The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca

Front matter

I he classic account of the rise and fall of a great American civilization by Garcilaso de la Vega • edited by Alain Gheerbrant

The birth and death of the greatest and most powerful empire of pre-Columbian America is of major interest and importance/This dramatic nar¬ rative by one of the last Inca princes traces the legends surrounding the rise of his people, their wars, sexual customs, and religion. If ends with the arrival of Plzarro and the Spanish, the capture, imprisonment, and execution of Atahuafpa, the fast Inca, and the beginning of Spanish hegemony.

IT IS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING AND SADDEST TALES IN WORLD HISTORY, A TALE OF GRANDEUR AND TRAGEDY.

BOOK TWO Which treats of the life, works, and con-*

quests of Sinchi Roca, second king of Peru, and of the third king, Lloque Yupanqui; together with the administrative divisions of the Empire, and the knowl¬ edge acquired by these lords in astrology, medicine and pharmacy, geometry, geog¬ raphy, arithmetic, music, philosophy, and poetry 54

V

Which treats of the life works, and con¬ quests of Maita Capac, fourth king of the Incas, and of Capac Yupanqui, their fifth king, with the description of a famous bridge on the Apurimac river; and that of the very famous temples of Cusco and Titicaca 89

Which treats of the life, works, and con¬ quests of Inca Roca, sixth king of Peru, and of his successor, Yahuar Huacac, sev¬ enth king. With the life and status of the virgins dedicated to the Sun; and the cus¬ toms relative to marriage, birth, family life, and child education. Also the dis¬ grace of the crown prince, the vision that comes to him, and the revolt of the Chancas 127

Which treats of the life, works, and con¬ quests of the Inca Viracocha, eighth king of Peru. With the laws and customs of the Incas concerning land division and their manner of tillage; taxes, benefits, and statute labor; rules and regulations covering public and private estates; the Inca Viracocha’s great victory, and how he predicted the coming of the Spaniards

BOOK SIX Which treats of the life, works, and con¬

quests of the Inca Pachacutec, ninth king of Peru. With a description of the royal mansions; of the funeral ceremonies of the kings; of the hunting season; posts and messengers; Empire archives c.nd ac¬ counts kept with cords called quipus; the great Sun festival; divinatory sacrifices and ceremonies; the manner in which the young Incas were knighted; schools; and subjugation of the great Chimu 189

BOOK SEVEN Which treats of the Inca Ypanqui, tenth king of Peru. With a description of the third feast of the Sun, and also of the fourth, during which the city of Cuzco was purified of its diseases. Description of the imperial city of Cuzco, with its quarters, its streets, its palaces, and its schools; and its prodigious Sacsahuaman fortress 257

BOOK EIGHT Which treats of the Inca Tupac, eleventh king of Peru, who conquered the Canaris and the kingdom of Quito. With a de¬ scription of these rich provinces; and the exploits of the young Prince Huaina Capac, until his three marriages 295 vii

Life, government, and death of the great King Huaina Capac, twelfth sovereign of Peru. With the surrender of the people of Tumbez, and of the island of Puna; the story of the great gold chain the said king had made, how and why; that of the re¬ bellion and punishment of the Chachapuyas and the Caranques; that of the giants who landed and lived on the seacoast. How Huaina Capac made his son Atahualpa king of Quito; how he was warned of the arrival of the Spaniards; the predictions he made in his testament, and his last will. Huascar Inca becomes king of Peru. His brother Atahualpa makes odious war upon him, and by his cruel actions, prepares the fall of the Em¬ pire and of the dynasty of the Incas 313

How the Spaniards discover Peru, land there and take possession of it. Pizarro makes Atahualpa a prisoner. Atahualpa has his brother Huascar executed and promises an unbelievable ransom in ex¬ change for the freedom that is not grant¬ ed him. Sentence and death of Atahualpa, which put an end to the tragic history of the Incas. The author’s conclusions 363 viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Drawings of The Author (Guaman Poma)

