Peru - Lonely Planet Publications [15]
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The following three decades, however, would be a period of great turmoil. For the indigenous people, the arrival of the Spanish brought on a cataclysmic collapse of their society. One scholar estimates that the indigenous population – around 10 million when Pizarro arrived – was reduced to a mere 600,000 within a century. As elsewhere in the Americas, the Spanish ruled by terror. (In 1613, in fact, an Inca noble named Guamán Poma de Ayala wrote a lengthy report on the abuses, which he sent to King Philip III in Spain – to no avail. His chronicle was likely never read by the Spanish royal.)
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Kim MacQuarrie’s gripping 2007 book, The Last Days of the Incas, is a page-turning, can’t-put-it-down narrative of the history-making clash between two civilizations.
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Rebellions erupted regularly. Atahualpa’s half-brother Manco Inca (who had originally sided with the Spanish and served as a puppet emperor under Pizarro) tried to regain control of the highlands in 1536 – laying siege to the city of Cuzco for almost a year – but was ultimately forced to retreat to the jungle, to the site of the fabled Vilcabama, the Incas last settlement. He was stabbed to death by a contingent of Spanish soldiers in 1544. A couple of other indigenous figures would serve as de facto heads of the Inca state, until 1572, when the Spanish viceroy put a bounty on the head of the last Inca leader, Túpac Amaru (a son of Manco Inca). He was captured and, after a short trial, publicly decapitated before a crowd of thousands in Cuzco’s main square.
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In addition to taxes and tributes, indigenous peoples during the viceroyalty were forced to participate in repartos – forced purchases of articles produced by the colony.
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Throughout all of this, the Spanish were doing plenty of fighting among themselves, splitting up into a complicated series of rival factions, each of which wanted control of the new empire. In 1538, Diego de Almagro was sentenced to death by strangulation for an attempt to take over Cuzco. Three years later, Francisco Pizarro was assassinated in Lima by a band of disgruntled De Almagro supporters. Other conquistadors met equally violent fates.
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The Virgin of the Andes: Art and Ritual in Colonial Cuzco, by Carol Damian, is a well-illustrated tome devoted to covering the European and indigenous fusion that is Cuzco School art.
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Things grew relatively more stable after the arrival of Francisco de Toledo as viceroy, an able administrator who brought some order to the emergent Spanish province. Lima solidified its position as the main political, social and economic center, while Cuzco was relegated to backwater status. (The city nonetheless made its mark on the era for its role in the development of an ornate style of religious painting known as the escuela cusqueña, or Cuzco School, in the 17th and 18th centuries.)
Until independence, the country was ruled by a series of Spanish-born viceroys appointed by the crown. Immigrants from Spain held the most prestigious positions, while criollos (Spaniards born in the colony) were generally confined to middle management. (This is how Spain controlled its colonies – and bred resentment.) Mestizos – people who were of mixed blood were placed even further down the social scale. Full-blooded indígenas resided at the bottom, exploited as peones (expendable laborers) in encomiendas, a feudal system that granted Spanish colonists land titles that included the property all of the indigenous people living in that area.
Tensions between indígenas and Spaniards reached a boiling point in the late 18th century, when the Spanish crown levied a series of new taxes on the colony,