On the very day that the Spaniards cruelly destroyed Chalcuchima, a new figure of great importance entered their orbit. On the hillside above Vilcaconga, the native prince Manco appeared with two or three orejones and advanced to the column of horsemen. He presented himself to Governor Pizarro, and the Spaniards learned to their delight that this Manco was ‘a son of Huayna-Capac and the greatest and most important lord in the land … the man to whom all that province succeeded by right, and whom all the chiefs wanted as their lord’. Manco was almost twenty but looked boyish and ‘was wearing a tunic and cloak of yellow cotton’. ‘He had been a constant fugitive’, ‘fleeing from Atahualpa’s men to prevent their killing him. He came all alone and abandoned, looking like a common Indian.’

Both leaders must have seen the meeting as heaven-sent. The arrival of the invincible strangers meant for Manco the end of flight from Quisquis’s attempted extermination of the family of Huascar. Pizarro’s men were the only force that could rid Cuzco of its Quitan army of occupation and elevate Manco himself to his father’s throne. For Pizarro, Manco’s sudden appearance provided the pliable ruler that he had been seeking since Tupac Huallpa’s premature death. It meant that the Spaniards could enter their goal, Cuzco, as liberators, bringing with them the prince that the local tribes fervently wanted as ruler. Manco’s son wrote later that the prince embraced Pizarro, who had dismounted from his horse. ‘And the two of them, my father and the Governor, made a confederation.’ Pizarro’s oratory warmed to the occasion. He assured Manco: ‘You must understand that I have come from Jauja for no other reason than … to free you from slavery to the men of Quito. Knowing the injuries they were doing to you, I wanted to come and put a stop to them … and to liberate the people of Cuzco from this tyranny.’ Pizarro’s secretary Pedro Sancho explained the obvious : that ‘ the Governor made him all these promises solely in order to please him … and that cacique remained marvellously satisfied, as did those who had come with him.’ It was two days after this first meeting that Manco rode with his Spanish allies into the city of Cuzco.

The Inca capital was a low city lying across the foothills at the upper end of a trough-like green valley. Few of its houses had more than one storey. At first it must have looked reasonably familiar to the Spaniards as they rode over the brow of Carmenca hill and gazed down on the city. Most of the houses had steeply-pitched thatched roofs, like some medieval northern European town, and there would have been wisps of smoke from the many cooking fires hanging over the dull grey of the ichu grass thatch. The houses at the edges of Cuzco were simple rectangles, with a base of stone and the upper walls of mud bricks or of mud packed down into tapia forms. The roofs rested on agave beams, and the thatch was fastened down by a trellis of reeds tied to projecting bosses of the roof beams. The houses had wide eaves to protect the mud walls from the Andean rains. Pedro Sancho’s report to the King found nothing unusual to say about these ordinary houses of Cuzco. ‘Most of the buildings are built of stone and the rest have half their façade of stone. There are also many adobe houses, very efficiently made, which are arranged along straight streets on a cruciform plan. The streets are all paved, and a stone-lined water channel runs down the middle of each street. Their only fault is to be narrow : only one mounted man can ride on either side of the channel.’

It was only as the invaders moved on into the centre of the city that its marvels were revealed to them. All Cuzco’s monumental buildings were clustered on a tongue of high ground projecting into the valley between two small streams, the Huatanay and Tullumayo. These streams added to the clean, almost austere, character of the Inca city. Their swift mountain water rushed along gutters in the middle of the streets and provided excellent sanitation. All the earliest visitors were impressed by this, and by the fact that both streams flowed in artificial channels with stone flags lining the sides and bed. Only fifteen years after Pizarro’s entry Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote, sadly, that ‘at present there are great heaps of rubbish alongside the banks of this river [Huatanay, which is] full of dung and filth. This was not the case in the days of the Incas, when it was very clean, the water running over stones. At times the Incas went to bathe there with their women, and on various occasions Spaniards have found small gold ornaments or pins which they forgot or dropped while bathing.’

The Huatanay ran, in its stone culvert, across the great central square, dividing it into two sections. To the west lay Cusipata, the square of entertainment, where the people crowded to celebrate their festivals. To the east was the larger Aucaypata, surrounded on three sides by the granite walls of the Incas’ palaces. The vast square was surfaced in fine gravel.* Beneath ran a series of sewers to evacuate libations poured into ceremonial fonts – and to rid the square of any unwanted effluents during the often riotous festivities.

Pizarro’s column of weary horsemen and foot-soldiers marched two abreast along the narrow streets towards the square. They were jubilant at this supreme moment, the final triumph of successful explorers and conquerors. They described their prize to King Charles with breathless pride. ‘This city is the greatest and finest ever seen in this country or anywhere in the Indies. We can assure Your Majesty that it is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be remarkable even in Spain.’ They were almost humble in contemplating their achievement. ‘The Spaniards who have taken part in this venture are amazed by what they have done. When they begin to reflect on it, they cannot imagine how they can still be alive or how they survived such hardships and long periods of hunger.’ In the first hours and days they were wary, expecting the Quitan troops who had fought so hard to prevent their entry to launch a counter-attack. ‘But we entered the city without meeting resistance, for the natives received us with goodwill.’ For a month Pizarro made his men sleep in tents on the main square, with their horses ready day and night to repel any attack.

