12

THE CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIONS

OF INVADED SOCIETIES:
ANDEAN AREA (1500-1580)
KAREN SPALDING

As a European historian has observed, historians "have a soft spot for

conquest," which provides a neat, defined chronology in which to fit an
intractable past.1 That is particularly true in the Americas, where the
conquest of the native states has been generally accepted as marking the
beginning of modern history. But conquests can provide only a chronol-
ogy for the winners, for like many defining "events," they become clear
only with the passage of time, and only as long as they are seen from a
single perspective. The Spaniards who moved into the Andes in 1531
regarded themselves as conquerors, and their own versions of what hap-
pened in the region between that date and the 1560s remains unchallen-
ged. After all, after 1532, it became impossible to deal with the region
without taking into account the European presence. The Andes became
part of an expanding Europe, and more specifically, of the Spanish
empire, the most powerful European political structure of the sixteenth
century (Map 12.1). But it would be very poor history to view the events
of the sixteenth century through the focus of the twentieth, and to
assume the absolute victory of Spaniards over Andeans simply because,
centuries later, the relationship between people who defined themselves
as European and people who were defined (and often defined themselves
as well) as Andean was one of almost total domination of the latter by
the former.
The pages that follow attempt to examine the period from 1500 to
1
This chapter began as a revised version of chapter 4 of my book Huarochiri: An Andean society
under Inca and Spanish rule (Stanford, 1984). I would like to thank both Stanford University Press
for permission to use that material, and my editors, Frank Salomon and Stuart Schwartz, for
urging me to undertake the revision, which has become a very different piece from the original. It
is seldom that an author gets the opportunity to rewrite what has already been "set in print," and
it has been both exciting and humbling to have the opportunity to take stock of how much the
discipline and my own ideas have changed in the course of the last decade.

904
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 Colonial Cities and Indigenous
Regions in the Early Viceroyalty
ofPeru(ca.l560)
• City or settlement Land elevation
Cant a Region ^ ^ | 500-4000 meters
A Mountain peak HIHH Over 4000 meters
Place names in colonial spellings.

PACIFIC
OCEAN

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Map 12.1
 906 Karen Spalding

1580 — the period usually classified as the Spanish conquest — from a

somewhat different perspective. The task is not easy because the appear-
ance of the Spaniards in the Andes also means that the sources for the
study of the region change massively. Before 1531, the only direct records
available to a student of Andean history are those read by archaeologists;
the Europeans who came to the Andes after 1532 generated the kind of
record used by scholars who traditionally depend upon written materials.
That change is both useful and misleading, because the standard bias of
the written word, which is a bias toward the view of an elite, is multiplied
by the fact that all our data about Andean people undergoes a process of
translation and interpretation through a different culture. Even sources
generated by Andeans are constrained by the differences between oral
and written traditions. So we must use data about Andeans generated by
Spaniards cautiously, and appreciate that the data has made it possible to
learn a great deal not only about Andean societies since 1532 but before
as well.
We have learned a great deal in the last decade alone. Ten years ago
the present author set about the study of how members of Andean
societies "responded to or resisted the political structures imposed upon
them, and how they dealt with, were exploited by, or benefited from the
Europeans who occupied their land and made it their own."2 I would
not frame the issue in those terms today. It is becoming increasingly
possible to see the members of Andean societies as active participants in
the events that transformed their lives. The Spaniards did not have an
entirely free hand in the Andes; like all other conquerors, they had to
deal with people who had their own ideas about what was going on, and
who defined their own agendas and objectives.
Nor can we look at the encounter between Europeans and Andeans
simply in terms of opposing forces, even opposing forces in which many
Andeans chose for their own reasons to ally with the invaders. Beneath
the umbrella of the Inka3 state (see Chap. 10), itself in disarray when the
Spaniards appeared, there were many different societies, some of them
complex state systems in themselves and others smaller and less stratified
(see Chap. 6). All the respective leaders had their own agendas. It is
becoming increasingly clear that, whereas Andeans and Spaniards un-
2
Huarochiri, 8
3
The term "Inka" signifies a member of an ethnic group that expanded from the Cusco Valley to
conquer the Andean region from what is today Ecuador to Chile and Argentina. It also refers to
the ruling elite of the Inka state, as well as to the head of state or ruler.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 907

doubtedly did not understand a great deal about one another, this fact
hardly kept them from trying to use one another for their own ends.
Andean leaders used Spaniards to buttress or advance their positions in
their own societies; they participated actively — and successfully — in
European markets; they took part in the political definition of the colo-
nial system. There is no longer any need to choose between the two
standard — and equally unsatisfactory — versions of this period: either
portraying the Indians as passive victims or the Spaniards as all-powerful.
Members of Andean society were full participants in the struggle to
define what the European presence would mean. This effort to broaden
our perspective is still in its initial stages, but it is already possible to see
some of the exciting prospects opened by the work of those who have
made the effort.

THE SPANISH INVASION AND THE KILLING OF THE

SOVEREIGN INKA

The conquest of the Andes began from Panama. In 1524 the governor of
Panama, Pedrarias de Avila, gave Francisco Pizarro, a captain and veteran
of the Indies who had been in the New World since 1502, authority to
explore and conquer toward the south. After a first unsuccessful expedi-
tion south, injvjjich the explorers were forcibly beaten off by the people
they met, and the insects took all the booty that was to be had, a second
expedition reached the settled area of what is today northern Ecuador.
The members of the expedition, most of them hungry and ill, holed up
on Gallo Island off the coast of Colombia. Thirteen remained there
through the winter while the rest went back to Panama. The pilot who
took the group that withdrew back to Panama returned a few months
later with fresh supplies, and the tiny group explored the coast by ship,
penetrating the Inka empire as far south as Tiimbez. They saw evidence
of a settled, prosperous society along the coast, and they met and cap-
tured a seagoing raft with a crew of twenty people. The cargo included
objects of gold and silver and finely woven cloth of many colors. Pizarro
also obtained two young boys from a coastal chieftain, or kuraka, whom
he trained to become interpreters for the Spaniards.
From Panama Pizarro went to Spain, with the evidence of the rich
lands lying to the south of the territory then claimed by Spain, in order
to obtain legal authority for further action. He returned in 1530 with full
authorization from the crown to establish Spanish rule over the territory
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 908 Karen Spalding

he had discovered and a title of governor and captain-general of the lands

he conquered. The crown gave Pizarro full military command and direc-
tion of the enterprise, which contravened the terms of the partnership
Pizarro had formed in Panama before leaving for Spain with a younger
man, Diego de Almagro, and a priest-investor, Hernando de Luque.
Almagro's anger at his exclusion almost ended the partnership, but rela-
tions were patched up, and the first band of conquerors left for Peru
under Pizarro's command in January 1531, with about 180—200 men and
thirty horses, to be followed by Almagro with the rest of the men who
signed up for the operation. Pizarro's band disembarked on the coast of
northern Ecuador, occupying a large settlement and sending their plun-
der in gold and silver objects back to Panama.
The expedition entered the Inka empire early in 1532. The first Spanish
settlement in Peru, San Miguel de Piura, was founded in August. There
the Spaniards learned about a civil war over succession to the leadership
of the Andean state. Warfare had raged since the sudden death of the
last Inka, Huayna Capac (Quechua: Wayna Qhapaq). Following rumors
that Atawallpa (hispano-Quechua: Atahuallpa) the Quito-based con-
tender who was then winning the civil war, was in the northern Inka
center at Cajamarca, the Spaniards moved into the Andean highlands in
search of him. They entered Cajamarca in November and requested a
meeting with Atawallpa. After an initial delay, the Inka sovereign (whom
his people titled Sapa Inka) agreed to the meeting, and with a small force
of some several thousand men, mostly unarmed, he entered the square at
Cajamarca. What he met was an ambush from the Spaniards, who had
hidden in the long buildings surrounding the square. The ambush went
according to Pizarro's plan, and the Inka was taken prisoner while his
forces, unable to move within the enclosed space when the horses charged
directly into them, died by the thousands.
In an effort to regain his freedom, Atawallpa offered to collect a
ransom of a room filled with gold and silver as high as he could reach.
The Spaniards agreed. Atawallpa sent messengers throughout Inka terri-
tory to collect gold and silver objects, using the opportunity to revenge
himself upon regional deities or wak'as that had failed to support him
during the civil war, and respecting only the mummies of past Inka rulers
who were guarded by their descendants. The Spaniards settled in Caja-
marca to wait for the treasure, uncertain what to do with their dangerous
and powerful captive if and when he met the ransom. Waskhar (hispano-
Quechua: Huascar) Atawallpa's half-brother and rival in the civil war,
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 909

was already dead, killed by Atawallpa's forces on his order. The war for
succession was over - or would have been if it had not been for Francisco
Pizarro.
The ransom was collected and melted down into bars of gold and
silver by the spring of 1533. At the same time, the Spaniards condemned
Atawallpa to death on the basis of rumors that he was organizing his
forces in the field to move against the Spaniards; they thus removed a
figure whose presence had become steadily more inconvenient to them.
The treasure of Cajamarca totaled more than I.J million pesos when it
was melted down. After the traditional "royal fifth" was set aside for the
king, the remainder was divided into shares and distributed among the
men. The share of the plunder that fell to a horseman in the distribution
of the treasure was some 90 pounds of gold and 180 of silver.4 The share
of a foot soldier was about half that amount, and Pizarro himself took
thirteen shares. The initial investment in the expedition paid off beyond
the wildest dreams of everyone in the Americas, and it sparked a rush of
men to Peru in the hope of making their fortunes.
Groups of hopefuls captained by men who had participated in earlier
expeditions began to descend on Pizarro almost immediately. Diego de
Almagro, Pizarro's original partner, and the force of 150 men he brought
to Peru, reached Cajamarca while the ransom was being collected. In
October 1533 the authorities in Panama wrote excitedly to Madrid that
"the wealth and greatness of the provinces of Peru increase so greatly
every day that it is becoming impossible to believe, and in truth, to those
of us who are here and see it most closely, virtually within our reach, it
seems a dream." Almagro was followed by Pedro de Alvarado, Hernan
Cortes's erstwhile lieutenant in the conquest of New Spain (Mexico),
who brought a force of 500 men from Guatemala to Ecuador in the hope
of finding another Peru in the northern reaches of the Inka state. One of
Pizarro's lieutenants, Sebastian de Benalcazar, reached Ecuador first, stak-
ing out his own claim to Quito and making himself effectively indepen-
dent of Pizarro. The conquest of Quito was long and hard and produced
little plunder, but the rumors of immense wealth were a magnet drawing

