An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru Read online

  Constance Classen has argued that what made writing so “radically novel” for the Incas was its “disembodied nature.” Unlike the Native non-alphabetical quipu, which still required oral transmission, European writing represented and appeared to act as a “substitute of speech,” thus placing knowledge outside the human body (Classen, 127). But although this might be true for Atahuallpa and the first Andeans who came in contact with Europeans, it is unlikely that Titu Cusi (whom she cites here) would have viewed writing as radically novel, having lived in Cuzco and, in fact, now (in 1570) making use of it by relating his story for translation and transcription. Atahuallpa’s successors quickly learned to use the written word for political purposes in dealing with the Spaniards, employing scribes and even becoming themselves literate in the foreign medium. Although Titu Cusi doubtlessly understood the power of alphabetical writing in Spanish culture, there is little evidence suggesting that he believed it inherently superior to Andean practices of recording and memorizing the past or even thought of it as divine. His own explanation of his decision to have his narrative written down—that “[since] the memory of men is frail and weak, it would be impossible to remember everything accurately with regard to all our great and important affairs unless we avail ourselves of writing [letras] to assist us in our purposes” (p. 58)—may well contain a hint of irony. After all, native Andeans did remember their own histories without alphabetical writing. Indeed, Titu Cusi was himself drawing on these non-alphabetical traditions even as he spoke when relating his account to fray Marcos García. Thus, we may read Titu Cusi’s reference to the men whose memory is frail and weak unless assisted by writing not so much as a general statement about humanity’s shortcomings at large but rather as a critical commentary specifically on Spanish infidelities to the spoken word.

  The composition of this text was profoundly informed by Spanish and native Andean structures of knowledge, fusing various and often incommensurate rhetorical practices and conceptions of history. Related orally in Quechua by a speaker known to be curious about the culture of his Spanish audience, translated by a Spanish missionary whose knowledge of Quechua was probably proficient though limited, and transcribed from an oral medium into a written one by a bilingual mestizo, this text is an apt expression of the hybrid culture that was taking shape in sixteenth-century colonial Peru and resulting from some forty years of intercultural contact, conflict, and mixture.20 It was a colonial culture, to be sure, whose intercultural exchanges occurred under conditions of extreme power imbalances. Nevertheless, it was a culture that was neither entirely Spanish nor entirely Andean but had become, as various historians and anthropologists have put it, “mutually entangled.”21

  On the one hand, Native leaders quickly learned not only that writing was the foundation for European notions of truth in general but also that it was particularly closely tied to royal power. After their battle-axes had failed them against the Spanish conquerors, many of whom (like Francisco Pizarro himself) were illiterate or only marginally literate (see Lockhart 1972, 135–156), here might yet be an effective weapon in the fight against the Spaniards’ claims of being the new rightful lords of Peru. It was with this awareness that many Latin American Indian chronicles, such as that of Titu Cusi as well as those of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1615) and Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui (1613) were written. As Angel Rama has argued, if writing had already been a privileged medium in Spanish culture before the American conquests, it “took on an almost sacred aura” in the largely illiterate territories of the New World (9–10). It is in this context of a culture of “letrados”—what Rama calls the “lettered city”—emerging in the Spanish empire that Titu Cusi’s instructions to Marcos García and Martín de Pando with regard to his narrative must be seen: “[Because] I am unfamiliar with the phrases and modes of expression used by the Spaniards in such writings—[I] have asked the reverend fray don Marcos García and the secretary Martín de Pando to arrange and compose the said account in their customary ways of expression” (p. 136).

  Formally, the text is divided into three distinct major sections: (1) a short introductory part explicitly addressed to Lope García de Castro, the departing governor of Peru, with Titu Cusi’s request (instrucción) to present his text to King Philip II; (2) Titu Cusi’s historical account (relación) of the Spanish Conquest of Peru, his father’s maltreatment at the hands of the conquerors, the ensuing military conflicts, his father’s withdrawal to Vilcabamba, his eventual murder there, and Titu Cusi’s own succession as Inca, as well as his conversion to Christianity, leading up to the production of the manuscript; and (3) a power of attorney (poder) in which Titu Cusi authorizes García de Castro to represent him legally in the courts of Spain in any matter pertaining to his interests, title, or possessions.