Guaman Poma en rG ute to the City of Lima 62

Idolatry, Witchcraft, and the

Interpretation of Omens 110-112

The Months and Their Occupations 203-205

The Great Officials of the Empire 235-237

The Months and the Festivals 277-279

Huaina Capac Leaving to Undertake the Conquest of the Canaris 306

The Arrival of the Spaniards 330-332

The Poor Indian 368

The Spaniards and the Incas in Peru 394-396

The Clergy in Peru 408-410

Map Extension of the Inca Empire between 1438 and 1525 based on a map by John H. Rowe in the Handbook of South American Indians , vol. 2 126

The designs at the beginnings of 3ooks I, HI, V, VIII are drawn after figures taken from the Sun Door at Tiahuanaco. The designs at the beginning of Books VII, IX, X are Trujillo in origin. The one at the beginning of Book IV is Mochica in origin. Those of Books II and VI are Tia¬ huanaco and Pacasmayu, respectively, in origin.

GARCILASO “EL INCA 95

Today, when the annual feast of the Sun is revived in the ancient Inca city, a feast that is a source of joy for tourists and of emotion for the Indians, it is no exaggera¬ tion to say that the entire population talks of the Inca Garcilaso, whom they piously and rather naively as¬ sociate with the greatest figures of the past. The Calle Garcilaso is one of the principal avenues of the new city, between the Calle Manco Capac and the Calle Pachacutec. Here, two steps from the hotel where Americans usu¬ ally stay, is the “old Cuzco Bazaar” which sells postcards of the Sun, and tapestry or terra cotta likenesses of the Incas. The young “Cuzcenos” get their sports training at the “Garcilaso Stadium” and, at school, they are taught the story of the Inca Garcilaso, Peru’s leading writer. Finally, in the heart of the old town, no visitor should miss the casa Garcilaso, where our author himself will act as guide and let us attend the bullfights given four hundred years ago, on the main square of the city.

At that time—that was in 1553, Garcilaso was there¬ fore fourteen years old—the fratricidal struggles of the first conquistadors had ended in bloodshed, like those of Huascar and Atahualpa. Indeed, it looked as though, from the last Incas to the first Spaniards, the same tragic story had repeated itself. The reigns of Pizarro and Almagro had been quite as ephemeral as those of Huaina Capac’s sons; hardly had they thought they held the Em¬ pire in their hands, when it had eluded them, with their lives. They had been superseded by men of haughty mien, sparing of gesture and word, from a legal rather than a military background. Under their rod of iron, thousands and thousands of Indians were digging in the mountains and scraping the beds of the rivers, in order that thou¬ sands and thousands of cargos of gold and silver might keep moving towards the coast, where they were awaited by the potbellied galleons of H.M. Charles V, supreme xi xii lord of all Spanish possessions, supreme master of the former kingdoms and provinces of Peru. From Quito to Chile, there was no longer an Empire, but a sort of huge farm, dotted with churches, schools and courthouses: con¬ quest had given way to colonialism.

This had happened little by little with the passing years, while, one after the other, with the regularity of a pendulum, the heads of the last rebels had fallen under the knife of the executioner. To the end of his days the Inca Garcilaso never forgot those years during which Spanish justice had mowed down his childhood dreams, replacing them in his adolescence and maturity with a world without miracles; when it was not a case of the last miracle workers doing away with each other.

In 1541, three years after the elder Almagro was ex¬ ecuted, a handful of partisans forced their way into Fran¬ cisco Pizarro’s palace in Lima and assassinated the Pe¬ ruvian conqueror as well as his half-brother, Martin de Alcantara. The body of the most famous of all the con¬ quistadors was thrown out into the street and buried at night by a Negro slave. . . . The same year Pedro de Alvarado, who had been in Mexico with Cortez before coming to Peru with Captain Garcilaso, father of the poet, ended his astonishing adventures in a stupid acci¬ dent. Our Inca was two years old at the time.

In 1542, Don Diego de Almagro the younger, for whom Pizarro’s head was not enough, aimed as well at the Peruvian crown. He met the royal armies at Chupas, was beaten, then beheaded. Before surrendering, however, with his lance he nailed the first white man to tread upon Peruvian soil to the gun carriage of a cannon. This man was the stupendous, legendary figure Pedro de Candia, whom Garcilaso, in one of his most brilliant passages, shows us walking alone and unarmed through the streets of Tumbez, while the wild beasts that had been unleashed to devour him lay down at his feet when they saw the cross in his hand: rather like in a Byzantine hagiography. By now, Garcilaso was three years old.