4
Some 13,420 pounds of gold and 26,000 pounds of silver were melted down at Cajamarca.
Calculations of their worth in contemporary terms do not take into account changing currency
values or prices, whose fluctuations limit the value of any estimate. Still, the figure of over half a
billion dollars provides an approximate yardstick against which a reader can estimate the plunder
of the conquest. See John Hemming, The conquest of the Incas (New York, 1970), 74, 556; and
James Lockhart, The men of Cajamarca (Berkeley, 1972), 13.
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 910 Karen Spalding

Spaniards from Central America and the Caribbean whose years in the
new lands had brought them little more than hard times.
From 1533, when the first of the men present in Cajamarca returned
to Spain with the crown's and their own shares of the treasure, word of
the great event spread rapidly. The first eyewitness reports of the con-
quest, by Cristobal de Mena and Francisco de Jerez, were read and
translated and read again, encouraging growing numbers of people to
consider seeking their fortunes in Peru. In October 1533 an official in
Panama reported that "the numbers and quantity of people mobilizing
to pass through these parts en route to the provinces of Peru are so
numerous and so sudden that here we have not been able to provide for
them."5 Early in 1533 an authority in Panama informed the crown that
"here everyone is up in arms about leaving for Peru, and if Your Majesty
does not send authority to restrain people, . . . this province will be
entirely deserted."6 A few days later the authorities in Santo Domingo
wrote anxiously that "with the enormous news of the riches of Peru, we
are hard put to stop the people of this island and even of all the
surrounding areas . . . because all the people are aroused with plans to go
to that land."7 The officials in Puerto Rico added that "with the news
from Peru, not a citizen would remain if he were not tied down."8 The
gold rush was on.
The history of the European invasion of the Andes, like the history of
any struggle for power, has more than one dimension, and not only the
interpretation of events, but the chronology - and even the facts them-
selves - shift according to the perspective from which we view the
struggle. From the European perspective - the one with which we are all
familiar - the capture of the Inka ruler and his death a year later at the
hands of the Spaniards mark the conquest of Peru. But if we try to see
the events of this period from an Andean perspective, there is little
evidence that the Andean combatants saw what happened to Atawallpa
as anything more than another part of the long civil war that rent the
Inka state from the 1520s. Atawallpa's death was a setback to the aspira-
tions of the factions backing him, and a reprieve for the factions that

5
El Lie. Espinosa al Emperador, Panama, 10 de Octubre de 1533," in Raul Porras Barrenechea,
Cartas del Peru (I$24-I$4)) (Lima, 1959), 68.
6
"Francisco de Barrionuevo al Emperador, Panama, 19 de Enero de 1534," Cartas del Peru, 96.
7
"La Audiencia de la Isla Espanola al Emperador, Santo Domingo, 30 de enero de 1534," Cartas del
Peru, 99.
8
"Los oficiales de Puerto Rico al Emperador, San Juan, 26 de febrero de 1534," Cartas del Peni, 100.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 911

mobilized around Waskhar, leader of the opposing side in the war, killed
only days before the Spaniards appeared in Cajamarca.
As Pizarro was well aware, Atawallpa's death left the opposing Inka
factions intact in the field. Despite the enormous advantage attributed
by European scholars to Spanish military skill and technology, Pizarro
himself was acutely aware that his future depended on how he managed
Spanish fortunes in the struggle among Inka factions for control of the
state. Our sources depict Pizarro as selecting a puppet Inka to replace
Atawallpa, but from an Andean perspective, the Spaniards can be seen as
one more among the multitude of groups negotiating in the confused
field of a war in which the leaders of both major factions had been
eliminated, and no resolution had been made. Pizarro was acutely aware
that the safety of the Spaniards depended upon some Inka faction gaining
control of the situation, for as the Pizarran version of events sent to
Madrid put it, Pizarro's principal concern was that there be a single ruler.
"For if that were not so, there would be great confusion, for each [lord]
would revolt along with those who obeyed him, and it would be very
difficult to bring them to friendship with the Spaniards and service to
His Majesty."9 From the Spaniards' perspective, it mattered little which
Inka faction won, as long as they were on the winning side, so when one
claimant died as the Spaniards, with their current Inka allies, were en
route to Cusco (Quechua: Qusqu, also written Cuzco), they allied them-
selves quickly with the next.
The version recorded by Pizarro's secretary presents the story of Pi-
zarro's support of Manco Inca (Manqu Inka), who intercepted the Span-
ish/Andean force outside of Cusco, as a Spanish tactic. But even the
secretary cannot hide the fact that Manco initiated negotiations with the
Andean/Spanish forces as a Cusco lord "who was the rightful leader of
that province, and the one who all of the chiefs [caciques] of the area
wanted as their lord." He offered an alliance with the Spaniards "in order
to expel from the land all those from Quito, for they were his enemies."10
It seems obvious that, as far as the Inka factions in Cusco were con-
cerned, their primary focus was the elimination of what they regarded as
a revolt against Cusco by Quito and its allies, and the reconstitution of
the Inka system ruled from Cusco. One of the ethnic groups that favored
the venture was the central Peruvian Wanka or Huanca (see pp. 561—566).

' Pedro Sancho, Relacidn de la conquista del Peru [1534] (Madrid, 1962), 20.
10
Sancho, Relacidn, 61.
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 912 Karen Spalding

An Inka/Huanca/Spanish force succeeded in driving the Quito forces

that threatened Jauja out of the central highlands and back to the periph-
ery of the Inka state. From an Andean perspective, that victory made it
possible to define the civil war as over, and to open the door for a new
Inka to rebuild the authority of the Inka system. Manco was crowned in
Cusco in a ceremony where the Spaniards occupied the position of
valued allies. Perhaps the Inka now evaluated Spaniards as somewhat
analogous to the status of the Cafiari - that is, as "foreign" but recog-
nized warriors of the Inka state. During the ceremony the Spanish read
and translated the requerimiento, that odd bit of legalistic bombast that
demanded that the hearers acknowledge, without question, the suprem-
acy of the Christian God in heaven and the Spanish monarch on earth.
Manco embraced Pizarro, and "with his own hand offered drink to the
Governor and the Spaniards." And with these two examples of political
ritual, probably meaningful only to Spaniards, both Spaniards and An-
deans "withdrew to eat because it was already late," neither understand-
ing the meaning assigned the performance by the other.11

THE VIEW FROM SPAIN

It is virtually impossible to comprehend the 3 years between Manco's
coronation in Cusco and his attack on the Spaniards in 1536 without
making a serious effort to read "behind" our sources. From the death of
Atawallpa on, Pizarro moved through the Andes founding Spanish cities
and assigning control over Andean polities to Spaniards in recognition of
their services in the region. The sources contain abundant evidence that
during these years, the Spaniards looted and plundered with impunity,
providing abundant material for later Spanish portrayals of the conquer-
ors as ravening wolves among sheep. The depredations of some of the
Spaniards in the Andes were so extreme that those men were tried later
for excessive violence despite their "services" to the crown. Pedro de
Alvarado faced such charges in 1545, and witnesses testified that "he
warred against [the Indians] by both fire and sword, as is normally done

