The Last Days of the Incas (51 page)

IN JUNE OF 1541 FRANCISCO PIZARRO WAS STILL THE SAME
unpretentious man of simple interests that he had been when he first arrived in the New World thirty-nine years earlier. Although he had now spent more than two thirds of his life in the Americas, the sixty-three-year-old conquistador still bore the unmistakable stamp of his formative years in rural Extremadura. The son of a distinguished cavalry captain, Pizarro had grown up with his mother—a maid who came from a family of peasants—and her family and not with that of his father’s. Francisco’s three paternal half-brothers—Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo—by contrast, although born many years later, had grown up in their father’s household, while Hernando, as the eldest among them, had received both a formal education
and had
inherited his father’s estate.

A Spanish
encomendero
being carried in a litter previously reserved for the Inca elite.

Had Pizarro been a man of lesser ambition, then his future in Spain no doubt would have been circumscribed by the limitations of his family and birth. His normal destiny would have been to perform agricultural work where, occasionally from the fields, the tall, lean man with the thickly callused hands, the thin black beard, and peasant shoes would have looked up in dull envy at the elegantly clothed people riding nearby in carriages or on horseback—people whose pedigrees, accomplishments, and inheritances had rendered unto them not only noble titles and vast estates, but also complete freedom from manual labor. Pizarro
was
ambitious, however, meaning that his own vision of himself and his future did not coincide with the expectations his fellow townsmen had of him. That ambition—coupled with the social stigma of his illegitimacy and perhaps with a subconscious desire as a boy to have grown up in his father’s more prestigious house rather than in his mother’s home—was undoubtedly the motor that propelled him both across an ocean and a continent. It was also no doubt the driving motivation that ultimately led Pizarro to conquer the largest native empire in the New World.

Unlike his fellow Trujilleño, Rodrigo Orgóñez, who after achieving wealth in Peru had written letters to a local nobleman pleading for him to legitimize his name, Pizarro had in a sense created his own legitimacy through conquest. Orgóñez’s craving for a pedigree stemmed from his desire to petition the king to become a Knight of the Order of Santiago—one of Spain’s most prestigious titles and one that required legitimate birth on the part of the petitioner. Because of Pizarro’s conquest of the wealthy Inca Empire, however, King Charles had overlooked Pizarro’s illegitimacy and had made him a knight. Nevertheless, in the sixteenth-century kingdoms of Spain, a well-positioned “gentleman” normally had a full paragraph of titles and descriptive modifiers that preceded his written name. Any inquisitive person had only to scan the paragraph to know precisely where that person fit into society, and the virtues or lack thereof of his pedigree.

By 1541, however, Francisco Pizarro had obtained all the status and prestige that he had ever dreamed of: he was Knight of the Order of Santiago, Governor, Military Commander, and Marquis of His Majesty’s Kingdom of New Castile. As governor—a post equivalent to that of a viceroy, or deputy king—Pizarro was in the enviable position of having
been personally appointed by the king to represent Spanish power in Peru and to govern the millions of new vassals that the king had acquired by virtue of Pizarro’s own sword. If any of Pizarro’s enemies were to question his plebeian origins, Pizarro could easily say—as the illegitimate Voltaire would later reply to the inquiries of an insolent French nobleman nearly two centuries later—“I am
beginning
my name—and you are finishing yours.”

Despite his titles, his immense wealth, and his power, however, Pizarro’s early peasant years nevertheless had left an indelible stamp upon the veteran conquistador’s tastes. Although many of the wealthy
encomenderos
to whom he had granted natives had quickly shed their armor and had replaced it with silk stockings, plumed caps, and fine imported European clothes—mimicking the behavior of the nobility in Spain—Pizarro preferred to wear simple clothes with no frills. Wrote the chronicler Agustín de Zárate:

Not only did Pizarro dress plainly, but in an era when properly bred Spanish noblemen commonly took an interest in horses, hunting, and falconry—the sixteenth-century equivalent of modern-day tennis, golf, and yachting—Pizarro preferred working-class sports and games of chance. Wrote Zárate:

The man who as a boy had grown up in the poorer part of town not surprisingly preferred plebeian to aristocratic company, spending his time whenever possible among sailors, millers, muleteers, artisans, and other men who worked with their hands. Pizarro spent hours playing cards and gambling with them as well, although, because of his natural stinginess, it was said, “he collected what he won and left unpaid what he lost.”

Sometimes, while searching for the governor, Pizarro’s contemporaries would find the wealthy marquis in the fields outside Lima, reaping imported European wheat with the natives, “doing what he enjoyed and was his trade.” It was an activity that no respectable marquis or any other nobleman in Spain would ever do. As workmen began installing two grinding mills beside Lima’s Rimac River, important business meetings and papers sometimes had to be transported along with a notary to the site of the mills, “in whose construction he [Pizarro] spent all his leisure time, urging on the workmen who were building them.” Similarly, when the time came for the casting of the first bronze bell of Lima’s cathedral, which Pizarro had dedicated to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, once again the governor could be found not in his residence relaxing but instead at the forge site personally operating the bellows, sweating profusely, and with his clothes and hands dirty.

While Pizarro busied himself with governing the native empire he had spent all his life striving
to obtain, his thirty-eight-year-old brother, Hernando, had meanwhile arrived in Spain in order to defend to the king his execution of the governor Diego de Almagro. One of Almagro’s captains, Diego de Alvarado, had arrived before him, however, and had immediately filed charges against Hernando for Almagro’s murder. Hernando nevertheless was no doubt counting upon his ability to leverage the shipment of the king’s Peruvian treasure to his advantage. Much to his surprise, however, and before even being granted a royal audience, Hernando was arrested and thrown into prison. Soon, other supporters of Almagro returned to Spain and testified against Hernando as well, such as the nobleman Don Alonzo Enríquez de Guzmán. Although the latter had fought alongside Hernando during Manco’s nearly year-long siege of Cuzco, the experience had not drawn the two men closer together. In a letter sent to the Royal Council, Enríquez de Guzmán pulled no punches in impugning the large, arrogant man whom he had clearly grown to hate.

The accusations—many of them exaggerated and in some cases wholly made up—nevertheless were based upon an inescapable core of truth: Hernando
had
killed Diego de Almagro, despite having been set free by Almagro himself. Thus, even though Hernando had access to the finest legal counsel available in Spain, he would nevertheless spend the next twenty-three years of his life in prison, just outside Madrid. By the time he emerged, at the age of sixty in the year 1561, Hernando was a prematurely aged and partially blind old man. No one who later saw the hunched, white-haired, former conquistador walking down the street with the help of a cane would ever have guessed that this was the same arrogant and boastful man who had once ridden more than a thousand miles among the jagged mountains of Peru, had engaged native armies numbering in
the hundreds of thousands, and who had possessed so much wealth, power, and status that he had once believed himself to be virtually untouchable, even by a king. Hernando had clearly overreached and had lost nearly everything in the process. The second eldest of the Pizarro brothers would live another seventeen years, would outlive all four of his brothers, and would eventually die in 1578 at the age of seventy-seven. He would never, however, see any of his brothers nor set foot in Peru again.