Who remained among the conquistadors after the bat¬ tle of Chupas? Francisco Pizarro, Juan Pizarro, Martin de Alcantara were dead; Ferdinand Pizarro was rotting in a Spanish jail; the two Almagros, father and son, were dead; Alvarado was dead. The only one left, among those who had been the “great of the great,” was Gonzalvo Pizarro, a friend of the Garcilaso family. The young Inca xiii knew him well, having gone to school with his son, whose mother was also an Indian princess. And very often, in the evening or on Sundays, the two children would play to¬ gether or run races under the watchful eye of the old warrior. In these moments, no doubt, Gonzalvo saw the future of the two schoolboys in the light of his own past. For how could he imagine what the real future was to be when, already, he was no longer able to see the real pres¬ ent? Figures, accounts, all the cold reality of this colony, were not the affair of a Pizarro. It was one thing to or¬ ganize an Empire, but quite another to domesticate the prodigious Peru whose image haunted this old man still. He had shod his horses with silver and gold; he had fought and won, a thousand to one; he had seen with his own eyes and weighed with his own hands the fabulous ransom of Atahualpa, richer than all the treasures of the old world. He knew that masses of white clouds scatter every morning over the crests of the cordillera; but he also knew that they form again every evening. How could he admit that ah implacable present had won for all time over his fabulous past? Did he realize even that he him¬ self had been an assassin of grandeur? Even madder than he, although older, his companion in arms, Carvajal, who was a terrible old man, encouraged him to hurl back the newly arrived Spaniards into the sea and to recapture Peru. In 1543, together, they raised a small army and at¬ tacked the troops of Viceroy Nunez Vela. Luck was with them and, after a few hours’ fighting, the viceroy sur¬ rendered his sword to Gonzalvo, who had him properly be¬ headed.

But time was on the side of the new order, and Madrid, like a giant spider, kept tirelessly mending the immense net which finally began to tighten about Pizarro.

In 1548, a new emissary of Charles V, La Gasca, an¬ nounced that he was going to “restore order in Peru.” Gonzalvo Pizarro and Carvajal were soon in their saddles. They stayed in them until the day of their execution in the middle of the main square of Cuzco. “That day,” Garcilaso wrote later, “we left school early to go and watch the execution of those two gentlemen. Gonzalvo’s head was carried by messenger to the Lima gallows, nearly a thousand miles from Cuzco, in order that everyone should know about it. As for Carvajal, who had rebelled not only against men but also against God—he had re¬ fused confession, he was hanged and quartered, despite the xiv fact that he was eighty-one years old, and his body was strewn, piece by piece, along Cuzco’s four streets.” La Gasca wanted to finish entirely with the past. But even this penalty seemed insufficient to him. He also ordered all the soldiers who had fought with the last Pizarro to be whipped in public, “which greatly scandalized the In¬ dians.” What a spectacle indeed, to see these hardened veterans, naked, submitting publicly to a punishment that was crueler than death! No doubt, the notaries, the scribes, and the inquisitors returned home satisfied and relieved. But the Indian people, taking upon themselves the humiliation inflicted upon those who had succeeded in conquering them—the Indian people felt deep shame. For although the new colonial order had little use for grandeur, considered as just another source of disorder, the Indians could not forget their love for those to whom they had surrendered, and to whom they had delegated their own former grandeur.

“A few days later,” Garcilaso wrote, “it being Sunday, we went for a walk in the country, my school friends and I, along the Collasuyu road, which runs south of Cuzco. There were a dozen or so children, all half-breeds, the eldest of whom was not over twelve years old. A piece of Carvajal’s body was lying in a field: ‘Let’s go and look at Carvajal!’ we all shouted. And very soon, there we were beside it. It was a piece of thigh from which the fat had dripped onto the ground in a large pool. The flesh itself was green, already putrid.

“ ‘Shall we touch it?’ said one boy. ‘No,’ said another. ‘Let’s do,’ said a third.