The central square of Aucaypata was flanked by the palaces and ceremonial buildings of the Incas. Each Inca ruler built himself a palace during his reign, and after his death the building was preserved as his spiritual resting-place. It was full of his furnishings and tended by servants from his own ayllu or lineage, presided over by the Inca’s mummy and his effigy or huauque. These mummified bodies were regularly carried out to participate in ceremonies on the square, and were sustained by offerings of food and drink. The Incas were too confident of the security of their empire and the honesty of its citizens to hide their dead rulers’ possessions. There is thus no hope of the discovery in Peru of a Tutankhamen’s tomb. Instead, the palaces provided billets for the officers of Pizarro’s army, with each of the leaders taking possession of one of the buildings on the square itself. This casual occupation on the day of the Spanish entry was later converted into title-deed in the Act of Foundation of Cuzco as a Spanish municipality.

Francisco Pizarro himself took the Casana, which was, appropriately, the palace of the great conquering Inca Pachacuti who led Inca expansion out of Cuzco in the mid-fifteenth century. The palace lay on the north-western side of the square, at the corner where the Huatanay flowed across it. The outstanding feature of this palace was an enormous baronial hall. Garcilaso de la Vega saw it when he was a boy in Cuzco in the middle of the sixteenth century. ‘In many of the houses of the Incas there were vast halls, 200 yards long by 50 to 60 yards wide, in which the Indians celebrated their festivals and dances when rainy weather prevented them from holding these in the open air. I saw four of these halls that were still intact in Cuzco during my childhood…. The largest was that in Casana, which was capable of holding four thousand people.’ The great hall of Casana was later destroyed to make way for colonial arcades and shops. Some of these collapsed in the earthquake of May 1950; behind lay the fresh, pale grey stones of some of the palace walls, which have been left on view.

Pizarro’s younger brothers Juan and Gonzalo were quartered alongside him, in buildings that had been used by Huayna-Capac, and before him had belonged to earlier Incas.* Diego de Almagro, as Pizarro’s partner and second-in-command of the expedition, was awarded the newest palace which had just been built for Huascar, on the hill immediately above the northern corner of the square and just beyond the quarters of the younger Pizarro brothers.*

Another great palace lay across the square opposite Francisco Pizarro’s Casana. This was Huayna-Capac’s main palace, Amaru Cancha. Pedro Sancho described it as the finest of the four palaces on the main square. ‘It has a gateway of red, white and multicoloured marble, and has other flat-roofed structures that are very remarkable.’ Miguel de Estete wrote that’ it has two towers of fine appearance, and a rich gateway faced with pieces of silver and other metals’ and Garcilaso remembered one of these towers as having ‘ walls some four estados [30 feet] high, but the roof was far higher, built of the fine wood that was used in royal palaces. The roof and walls were round. Instead of a weather-vane at the top of the roof, there was a tall thick pole that added to the height and appearance of the building. The tower was over 60 feet in diameter.’ Amaru Cancha possessed one of the great thatched halls in addition to its towers. It fell to the lot of Hernando de Soto and Hernando Pizarro, who was then sailing towards Spain. Hernando Pizarro eventually gained possession of the entire site and sold it, many years later, to the new Jesuit order. The Jesuits’ lovely pink baroque church of the Compañía now occupies this side of the square.*

With Francisco Pizarro and his captains installed among the relics of the Incas in their empty palaces, the Governor granted property to the ecclesiastical and municipal authorities of the city. He designated a building on the terraces above the square to be the first town hall. The church received a more imposing site: the palace and hall of Suntur Huasi that dominated the eastern side of the square. Vicente de Valverde, Bishop of Tumbez and future Bishop of Cuzco, installed himself here with a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Conception. The property has never changed hands, although more than a century was to elapse before completion of the superb baroque cathedral that now glorifies this site.

The road to the southern quarter of the empire, the Collasuyo, left the square to the right of the Suntur Huasi. Other palace enclosures lay alongside it, and long stretches of their walls survive to this day. At the corner of the square was the massive enclosure called Hatun Cancha, the palace of the fifth Inca, Yupanqui. Beyond was the enclosure of Yupanqui’s successor, Inca Roca which is known by the modern name Hatun Rumiyoc or ‘great stone’. The name commemorates an enormous boulder embedded into its northern enclosing wall. Every visitor to Cuzco is taken to see this rock, because its façade has no fewer than twelve corners, some convex and some concave, but all interlocking with uncanny precision into the adjacent stones of the wall (plate 24). Another great enclosure lay to the south of Hatun Cancha: Pucamarca, home of the great conqueror, the tenth Inca Tupac Yupanqui. These three royal corrals, Hatun Cancha, Hatun Rumiyoc and Pucamarca, formed an easily-defensible barracks for Pizarro’s horsemen. They became the Spaniards’ strong-point to control the centre of Cuzco, and many of the soldiers were awarded plots of land within them in the settlements of 1534.

