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By Root 1918 0

Its generals planned to attack Pizarro, he said, and free the emperor. Atawallpa denied the charge, truthfully. Pizarro nonetheless ordered him to be bound. Some of the Spaniards most sympathetic to Atawallpa asked to investigate. Soon after they left, two Inka ran to Pizarro, claiming that they had just fled from the invading army. Pizarro hurriedly convoked a military tribunal, which quickly sentenced the Inka to execution—the theory apparently being that the approaching army would not attack if its leader were dead. Too late the Spanish expedition came back to report that no Inka army was on the move. Thupa Wallpa emerged from hiding and was awarded the fringe as the new Inka.

The execution, according to John Rowe, the Berkeley archaeologist, was the result of a conspiracy among Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa, and the lord of Cajamarca. By ridding himself of Atawallpa and taking on Thupa Wallpa, Rowe argued, Pizarro “had exchanged an unwilling hostage for a friend and ally.” In fact, Thupa Wallpa openly swore allegiance to Spain. To him, the oath was a small price to pay; by siding with Pizarro, Washkar’s panaqa, “which had lost everything, had a chance again.” Apparently the new Inka hoped to return with Pizarro to Qosqo, where he might be able to seize the wheel of state. After that, perhaps, he could wipe out the Spaniards.

Although Andean societies have been buffeted by disease and economic exploitation since the arrival of Europeans, indigenous tradition remained strong enough that this chicha seller in Cuzco, photographed by Martín Chambi in 1921, might have seemed unremarkable in the days of the Inka.

On the way to Qosqo, Pizarro met his first important resistance near the river town of Hatun Xauxa, which had been overrun by Atawallpa’s army during the civil war. The same force had returned there to battle the Spanish. But the Inka army’s plan to burn down the town and prevent the invaders from crossing the river was foiled by the native Xauxa and Wanka populace, which had long resented the empire. Not only did they fight the Inka, they followed the old adage about the enemy of my enemy being my friend and actually furnished supplies to Pizarro.

After the battle Thupa Wallpa suddenly died—so suddenly that many Spaniards believed he had been poisoned. The leading suspect was Challcochima, one of Atawallpa’s generals, whom Pizarro had captured at Cajamarca and brought along on his expedition to Qosqo. Challcochima may not have murdered Thupa Wallpa, but he certainly used the death to try to persuade Pizarro that the next Inka should be one of Atawallpa’s sons, not anyone associated with Washkar. Meanwhile, Washkar’s panaqa sent out yet another brother, Manqo Inka. He promised that if he were chosen to succeed Thupa Wallpa he would swear the same oath of allegiance to Spain. In return, he asked Pizarro to kill Challcochima. Pizarro agreed and the Spaniards publicly burned Challcochima to death in the main plaza of the next town they came to. Then they rode toward Qosqo.

To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism. In this he was echoing conclusions drawn centuries before by Pedro Pizarro. Had Wayna Qhapaq “been alive when we Spaniards entered this land,” the conquistador remarked, “it would have been impossible for us to win it…. And likewise, had the land not been divided by the [smallpox-induced civil] wars, we would not have been able to enter or win the land.”

Pizarro’s words, Dobyns realized, applied beyond Tawantinsuyu. He had studied demographic records in both Peru and southern Arizona. In both, as in New England, epidemic disease arrived before the first successful colonists. When the Europeans actually arrived, the battered, fragmented cultures could not unite to resist the incursion. Instead one party, believing that it was about to lose the struggle for dominance, allied with the invaders to improve its position. The alliance was often successful, in that the party gained the desired advantage.