Cradle of Gold by Christopher Heaney

Author:Christopher Heaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Interlude: Tupac Amaru

Friar Ortíz shivered in the cold morning air below Vitcos, pulled on his vestments, and began to pray. He closed his eyes. He knew the Incas were watching him closely. He called out, asking God for a miracle. But when he stopped speaking and opened his eyes, he knew nothing had changed. It was the end of the rainy season, 1571, and lying before him, pale and lifeless, was the corpse of Vilcabamba’s last chance for peace: the Inca emperor Titu Cusi, who had died horribly in Ortíz’s care.

The Incas cursed Ortíz for his failure. Ortíz righteously declared that it must have been God’s will that the emperor died. For that, the Incas thrashed him, pierced a hole in the flesh behind his jaw, threaded it with a rope, and dragged him over the mountains and down toward the religious refuge of Vilcabamba. They were afraid of killing a Spanish missionary outright, so they sought the advice of the new emperor, Titu Cusi’s younger brother, Tupac Amaru.

If Ortíz had prayed for his survival, he was disappointed. In contrast to Titu Cusi, Tupac Amaru had been raised by Vilcabamba’s priests, sheltered from diplomacy and exchange with the Spaniards. He was devout, intelligent, and well spoken, but reliant on his priests for counsel. When the Inca soldiers brought the missionary to the edge of the city of Vilcabamba, Tupac Amaru refused Ortíz an audience, sealing his fate. An Inca captain smashed open the Spaniard’s skull with his club and laid his corpse on the road to be trampled. According to his fellow Spaniards, the Inca captains then buried Ortíz head first in a deep hole and drove a palm spear up his rectum.

With the friar’s killing, Inca policy shifted from wary coexistence with the Spanish to hard-line isolation. They would never be able to send the Spaniards back to Europe on a raft, but they could cut all ties. Their military leaders destroyed the friars’ abandoned churches, persecuted the remaining Christian converts, and stopped communication with the Spanish. The Inca captains kept the crisis in Vilcabamba a secret until the following year, when they killed a Spanish envoy attempting to cross into the province.

For most residents of Cuzco, the envoy’s death was a tragedy—a step backward to the days of Spanish-Inca war. For all the violence of the conquest, Incas and Spaniards had been able to work out a wary coexistence in Cuzco. The rights of the Inca nobility were respected, and a new class of mestizo children had been born, enjoying the nobility of both worlds. Some Spaniards genuinely recognized the injustice of Atahualpa’s execution in 1533 and had hoped to draw out Manco’s family to make a permanent peace. They had wanted to marry Titu Cusi’s son to the daughter of his brother Sayri Tupac to shore up Inca power in a colonial setting. The murder ended those dreams and proved to both Spaniards and Incas that they had not come as far as they thought.

It became clear

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