“And so we were divided into two camps. Finally, the most daring among us stepped forward. ‘Watch me, I’ll do it!’ he said. And he laid his hand down so hard on the piece of corpse that his entire thumb sank into it.

“ ‘Shame on you!’ we shouted, drawing back. ‘It’s dis¬ graceful! Dirty! Disgusting! Carvajal is going to kill you for your audacity!’

“The child ran to a nearby brook and washed his fingers and hand in it as hard as he could. Then we all went home.

“The following day, Monday, when we met at school, his thumb was so swollen and black that it looked as if he were wearing the finger of a glove. That evening the swelling had spread to his entire hand, as far as the wrist. And the next day it had reached his elbow, with

XV the result that he was finally obliged to tell his father the truth. Doctors were called who treated and bandaged it, and gave him all kinds of antidotes. Nevertheless, the child all but died, and for four months he was unable to hold a pen in hand.

“And that,” concluded Garcilaso, “is what old Carvajal did after he died. Nor was it very unlike what he had done during his lifetime.”

Thus ends the tale of the conquistadors in Peru, and one could add that, with them, there disappeared a late shoot of the Middle Ages which had burgeoned in the soil of the New World as a result of the unusual atmosphere of adventure and isolation in which these conquerors lived. Its blooming lasted nearly twenty years, at a time when the first result of this same conquest had been to bring about a golden age in Renaissance Spain.

For this renaissance to be felt in the former Empire of the Incas, it was essential that the chaos of the early years should subside, and trade with the parent state increase. This had been accomplished in the second half of the sixteenth century, when young Garcilaso, who was a precocious lad, left his childhood behind him to enter into adolescence. On the recommendation of Las Casas, who pleaded the cause of the Indians, Charles V had just promulgated the famous Leyes Nuevas, or New Laws, which did away with Indian slavery, and attributed to them the same rights and duties as to all other vassals of His Majesty.

Thanks to the normalizing, innovating current that followed this event, Garcilaso was given the same edu¬ cation in Cuzco that the sons of gentlemen enjoyed in Spain, an institution of learning, especially devoted to in¬ structing young half-breeds of noble descent, having been founded there by priests. Here it was that the future his¬ torian of the Andes became familiar with the New Testa¬ ment, Christian Revelation, Latin, the classical humanities, and all that a wellborn young man of that time was sup¬ posed to know. Things went so far, and so fast, in fact, that in 1551, the first university in the New World was founded in Lima, with classes in theology, medicine, juris¬ prudence, mathematics, Latin, Aristotelian philosophy, and the Quechua language. All of which goes to show the very special interest—today it would be called a developxvi

ment program—that Spain took in Peru. This fortunate state of affairs was to be of great assistance in making our young Inca feel that history had not forgotten him in its forward march.

Meanwhile, Captain Garcilaso, having survived with some difficulty the vicissitudes of the preceding years, was now in favor with the viceroy who, in 1553, named him governor of the city of Cuzco. From then on, he kept open house, and his home became quite naturally the meeting place of all those who arrived from Spain, whether they were men of arms, letters, or law. In this society, the Inca Garcilaso, having discovered that he was the son of a highborn gentleman, also became aware of the refinements of his century, and we can imagine with what rapt attention he listened to the conversation of the gentlemen and ladies of quality who were the guests of the governor, his father. It was through them, in fact, that he first entered into contact with his second coun¬ try, for he had also begun to read the polite literature of the time, and one guesses that he must have witnessed an astonishing symbiosis within himself, between the imaginary adventures of Amadis, going forth in search of an ideal island, and the very real adventures experienced by his father and his father’s companions, when they had encountered the Incas, his other relatives. At the same time, in his mother’s home, they too told him stories of their past.

For, alas, those exceptional times having become merely a memory, the inevitable had happened and, once more, the two bloods that had joined together and blended in his veins, were now divided between two houses. As a result of scruples, today we should say, of “complexes,” created by the society of these new gentlemen with whom he was in frequent contact, Captain Garcilaso had left nusta Isabel, and married a real Spanish woman, from Spain. To Garcilaso “El Inca,” it must have seemed that the new Peru, which he himself incarnated, was already disintegrating.