The Quechua word ‘ cancha ‘ means enclosure, and it helps us recapture the appearance of Inca Cuzco. The palaces of the Incas were elaborate corrals, surrounded by a masonry retaining wall and flanked by beautifully thatched chambers opening on to the central courtyard. This plan is common in any architecture derived from farming communities, but among the Incas such enclosures were a privilege of chiefs. ‘Only the caciques’ houses have large courtyards in which the people used to gather to drink during their festivals and celebrations.’ Bernabé Cobo noted three characteristics of all Inca building. ‘Firstly, each room or chamber was a separate entity: they did not interconnect with one another. Secondly, the Indians did not whitewash their houses as we do ours, although leading chiefs used to have walls painted in various colours and with simple decorations. Thirdly, neither nobles’ nor commoners’ houses had fixed doors mounted for opening and closing. The Indians simply used canes and wattle to shut the doorway when they closed it…. They used no locks, keys or protection, and were not concerned to make large, ornate gateways. All their doors were small and plain, and many were so low and narrow that they look like oven doors. When we go to give confession to the sick we have to crouch or even crawl on all fours to enter.’

It was a privilege of Inca royalty to have buildings with masonry walls, built by a guild of highly skilled masons. The simplicity of plan of the royal palaces was amply compensated by the glory of their stonework. The original Spanish conquerors and all subsequent visitors were deeply impressed. Cobo wrote: ‘The only remarkable feature of these buildings was their walls. But these were so extraordinary that it would be difficult for anyone who has not actually seen them to appreciate their excellence.’ Cieza de León echoed this wonder: ‘In all Spain I have seen nothing that can compare with these walls and the laying of their stones.’

The Incas’ skill as masons is their most impressive artistic legacy – in other spheres of the arts they were overshadowed by earlier Andean civilisations. They succeeded in cutting and polishing their stones with dazzling virtuosity. Adjoining blocks fit tightly together without visible mortar. Even when the blocks interlock in complicated polygonal patterns, their joints are so precise that the crevices look like thin scratches on the surface of the wall. And when earthquakes have brought flimsier later walls crashing down, the Inca ashlars have remained proudly unaffected, with each block still smoothly fixed between its neighbours.

The Incas used three types of stone in their public buildings in Cuzco. Most of the Incas’ own palaces were made of rectangular ashlars of a black andesite that weathers to a deep reddish-brown. A greenish-grey diorite porphyry from Sacsahuaman hill provided most of the large polygonal blocks used in enclosure walls such as Hatun Rumiyoc. And Yucay limestone was the hard grey stone used extensively in the fortress of Sacsahuaman and for foundations and terraces throughout the city.

The surfaces of the stones were smoothly polished, but each individual block was bevelled inwards at the edges of its outer face. As a result the joins between blocks were indented and the wall as a whole was crisply rusticated. There was no structural purpose for this bevelling. It was purely decorative, to break an otherwise smooth wall with contrasts of shadow, to give full weight to each individual block, and to draw attention to the brilliant precision of the joining cracks. It proved a successful aesthetic device: the curved surfaces of the stones give a fluid grace to the walls of Cuzco.

Inca masons adopted two styles for their walls. In some the stones interlock in haphazard shapes, with no two stones identical and the joints between them undulating like an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. This style is known as polygonal. In the other style, the stones were cut into rectangles and laid in regular courses, generally with each successive course slightly smaller than the one below. This symmetrical style is known as coursed. The Incas themselves clearly preferred the tidiness of coursed masonry and used it in the walls of important buildings. But to the casual modern observer the polygonal walls are more baffling and impressive. It is almost alarming to see gigantic rocks fitting snugly together like great lumps of putty. Cobo gave the normal reaction to the sight: ‘I assure you that although they appear rougher they seem to me to have been far more difficult to build than the walls of coursed ashlars. For they are not cut straight but are nevertheless tightly jointed to one another. One can imagine the amount of work involved in making them interlock in the way in which we see them…. If the top of one stone has a projecting corner there is a corresponding groove or cavity in the stone above to fit it exactly…. Such a work must have been endlessly tedious. For to make the stones interlock it must have been necessary to remove and replace them repeatedly to test them. And with stones as large as these, it becomes clear how many people and how much suffering must have been involved.’

