When my three sons and I landed in Cusco a little over two weeks ago, we were immediately overwhelmed by the presence of the indigenous people of Peru. It wasn’t just the monumental architecture and engineering that we saw everywhere. It was the physical presence of the people themselves, the direct, full-blooded Quechan-speaking descendants of the Inca who walked among us, hawked their wares and enticed us to photograph them for a tip.
Like the southern highlands of Guatemala or the Oaxaca region of Mexico, strong indigenous culture survives by sheer force of numbers against centuries of injustice. And yet, as Peru proves the point, the so-called Black Legend is an inaccurate historical oversimplification. The legend, that the Spanish were the most cruel in their treatment of native peoples in the Americas, is a convenient means by which English-speaking apologists for their own territorial ambitions dismiss their own rather soiled history of abuse and extermination by suggesting that the Spanish were worse by degree.
The reality is that all early Europeans to the Americas introduced pathogens that extinguished millions of lives. All came to enrich themselves and all clothed their self-interest in the garb of providential sanction, the Western equivalent of a holy war in which a righteous crusade is propelled by the engine and energy of God’s will.
After visiting the Inca temple of Tambomochay and the citadel of Pukapukara on our second day in Peru, Matt, Will, Glennon and I approached an Indian who suggested we take a shortcut to the massive Inca fortification of Saqsaywaman (we call it Sexy Woman) by following a footpath down the side of the mountain. The trail passed a small sacrificial altar made of stones where the incinerated residue of coca leaves was left as a burnt offering to the sun god Inti, the earth goddess Pachamama, or some other deity in the crowded Incan pantheon. Despite centuries of effort, Spanish Catholicism has been unable to completely extirpate Andean polytheism.
The day after we returned to Cusco from the four-day hike to Machu Picchu, we were too exhausted to do anything more vigorous than some low-intensity shopping in the crowded market. I saw a colorful chess set featuring elaborately garbed Inca warriors arrayed against Spanish conquistadors. Their alignment and orderliness didn’t reflect the treachery, brutality and asymmetrical nature of the conquest.
Spain may have been the most formidable military power in the western world, but Francisco Pizarro had only a force of a hundred and six infantrymen and sixty-two mounted knights against an Inca army of tens of thousands. On the other hand, in probing the northernmost frontier of the vast Inca Empire four years earlier, Pizarro had almost certainly introduced deadly pathogens that rapidly spread throughout the realm due to the efficient network of roads designed to facilitate Inca commerce and troop movements. Moreover, in 1532 when Pizarro moved against the Inca deep in their territory, the kingdom was in the midst of a bloody civil war in which two brothers each claimed the title of Inca (king) when their father, the previous ruler, died. The fratricidal war between Atahualpa and his half-brother Huascar weakened the realm internally by exhausting human and material resources and externally by inviting revolt by recently conquered peoples. The Spanish arrival was at a propitious moment. The timing could not have been better.
Atahualpa likely was in high spirits when he met Pizarro in the plaza of Cajamarca on 22 November 1532. He learned from fast-moving relay runners that his army in Cusco had just crushed the forces of Huascar and that he was now the uncontested ruler. It was there in Cajamarca that Pizarro presented Atahualpa with the so-called requierimiento, an ultimatum demanding that he submit to the authority of the Spanish king and to the precepts of the Catholic faith. The problem was that, as the Inca ruler, Atahualpa was regarded as the son of the sun god, the living embodiment of divinity. According to one source, when he was handed a Bible and informed that it contained the words of God, Atahualpa held the book to his ear and, claiming he could hear nothing, flung the book to the ground. It provided an excuse to attack.
Startled by the explosive discharges of cannon and firearms, the charge of heavily armored knights on horseback, and the cutting efficiency of swords forged from Toledo steel, Atahualpa’s army was routed, his bodyguard executed, and he himself captured. When the dust cleared, two-thousand Inca warriors and five Spaniards were dead – if the sources are to be believed. Atahualpa was presented with another ultimatum. He would be released only if a ransom were paid sufficient to fill an entire room with gold. If not, he would be executed. Within a few months, gold was conveyed to Cajamarca from temples throughout the empire.
In the end the Spaniards refused to honor their promise. Atahualpa was executed by garroting on 29 August 1533. The death of the god-king at the hands of the Spaniards was a catastrophe for the Inca. Politically, it meant that the rigidly hierarchical body of a centralized state had been decapitated. Religiously, it was a cosmic collapse. Pizarro appointed a puppet ruler and mopped up what resistance remained.
On the evening before leaving Peru, I passed an old woman on the steps of the church of Santo Domingo. She was burning incense and coca leaves while muttering what seemed like incantations in Quechan. The church was built on the still-visible foundations of the Temple of Qorikancha, reputed to have been the richest temple in the Inca world. Its walls were said to have been lined with solid sheets of gold. In the ransom payment for Atahualpa, the gold was stripped from the temple, and when the Spanish entered Cusco, the temple walls were brought down and the stones used to build the church.
Times have changed, and the lot of the Peruvian Indians has improved. Still at the bottom of the social pyramid beneath Creoles and Mestizos, the Indians have benefitted from an improved economy and from Indigenismo, a growing movement of recognition of and respect for the glorious past of the Inca people. Reflective of the changing times, in 2001 Alejandro Toledo became the first Quechua president of Peru. The incantations of the old woman on the steps of Santo Domingo may have been prayers offered in thanks.
William X. Andrews recently retired from Columbia State where he taught history for 35 years. He resides in Columbia.