Pizarro by Stuart Stirling

Author:Stuart Stirling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

SEVEN

The Frontiers of New Castile

My governorship has no frontier, it stretches even to Flanders.

Francisco Pizarro

The vastness of the colony Pizarro had founded, and the immense distances its early settlers and armies of conquistadores walked and rode across on horseback and mule, climbing through snow-bound mountain passes and traversing the bleak pampas of its southern highland country, can only be envisaged when set in the context of their endless hardship and remorseless endeavour. It was a route Pizarro had himself undertaken on various occasions, and which for the last time brought him to Cuzco, and for the first time had taken him to the lake of Titicaca and the ruined Bolivian city of Tiahuanacu, the ancient cradle of Inca civilisation.

Even before Almagro’s execution, he had instructed his brother Hernando, by letter, to counter the inevitable discontent of Almagro’s partisans and the hundreds of landless veterans of Salinas by ordering several expeditions of exploration, with the promise of rewarding its pioneers with lands and Indians. He had even chided Diego de Alvarado, one of Almagro’s fallen captains, by telling him somewhat imperiously that his own mandate stretched as far as Flanders, and that only greed and not justice had been Almagro’s cause.1

Among several expeditions Pizarro sanctioned was one to the Cotahuasi region of the western Cuntisuyo, under the command of Nicolás de Heredia, one of the future discoverers of northern Argentina, and Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, who, together with other Pizarro loyalists, had spent almost a year imprisoned by Almagro in the dungeons of the Inca fortress of Sacsahuaman. The expedition was typical of the conquest of the colony’s frontier regions, in which the conquistadores often took with them their private armies of Indian warriors from their existing encomiendas. Rodrigo López Bernal, one of the hundred Spaniards who served on the expedition, recalled that Serra de Leguizamón captained a company of his Indian warriors from his encomienda of Callanga and Catanga, one of the richest in Cuzco, and as a result was awarded the encomienda of Alca in the Cuntisuyo’s mountainous and arid region:

… much was risked, for there were few of us Spaniards in comparison to the great number of Indians who attacked us and surrounded us in very mountainous terrain, making it impossible for us to reach a river [the Cotahuasi] for the water we needed to drink; and that night in the tambo of Alca, Mansio Serra de Leguizamón and the Indians in his service left our encampment in order to break the siege, entering the tambo from the high ground of a slope, passing their sentries and putting them to the sword so that they could not warn their warriors; and in this manner in the middle of the night they climbed to the upper villages where the great multitude of warriors were camped, and catching them asleep they killed many of them, and then gave the Spaniards who had remained below the signal to climb up and follow them.2

Another such expedition had been initially led by Pizarro’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.