It used to be thought that the polygonal walls were more ancient than the more familiar coursed walls, but recent archaeology has shown that both styles were common during the Inca empire in the late fifteenth century.† There is a plausible explanation for the two styles of stonework. Polygonal masonry was used only for terraces or retaining enclosure walls, where strength was required. The rocks were left in uneven shapes to waste as little as possible of large boulders, and in imitation of the rough fieldstone walls that are common for terracing throughout the Andes. Coursed masonry was used for free-standing house walls. The style may have been an imitation of the turf buildings found in the Cuzco area. The turfs were cut in rectangular pieces and laid with the grass downwards. As they dried the tops and bottoms contracted and the outer sides bulged. This would provide a precedent for the ornamental countersinking of the joints on Inca masonry.*

Inca architecture had one other unmistakable characteristic. Doors and niches were invariably built in trapezoidal shapes, with the sides tapering inwards towards the lintel at the top. This was a logical method for builders who had not discovered the principle of the arch. It reduced the length of the lintel stone and spread the thrust of the weight it supported. Rows of such trapezoidal niches broke the monotony of Inca walls. Sometimes the niches were the size of sentry-boxes, tall enough to accommodate a line of standing attendants, but more often they were smaller, sunk into the wall at chest height to form a row of convenient cupboard alcoves.

Francisco Pizarro faced many immediate problems after occupying Cuzco. He had to protect his new prize from a Quitan counter-attack. He had to settle the native government and provide for the administration of the native populace. And he had to reward his own victorious troops and persuade them to remain as settlers.

Now that Cuzco was his despite a spirited defence by Quitan troops, with Chalcuchima dead and Quisquis defiant, Pizarro made no further attempt to play off both sides in the civil war. He sided openly with the Cuzco faction of Huascar’s branch of the royal family. He and his men delightedly donned the mantle of liberators. On the day after their entry, Pizarro made Manco ruler, ‘ since he was a prudent and spirited young man, was chief of the Indians who were there at the time, and was legitimate heir to the kingdom. He did this rapidly … so that the natives would not join the men of Quito, but would have a ruler of their own to revere and obey.’

Pizarro immediately encouraged the new ruler to organise an army to rid Cuzco of its Quitan invaders. Manco wanted nothing better than to avenge the persecution of his family. ‘ Within four days he had assembled five thousand Indians, all of them well equipped with all their weapons.’ Fifty Spanish horse under Hernando de Soto accompanied this force in pursuit of Quisquis, who had retreated into the mountains of the Condesuyo, the western quarter of the empire, and was on the upper Apurímac some twenty-five miles south-west of Cuzco. The allied expedition lasted ten days but was a failure. Quisquis’s advance guard defended a pass and redoubt, and warned the main Quitan army of the approach of Soto’s cavalry. Quisquis retreated across the gorge of the Apurímac near a village called Capi, burned the suspension bridge and repulsed an attempted allied crossing with a hail of missiles. The Spaniards were appalled by the region, ‘ the wildest and most inaccessible they had ever seen’, but Manco was pleased that his men emerged well from a savage battle with part of Quisquis’s force.

Although the Quitan army eluded this punitive expedition, its morale was shattered by this third defeat. Quisquis could no longer force his men to remain near Cuzco, far less to launch a counter-attack on its foreign conquerors. They thought only of returning to their homes and began a long migration towards Quito.*

The expedition against Quisquis returned to Cuzco towards the end of December 1533. Soto’s Spaniards were eager to participate in any looting, and Manco wanted to receive formal coronation as Inca. Manco retired to a mountain retreat for the requisite three-day fast. He then made his triumphal entry into the square, amid all the ritual that had attended the coronation of his half-brother Tupac Huallpa in Cajamarca four months earlier. The coronation was coupled with victory celebrations for the deliverance from the Quitan occupation. Days of riotous festivities ensued, and the conquistadores could observe the full panoply of Inca ceremonial. The mummified bodies of the Inca ancestors played a prominent part – the Christians did not yet feel strong enough to interfere with these heathen practices. Miguel de Estete left a vivid account of those days of jubilation. ‘Such a vast number of people assembled every day that they could only crowd into the square with great difficulty. Manco had all the dead ancestors brought to the festivities. After he had gone with a great entourage to the temple to make an oration to the sun, throughout the morning he proceeded in rotation to the tombs where each [dead Inca] was embalmed. They were then removed with great veneration and reverence, and brought into the city seated on their thrones in order of precedence. There was a litter for each one, with men in its livery to carry it. The natives came down in this way, singing many ballads and giving thanks to the sun…. They reached the square accompanied by innumerable people and carrying the Inca at their head in his litter. His father Huayna-Capac was level with him, and the rest similarly in their litters, embalmed and with diadems on their heads. A pavilion had been erected for each of them, and the dead [kings] were placed in these in order, seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been alive. Beside each was a reliquary or small altar with his insignia, on which were the fingernails, hair, teeth and other things that had been cut from his limbs after he had been a prince…. They remained there from eight in the morning until nightfall with no lull in the festivities…. There were so many people, and both men and women were such heavy drinkers, and they poured so much into their skins – for their entire activity was drinking, not eating – that it is a fact that two wide drains over half a vara [eighteen inches] in diameter which emptied into the river beneath the flagstones … ran with urine throughout the day from those who urinated into them, as abundantly as a flowing spring. This was not remarkable when one considers the amount they were drinking and the numbers drinking it. But the sight was a marvel and something never seen before…. These festivities lasted for over thirty days in succession.’ Pedro Sancho described, in particular, the mummy of Huayna-Capac as being ‘ wrapped in rich tapestries and almost intact – only the tip of the nose is missing’. Pedro Pizarro recalled that the daily ritual began with a procession carrying an effigy of the sun and headed by the chief priest Villac Umu. The ceremony also included a symbolic meal for each mummy. Food was burned on a brazier in front of the effigy, and chicha maize alcohol was poured into great pitchers of gold, silver or pottery. The ashes of the burned food and the chicha were then poured into a round stone font that emptied into the same hidden conduits that had carried off the urine.