Both quotes can be found in Sancho, Relacidn, 67—6$. This incident, I suggest, offers a great deal
more meat to scholars interested in analyzing cultural misunderstandings and disjunctures be-
tween Spaniards and Andeans than the "batde of the book" between Valverde and Atawallpa,
which has been the subject of several articles to date. For examples of these articles, see the
chapter-end Bibliographical Essay.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (I$OO-IS8O) 913

with Indians."12 In the same proceeding, another Spaniard who "robbed

in the province of the Chupachos [Huanuco] and other provinces, and
in the royal tambo [tampu, 'waystation'] of the province of the Chupa-
chos," was charged, with his Indian allies, who were more than 400 in
number, of having "killed the principal cacique of the Chupachos, and
bound and carried off many Indians, men and women, and robbed the
natives of their llamas and shawls and gold and silver, leaving them in
such misery and poverty that they will never recover." The Spaniard, it
was alleged, "told the caciques and Indians to give him gold and silver
because he was a son of Huayna Capac."13
But such testimony only reinforces the image of the Andean popula-
tion as passive witnesses to their own destruction, unable to prevent the
Spaniards from doing whatever they chose. If we accept such images, we
cannot escape the tendency to see the Spaniards as superhuman maraud-
ers and the Andeans as passive victims. If we are to get beyond this
vision, we need to develop a vision of Spaniards and Andeans alike as
people who sought to work out their futures in terms of their own
cultures.
As might be expected, we have much more information about the
culture of the Spaniards than we have about the Andeans. The Spaniards
who entered the Andes in 1531 were products of a culture that was in a
process of rapid change. European societies, organized around commod-
ity production and an expanding market economy, were rapidly moving
toward a social structure in which social position was closely related to
material wealth, which in turn was tied to the accumulation of precious
metals. And the seeds of that transformation were present in the 1530s;
the clash of the two cultures was a clash not only of productive systems
but of the entire complex of law and custom that structured social
relations and defined the patterns of distribution and access to goods and
resources.
The European invasion of the Americas took place against a back-
ground of economic and social tension in Europe. The growing demand
of the Spanish state for money to finance its European designs, and the
doctrinal revolts against the power of the Church that took the form of
a political revolt against the Spanish-Hapsburg claims in central Europe,
12
Carlos Sempat Assadourian, "La gran vejaci6n y destruicion de la tierra": las guerras de sucesibn
y de conquista en el derrumbe de la poblacidn indigena del Peni," in his Transiciones hacia el
sistema colonial andino (Lima, 1994), 30.
13
Sempat, "La gran vejaci6n," in Transiciones, 32—33.
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 914 Karen Spalding

are the most obvious factors in that tension, and the ones that most
directly affected Spanish policies in the Andes. By the sixteenth century,
European political struggles were increasingly defined by the financial
capacity of the combatants. The "new monarchies" rested upon the
abilities of the monarch to "buy" loyalty by offering lucrative privileges
to the nobility or, on the other hand, by offering privileges to the towns
that threatened noble income. The armies of the sixteenth century fought
for cash, and the monarch who could field the largest mercenary force
was generally the victor in a conflict. But if contracts were not met, that
same army would take its pay by plundering the local population. It took
increasing amounts of money to maintain and protect political power;
even crowns were up for auction. The three candidates for the office of
Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 all supported their claims with bribes, and
the election went to Charles, soon to be Charles I of Spain, because his
bribe was backed by precious metals coming from the new American
lands. From the time of the regency of Ferdinand of Aragon, Charles's
grandfather, it was increasingly clear to the people surrounding the Span-
ish monarch that the "Indies" offered an unparalleled source of income
that could be used to bolster and extend the power of the crown in
Europe, and the demand for remissions from the Americas was a major,
and steadily increasing, factor in all decisions regarding the new colonies
made in Spain.
Nor was the search for wealth limited to the newly expanding states.
Wealth was increasingly important for ambitious individuals as well. The
driving force of the rapid Spanish expansion in the Americas was the
search for wealth that could be traded for rank and position in contem-
porary Spanish society. The Spanish conquerors themselves were essen-
tially pirates: organized gangs of men who, under a thin cover of legality
that consisted of little more than titles of authority over the unknown,
drawn up in Madrid or wherever the royal court happened to be, robbed
and plundered in search of the precious metals that were in short supply
in the rapidly expanding European economy. The men who came to
America were the heirs of a culture that equated status and privilege with
warfare. The society that men left for the Indies was highly aristocratic,
dominated by the power and the values of the great noble families built
during the Reconquest — that is, the long process of expansion of the
northern Iberian Catholic principalities southward into lands occupied
by the Muslim principates in the eighth century C.E.
The Catholic kingdoms expanded rapidly toward the south in the
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 915

thirteenth century, and the conquest of Muslim territories opened vast

areas of land for Christian occupation. Control over newly occupied
territories was assured, however, not only by military victory but by
occupation. The social prestige of the aristocracy depended on its role as
warriors, a function honed in the battles of the Reconquest. Those battles
were the source of the material wealth that made possible the profession
of arms. From the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, the Christian prin-
cipalities in the north of the Iberian peninsula pushed south, occupying
the rich lands held by the Muslim principates. Unlike the more organized
and static societies to the east of the Pyrenees, where feudalism was more
solidly established, the Iberian peninsula from the tenth to the fourteenth
centuries was a frontier, a land of opportunity for the ambitious individ-
ual willing to risk his life for great rewards.
The life of El Cid, the eleventh-century figure who became a legend
shortly after his death and the hero of an epic known and referred to by
the Spaniards when embarking on their own adventures in the sixteenth
century, represents the model of the horizons open to the man with
sufficient skill and audacity. From a beginning as a member of the minor
nobility of Castile, Rodrigo Diaz, "El Cid," turned the profession of
arms to such advantage that he died the independent ruler of a principate
that he won for himself in eastern Spain, with its capital in the city of
Valencia.14 Within a few years after his death, the life and exploits of this
man were familiar enough to people all over the Iberian peninsula that
authors could refer to him simply as meo Cid, a term meaning simply
'my leader', 'my commander', or 'my boss'. Until the fourteenth century,
the Muslim territories offered a chance for an ambitious noble to become
wealthy and powerful by taking control of a more prosperous area. The
security of the newly conquered territory could be assured by quickly
attracting other people. The bargain was to let them establish their own
town government in exchange for the payment of a tax to the new lord.
These towns became the other pole of the complicated combination of
aristocratic and popular values characteristic of early modern Spain: a
society in which the "self-made man" was a dream on which many
would stake their lives.
The majority of the men who participated in the invasion of the
Andes came from Castile, and the largest proportion of those hailed from

For a discussion of the career of Rodrigo Diaz and his later transformation, see Richard Fletcher,
The Quest for El Cid (New York, 1989).
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 916 Karen Spalding

Extremadura, a less-developed, primarily rural region of Castile. That

region was primarily a wool-producing area, providing the raw material
that supplied the great textile-producing areas of Flanders and France. In
the course of the fifteenth century, the great military orders, which played
an important part in the Reconquest and had amassed vast areas of land,
were gradually brought under royal control. But economic expansion
from the late fourteenth century meant that wealth, rather than lineage
or service, increasingly became the measure of rank and status. By the
late fifteenth century, 2 or 3 percent of the population of Castile owned
97 percent of the land, and over half of that 97 percent belonged to a
handful of great families. Sixty-two noble houses in the kingdom of
Castile controlled the vast majority of the wealth of the kingdom.15 The
authority of the monarch over this group rested more on alliance than
authority, with the grandes (upper-tier nobility) providing for both the
monarch's and their own interests through their participation in the
definition of royal policy.
Few of those great families, however, were in Extremadura, which
was in many ways a less-developed backwater of Castile, and in any
case, the grandes of Castile did not contribute to the number of those
who went to the Indies. The lineage of a grande, founded on wealth,
might be relatively recent in contrast to the generally less wealthy but
illustrious caballeros ('men on horseback'). The latter traced their an-
cestry and privileges to their participation in the Reconquest, in the
tradition of El Cid, but their wealth might not have lived up to their
status. Below the caballeros were the individuals and families who
lacked titles but were exempt from taxation or had some privilege, real
or honorary, that separated them from ordinary taxpayers subject to
fiscal and military levies. These exempt individuals were the hidalgos, a
group that was not homogeneous in either wealth, social standing, or
political influence. The economic development of Castile, reflected to a
less but real degree in Extremadura, introduced disjunctures in die cri-
teria that were once united in the elite, blurring the boundaries of
rank and privilege and presenting opportunities to those eager to im-
prove their position.
The Indies presented vast new horizons of opportunity, especially to
members of this group. The poor hidalgo - or in some cases even a
commoner with sufficient military skill to become part of a conquest

15
John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, (New York, 1963), 109.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 917

company - who became wealthy in the Indies could turn that wealth
into higher status at home through the purchase of land, a position on
the cabildo ('council') of his town, and social connections that could be
parlayed into association - even marriage - with the nobility. The whole
concept of nobility and hidalguia was changing during the sixteenth
century, as wealth made it possible to behave in ways that were hardly
possible before the entry of Spain in the Americas. The gradual expansion
of the Spanish wool trade from the thirteenth century became a flood
that made it possible for the newly wealthy to exchange a part of their
wealth for the privileges and social position that went with a title, even a
relatively minor one. Ferdinand and Isabella began to create new hidalgos
liberally in the fifteenth century. By the 1520s the privileges of hidalguia
were being freely offered for sale despite numerous complaints.16 A prov-
erb of uncertain origin but accurate insight that was repeated in Latin
America during the colonial period described a tide as equivalent to a
zero. Alone it was worth nothing, but combined with money it multi-
plied the value of anything placed in front of it.17 The cynicism of the
proverb, whatever its actual provenance, fits the mood of the sixteenth
century, with its inflation of titles and scramble for the wherewithal to
obtain them.
The values of hidalguia were prominant in the men who came to the
Americas in the years following the first voyages of Christopher Colum-
bus, as well as in the 1530s and 1540s when the Spaniards entered the
Andes. These values explain much about the conduct of the conquerors
in Peru. As an historian of Spain has pointed out, noble values could
appear quite contradictory: qualities of honesty, charity, generosity, and
justice were ranked equally with horsemanship, military skill, wealth,
success - and a conviction of the right and justice of one's claim whatever
it might be. The hidalgo insisted upon his loyalty to his sovereign but
ignored law and royal officials when either conflicted with his own
interests or objectives. Violence and defiance of authority were common
among these men, who saw themselves as the natural leaders of their
society, fully justified in expecting to be obeyed while at the same time
defying all efforts to control them.18 The same attitude is evoked by Steve