But the Inca Garcilaso was equally respectful and proud of both his origins. Quite precociously, he knew what a changing thing is human fortune—he who only yester¬ day had helped his father flee the justiciaries of the mo¬ ment. He perhaps understood, too, with that innate pa¬ tience that is in the blood of every Indian, that all mixtures must be tested and retested before they can constitute, for xvii all time, a new body. Lastly, the Christian God and the Revelation, in addition to his natural tendencies, helped him to reconcile, through religion, the opposing elements which must necessarily have clashed in him at times. And thus it was that Garcilaso “El Inca” became neither a rebel nor a melancholy dreamer, but a man of action, fully aware of things and serious, with a seriousness that is often acquired earlier than we think. For many de¬ tails of his writings lead us to believe that, already when he was quite young, he had sensed that the unusual cir¬ cumstances of his birth—even that of being a half-breed, which might, in the eyes of certain less clear-sighted per¬ sons, seem nothing but a handicap—would, on the con¬ trary, help him to find a special niche in the historic upheaval that was taking place, and which was justified in his conscience by the teachings of Christ.

Without this conviction, the actual divorce that sepa¬ rated his parents (who, it must be recalled, had never been legally married) would quite naturally have led him to choose between Spain and Peru of the Incas, in other words, to refuse both the present and the future, of which he himself was a forerunner; to destroy the rich alloy tak¬ ing place within himself; and, finally, to ignore the very thing that was to lend a novelty of tone and a significance to his work that can only increase with the passing cen¬ turies.

But on the contrary: already as an adolescent, we see him equally attached to all that both houses, which were equally dear to him, held for him and taught him.

In the very first lines of the Royal Commentaries he returns to this period of his life to tell us how, in the home of the princess, his mother, he questioned the older members of the family, the last of the Incas; how he was taught and made his own the word-of-mouth tradition of his ancestors; how, thanks to his knowledge of the Quechua language, he was able to question people in the market places and in the streets, even in the ruins of ancient Cuzco; in other words, how he began to collect the enormous amount of material out of which he was to construct his vast work. He neglected nothing of what he saw; everything Spanish interested him; but every¬ thing Inca interested him more, and throughout his in¬ vestigations, he gave first place to the witnesses of their waning civilization. He tried out the local medicines on himself; had himself taught the use of the quipu; and, xviii despite his fervent Catholic faith, took part in the sacri¬ ficial ceremonies that certain former priests of the Sun continued to perform in secret, and noted what he saw with almost scientific care. In Coricancha, in Sacsahuaman, everywhere, in fact, where only yesterday he had played with his little school friends, he returned now, pen in hand, looking for the traces of history.

That he had already begun to take notes at this time, there is no doubt. Otherwise, as C. R. Markham has re¬ marked, how could he have named three hundred and twenty towns of old Peru, fifty years later, without making a single mistake as to their location? And we should be inclined to add, how could he remember, when he came to write it all down, so many details, so many anecdotes which, in his telling, lose nothing of their vividness? The human memory, however vast, would not suffice to make this possible. And the correspondence that, after settling in Europe, he kept up with relatives and friends who had remained in Peru, could not, by itself, have been the only source of the invaluable, living raw material that enters into the Royal Commentaries.

The last years that Garcilaso spent in Peru—he left it never to return at the age of twenty-one—were therefore of great importance to his own development, and essential to the work he was to write. Not only did he take notes, but already, he was making his choice of what he wanted to recall. Today he is reproached for his partiality. I agree with Baudin, however, that this is not only com¬ prehensible but enlightening; not merely because, as he says, it reveals “the state of mind of the Indians who lived in a state of perpetual hankering for the past,” but because, in addition to a certain melancholy, which has its charm, Garcilaso, in making this choice, sought to give voice to everything which, in the case of the first Spaniards as well as in that of the Incas, might justify both the present and the future of Peru. Garcilaso made his choice, and occasionally even went too far, either in the role of a son determined to defend the memory of his ancestors, or in that of a Christian who is convinced that the downfall of one side and the demands of the other have served humanity by extending belief in Christ’s re¬ demption to the Peruvian Indians.

