The Last Days of the Incas (57 page)

Whoever captured the Inca emperor, in other words, was to be granted an
encomienda
with enough natives on it to guarantee a lifetime income of one thousand pesos (around ten pounds of gold) per year, a grant that could then be passed on for one additional lifetime to the recipient’s son, daughter, or other heir. The stakes on both sides, therefore, couldn’t have been any higher: a fortune in gold and an easy retirement for whoever captured the Inca emperor versus the capture and imprisonment or death of the Inca emperor. The Spaniards also wished to put an end to future native rebellions by driving a stake into the heart of the final pocket of Inca resistance.

The ensuing pursuit through the jungle after the Inca emperor was consequently a brutal one. Descending the river Masahuay (probably today’s Cosireni and Urubamba Rivers), García de Loyola and his men traveled more than a hundred miles, deep into the region of the Mañari Indians, an ethnic group probably related to today’s Campas or Machiguengas. Floating on rafts and led by their native guides, the Spaniards drifted downstream through the primeval wilderness of the upper Amazon. Immense
trees in various shades of emerald and green with enormous trunks rose alongside the riverbanks beside them, some with giant crowns full of flowers, others with exotic fruits. Toucans with their disproportionately large and colored beaks occasionally looked down upon the armored men drifting below, cocking their heads sideways for a better view.

As the Spaniards floated downriver, they periodically captured frightened natives on rafts or in canoes and forced their captives to give them information as to the whereabouts of the fleeing Inca emperor. The Spanish bounty hunters soon learned that the emperor “Tupac Amaru was in the Momori Valley, secure [in the belief] that it was not possible to catch him [there] because of the impenetrability of the country and of the rivers.” Encouraged by the fact that they were obviously heading in the right direction, García de Loyola and his men now continued on downriver, braving the cataracts and rapids and eventually arriving at Momori. There, the Spaniards were encouraged to learn that they were gradually closing the distance between themselves and the fleeing emperor, as only

Quickening their pace, the Spaniards now began to chase their quarry by both day and night, guided by Mañari Indians and lighting their way late at night with torches. As the orange flames illuminated the strange, eerie black jungle, the Spaniards sometimes froze momentarily as unseen beasts suddenly crashed noisily away. Finally, after a chase that had lasted for more than two hundred miles, the Spaniards eventually glimpsed a small fire flickering ahead through the jungle. Moving cautiously with drawn swords, García de Loyola and his men emerged into a small clearing where they found Tupac Amaru and his pregnant wife huddled beside a campfire. The two royal fugitives no doubt must have looked up bleakly as the bearded men emerged from the darkness, the fire causing the steel of their swords and breastplates to glisten. There, in the middle of the night,
deep in the Amazon rain forest, the thirty-five-year-long Spanish campaign to destroy the rebel province of Vilcabamba and to seize its last remaining Inca emperor had finally came to an end.

On September 21, 1572, on what the Spaniards call St. Matthew’s Day and in the month the Incas called the
Coya Raymi
, or the “Festival of the Moon,” General Arbieto’s victorious expedition arrived at the gates of Cuzco. Tupac Amaru and the rest of the Spaniards’ high-ranking prisoners marched before the cavalry, tethered by ropes and chains to their Spanish captors. Virtually all the Spanish and native inhabitants of the city turned out to watch the expedition’s triumphal return after nearly four months. Arbieto and his men now marched and rode into the city, their native auxiliaries walking alongside together with the Spaniards’ numerous black slaves. The victors carried with them their captured treasure, such as the golden
punchao
, or sacred image of the sun, which they had discovered in the forests outside Vilcabamba; they also brought the mummified bodies of Manco Inca and Titu Cusi—the two rebel leaders, now dead, who had caused the Spaniards so much grief with their deadly insurgency campaigns.

As Tupac Amaru and his captains were led away and imprisoned, the conquering Spaniards, by contrast, were treated to celebrations that lasted late into the night. Within a matter of days, the Spaniards quickly tried, convicted, and then executed Tupac Amaru’s generals. Their offense, apparently, had been to command the military defense of Vilcabamba against the Spanish invaders. Their real crime, of course, was to have resisted the final Spanish subjugation of Tawantinsuyu. A gathering of Spanish priests who spoke
runasimi
, meanwhile, did their best to convince Tupac Amaru to convert to Christianity, no doubt hoping that the emperor would choose to save himself spiritually, even if it proved impossible to do so physically.