The Spaniards again exploited the coronation to stage a demonstration of friendship and allegiance between natives and Europeans. ‘After the friar [Valverde] had celebrated mass, he came out on to the square with many men from his army, and in the presence of the cacique [Inca], the chiefs of the land, the fighting men … and his own Spaniards, with the Inca on a stool and his men on the ground around him, the Governor addressed them in the same way as he had done on similar occasions. I [Pedro Sancho], as his secretary and the army scrivener, read out the proclamation and the Requirement that His Majesty had ordered. The contents were translated by an interpreter and they all understood them and replied that they had.’ Each chief then went through the ritual of raising the royal standard of Spain, twice, to the sound of trumpets, and Manco drank from a golden cup with the Governor and leading Spaniards. The natives ‘sang many ballads and gave thanks to the sun for having allowed their enemies to be driven from the land, and for sending the Christians to rule them. This was the substance of their songs, although’- Estete added cautiously—’I do not believe that it was their true intention. They only wished to make us think that they were content with the company of Spaniards.

The document that was read out, translated and ‘understood’ by the native chiefs was an extraordinary statement called the Requirement. This proclamation resulted from a moral debate that had been raging in Spain and the Indies for over twenty years. The question at issue was whether the Spaniards had any right to conquer the native kingdoms of the Americas. Although Pope Alexander had divided the world with a line that awarded Africa and Brazil to Portugal and the remainder of the Americas to Spain, many argued that this donation was for religious proselytism only – not for conquest and invasion. ‘The means to effect this end are not to rob, to scandalise, to capture or destroy them or to lay waste their lands: for this would cause the infidels to abominate our faith.’

As early as 1511, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos had launched the debate with a startling, searching sermon to the settlers on the island of Hispaniola. ‘You are in mortal sin,’ he warned them. ‘You live and die in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny you practise in dealing with these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against these people who dwelt quietly and peacefully in their own land?’

The pro-Indian movement found a champion when Bartolomé de las Casas, who had been enjoying the life of a colonist for a dozen years, suddenly reversed his attitude in 1514. Las Casas championed the Indians throughout the remainder of his long life. Matías de Paz, professor of theology at the University of Salamanca, had written a treatise in 1512 that argued that the King had the right to propagate the faith but not to invade for wealth. But other authorities endorsed the monarchy’s right to rule the Indies, since the childlike natives needed European paternalism. They quoted Joshua’s defeat of Jericho as precedent for righteous extermination of infidels. They argued that heathen Americans should be treated in the same way as the Moors – even though the latter had violated and harassed Christian territory, while the Americans had lived in peaceful isolation.*

Spanish monarchs were profoundly troubled by the debate over their moral rights to conquer. In sixteenth-century Spain theologians were immensely influential, and all Spaniards, even humble soldiers, had an extraordinary respect for religion and for legal formalism. The King therefore appointed a commission containing members with both conflicting points of view. The results of their debates were the Laws of Burgos, 1512–13, which regulated many aspects of native life in the West Indies. The ordinances were reasonably humane when dealing with housing and clothing, and the protection of men, women and children from excessive working hours. But Indian men were compelled to work for nine months a year for Spaniards.

The debate on the moral rights of conquest continued. The King appointed a further commission to meet during 1513 in a monastery in Valladolid. Its brain-child was the Requirement, a proclamation to be read out to natives through interpreters, before Spanish troops opened hostilities against them. It represented a victory for the pro-Conquest thinking of its author, Juan Lopez de Palacios Rubios. He claimed that the Requirement provided a means for Indians to avoid bloodshed by complete and immediate surrender.