Indeed, there is more in the Royal Commentaries than just reflection of the soul of a vanquished people, as the oft-quoted Menendez y Pelayo stated. There is as well xix something that is more alive, more instructive, more significant for us today than merely that. Garcilaso believed in the future, and his thought was that of a man of the future who refuses to deny, on one side or the other, the things his young country may be proud of; and in this, as a man of the sixteenth century, he was incredibly ahead of his time. For it must be reiterated that Garcilaso did not reject the forward march of history and, al¬ though he took his sustenance from the past, he also spoke of the present, and wanted to assist in the realization of the future. He knew that this “vanquished people” would continue to form the great mass of Peruvian humanity, and it was for this reason that he insisted so fervently, at that critical time, upon its past grandeur, and was inclined to forget the elements of this past that had disturbed his conscience. Such was his vocation, and he owed it to the fact that he was a half-breed; nor is there any doubt in the minds of the people of the Andes, for whom the Inca Garcilaso is the “leading Peru¬ vian writer.” And despite the separation of four cen¬ turies, the astonishing modernity of his subject relates him today to the youngest among Latin American writers.

No one today would say of a writer like Miguel Angel Asturias that his work is nothing but melancholy nostalgia for a distant past. On the contrary, it constitutes a lyrical endeavor, which is so violent that, at times, it appears to be desperate, to recapture the forgotten forces of ancient Guatemala, to breathe their spirit into a modern body that, otherwise, risks desiccation and decay through de¬ personalization.

In every line of Garcilaso’s great work, the “Peruvian personality” is also present, even when the Spaniards oc¬ cupy the center of the stage. In this connection, the fol¬ lowing passage, among a hundred others from the Royal Commentaries , is significant. It tells how the first hospital to be opened for the Indians in the New World was founded in Cuzco. This took place, he tells us, in 1555 or 1556, when he himself was therefore sixteen or seventeen years old. The idea of building a hospital with Spanish funds originated with a former Franciscan friar who, one Lenten Sunday, speaking from the pulpit of the Cuzco cathedral, unfolded his plan to his parishioners with these words: “Gentlemen,” he said, “today at one o’clock, accompanied by our governor, I plan to take up a house-to-house collection for this purpose. I hope that,

XX on this occasion, you will show yourselves to be as open-handed and generous as you were strong and brave in the conquest of this country . . This, added Garcilaso, in order that everyone, conquistadors and others alike, might, in this manner, repay the indefeasible debt they had contracted towards the Peruvian people.

Is it necessary to emphasize that reflections which reply as precisely as this to questions that are being asked with increasing insistence in our twentieth century, are not to be found in the works of all the chroniclers of the Span¬ ish conquest? It is easy to understand therefore, why, after the emancipation of Latin America, the young re¬ publics built upon the former Empire of the Incas pro¬ claimed the glory of the Inca Garcilaso with a fervor that has not yet died down; why, too, Madrid thought it best to forbid his work on the new continent at the very be¬ ginning of the disturbances that preceded the wars of independence. But to come back to the founding of the Cuzco hospital, it should be added that that evening the younger Garcilaso acted as secretary to his father, the governor, keeping an account of the funds collected. This example of cooperation between civil and religious au¬ thorities, for a humanitarian purpose, impressed him so strongly that, fifty years later, he reproduced this ac¬ count for us, without having forgotten so much as a maravedi!

We have now reached the critical moment when Garcilaso was obliged to leave his first homeland to go to Europe. In 1556, Captain Garcilaso resigned from his post of governor, and in 1559, he died a natural death, which was more or less exceptional for a conquistador. Events followed fast one upon the other. The Inca’s mother, Princess Isabel Chimpu Occlo, was the next to die. The father’s property went to the children he had had by his Spanish wife, and that of his mother was con¬ fiscated, despite the laws and ordinances promulgated by Charles V. Garcilaso was twenty, or perhaps twenty-one, when he decided to appeal to the only higher au¬ thority that might hear his claim for what was due him, and that was the Emperor, or rather King Philippe II, since, five years earlier, Charles V had renounced the crown and the vanities of this world to enter holy orders. Did Garcilaso have other motives for leaving? We know of at least one other, which undoubtedly fits in