The Last Days of the Incas Read Online Free Page B

ostentatious jewelry,andsleek linen tights. In Spain and other European kingdoms, and on scattered islands and possessions throughout the Spanish Caribbean, the conquerors of Peru were already legendary figures: young and old alike dreamed of nothing more than walking in these same conquistadors’ now finely appointed shoes.

    The conquistadors Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro voyaging toward the new world and Peru, by the sixteenth-century native artist Felipe Huamá Poma de Ayala.
    On this crisp spring morning, however, at an elevation of 11,300 feet in the Andes, church bells of bronze had begun to clang incessantly from a structure the Spaniards had hastily erected on top of the immaculately cut gray stones of the Qoricancha, the Incas’ temple of the sun. Rumors now swirled along the streets of this bowl-like city, surrounded by green hills, that the puppet Inca emperor had escaped and in fact was about to return with a massive native army, hundreds of thousands strong.
    As the Spaniards swarmed out of their dwellings, arming themselves with steel swords, daggers, twin-pointed morion helmets, twelve-foot lances and saddling up their horses, they bitterly swore that the Inca rebels were so many “dogs” and “traitors.” The air was clear, sharp, and thin, and the iron-clad hooves of the horses clattered on the cut stones of the streets. A question that no doubt arose in at least some of the conquistadors’ minds, however, was—where had it all gone wrong?
    Indeed, thus far the Spaniards had enjoyed one stunning success after another. Four years earlier, in September 1532, led by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, 168 of them had made their way up into the Andes—sixty-two on horseback and 106 on foot—leaving a cluster of lanteen-rigged ships moored in the deep blue waters of the Pacific Ocean, or the “Southern Sea.” The Spaniards had eventually climbed eight thousand feet and then had walked directly into the lion’s den—where the lord of the Inca Empire, Atahualpa, with an army of possibly eighty thousand warriors, was waiting for them.
    Francisco Pizarro at this time was a fifty-four-year-old, moderately wealthy landowner who had been living in Panama and who had thirty years of Indian fighting experience behind him. Tall, sinewy, athletic, with hollow cheeks and a thin beard, Pizarro resembled Don Quixote, even though Don Quixote wouldn’t be created for another seventy-three years. A poor cavalryman (until literally the last moments of his life, Pizarro preferred fighting on foot), Pizarro was also quiet, taciturn, brave, firm, ambitious, cunning, efficient,diplomatic, and—like most conquistadors—could be as brutal as the situation required.
    For better or for worse, Pizarro had been molded by the region he hailed from in western Spain—Extremadura. * An impoverished, rural, backward area, Extremadura was covered in arid, Mediterranean scrub and lay marooned like a landlocked island in the midst of a relatively poor country just emerging from the feudal ages that had yet to become a nation. The region, it was well known, typically produced men who were both uncommunicative and parsimonious, men who showed little emotion and who were known to be as tough and unsympathetic as the landscape that had nurtured them.
    Of such gritty material were made both Pizarro and a large number of his fellow conquistadors, many of whom had also come from the same region. Vasco Núñez de Balboa—the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean—for example, was from Extremadura. So was Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer of Florida. Hernando de Soto, the seasoned explorer who would later fight his way through what are now Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, was an
extremeño.
Even Hernando Cortés, the recent conqueror of the Aztec Empire in Mexico, had grown up within forty miles of his compatriot and second cousin Francisco Pizarro. † That the conquerors of the New World’s two most powerful