68 CHAPTER 3 THE CONQUEST OF AMERICA
poverty and supposed wrongs. Twelve of them,
contemptuously dubbed by Pizarro’s secretary
“the knights of the cape” because they allegedly
had only one cloak among them, planned and
carried out the assassination of the conqueror of
Peru in June 1541. But their triumph was of short
duration. Charles V sent a judge, Vaca de Castro,
to advise Pizarro on the government of his prov-
ince. Assuring himself of the loyalty of Pizarro’s
principal captains, Vaca de Castro made war on
Almagro’s son, defeated his army on the “bloody
plains of Chupas,” and promptly had him tried and
beheaded as a traitor to the king.
That was not, however, to be the end of the
troubles. Early in 1544, a new viceroy, Blasco
Núñez Vela, arrived in Lima to proclaim the edicts
known as the New Laws of the Indies. These laws
regulated Indian tribute, freed indigenous slaves,
and forbade forced labor. They evoked outraged
cries and appeals for their suspension from the
Spanish landowners in Peru. When these pleas
were not heeded, the desperate conquistadors rose
in revolt and found a leader in Gonzalo Pizarro,
brother of the murdered Francisco.
The fi rst phase of the great revolt in Peru ended
auspiciously for Gonzalo Pizarro with the defeat
and death of the viceroy Núñez Vela in a battle near
Quito. Pizarro now became the uncrowned king of
the country. The rebel leader owed much of his ini-
tial success to the resourcefulness and demoniac
energy of his eighty-year-old fi eld commander and
principal adviser, Francisco de Carbajal. To these
qualities Carbajal united an inhuman cruelty that
became legendary in Peru.
After his victory over the viceroy, Carbajal
and other advisers urged Pizarro to proclaim him-
self king of Peru. But Pizarro, a weaker man than
his iron-willed lieutenant, hesitated to avow the
revolutionary meaning of his actions. The arrival
of a smooth-tongued envoy of the crown, Pedro de
la Gasca, who announced suspension of the New
Laws and offered pardons and rewards to all re-
pentant rebels, caused a trickle of desertions from
Pizarro’s ranks that soon became a fl ood.
Finally, the rebellion collapsed almost without
a struggle, and its leaders were executed. Before
the civil wars in Peru had run their course, four of
the Pizarro “brothers of doom” and the Almagros,
father and son, had met violent deaths; a viceroy
had been slain; and numberless others had lost
their lives. Peace and order were not solidly es-
tablished in the country until the administration
of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who came out in
1569, a quarter-century after the beginning of the
great civil wars.How a Handful of Spaniards
Won Two Empires
The Spanish Conquest raises a question: How did
small groups of Spaniards, which initially num-
bered only a few hundred men, conquer the Aztec
and Inca empires that had populations in the mil-
lions, large armies, and militarist traditions of their
own? With relative ease, the Spaniards conquered
the Aztecs and the Incas, peoples who were organ-
ized on the state level, lived a sedentary life based
on intensive agriculture, and were ruled by em-
perors to whom they gave complete obedience. On
the other hand, tribes of marginal culture, such as
the nomadic Chichimecs of the northern Mexican
plains or the Araucanians of Chile, who practiced
a simple shifting agriculture and herding, were
indomitable; the Araucanians continued to battle
Spanish invaders and their descendants for hun-
dreds of years until 1883.
A sixteenth-century Spanish soldier and chron-
icler of uncommon intelligence, Pedro Cieza de
León, refl ecting on the contrast between the swift
fall of the Inca Empire and the failure of the Span-
iards to conquer the “uncivilized” tribes of the Co-
lombian jungles, found an explanation in the simple
social and economic organization of the tribes,
which made it possible for the people to fl ee before a
Spanish advance and soon to rebuild village life else-
where. In contrast, the mass of the Inca population,
docile subjects, accepted their emperor’s defeat as
their own and quickly submitted to the new Span-
ish masters. For these people, fl ight from the fertile
valleys of the Inca to the deserts, bleak plateaus, and
snowcapped mountains that dominate the geogra-
phy of the region would have been unthinkable.
Although Cieza’s comments are insightful,
they do not satisfactorily explain the swift fall of