Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [59]
TWENTY-SEVEN
Trouble
Approaching Vista Alegre
After seven years of hideous fortune, Manco finally caught a break. The Spaniards who had chased him from Vilcabamba received word of bigger problems in Cusco and A abruptly abandoned their pursuit. Manco returned to his jungle capital in exile and entered his first period of relative calm since he’d fled Cusco. He was able to split his time between Vilcabamba and Vitcos undisturbed. Attacks on Spanish travelers resumed with surprising ease.
In Cusco, a civil war had broken out between the Pizarro brothers and Diego de Almagro, one of Francisco Pizarro’s two original business partners in the conquest of Peru. Almagro had arrived late to the bloodbath at Cajamarca and received only a small fraction of the bonanza from Atahualpa’s ransom; he also deeply resented the title that the king of Spain had bestowed upon his partner. In revenge, Almagro seized control of Cusco. The Pizarro brothers overran Almagro’s army in a battle outside of the city, after which Almagro was captured and executed in the Plaza de Armas. A group of surviving Almagristas retaliated by bursting into a dinner party at Francisco Pizarro’s house in Lima and chasing down the sixty-three-year-old conqueror of Peru. Pizarro killed two of his attackers before his own throat was cut. His last act, William Prescott wrote, was “tracing a cross with his finger on the bloody floor,” which he was bending over to kiss as he received a blow to the head that ended his life.
In an early example of the country’s magical realist politics, seven of Pizarro’s murderers sought asylum with Manco. The Inca allowed them to live in comfort at Vitcos, and in return they instructed their hosts in horsemanship, European weaponry and recreational games. While playing horseshoes in 1544, one of Manco’s guests pulled out a dagger and stabbed the emperor from behind. The Spaniards, who had plotted the regicide in the hope of ingratiating themselves with the new post-Pizarro regime in Cusco, crowded around the Inca and knifed him repeatedly. They mounted their horses and fled, but Manco’s men discovered them hiding in a thatched hut, which was set afire. The assassins were shot with arrows and clubbed to death as they attempted to flee. Three days after the attack, the great rebel Inca died at Vitcos of his wounds.
For the next two decades, Manco’s sons Sayri Tupac and Titu Cusi played political cat-and-mouse with the Spaniards, who in a radical strategic shift, tried to co-opt the native leaders rather than exterminate them. Sayri Tupac eventually accepted a Spanish offer to leave Vilcabamba in return for a grand estate; he later converted to Roman Catholicism. Titu Cusi took his interest in the conquerors’ religion further. He allowed priests to establish a church near Vitcos; when they burned down the White Rock temple, they left behind the clues—via their hagiographer Father Calancha—that ultimately started Bingham on his search for the Lost City of Incas.
The independent Inca state remained alive until Titu Cusi’s sudden death in 1571, when the title of Inca passed to a third son of Manco, named Tupac Amaru. The new Spanish viceroy in Cusco noted a chill in diplomatic relations with Vilcabamba and decided to resolve the ambiguous political situation. On the Sunday before Easter 1572, he declared a “war of fire and blood” against the rebel Inca state.
At a newly constructed fort called Huayna Pucará, built along the road that John and I were following to Espiritu Pampa, the natives again plotted to drop boulders on their enemies. This time, the Spaniards seized the high ground immediately. Tupac Amaru fled deeper into the jungle, to what was now the last city of the Incas.
“This is a trail almost like Bingham would have seen,” John said as we approached the onetime fort at Huayna Pucará. The cloud forest we walked through was thick with creatures: birds,