The Requirement itself contained a brief history of the world, with descriptions of the Papacy and Spanish monarchy and of the donation of the Indies by Pope to King. The Indian audience was then required to accept two obligations: it must acknowledge the Church and Pope and accept the King of Spain as ruler on behalf of the Pope; it must also allow the Christian faith to be preached to it. If the natives failed to comply immediately, the Spaniards would launch their attack and ‘would do all the harm and damage that we can’, including the enslavement of wives and children, and robbery of possessions. ‘And we protest that the deaths and losses which shall result from this are your fault…”

Spanish conquistadores sailed forth with the Requirement in their baggage, and it was read out in various extraordinary situations – to empty villages, to natives already captive, or, in the present instance, during a victory celebration on the square of a conquered capital city. Las Casas confessed that on reading the Requirement he did not know whether to laugh at its ludicrous impracticality or weep at its injustice. But Pizarro had his instructions as to its use, and it satisfied Pedro Sancho’s sense of legal rectitude to perform the ritual of its proclamation.

Having given the natives a ruler and read them the Requirement, Pizarro could begin the hispanicisation of his prize, Cuzco. He had the pleasant task of supervising the plunder of its great treasures. His men had survived much to achieve this incredible success. As Sancho wrote to the King, ‘the conquistadores endured great hardships, as the entire country is the most rugged and mountainous terrain that a horse is capable of crossing…. The Governor would never have dared to make this long and dangerous expedition had he not had the greatest confidence in all the Spaniards in his force.’ Pizarro now had to see that the looting was carried out in an orderly manner, with strict supervision of the distribution of treasure among members of the expedition, with a

The tiled roofs, eucalyptus trees and cathedral of modern Cajamarca, seen from a carved rock known as the Inca’s seat. Piçarro approached across the hills in the distance

2 Cristobal de Mena, La conquista del Peru, Seville 1534—the first book ever published about Peru

3 Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, Nueva coránica y buen gobierno, drawn in Peru about 1600

4 Theodore de Bry’s powerful anti-Spanish propaganda, an illustration for Benzoni’s Americae, Frankfurt, 1596

Three versions of the scenes on the square of Cajamarca. None is wholly accurate. The European artists imagined the Incas almost naked and their city surrounded by crenellated walls. The Peruvian Guaman Poma de Ayala, although accurate about dress, showed Atahualpa seated on a throne platform rather than a litter and surrounded by armed warriors

Some of the precious objects that escaped the conquistadores’ furnaces

5 A golden llama of the Inca period

6 A silver beaker of the earlier Chimu period

7 Golden idols show the pierced earlobes of noble Inca orejones

8 A Chimu ceremonial tumi knife, with the blade of gold and silver. The handle is surmounted by a jaguar of gold and turquoise

9 A Chimu god, of gold and turquoise, forms the handle of a ceremonial tumi knife

10 Pumas guard a trapezoidal gateway in the remote ruin of Huánuco Viejo, once an important Inca city visited by Hernando Pizarro and Chalcuchima on the journey to Cajamarca in 1533

11 Hernando Pizarro strode past outraged priests to overthrow the idol of Pachacamac. The great temple stands beside the Pacific and consists of platforms of adobe bricks

The reverse of the royal standard carried by Francisco Pizarro throughout the conquest of Peru

The author in the gateway to the usno platform of Vilcashuaman, the only surviving structure of its kind in Peru. The Inca sat on the stone seat beside the top of the stairway

14 The unexcavated Inca palace at Vilcashuaman, where Hernando de Soto fought in November 1533

15 Polygonal Inca masonry in the terraces of Tarahuasi, Limatambo, below the hill of Vilcaconga

fifth of everything reserved to the Crown, and with a minimum of provocation of the natives from whom it was being stolen. Pizarro and his officers had sufficient authority to enforce some degree of restraint on their men, and it was obvious to the men themselves that their situation in Cuzco was too precarious for them to risk undue excesses. Pizarro was also helped by the fact that the treasures of precious metal had to be laboriously melted down before they could be distributed or removed.

The melting and distribution of the Cuzco treasure was carried out with even more precautions than at Cajamarca. Rafael Loredo found ninety pages of documents relating to it, and these revealed twenty-two stages in the legal processes involved. The precious objects were collected into a large shed within Pizarro’s lodging and each item was recorded by the acting treasurer Diego de Narvaez. Pizarro first ordered the melting to begin under the supervision of Jerónimo de Aliaga on 15 December 1533, and during the ensuing weeks there were many decrees swearing in the officers involved, weighing the precious metals and arranging for separate melting of the poor quality silver, finer silver and gold. The royal treasurer Alonso Riquelme was still at Jauja with the official marks. On 25 February 1534 Pizarro therefore had to authorise the fabrication of new marks bearing the royal arms. These should have been stored in a chest with two locks, but the conquistadores had to settle for one lock, since ‘ at present no chest with two keys could be found’. The crier Juan Garcia was sent out on 2 March to summon all who still had any silver to bring it to the melting.