16
Imperial Spain, 113.
17
My memory of the proverb dates to graduate lectures by Robert Padden; a poem of similar
import is found in Sergio Bagii, Estructura social de la colonia (Buenos Aires, 1952), 125.
18
Ida Altman, Emigrants and society: Extremadura and America in the sixteenth century (Berkeley,
1989). 73-78-
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 918 Karen Spalding

Stern with the saying "nobody gives me commands, I'm the one to
command others."19
Somewhat less than a quarter of the men present at the capture of
Atawallpa could use the elevating title don in 1533, but all of them shared
the values and the ambitions of the hidalgo class to which they aspired,
no matter how recently they had gained the means to fulfill those aspi-
rations.20 They, as well as floods of people who followed them to Peru,
hoped to amass a fortune by force of arms and trade it to the crown for
a reward that matched what they regarded as their service to the monarch
in adding new lands and vassals to his patrimony. And for the first
generation of the conquerors, that was true; from the 1530s through the
1560s, those present at the capture of Atawallpa were indisputably the
upper nobility of Peru. Moreover, members of the Iberian nobility came
to Peru in increasing numbers after the first years, often as part of the
household entourage of officials sent from Spain, and all of them ex-
pected to be rewarded in accord with their social rank at home. Their
social position and their rapid accommodation in the new kingdom
overseas fixed the aristocratic values developed in Spain at the summit of
Spanish colonial society in Peru.
Although the men who came to the Indies to seek their fortunes and
social position subscribed firmly to the concept of a society led by an
aristocracy supported by income from land worked by commoners, they
saw no contradiction between that concept and active participation in
commerce. The aristocracies of both Castile and Aragon were actively
involved in maritime trade from the thirteenth century. In addition to
supplying the international trade in wool, wealthy nobles were also di-
rectly involved in trade. Whereas association with petty trade might have
carried a stigma, there was no such attitude toward international com-
merce. In fact, one of the most powerful aristocrats of Spain, the Duke
of Medina-Sidona, owned ships, negotiated directly with Genoese mer-
chant houses for the sale of his grain, and was dubbed "the tuna king"
for the fisheries he controlled off the Atlantic coast west of Cadiz. Despite
the alleged antagonism between nobility and trade, the great noble fami-
lies took quick advantage of the opportunity to increase their wealth
presented by exploration and settlement overseas. They financed at least

" "Nadie me manda a mi; yo soy el mand6n de otros." Stern, "Paradigms of conquest," Prologue
to the m d edition of Peru's Indian peoples and the challenge of Spanish conquest (University of
Wisconsin, 1993), xxix.
20
Lockhart, Men of Cajamarca, 32.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 919

some of Columbus's expeditions and advanced capital to merchants

outfitting ships to send to the Indies in exchange for a percentage of the
gains.
At least some of the new Spanish aristocracy in Peru increased their
wealth by mercantile activities in Peru; a man who used his opportunities
in America to buy and sell in the course of amassing a fortune drew no
adverse comment. In doing so they sometimes took commercial advan-
tage of the encomienda, which was a grant of authority over a group of
Indians, most commonly defined as all of the people under the authority
of a designated native leader, or kuraka. A grant of encomienda21 in Peru
could provide the goods and labor needed to produce commodities for
international trade. Precious metals mined and refined by the Andean
people were shipped to Spain, and cloth requisitioned from Andean
households was shipped to distant centers such as Chile to clothe Spanish
settlers. The search for additional wealth was not scorned by members of
the Spanish nobility, and the accumulation of profits from commerce
was characteristic of Spanish society in the Americas as well as in Spain.
Trade, like conquest, was a mechanism for the accumulation of wealth,
a means to gain income that could be used to buy social status. Mercan-
tile fortunes bought titles and land and entailed estates to maintain family
status and position. The values of the nobility were shared by the people
who dealt in merchandise — at least by those who did so on a large scale.
Making money, in short, never undermined the predominance of the
aristocracy in Spain or in Peru. (The encomienda is further discussed on
PP- 935-942)•
In the Indies both plunder and commerce were part of the search for
the wealth necessary for social ascent. The expeditions that explored and
took possession of the new lands in the Americas were private enterprises
organized for personal gain. The men who joined an expedition "in-
vested" their persons and equipment in the enterprise; the goods appro-
priated in the course of their operations were distributed among them in
proportion to their initial investment and their participation. The crown
granted the right to undertake an expedition to designated leaders who
petitioned for that authority, carefully reserving specific rights and in-
comes for itself. The agreements that were concluded between the pro-
spective leader of an expedition and the crown, usually called capitula-

The recipient of the grant, the encomendero, was charged with the responsibility for the natives'
conversion to Catholicism in return for the privilege of using their labor essentially as he saw fit.
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 92.O Karen Spalding

clones, specifically reserved for die crown the legal authority over any
territory claimed in its name as well as the royal fifth — a tax of one-fifth
of all plunder taken on the expedition. Because the crown rarely provided
any financial assistance to the operation, the bargaining was usually hard,
and the expedition leader came away with extensive authority.
As might be expected, the initial objective of the Spaniards in the
Andes was openly and frankly the appropriation of treasure. The mem-
bers of the expedition outfitted themselves at their own expense, buying
their horses if they joined as horsemen as well as their arms and equip-
ment. Pizarro contracted for the ships and other supplies, paying for
them from his own income or taking out loans against expected plunder.
The proto-company that was the expedition to Peru was financially a
gamble; many similar expeditions brought little besides illness and defeat
for the warrior-entrepreneurs. It is hardly surprising under the circum-
stances that the people who followed the lucky few who shared Ata-
wallpa's ransom and the later plunder collected in Cusco among them-
selves were ready recruits to factions whose members felt that they, too,
should receive a share of the spoils of conquest. And Pizarro, who meant
to insert himself as ruler, was undoubtedly frustrated and upset by the
behavior of his countrymen.
Despite his wealth Pizarro, like other leaders of conquest expeditions,
sought far more than riches alone. These men sought to establish new
realms, new political entities under their ultimate supervision and com-
mand. Their dreams were of power and authority — political objectives
rather than primarily economic ones. The capitulations between the
crown and Pizarro gave the latter the rank of governor and captain-
general of all territories that he conquered; he was to enjoy the full
prerogatives of government, including military authority and the right to
grant land and assign vassals, together with responsibility for organizing
the institutions of Spanish society in the newly claimed lands. Pizarro
had no intention of grabbing the plunder and running for Spain to buy
a title of nobility and a permanent seat on the cabildo of his home town.
His primary concern was the authority and command he exercised as
governor, and he insisted to his death that any infringement of his
authority, even by the crown, was unjust and unfair. Pizarro's jealous
defense of what he regarded as his right to order and govern the lands he
held was echoed, interestingly enough, not by his elder brother, a titled
member of the nobility, whose entire concern seems to have been obtain-
ing and protecting the fortune and position that went with his title, but
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—i$8o) 921

by his half-brother Gonzalo, who claimed that "rather than live forty
years he would prefer to live ten and be governor of Peru."22

THE VIEW FROM CUSCO

Just as the behavior of the Spaniards must be understood in terms of
their own culture, we cannot understand the behavior of the Andeans —
particularly of Manco Inca as the head of a state system that spanned the
Andes — without taking a closer look at the Inka state. According to Inka
informants the Inka expansion had brought peace and security to the
Andes by imposing order upon a chaos of warring local communities,
translated by the Spaniards as behetrias. But this Hobbesian imagery of
the Andes as existing under conditions of unremitting war hides the fact
that these behetrias were not fragmented local societies but organized
polities of varying size and extent. The Inka state was simply the latest
and most successful polity to expand rapidly enough to become a power
that could not be easily opposed, while incorporating other more local
states under its authority. In central Peru, archaeologists have found a
decline in the evidence of high-status activities and goods in Inka-period
sites occupied by local people. The high-status remains were found in-
stead in Inka-constructed tampu ('way stations') in regional centers such
as Huanuco Pampa and in storage complexes that stood apart from local
communities.23 This evidence supports the argument that the Inka ap-
propriated the goods that fueled and maintained the reciprocity expected
of those who held authority. The Inka elite used these goods to create
new relationships that tied local elites to Cusco by a chain of gifts,
feasting, wives, and other honors (see Chap. 10). The highly visible
constructions pointed to by those who have argued for Inka power and
stability may in fact be evidence of the ephemeral quality of power built
on ritual and ceremonial as a substitute for open conflict. There is little
evidence of a bureaucratic or military presence in Huanuco Pampa, the
only Inka provincial center that has been systematically excavated. In-
stead the archaeological evidence points to the use of the center for
feasting and public display in which local elites received gifts and partic-
ipated in ceremonies renewing their allegiance.24

22
Altman, Emigrants and society, 44.
23
Christine A. Hastorf, Agriculture and the onset ofpolitical inequality before the Inka (Cambridge,
1993), 227.
24
Craig Morris and Donald Thompson, Hudnuco Pampa (New York, 1985).
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 922 Karen Spalding