  Most likely, this surface structure of the text must be ascribed to the “ordering” hand of the translator fray Marcos García. The text’s generic designations help us reconstruct the Spanish cultural context in which Titu Cusi’s account of the Conquest of Peru must be seen. In early modern Spain, the designation of a text as a relación identified it as belonging to a genre that originated, as Roberto González Echevarría has shown, in legal discourse, especially notarial rhetoric, denoting an eyewitness account in a legal dispute. A defining characteristic of the relación genre, as it originated in the Old World context, was its humble, plain, but highly official character, as well as its appeal to the authority of firsthand experience.22 In the New World context of overseas expansionism during the sixteenth century, however, the term relación took on a new meaning, now becoming, as Walter Mignolo has shown, largely synonymous with the terms historia (history) and crónica (chronicle), “in order to refer to a historiographic text.”23 In the context of overseas imperialism, law and history became inextricably intertwined. One of the most common sub-genres of the relación was hereby the relación de méritos (the account of merits). These were personal narratives composed not for a public audience in the modern sense of the word but rather for a patrimonial audience within the hierarchy of the monarchical state in order to supplicate the monarch for a royal pension, office, or favors as compensation for services rendered to the Crown. Their printing was frequently paid for by the author himself, making this type of writing “one of the major genres of publishing in colonial Spanish America” (MacLeod, 1). As González Echevarría points out, “many of the adventures and misadventures, by people who were marginal to society, found their way to legal or quasi-legal documents in which lives large and small were told in search of acquittal or social advancement” (1980, 20–21). Nevertheless, the vast majority of these texts remained unpublished and survive today only in manuscript form. Typically, their publication was patronized by the Crown only if they contained material that was of wider interest than the private gain of an individual author. Historical relaciones by eyewitnesses of the American conquests could hereby serve as a sort of legal deposition or testimony in the official courtrooms of imperial policy and legislation (see Bauer 2003, 30–76).

  It is in this legalistic context that Titu Cusi’s critique of the conquerors’ avarice and cruelty must be seen. Although it may appear as odd to the modern reader that a text addressed to the Spanish monarch engaged in what seems to be a radical indictment of the Spanish conquest, it is in fact of a piece with the scholastic political philosophy of influential voices in the Spanish Empire, such as the Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas, who had argued that the conquest of America was an “unjust” war by the standards of scholastic law. Their depositions were used, in turn, by the Crown to justify stripping the conquerors of their neo-feudal status by passing in 1542 the “New Laws,” which revoked the conquerors’ claim to an encomienda (a geographically defined grant of Native tribute and labor) in perpetuity. These New Laws caused outrage and defiance among the conquerors throughout the Americas and even led to the aforementioned insurrection against the Crown led by Gonzalo Pizarro. When the conquerors mobilize
d a legal counteroffensive, the dispute over the constitution of the Spanish Empire came to a head in a famous series of debates held in Valladolid in 1551–1552. The conquerors’ legal representative, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, argued that the native lords of the Americas, such as the Aztecs or the Incas, had governed their subjects by way of cruelty and tyranny. Furthermore, they had engaged in violations of “natural law” (such as the Incas’ habit of polygamy), all of which disqualified them from being considered legitimate rulers. Given the native lords’ presumed illegitimacy as rulers, the Spanish conquest had been “just” (by scholastic legal standards) and hereby not unlike the Christians’ “re-conquest” of Spain from the Moors. By implication, the Spanish conquerors of America, as participants in a “just” war, were entitled to feudal lord stature and to the tribute and labor previously claimed by the native lords. By contrast, the opposite side, represented by Las Casas, argued that the local nobles, even though previously pagans, were and continued to be the legitimate rulers of the American communities who had willingly subjected themselves to the supreme authority of the emperor Charles V and the Holy Catholic faith, not unlike the local nobility of Italy, Germany, or the Netherlands. The Spanish conquerors were therefore foreign invaders who in an “unjust” war not only perpetrated unspeakable acts of cruelty, destruction, and avarice but arrogated to themselves a status of feudal lords that rightfully belonged only to the Native nobility (see Brading, 70–71; Hanke; Pagden).

  In this historical context, the apparently radical critique of Spanish abuses in Titu Cusi/Marcos García’s historical narrative becomes intelligible as a politically shrewd and rhetorically persuasive exercise. The unflattering portrayal of Gonzalo Pizarro lusting after gold and Manco Inca’s coya (“queen,” although see later discussion), for example, lends specific testimony to the general arguments made by Las Casas and others about the insatiable greed, unbridled cruelty, and moral depravity of the Spanish conquerors. Similarly, the hardship and suffering imposed on the Andean communities by the Pizarro brothers’ repeated attempts to extort gold and silver as ransom for captured Inca sovereigns corroborates political arguments that the unduly heavy burden in tribute and labor imposed by the conquerors on the Natives had degraded them to the status of personal slaves and was responsible for the catastrophic decimation of His Majesty’s Native subjects in the Americas. Finally, the emphasis on the uncompromising loyalty of the various local leaders to Titu Cusi’s father as well as on his own conversion to Christianity, reinforces the political ideal of him as a natural Christian prince voluntarily placing himself under the imperial protection of the king. If, admittedly, this political ideal seemed somewhat out of touch with historical reality—after all, the Vilcabamba Incas were in an official state of rebellion—the account takes pains to show that Manco Inca made the decision to remove to Vilcabamba only as a last resort, after Manco Inca’s many attempts at accommodation had been frustrated and his boundless good intentions (voluntad) to coexist had been exhausted by Spanish treachery and greed. Titu Cusi’s conversion to Christianity continues this gesture of voluntad for peaceful coexistence but his father’s experiences and last words have understandably made him wary of the Spaniards’ trustworthiness. For this reason, he requires legal assurances from the monarch that his status as the legitimate Christian prince of Peru will be respected before he can reasonably be expected to consider giving up his refuge at Vilcabamba. Thus, it is in the spirit of the (belated) realization of this political ideal—of him relinquishing his refuge and assuming his place within the Spanish imperial order—that he “relates” his version of Peruvian history to the Augustinian Marcos García, “instructs” the returning governor Lope García de Castro to present his case before the monarch, and “empowers” him to act on his behalf in all the empire’s legal affairs.

