The Last Conquistador by Stuart Stirling

Author:Stuart Stirling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750952842
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

Battle of Huarina. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

Only some weeks after the battle did Gonzalo make his entry into Cuzco, where he received the rapturous acclamation of the very settlers who had prepared his gallows in expectation of his defeat, and from whose wooden poles hung the corpses of the city’s Mayor and one of its regidores. Somehow Mansio managed to escape and flee the city, evading his certain execution at the hands of Gonzalo. For days the rebel soldiers pillaged the mansions of Cuzco’s defectors in an orgy of retribution, raping with abandon the city’s women, Spaniard and Indian. Cespedes recorded that Gonzalo sold some of the loyalist prisoners as slaves.30 The obese Carbajal ordered that the wives and daughters of Arequipa’s loyalists be brought to Cuzco, most of whom had already been raped by their captors. One woman, María Calderón, the wife of the astrologer and loyalist captain Jerónimo de Villegas who was lodged in Mansio’s residence, was visited by Carbajal. He ordered his Negro slaves to strangle her for having criticized him publicly, and who then hanged her by the neck from the window of her bedroom – a corner window of the Casa de Sierpes, facing the square of the Nazarenas.31

By the end of December 1547, Gasca’s army of reconquest had reached the city of Jauja, reinforced by many former rebel encomenderos. ‘I was in the valley of Jauja with the president Gasca among his troops he took with him for the castigation of Gonzalo Pizarro and his followers,’ recalled Pedro Súarez de Illanes, ‘and there I saw and met Mansio Serra, who was well armed, with horses, and in good order, as a fine soldier and hidalgo . . .’.32 After waiting for the winter rains to pass, Gasca’s army reached the Apurímac River and the vicinity of Cuzco in the early part of April 1548. At the valley of Jaquijahuana, a few miles north of Cuzco, the two armies of some 2,000 Spaniards took up their battle positions. One by one, however, the rebel cavalry, and then its infantry, began a mass desertion. Within the hour both Gonzalo and Carbajal were prisoners.

Most chroniclers record that Gonzalo Pizarro met his death with resolve and dignity. His sentence was proclaimed before the entire army by the judge Andrés de Cianca:

. . . it be declared that the said Gonzalo Pizarro has committed the crime of laesae majestatis against the crown . . . and for which we condemn him as traitor and his descendants in the male line for two generations and in the female line for one generation . . . that he be taken from his imprisonment on a mule with his feet and hands manacled and that he be brought before this royal assembly of His Majesty . . . and that his crimes be proclaimed . . . and that he be brought to this place of execution and that his head be struck off . . . and that after his death it be taken to the city of Lima .

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