The Inka presence in the Andes, particularly on the peripheries of the

state, was relatively recent - it is estimated that the region of Quito (now
Ecuador) was not controlled from Cusco until the 1460s - and local
sources published since the 1950s have made it clear that there was
considerable variation at the local level in the relations between the Inka
and the peoples under their control. This is not to deny the extent of
Inka demands. The huge extent of material construction that took place
during the relatively short period during which Inka elites ruled the
Andes bears witness to the enormous amount of labor appropriated by
the state. The lavish expenditure of labor not only in construction but in
war, the displacement of entire populations, and the elimination of
others, all indicate that under the Inka, the reciprocities based on kinship
were in the process of transformation into the deeper and more long-
standing inequalities based on the monopoly of resources by a ruling
minority in the Andes. The Inka still formally "begged" labor services
and retained the figment of reciprocity with lavish feasts and "gifts" to
local elites, but the threat behind the gifts was clear not only to the Inka
but to the people absorbed into the state as well.
But despite all of this, the Inka system in the 1520s was hardly a
monolithic state. Franklin Pease has suggested that, rather than a central-
ized authoritarian state that collapsed with the death of its ruler, the Inka
system can be better understood as a network of asymmetrical relation-
ships, ritually confirmed, that were established between the Inka and the
polities that made up the empire self-denominated Tawantinsuyu (his-
pano-Quechua: Tahuantinsuyo).25 Those relationships, established both
with local elites and with the more important regional deities, were not
abstract but were continually renegotiated, as evidenced by the "rebel-
lions" inside the frontiers of the state throughout its existence. Local
sources indicate that, despite Inka willingness to use brutal tactics against
enemies, internal or external, the authority of the state rested on a
carefully structured web of alliances with regional deities and the elites of
the polities that made up the Inka system. The war over the succession
in Cusco opened the entire network of alliances for a process of renego-
tiation that might have been accomplished by Atawallpa but was reini-
tiated and prolonged by the appearance of the Spaniards in the Andes.
The conclusions reached by the archaeologists responsible for the exca-

25
Franklin Pease, Caracas, Reciprocidad y Riqueza (Lima, 1992), 21; and his general history, Peru,
hombrey historia, II, Entre el siglo XVIy elXVIII (Lima, 1992), 65—77.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (I$OO-I$8O) 923

vation of Huanuco Pampa suggest that Inka power may well have been
"bought" with lavish ritual and ceremonial activity.

It is rather ironic that the great centers and monuments constructed by the Incas
in similar styles in far-removed parts of the Andes have created the impression
of a powerful, stable, and relatively uniform state. When we narrow our focus
to the actual operation of a specific region the picture changes to one of diversity
and a system of government almost impossible to conceive of in terms designed
for European nation states. The Inca political and economic achievement was
based in large part on principles so dynamic they almost ensured that the state
itself would be ephemeral.26

The Inka maintained and perhaps even promoted cultural and linguis-
tic diversity among the various societies that were included in Tawantin-
suyu, and the regional deities played an important part in tying them to
Cusco. The Inka courted the regional deities, honoring them with gifts
of valued objects as well as productive resources. Among the regional
deities favored by the Inka were Pacha Kamaq, whose shrine was on the
central coast at the mouth of the Lurin River; Paria Kaka (known by his
colonial name Pariacaca), who watched over his people from a snow-
capped mountain at the watershed of the western Andean range in Jauja;
and a northern deity, Catequil, in Huamachuco. The Inka alliance with
Pacha Kamaq permitted the regional deity, and the polity associated with
it, to aid the expansion of the Inka and serve its own interests at the
same time. The Inka built shrines for "sons" of Pacha Kamaq in areas
not yet under the direct control of the state, as well as in other areas that
were within the southern core of Inka territory nearer to Cusco.
Regional deities took an active part in Inka politics. The traditions of
Huarochiri record that Pariacaca sent a "son" to help the Inka put down
a series of rebellions during the rule of the Inka Tupa Yupanqui (also
written Thupa Yupanki). In return, the Inka gave offerings and support
to Pariacaca, assigning him retainers and accepting the ritual responsibil-
ities of a descendant of the regional deity. Catequil, in the north, was
teported by the Augustinian friars who entered the region in the 1550s to
be "adored and revered from Quito to Cusco, the huaca [regional deity]
most feared by the Indians." 27
The regional deities were crucial to Inka power because their predic-

Morris and Thompson, Huanuco Pampa, 166.

Augustinos, [1561], Relacidn de la religidn y ritos del Peru hecho por las padres agustinos, ed. Lucila
Castro de Trelles (Lima, 1992), 18.
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 924 Karen Spaiding

tions could buttress the power of an Inka, or they could undermine it.
As long as the regional deities foresaw victory and success for the Inka,
challenge to Inka authority was less likely, and his power was real. The
regional deities' participation in Inka state politics could facilitate their
own expansion as long as their predictions came to pass, but if they, and
their priests, failed to chart the course of events successfully, their failure
could have serious consequences. If they predicted that an aspirant to
power would fail, and he turned out to be successful, he was likely to
take action against the regional deity for its "lies." The civil war that
devastated the Andes after the death of Huayna Capac gave rise to several
cases of retribution against regional deities. The shrine of Catequil was
ransacked by Atawallpa in retribution for its prediction of a victory by
his half-brother and rival, and Atawallpa also abused the priests of Pacha
Kamaq for the "lies" of the regional deity. Pacha Kamaq had not only
failed to predict Huayna Capac's death but had first sided with Ata-
wallpa's foe in the civil war by predicting his victory, and later dismissed
the threat of the Spaniards, predicting that Atawallpa would eliminate
the strange invaders.28
Amid the invasion crisis, then, Inka prospects for recovery seemed to
depend on forging new alliances. Manco Inca's faction hoped to coopt
the still little-known Spanish army. Manco's first priority after gaining
the support of the Huanca/Spanish forces outside Cusco was to end the
war that had divided the Andes for a decade, driving the forces that had
supported Atawallpa from the core area of the Inka state. The Inka's
forces joined the Huanca/Spanish force, returning to Jauja to attack the
warriors of Quito. They arrived too late, but the Huanca repelled the
invaders, and the combined Spanish/Inka force drove them out of the
central Andes. From an Andean perspective, the victory at Jauja marked
the end of the civil war, after which the Inka would proceed to consoli-
date his control by reestablishing the ritual ties and gifts that bound the
Andean polities to Cusco. In 1532-1535 it seemed by no means unrealistic
to hope that Cusco could fashion a manipulative alliance to steer Spain,
as it had steered much bigger military forces before.
Seen from this perspective, the Inka's behavior during the 3 years that
followed the withdrawal of the forces of Quito makes more sense. Pi-
zarro's distribution of encomiendas, granting virtually unlimited authority

28
Agustinos, Relacidn, 19; Pedro Pizarro, Relacidn del descubrimiento y conquista de los reinos del Peru
(Lima, 1978), 34.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 925

over Andean people to Spaniards, meant nothing unless the Spaniards

could exercise that authority, and it is not difficult to understand how
the Inka could see the Spaniards and their actions, violent and brutal as
they were, as tools for the reprisals that Manco meant to conduct in the
process of reestablishing his own Cusco-based authority. Violent reprisals
were a common part of Inka tactics. When the Spaniards moved into the
highlands from the coast to meet Atawallpa, they were amazed to find
most of the settlements destroyed as a result, they were told, of the war
between Waskhar and Atawallpa. Francisco de Jerez was told by a local
chief that Atawallpa had killed 4,000 of a total 5,000 men under the
chiefs authority, and Carlos Sempat, using the khipu ('knotted cord')
records of local polities interpreted later for the Spaniards, has estimated
that the loss of adult men to Atawallpa's forces in Jauja was approxi-
mately 75 to 80 percent.29
The new Inka's initial support of the Spaniards' projects makes even
more sense if we can see the Spaniards from an Andean perspective as
useful auxiliaries, not unlike the Cafiari whom the state had used in its
expeditions to the peripheries. Expansion north was at least temporarily
blocked by a strong force in Quito that would not be taken easily;
southern explorations might result in campaigns that could be more
easily won. Manco had no way of knowing that other Spaniards com-
manded by Sebastian de Benalcazar, aided by local polities antagonistic
to the Inka, had taken on the Quito warriors. With the Cusco faction
temporarily compliant, Spaniards were able to enter the Inka's sacred
center, Cusco, in 1535. There a few witnesses beheld the innermost rites
of the "children of the Sun," including the "feeding" of the mummified
deceased Inka, before pillaging dismantled the holy city.
The data from this period leave the impression of two very different
scripts, telling different stories, that have been mixed together. Francisco
Pizarro acted as the governor of a conquest society in the process of
organization and consolidation, while at the same time Manco - operat-
ing in the same physical space - was attempting to rebuild the compli-
cated alliances that supported the system of rule from Cusco. Pizarro's
next act was the foundation of Lima. If the Spaniards were not to remain
entirely dependent on the good will of the Andean polities among whom
they moved in the highlands, they had to have ready access to the sea,
their only means of communication with other Spanish foundations and