The silver was allocated at the discretion of Francisco Pizarro and of Vicente de Valverde according to each soldier’s individual merits, with extra half-shares being awarded to the riders of certain outstanding horses. Pizarro himself allocated the gold between 16 and 19 March, generally in the same proportions as the silver. In addition to the men in Cuzco, shares were given to those who stayed at Jauja, or had ridden back to San Miguel with Sebastián Benalcázar, or had been killed at Vilcaconga. There was roughly half as much gold as at Cajamarca – much of Cuzco’s gold had been transported to Cajamarca for Atahualpa’s ransom – but over four times as much silver. The monetary value of the Cuzco melting was in fact slightly greater, f Francisco Pizarro received simply the share due ‘for his person and two horses and the interpreters and for his page Pedro Pizarro’. He held in trust the share of his partner Diego de Almagro, who received more than anyone from the two distributions. The crown again received its fifth, including ‘a woman of 18 carats who weighed 128 gold marks’ (no less than 65 lb or 29–5 kilos) and a llama of 18 carat gold weighing over 58 lb (26 45 kilos) as well as other smaller figures. Juan Ruiz de Arce wrote that ‘His Majesty got a further million pesos de oro of gold and silver.’

The sack of Cuzco was one of the very rare moments in world history when conquerors pillaged at will the capital of a great empire. It was an event to fire the imagination of every ambitious young man in Europe. Francisco López de Gomara wrote that, on entering Cuzco, ‘some of them immediately began to dismantle the walls of the temple, which were of gold and silver; others to disinter the jewels and gold vases that were with the dead; others to take idols of the same materials. They sacked the houses and the fortress, which still contained much of Huayna-Capac’s gold. In short, they took a greater quantity of gold and silver there and in the surrounding district than they had in Cajamarca with the capture of Atahualpa. But since there were many more of them now than there had been then, each man received less. Because of this, and because it was the second such occasion and did not involve the imprisonment of a king, it had less publicity.’

Pedro Pizarro recalled one of the most spectacular finds. ‘In one cave they discovered twelve sentries of gold and silver, of the size and appearance of those of this country, extraordinarily realistic. There were pitchers half of pottery and half gold, with the gold so well set into the pottery that no drop of water escaped when they were filled, and beautifully made. A golden effigy was also discovered. This greatly distressed the Indians for they said that it was a figure of [Manco Capac] the first lord who conquered this land. They found shoes made of gold, of the type the women wore, like half-boots. They found golden crayfish such as live in the sea, and many vases, on which were sculpted in relief all the birds and snakes that they knew, even down to spiders, caterpillars and other insects. All this was found in a large cave that was between some outcrops of rock outside Cuzco. They had not been buried because they were such delicate objects.’

The greatest prize in Cuzco was the temple of the sun, the golden enclosure, Coricancha. It lay at the foot of the triangular promontory between the Huatanay and Tullumayo streams, a few hundred yards south of the main square. Although the golden cladding had been stripped from the temple for Atahualpa’s ransom, it was still full of precious objects. Juan Ruiz de Arce recalled his entry into this treasure-house. ‘Since Atahualpa had ordered that nothing of his father’s should be touched [when the ransom was collected], we found many golden llamas, women, pitchers, jars and other objects in the chambers of the monastery. There was a band of gold eight inches wide running round the entire building at roof level.’ Diego de Trujillo described his insolent entry into the temple. ‘As we entered, Villac Umu, who was a priest in their canon, cried: “How dare you enter here! Anyone who enters here has to fast for a year beforehand, and must enter barefoot and bearing a load !” But we paid no attention to what he said, and went in.’

Coricancha is still a religious place, for the Dominicans soon acquired the site and built a monastery around the Inca building. The northern side of the temple is now occupied by the colonial church of Santo Domingo and by the reception rooms of the monastery. But the Inca wall running down the eastern side is virtually intact, a magnificent stretch of two hundred feet of coursed masonry, with each ashlar bulging slightly and interlocking snugly with its neighbours. Much of the wall stands to its original height of fifteen feet above the outer street and ten feet above the higher platform of the temple. It tapers towards the top and leans inwards, all to enhance the illusion of height and strength.* A series of rectangular chambers surrounds the central courtyard of the temple. Many of these have their Inca stonework intact, with rows of trapezoidal niches sunk into the wall at shoulder level. But the most dramatic architectural feature of Coricancha is a curved retaining wall at the north-western corner, beneath the western façade of the church of Santo Domingo. The dark grey stones are superbly fitted and finished, and rise to twenty feet with a slight entasis to correct any optical illusion. This smooth curve of wall has remained tightly intact through the various earthquakes in Cuzco’s history, and some visitors try to draw moral conclusions from the fact that the mortarless Inca wall has stood firm while the Spanish church above has often crumbled (plate 2.7).