  As mentioned before, however, it is entirely possible that Titu Cusi’s gestures of his intentions to leave Vilcabamba, including the resulting text, were but a political smokescreen created in order to delay changes to the status quo. Indeed, Spanish culture of the letter and the law constitutes only part of the context in which to read Titu Cusi’s account. It would be a mistake to assume that Titu Cusi merely provided the historical “facts” while Marcos García was entirely responsible for the form of this narrative. However pervasively the form of the text was shaped by its mediations through Spanish translation and transcription, it retains distinct traces of Andean conceptions of history and conventions of historiography. In order to excavate these aspects of the text, it is helpful to place this narrative in the context of recent ethnohistorical and anthropological scholarship that has provided much insight about other histories written in Spanish but drawing on native Andean traditions. In particular, the chronicles written by Juan de Betanzos as well as those written by Pedro Cieza de León, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and during the early seventeenth century the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega contain valuable comments about Inca historiographic practices that help us to reconstruct the traditions on which Titu Cusi would have drawn when telling his history of the conquest.

  Because the Incas had no alphabetic writing system, their histories were recited orally on ritual occasions as songs—sometimes described as cantares by Spanish observers—that were intended to celebrate the greatness of a specific ancestor and, thus, to legitimate certain claims made by his descendants. As Susan Niles has observed, these praise-narratives had narrative structures that depended heavily on mnemonic devices (xvii, 27). Such devices could include stimuli external to the narrative, such as music, war trophies especially kept for this purpose, or the Andean quipu. The quipu were strings of multicolored knotted cords arranged in particular patterns of color, texture, size, and form that encoded specific messages that could be read by persons initiated in this system, called the quipucamayocs. The quipu were typically used to store numerical information important for administrative purposes, such as recording tribute labor, taxes, and supplies but could also serve to assist the memories of oral historians (see Urton 1997 and 1998) (see Illustration 5). Another kind of mnemonic device was internal to the structure of the oral narrative itself, such as meter, formulaic repetition, and the performance of direct speech (Niles, 28–44). Although it is difficult to know with certainty how Titu Cusi conceived of the specific occasion when he himself performed his history before fray Marcos García, many of the events he related in his narrative were not witnessed by himself and therefore would only have been remembered by him in the form of the oral traditions about Manco Inca’s life as they were being passed down by performances on such ritual occasions.

  Despite the mediations through Marcos García’s translation and Martín de Pando’s transcription, several formal characteristics of Inca oral tradition on which Titu Cusi drew when relating his story still survive in the text. For example, narrative elements are frequently repeated ritualistically four times when they concern aspects of geography invoking the “fourness” of the Tahuantinsuyu and giving the narrative an “epic” character. The syntactical symmetry of the Spanish translation suggests that Titu Cusi’s performance may have been metrical or at least followed a pattern of rhythmical symmetry over certain passages. For purposes of illustration we might represent such a passage here in stanza. It relates the convergence of the various lords and their armies from the four parts of the Tahuantinsuyu during Manco Inca’s siege of Cuzco:

  5. A quipucamayoc interpreting quipus. From Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. By kind permission of the Royal Library at Copenhagen (GKS 2232 4to)

  From Carmenga, which lies in the direction of the Chinchaysuyu,

  Came Coriatao, Cuillas, and Taipi, with many others

  In order to close the city’s exit in that direction with their hordes.

  From the Contisuyu, which is the direction of Cachicachi,

  Came Huaman Quilcana, Curi Huallpa, all superbly equipped and in battle formation,

  closing a huge gap of more than half a league
wide.

  From the Collasuyu

  Came Llicllic and many other generals with a huge number of men, which was in fact the largest contingent

  That formed the besieging army,

  From the Antisuyu,

  Came Antallca and Ronpa Yupanqui and many others

  in order to close the ring around the Spaniards (pp. 105–106)

  Por la parte de Carmenga, que es hacia Chinchaysuyu,

  entraron Coriatao y Cuillas y Taipi y otros muchos

  que cerraron aquel postigo con la gente que traían.

  Por la parte del Contisuyu que es hacia Cachicachi,

  entraron Huaman Quilcana y Curi Huallpa y otros muchos