29
Sempat, "La gran vejaci6n y destruicidn," Transiciones, 35.
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 926 Karen Spalding

the source of news, goods, and reinforcements if necessary. Increasingly

mindful of that, Pizarro determined to move to the coast the capital of
the new state he claimed to rule. He sent out parties to determine a
proper site, and in January 1535 the city of Lima, originally named "City
of the Kings," was formally established. The city was built and supplied
by the Andean polities who lived in the area, at least one of whose leaders
became an important supporter of the Spaniards.
The Spanish faction was expanding, not only as a result of the arrival
of more Europeans but also as a result of its alliances with other Andean
polities. It is hardly surprising that Manco Inca finally decided to rid
himself of his now obviously sacreligious and untrustworthy allies. In the
spring of 1536, Inka forces gathered in response to messages from the
Inka to his kinsmen serving as governors and representatives of the Inka
in other parts of the Andes. They resolved to win the holy city back by
siege. The Spaniards estimated that the Inka force that attacked and
besieged Cusco consisted of from 100,000 to 200,000 men. The first
attack was almost successful, and the Andeans besieged the city for more
than 4 months, cutting Cusco off from all contact with the coast. Other
forces were sent down to the coast to attack Lima, but the Andean
polities of the valley, seeing a chance to repel Cusco's demands, defended
the city against the attackers. Pizarro sent desperate messages back to
Panama pleading for help; in July 1536 the authorities in Panama reported
to Santo Domingo that "the rebellion of Cusco has spread from province
to province and [the Indians] continue to rise in rebellion; rebel chiefs
will soon be within forty leagues [about 120 miles] of the City of the
Kings [Lima]."30 The siege of Lima was not broken until August, when
Manco's forces, no longer maintained by the vast system of state store-
houses, began to drift off to prepare their fields for planting.
The failure of Manco's attack meant the end of the Inka system. In
1539 Manco and those loyal to him withdrew into the eastern part of the
Andes, establishing themselves in the broken jungle region that slopes
gradually down to the Amazon Basin at a place known as Vilcabamba.
There he followed the pattern characteristic of the people who tradition-
ally harassed the Inka. His troops raided the highland areas once con-
trolled by his ancestors. The Spaniards as well as Andeans who were

30
"Pascual de Andagoya y el Lie. Espinosa a la Audiencia de Santo Domingo, Panama, 27 de julio
de 1536," Cartas del Peru, zi8—219.

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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 927

either actively or passively loyal to them were harassed by Manco's forces.

Manco became, in reality, the leader of a small polity on the periphery
of the Andes. The vast territory once ruled from Cusco became, as it had
been before the expansion of Cusco, a collection of behetrias, or self-
governing polities of varying size, whose elites competed with one an-
other for lands, resources, and power. In this fragmented situation the
Spaniards had become important players, and ambitious native elites
moved to assure their relationships with the new, rising power in the
Andes.

LOCAL POLITIES IN THE PLUNDER ECONOMY

From 1536 on, the history of the Spanish invasion can no longer be told
from Cusco, but it is also misleading to accept the story as told from
Lima. European versions of this period describe the civil wars among the
Spaniards, but all of these sources, valuable as they are, emphasize the
fratricidal struggles between Spanish factions. Spanish sources, however,
contain evidence that the Andean polities took active parts in power
struggles in their own rights. The Europeans focused only on their own
motivations, yielding oversimplified political interpretations.
From the outbreak of the struggle for power among the Inka factions
to the end of the battles among the Spaniards, the majority of the
fighting forces on all sides were Andean, not Spanish. Losses to the
Andean polities in lives and resources were enormous. And while many
groups did respond to Manco's call for warriors to attack the Spaniards,
there were factions among the Inka lineages, notably that of the noble
called Paullu Inca in hispano-Quechua, who refused to join the attack
against the Spaniards in 1536. The Spaniards were well aware of how
much their survival - let alone their ultimate victory - depended upon
the continued rivalries among the Inka lineages. Years after the attack on
Cusco, a Spaniard wrote to the crown that Paullu was "a true friend of
the Christians and Your Majesty, . . . and it is the truth that he has been
a great pillar of support in these parts, for if he had fallen and tried to
destroy things, the extinction of all the Spaniards living in Peru, little by
little, would have begun."31 Mancio Sierra, who was present at the

31
Luis de Morales, quoted by Carlos Sempat Assadourian, "Dominio colonial y senores etnicos en
el espacio andino, Transiciones, 153, note 3.

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 928 Karen Spaiding

capture of Atawallpa in Cajamarca, commented that "if the Inkas had

not favored the Spaniards, it would have been impossible to win this
kingdom."32
Throughout the years that Europeans called the civil wars between the
Spaniards, Spaniards and Andeans fought - and died - together. The
Spaniards saw the struggle as a battle among Spaniards; no one ever
asked the Andean polities who made up the majority of the fighting
forces on both sides what they thought. In all of the battles of these
years, ostensibly fought by Spaniards, Andean forces made up the major-
ity of the combatants, as well as all of the maintenance personnel. Paullu
supported the Pizarrist side in the conflict, blocking access to the coastal
valleys with warriors armed with slings, and a Spanish witness later
testified that in the final battle between the two forces, "the Indians on
both sides gathered, and fought, and Paullu's warriors proved to be a
great advantage to us because of their much greater numbers. . ."33 Years
later the great soldier-chronicler Pedro Cieza de Le6n, author of the
official chronicle of the wars between the Spaniards, said of the destruc-
tion caused by these wars among the natives of the coastal valleys of lea
and Nasca that "some trustworthy Spaniards told me that the greatest
destruction to these Indians has come from the struggle between the two
governors, Pizarro and Almagro."34
It is also clear that polities that had once been part of the Inka state
did not wait upon the Inkas to develop their own strategies. Well before
the Inka system was eliminated, the local polities were acting not only to
ensure their survival but also to gain what they could from the struggle
for power among the Inka factions. Some of the Spaniards' most loyal
allies faced certain retribution for their earlier support of Waskhar and
therefore stood only to gain if the Spaniards eliminated their nemesis.
The Huanca polity of Jauja chose the wrong side in the struggle between
Waskhar and Atawallpa and had only Atawallpa's vengeance to look
forward to when the Spaniards appeared in Cajamarca. Others had
already suffered from Atawallpa's forces.
In other cases Andean polities seem to have chosen to side with one
or another Spanish factions with more positive objectives in mind. Some

32
Cited by Sempat, "Dominio colonial," Transiciones, 153.
33
Cited by Sempat, "La gran vejaci6n y destruicci6n," Transiciones, 54.
34
Sempat, "La gran vejaci6n y destruicci6n," Transiciones, 54.

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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 929

sources suggest that the conflicts between first the Inka and then later
the Spaniards provided opportunities for polities to renew longstanding
enmities. In a quarrel over coca lands between the polities of ChacUa and
Canta near Lima that was carried to the Spanish courts in the 1550s, the
response of each side to the Inka seems to have been dictated primarily
by the choices made by the local ethnic adversary. Witnesses in the case
stated that Canta used Manco Inca's call for support to draw ChacUa
leaders to a meeting place where people of Canta killed them. Other
witnesses testified in turn that ChacUa accused Canta leaders of perform-
ing rites to kill Tupa Inka Yupanqui, the father of Huayna Capac, for
which crime the Canta leaders were killed and their lands assigned to
Chaclla.35 Here the Inka, and the Spaniards later, seem to be external
forces used by the local polities in their longstanding conflict with one
another. This case, as well as others, makes it clear that at least in the
Central Andes, local groups continued their struggles with one another
under the cover of the enforced truce imposed by the Inka, even seeking
when possible to use the power of the state against their neighbors.
In suppressing the warfare that seemed to have been expanding before
the Inka arrived, prehispanic Inka rule also had frozen the structure of
authority, together with access to additional goods and labor that under-
wrote and legitimated authority, at the state current when the Inka, with
their access to coercive force far beyond the means of any local group,
took control. But the effect of removing the negotiation of rank and
status from local control was, circa 1532, recent enough for local societies,
trained in their own histories through the songs of the deeds of their
ancestors and heroes, to remember their pre-Inka past. And the disinte-
gration of Inka power in the 1530s removed the coercive threat that
maintained the artificially static organization of local polities. The Span-
iards had unintentionally opened the playing field for the renegotiation
of rank and authority.
As the Spaniards gradually took control of the Andes, and as the
polities that once comprised the Inka state negotiated their relationships
to the new power, it soon became clear that there was considerable
variation in the internal organization of local polities. That variation was
recognized by the Spaniards, who were attempting to define the relation-

35
See Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Conflicts over cocafieldsin XVIth-century Peru, Memoirs
of the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 21. (Ann Arbor, 1988), 145, 180.

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 93° Karen Spalding

ships of these societies to a new central authority. Like the Inka before
them, they wanted to define a fixed social order in the local polities in
order to make it easier to tie that order to the colonial system.
The Spaniards later made strenuous efforts to impose upon the Andes
a vision of a highly stratified social system in which access to authority
was restricted to a specific group of people who could be defined and
codified according to European images of hereditary authority. However,
a close examination of Spanish sources from the period before the 1560s
suggests strongly that the prosperity and success of societies of varying
scale in the Andes depended upon the abilities of those who held author-
ity to negotiate successfully with the forces that affected the security and
prosperity of the group. Authority and leadership in Andean societies was
a complex process of interaction among many people. The local elders
who spoke for the lineages and segmented kin groups, or ayllus func-
tioned on a more minimal level, together with the variety of specialists
whose function it was to communicate with and interpret the messages
of the regional deities and the ancestors to their descendants. Authority
was negotiated and adjusted as people dealt with the conditions of their
lives. This characteristic of Andean polities played an important part in
the ability of these groups to respond rapidly, and often effectively, to
the cataclysmic changes that affected their world during the conquest
period.
Those changes constituted a major challenge to the capacity of Andean
societies to maintain and reproduce themselves. Perhaps the most im-
mediate evidence of that challenge was the demographic disaster that
affected the Andes in the sixteenth century. After the first massive expro-
priation of the accumulated goods of Andean society that the Spaniards
took as plunder, they too depended upon their access to Andean labor
for the wealth they accumulated. But within a few decades after the
Spaniards appeared, the fundamental differences between European and
Andean cultures began to undermine the basic organization of Andean
societies. The cataclysmic drop in the population of the Andean area,
especially in comparison with the growing demands of the Spanish pop-
ulation, put severe strains on the capacity of the societies of the region to
reproduce themselves.
The preconquest and early colonial demography of the Andean area
has been a subject of dispute since the sixteenth century. The evident
wealth of the Inka empire had to rest upon a dense population, particu-
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 931

