry natives now demanded that Ortiz raise Titu Cusi from the dead. Freed from his bindings, the naked friar now shuffled slowly into the church, put on some vestments, and then began to say mass, hoping to calm the still angry crowd. Far from Cuzco and thus beyond the help of his countrymen, surrounded by hostile natives and with the dead body of Titu Cusi lying nearby, Friar Ortiz invoked the name of God repeatedly, no doubt in an effort to enlist His aid. The natives, meanwhile, waited impatiently for signs of life from their dead emperor, vowing to kill Ortiz if Titu Cusi didn’t stir. When the crowd saw that the friar had finally finished his mass, crossing himself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Espíritu Santo
, and seeing that Titu Cusi hadn’t moved, they angrily seized the friar again, binding up his arms and demanding to know why Ortiz’s god hadn’t returned their emperor to the living. “He [Ortiz] responded that the Creator of all things, who was God, could do it,” wrote the Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa, “but that [Titu Cusi] did not come back because it wasn’t the will of God—that [God] must not want the Inca [emperor] to return to this world.”

The friar’s response was clearly not what the natives wanted to hear; the crowd now dragged Ortiz to a large cross that stood outside, bound him to it, and began to flog him. They then forced the hapless friar to swallow a vile concoction of urine mixed with other bitter substances. No doubt worried about the possible repercussions of killing him, however, the mob decided to take Ortiz to Vilcabamba—the city Titu Cusi had never allowed a Spaniard to enter. Lacing a cord through a hole they bored in the flesh behind his jaw, the crowd began dragging
the naked friar after them. In Vilcabamba, Titu Cusi’s younger brother—Tupac Amaru—would have to decide the friar’s fate. For Tupac Amaru was now the new Inca emperor.