The twenty-nine-year-old emperor, who had done his best to strengthen the Inca religion in Vilcabamba during his brief, sixteen-month reign, eventually agreed to convert. A strong motivation for doing so was no doubt the fact that he had been informed that a trial was being conducted against him, a trial in which his very life hung in the balance. Tupac Amaru was being accused, basically, of having been the ruler of a rebel state that had launched raids upon Spanish-controlled Peru, and also of having allowed
heathen religious practices to be tolerated within his kingdom. The raids, of course, had been launched not by Tupac Amaru, but by his older brother Titu Cusi, and by his father, Manco Inca. Both of those emperors had done so only after the Spaniards had attacked and occupied Tawantinsuyu, which, from the Incas’ point of view, the Spaniards had no right to rule. The “heathen religious practices” the emperor was accused of were likewise part of the Incas’ own native religion, one that they had practiced since time immemorial and long before the arrival of the Spaniards.

Tupac Amaru himself was neither conversant in the Spanish language nor familiar with Spanish jurisprudence, nor did he have any legal counsel to defend him. His trial therefore was the sixteenth-century equivalent of a kangaroo court. Even if the Inca emperor had been supplied with the finest legal representation from Spain, however, and even had such representation argued that the Spaniards had no legal right to invade the Inca Empire, it is unlikely that the results would have been different. The prosecution, no doubt, would have argued that God himself had given the pope the right to assign Tawantinsuyu to the king and queen of Spain, and that the Spaniards were thus simply carrying out God’s will. For the Incas of Vilcabamba to resist such a commandment was therefore both blasphemy and treason, and were actions that were obviously contrary to God’s will. Besides, even though Tupac Amaru was now converting to Christianity, he had nevertheless been the spiritual leader of a pagan religion, one that had worshipped false idols and that in fact had worshipped Tupac Amaru as a false god himself.

The verdict was thus a foregone conclusion. Neither the Spaniards nor the Incas would ever have allowed an independent, hostile enclave to exist within a territory they had conquered, nor would they have allowed an important resistance figure to inspire disloyalty among their newly conquered citizens. Just as the Romans had destroyed Spartacus, the Spaniards had cleansed from their native country every last vestige of the Moors. The laws of empire building are brutal and dispassionate, and both the Incas and the Spaniards implicitly understood them. No two empires, after all, can exist simultaneously in the same area; the stronger empire will always defeat the weaker, until in the end only a single empire remains.

Not surprisingly then, after only three days of trial, the judge selected by the viceroy condemned Tupac Amaru
to death. And although various religious leaders in Cuzco pleaded with the viceroy for the emperor’s life to be spared, Toledo insisted that the sentence be immediately carried out. The king’s viceroy was determined to remove from Spain’s new colony the last vestige of Inca independence and to crush once and for all the possibility of another native rebellion. Tupac Amaru, he therefore insisted, must not be allowed to remain alive.

On September 24, 1572, a phalanx of guards brought the emperor from his prison and led him through the streets to the main square. This was the same square where, thirty-seven years earlier, Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors had set up camp the day they had first arrived in Cuzco and where once a succession of Inca emperors had held giant religious ceremonies that symbolized their vast power. Now, in the center of the square, a simple scaffold awaited. One chronicler wrote that:

An eyewitness recalled that:

As crowds of gawking Spaniards, natives, and African slaves watched, Tupac Amaru rode “a street mule draped in black velvet, and he himself was completely covered in mourning.” The emperor’s hands had been bound together with rope while another rope had been tied around his neck, lest the Inca king should try to escape.

According to some accounts, just before he arrived at the scaffold, Tupac Amaru’s sister, María Cusi Huarcay, suddenly appeared at a window, crying out to him

Tupac Amaru now ascended the scaffold, which had been draped in black cloth, aware as he did so that the Spaniards had also murdered both his father, Manco Inca, and his uncle Atahualpa.

Standing alongside his executioner—who was an ethnic Cañari and thus an enemy of the Incas—and with a black-robed priest at his side, Tupac Amaru looked out over the vast multitude and slowly raised his right hand. He then “let it fall. With a lordly mind he alone remained calm, and all the noise was followed by a silence so profound that no living soul moved, either among those who were in the square or among those at a distance.” Then, when all had become silent and everyone on the square strained to see the last legitimate heir of the four
suyus
and to hear what he might say, Tupac Amaru, the Royal Serpent, addressed the crowd:

After delivering this surprising speech, spoken in
runasimi
so that few Spaniards other than a handful of priests understood it, and which no doubt stunned his native listeners,