larly in view of the limited sources of energy beyond that of the people
themselves. The miles of abandoned terraces that strike any traveler in
the Andes are witness to a large population sometime in the past. But
many of those terraces are difficult if not impossible to date, which only
increases controversy regarding the time of their construction and aban-
donment. The size of the population of the Inka state in 1532 has been
estimated as high as 32 million, although other scholars regard that
estimate as exaggerated. Maria Rostworowski has pointed to the devasta-
tion of the Inka expansion, the slaughter and relocation of entire popu-
lations, and the abandoned terraces and fields noted by the first Spaniards
to enter the Andes as evidence that the population of the Andean area
may well have reached its maximum prior to the establishment of the
Inka empire and have declined under the rule of the Inka.36
The Inka insisted that they had brought prosperity to the polities they
conquered, ending the constant warfare that prevailed before they ap-
peared. Inka rule may have blocked local conflicts, but the continued
expansion of the state, as well as risings and rebellions within the core of
the Inka system, exacted a heavy toll in lives and other resources lost to
their societies. But whatever the demographic cost of constructing and
maintaining the Inka system, the toll of death that accompanied its
destruction were enormous. It was acknowledged to be devastating by
eyewitnesses as well as by succeeding generations, and the loss of popu-
lation to war and famine was multiplied by the introduction of European
diseases. Smallpox, measles, and even the common cold were deadly to
people who had no immunological resistance, and epidemics spread
rapidly, each leaving thousands of dead in their wake. It is generally
assumed that the sudden death of Huayna Capac, which began the war
for succession that ended with the disintegration of the Inka state, was
due to his having contracted smallpox.
The first epidemic, estimated to have swept through the Andes about
1525, has been diagnosed on the basis of descriptions of the appearance
of people who contracted the disease as smallpox, although the penetra-

36
On Andean demography in general, see Noble David Cook, Demographic collapse. Indian Peru,
1520-1620 (New York, 1981). For the high estimate of Andean population before the appearance
of the Spaniards, see Henry Dobyns, "Estimating aboriginal American population: An appraisal
of techniques with a new hemispheric estimate," Current Anthropology 7(4) (1966), 24—31; and for
a discussion of Andean demographic history diat points out some of the problems with current
estimates, see Carlos Sempat, "La gran vejacion y destruicion," Transiciones, 19-24.

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 Karen Spalding

tion of that epidemic, documented only as far south as Panama, to Peru

has been questioned.37 A second major epidemic hit in 1546, originating
in Cusco and moving north. A third, again smallpox, spread through the
Andes from Lima in 1558-1559. Finally at the end of the century, the area
was devastated by three waves of different illnesses. The first was another
wave of smallpox that began in Cusco in 1585 and moved north, reaching
Lima a year later. Then a new disease, probably either typhus or bubonic
plague, came from the area of Panama, reaching Peru about 1590; at the
same time, an epidemic of grippe originating in Potosi moved north
through the Andes.38 Smallpox and measles ravaged Quito in the north-
ern Andes in every decade between 1531 and 1560, and again during the
last decade of the sixteenth century.39
There has been a great deal of controversy over the demographic
patterns of the Andes in the sixteenth century — and indeed in the
Americas as a whole — but there seems to be little question that the
population fell sharply through the sixteenth century. The coastal popu-
lation was hardest hit. Between 1525 and 1575 it has been estimated that
the population of the coastal societies in central Peru fell to about 4
percent of its preconquest size. Many depopulated villages were com-
pletely taken over by outsiders.
The catastrophe was less extreme in the highlands, but even there two-
thirds to three-fourths of the population is estimated to have died during
the first 40 years following the entry of the Spaniards.40 The depopula-
tion of the Quito region has been estimated at 85—90 percent in the 50
years between 1520 and 1570.4l
People died — of war, of disease, of famine — and other people left
their communities in enormous numbers during this period. In some
cases it is possible to reconstruct a fairly accurate estimate of the loss to
specific polities of their people. The Huancas of the Jauja area kept a
record of their losses in human and other resources from 1533, which was
presented to the Spaniards in 1561, in support of their claim for restitu-

37
See Sempat, "La gran vejaci6n y destruicci6n," Transiciones, 20—21.
38
Dobyns, "An outline of Andean epidemic history to 1720," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37
(1963), 493-515-
39
Karen Powers, Andean journeys: Migration, ethnogenesis and the state in colonial Quito (Albuquer-
que, NM, 1995), 17.
w
The standard work on Andean demographic history is Noble David Cook, Demographic collapse;
see also C. T. Smith, "Despoblaci6n de los Andes centrales en el siglo XVI," Revista del Museo
Nacional del Peru 35 (Lima, 1969), 77-91.
41
Powers, Andean journeys, 17.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 933

tion. The province of Jauja at the time of the Spanish invasion was
reported to have 27,000 warriors. This category, equivalent to the first
group of the Inka census categories, was described by Guaman Poma (de
Ayala) as "valiant men, soldiers," between the ages of 25 and 50 - in
other words, adult male heads of households. The Spanish took
thousands of these men and additional women with them in the march
to Cusco as warriors, bearers, and servants. Over 3,600 warriors accom-
panied the Spaniards to Cusco, to Lima, and into the provinces between
1533 and the Inka rising in 1536. About 5,000 more men and some women
accompanied the Spaniards to carry provisions and booty, build fortifi-
cations, repair bridges, and otherwise maintain the fighting forces.42 If
these numbers are compared to the fighting forces available at the time
of the conquest, it appears that nearly one-third of the total adult male
population of Jauja left the province in the company of the Europeans
between 1533 and 1548. Many of these men died in battle. All but a few
hundred never returned to their homes. Using the same kind of records,
Carlos Sempat calculated the loss of people to three Huanca groups from
the time of Huayna Capac to 1548 at between 79 and 86 percent.43
This is not to say that Andean people did not leave their communities
under normal conditions, voluntarily as well as involuntarily. Even in
normal times the Andean population was — and is — a mobile one. People
moved from one ecological zone to another to plant and harvest their
crops; they did labor service, or mit'a (hispano-Quechua: mitd), in pe-
ripheral areas or in warfare for the Inka; and they were sent as colonists
to specialized resource areas for their own polities or for the state.
But in the crisis of the conquest period, migration took on other
forms. Entradas, or expeditions of exploration and conquest to other
areas, forced large numbers of people out of their communities to accom-
pany the Spaniards. Almagro's expedition to Chile in 1535 took at least
12,000 warriors from the polities of Cusco, Collao (Qullaw), and Charcas
under the command of Manco Inca's brother, Paullu, in addition to the
yana (retainers) appropriated by the Spaniards.44 Gonzalo Pizarro's ill-
fated expedition into the Amazon drained Quito of between 6,000 and

42
W a l d e m a r Espinosa Soriano, Destruccidn del Imperio de los Incas (Lima, 1973): 6 8 , 9 7 , 129, 154,
182.
43
Andres de Vega, "La descripcidn que se hizo en la provincia de Xauxa por la instrucci6n de Su
Majestad," in Marcos Jimenez de la Espada (ed.), Reladones geograficas dt Indias, I (Madrid, 1881),
79-95; Carlos Sempat, "La gran vejaci6n y destruicci6n," in Transiciones, 47.
44
Sempat, "La gran vejaci6n y destruicci6n," in Transiciones 55-56.
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 934 Karen Spalding

10,000 native people.45 Other migrations were part of strategies of sur-

vival initiated by the Andeans themselves. In many cases individuals
seeking to escape the demands made on them simply fled to other areas
to become 'outsiders', or forasteros, cut off from their communities and
seemingly safe from levies. But in other cases migration was orchestrated
by community leaders. In the northern Andes the Andean population in
the region around Quito moved away from the area of Spanish settle-
ment, diffusing into the montana, the lower slopes of the Andes to the
east and west, whose population seems to have increased between the
1530s and the 1560s. From the 1560s, however, the native population near
urban Quito increased enormously, putting severe pressure on the land
and other resources around the Spanish city.
Karen Powers has suggested that the complicated and unusual demo-
graphic patterns of the area of Quito were the product of not only
Spanish depredation and European epidemics but also Andean initiative.
The close proximity of ecological zones in the northern Andes, where
people can travel from the Pacific coast into the Andean valleys to the
eastern lowlands in a few days, made possible a network of politico-
economic relationships that linked local groups through both outlier
colonies and specialized trade, and people seeking to escape Spanish
demands moved to the less accessible areas familiar to them. Migration
not only provided a refuge to individuals; it was a strategy used by local
elites to limit exactions on the community by hiding people from the
Spaniards. During the second half of the sixteenth century, highland
leaders in Quito even competed with one another for population.
The Andean people responded to the demographic disasters of the
conquest period by drawing on Andean precedents and traditions to deal
with the new conditions they faced. The same pattern can be seen in
their reaction to the primary Spanish institution of the conquest period,
the encomienda, through which the Europeans drew upon the resources
of Andean societies to provide them with the goods that they could
translate into wealth, status, and power in their own culture. Adapted
from the Reconquest, the encomienda was formalized and codified in the
Caribbean at the end of the fifteenth century, when the native population
of the islands was parceled out among the Spanish colonists for their
virtually unlimited use. The first governor of Hispafiola, Juan de
Ovando, regularized and institutionalized the practice, which bore a