Apart from its masonry and golden cladding, the features of Coricancha that were described most often by the chroniclers were a garden of golden plants, a sacrificial font and a golden image of the sun. The artificial garden amazed the Spaniards with its delicate replicas of maize with silver stems and ears of gold. Cristobal de Molina said that it was in the centre of the temple, before the room that housed the sun image. Not surprisingly, none of its precious plants survived the melting of 1534.

The font was more substantial. Juan Ruiz de Arce witnessed ceremonies being performed at it during the first year of the Conquest. ‘In the centre of the courtyard is a font, and beside this font is an altar, which was made of gold and weighed 18,000 castellanos. Beside it there was an idol. At noon the cover was removed from the altar and each nun [mamacona] brought a dish of maize, another of meat and a jar of wine and offered them to the idol. When they had finished offering their sacrifices, two Indian guardians came up carrying a large silver brazier. When this was lit they threw the maize and meat into it, and they threw the wine into the font. They sacrificed what had finished burning, raising their hands to the sun and giving thanks.’ Reginaldo de Lizárraga, one of the Dominicans living in the monastery at the end of that century, confirmed that ‘there remains in our convent a large stone font that is octagonal on the outer side. It is over a vara and a half [five feet] in diameter and over a vara and a quarter deep.’

There was greater confusion about the famous golden image of the sun. It was known as Punchao, which also meant daylight or dawn; the sun itself was called Inti. There were various sun images in Cuzco, and the temple of Coricancha also contained images of the moon, stars and thunder. The principal Punchao was ‘an image of the sun of great size, made of gold, beautifully wrought and set with many precious stones’. This main effigy eluded the Spaniards. The boastful Biscayan Mancio Sierra de Leguizamo claimed that he had had it in his possession in Cajamarca, but had lost it in a night of gambling, and this produced the Spanish expression ‘to gamble the sun before it rises’. Many chroniclers repeated this story, but no one believed Sierra. Pizarro did not allow any individual soldier to own precious objects from the ransom treasure before the official melting, least of all the most famous religious effigy of the empire. Spaniards continued to be tantalised by the missing Punchao, and Cristóbal de Molina of Santiago wrote in 1553 that ‘the Indians hid this sun so well that it could never be found up to the present day’.

The looting of Cuzco was inevitable, since the capture of the city was the culmination of an invasion inspired by greed. But the artistic loss was tragic. The sensitive young priest Cristóbal de Molina condemned his compatriots. ‘Their only concern was to collect gold and silver to make themselves all rich … without thinking that they were doing wrong and were wrecking and destroying. For what was being destroyed was more perfect than anything they enjoyed and possessed.’

The city of Cuzco also contained the immense storehouses of the Inca empire. Pizarro’s men had often seen provincial storehouses as they marched along the royal highway. The Incas appreciated the importance of commissariat for their conquering armies, and they kept deposits of essential stores along their roads. The supplies were housed in rows of identical rectangular sheds, and some of these can be seen to this day. There is a perfect example at the remote village of Tantamayo above the right bank of the upper Marañon. The neat line of fieldstone sheds looks from a distance like a goods train making its way along the bare hillside.* But most of the provincial stores had been exhausted by the armies of the civil war or emptied by Quisquis.

Nothing had prepared the Spaniards for the gigantic stores they found still fully stocked at Cuzco itself. Pedro Sancho described ‘storehouses full of cloaks, wool, weapons, metal, cloth and all the other goods that are grown or manufactured in this country. There are shields, leather bucklers, beams for roofing the houses, knives and other tools, sandals and breastplates to equip the soldiers. All was in such vast quantities that it is hard to imagine how the natives can ever have paid such immense tribute of so many items.’ The young Pedro Pizarro was particularly struck by the collections of tiny feathers from which the Incas made vestments that still grace many museum collections. ‘There were vast numbers of storehouses in Cuzco when we entered the city, filled with very delicate cloth and with other coarser cloths; and stores of stools, of foodstuffs or coca. There were deposits of iridescent feathers, some looking like fine gold and others of a shining golden-green colour. These were the feathers of small birds hardly bigger than cicadas, which are called “pájaros comines” [humming birds] because they are so tiny. These small birds grow the iridescent feathers only on their breasts, and each feather is little larger than a fingernail. Quantities of them were threaded together on fine thread and were skilfully attached to agave fibres to form pieces over a span in length. These were all stored in leather chests. Clothes were made of the feathers, and contained a staggering quantity of these iridescents. There were many other feathers of various colours intended for making clothing to be worn by the lords and ladies at the [Incas’] festivals….

‘There were also cloaks completely covered with gold and silver chaquiras (very delicate little counters), with no thread visible, like very dense chain mail, and there were storehouses of shoes with soles made of sisal and uppers of fine wool in many colours.’

The Spanish conquerors, dazzled by Cuzco’s gold, paid no attention to these prodigious stores. They allowed them to be plundered by the yanaconas, the native auxiliaries who had attached themselves to the successful invaders.