45
Powers, Andean journeys, 16.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 935

striking resemblance to the medieval tradition of frontier administration

of the same name. The people of the area newly claimed for Spain were
distributed among the conquerors by the leader of the expedition "in
encomienda" as part of the division of the spoils of conquest. The grantee,
or encomendero, received full authority to use the Indians as he saw fit.
In return he was charged with providing his people with religious instruc-
tion and the other benefits of European civilization. He was also obli-
gated to keep horse and arms prepared for the defense of the land,
whether against outside invaders or the people under his charge. Part of
that obligation included residing in the city within whose jurisdiction his
encomienda fell, and housing and feeding people in times of emergency.
The first encomiendas in Peru were distributed by Pizarro to the men
present at the capture of Atawallpa in 1533 and were grants of authority
over thousands of people, assigned in terms of a kuraka (indigenous
ruler) and all of the people subject to him. As all the Europeans in the
Andes admitted openly, the wealth that could be extracted from the new
territory depended entirely upon the native Andean population; the
importance of the right of jurisdiction over men and women was basic
to the encomienda. The encomienda altered the initial plunder of the
Spaniards' first forays among the local people, refining the practice to a
more institutionalized and regular form of plunder in which the right to
appropriate the goods and labor of the native population was restricted
to one man alone: the encomendero. A grant of encomienda defined the
legal rights of particular Spaniards — the grantees — who were authorized,
in reward for their services to the crown and the conquest, to assume
and exercise whatever authority they could make effective over the people
assigned to them. This included making virtually unrestricted use of
Indian labor and goods, to the extent that they were not limited by the
resistance, passive or active, of the Indians themselves.
Although the grants of encomienda define the rights of the encomendero
in relation to other Spaniards, they say little about the relations expected
or established between the encomendero and the people assigned to him.
Those relationships were hammered out between the 1530s and the 1550s
as encomendero demands were accepted by the people or resisted until a
modus vivendi — often an uneasy one — was reached. In the course of
that often violent bargaining process, a rough political system emerged
and lasted for more than three decades. Particularly when the Spaniards
moved into lands in which there already existed a political system that
Spanish culture recognized as such, the relationships that permitted an
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 936 Karen Spalding

encomendero to extract surplus from the local population were the prod-
uct of negotiation between the Spaniard and the local elites. Local "native
lords" or "natural lords" (senores naturales), who often regarded them-
selves as allies of the Spaniards, used the new relationship to gain advan-
tages for themselves, and sometimes for their people as well. The result-
ing system was a partnership — albeit what at this distance looks like a
highly unequal one — between the Spaniard who made demands and the
Andean elites who passed them on to their people.
There were enough similarities between the encomienda as it func-
tioned in the Andes, and the pattern of redistribution to privileged elites
employed by the Inka, to make the acceptance of the Spanish institution
by local polities understandable. Andean institutions could have provided
some precedent for the relations between the Spanish encomendero and
the kurakas under his authority. The Inka governor was also an outsider
with authority over the kurakas. The encomendero's demands for labor
could be defined in terms of the state's similar demands, and the external
similarities between the generosity expected of Andean leaders and the
lavish table that was traditional in medieval noble households cannot be
overlooked. Many of the leaders of ethnic groups maneuvered skillfully
in the complicated political scene engendered by the war for succession
and the Spanish presence. These same leaders, at least initially, chose to
accept the encomienda structure; however, they defined it for themselves
and their people. Without their cooperation the encomienda as a mecha-
nism for extracting goods and services from the Andean population
would have been worthless.
The kuraka who accepted the Spanish encomendero as his local over-
lord often built up a relationship with him reminiscent of the ties of
ceremony, reciprocal gifts, and feasting that linked the local ethnic elite
to the representatives of the Inka state. The kuraka of Huarochiri, Ni-
navilca, apparently built up a close relationship with the Spaniards, who
praised him as among the most able and acculturated of the kurakas
within the jurisdiction of Lima. Ninavilca, baptized Don Antonio, was
one of two kurakas charged with the administration of the Indians living
around Lima, a position that brought him the title of Regidor de Indios
('magistrate of Indians'), with power to enforce the orders of the Span-
iards and supervise the affairs of the people under his authority. His
daughter was brought up in the household of his encomendero — a practice
reminiscent of the education of young kurakas in Cusco or in the
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 937

provincial capital under the Inlca — and was later married to a Spaniard.46
All of this undoubtedly represented an extension of Don Antonio's
prestige and status widiin his own community. On the local level the
encomendero, with his lavish table to which the kuraka was often invited,
could be equated with the Inka governor. According to a Spanish official
some years later, "[T]hese encomenderos each set themselves up as an
Inka, and appropriated by virtue of the encomiendas all of the rights,
tributes, and services granted by that land to the Inka."47 And Guaman
Poma, also writing later, had some vivid comments to make about the
encomenderos' adoption of the panoply of Andean society. The encomen-
dero, he complained, "has himself carried in a litter like the Inca with
drums and dances [taquies] when he arrives at [his people's] communi-
ties."48
All of this demanded the presence of the encomendero in the Andean
communities, and successful encomenderos spent much of their time in
their encomiendas, returning to the urban centers to oversee the conver-
sion of the goods they extracted from the Indians into merchandise for
sale to other Europeans. The kuraka, with whom the encomendero main-
tained a close relationship, transmitted the encomendero % demands to his
people and organized the production of the goods he wanted. Initially
the Europeans adapted themselves to the structure of Andean society,
itself well organized to produce a wide variety of goods by utilizing social
relationships. These social relationships permitted the encomendero to lay
claim, through the kuraka, to the goods he wanted to maintain his
household and to enter the European economy with the surplus he
extracted from the Indians. It was possible to translate the Spaniards'
demands for goods in terms of the traditional claim of political authority,
to labor services from the local community. It was the task of the kuraka
to make that claim for the encomendero, translating the latter's demands
into labor time invested in producing the goods Europeans demanded,
generally on the lands once assigned to the state and the regional deities,
and appropriated by the conquerors as successors to the Inka authorities.
46
Waldemar Espinosa Soriano, "El alcalde mayor indigena en el virreinato del Peru," Anuario de
Estudios Americanos 17 (Seville, i960), 202; Biblioteca Nacional del Peru, doc. A-36, Libros
Notariales de Diego Gutierrez, 1545-1555, Lima, August 7, 1550.
47
Fernando de Santillan, "Relacidn del origen, descendencia, politica y gobierno de los Incas," in
Tres relaciones de antigucdadcsperuanas (Asunci6n del Paraguay, 1950), 57.
48
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva cordnica y buen gobierno (Codex peruvienne illustre) (Paris,
1936). 554-

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 938 Karen Spalding

The encomenderos made lavish use of the fine craftsmen of Andean

society. The first buildings of Lima were erected by Huanca craftsmen
sent from Jauja by their kurakas with Francisco Pizarro, and other con-
querors followed that example.49 The members of Andean society erected
the palaces of their encomenderos and sent men to plant their fields and
guard their herds - both llama and alpaca herds expropriated from the
Inka state and cattle and sheep imported from the Caribbean. The
Spaniards also used native labor as servants and household help. The
kurakas of the Chupachos of Huanuco testified in 1549 that they sent
forty people to serve in the household of their encomendero, Gomez
Arias.50 Skilled tapestry weavers prepared the cloth that decorated the
palaces of the conquerors, and skilled craftsmen carved the new coats of
arms awarded by the crown in stone over the palace doors in Cusco.
Although the conquerors could live luxuriously in Peru on the contri-
butions of the people they held in encomienda, they could not found a
lineage and gain the wealth that assured social position without exacting
goods from the Indians that could be converted into commodities —
goods valued for the price they could bring rather than the use that could
be made of them. The exploitation of silver and gold mines in the first
years following European invasion is one of the best examples that can
be found of the use of Andean forms of production for the benefit of the
Europeans — a use that also permitted Andean elites to accumulate
resources of their own. From the 1530s to the 1580s, members of the
Andean elite mobilized the productive mechanisms of their own society
to produce the precious metals demanded by the Europeans as well as to
feed and clothe both the Europeans and members of their own society at
work in the mining centers. In doing so they adapted quickly to the
European market system, rapidly monopolizing not only the production
of ore itself but also the supply of foodstuffs and other necessities that
maintained the growing mine city of Potosi (now in Bolivia).
The kurakas of the southern highlands sent mitayos or rotating labor
quotas, to mine silver in Potosi, using traditional Andean techniques of
production. The friable surface ores were easily extracted and were rich
in silver that could be purified by melting the silver free of embedded
ore in a wind-heated furnace called a huayra (Quechua: Wayra), fueled

•" Espinosa Soriano, Destruccidn, 154.

50
Marie Helmer, "La visitacidn de los Indios Chupachos: Inka et encomendero, 1549," Travaux et
Memoires de I'Institut Francois d'Etudes Andines 5 (Lima-Paris, 1955—1956), 42.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 939

by llama dung. But despite the use of traditional Andean methods, the
scale of the operation was far beyond that of mining under the Inka
state. It worked by drawing large amounts of unskilled labor from the
local communities. The laborers, working their mit'a turns under the
direction of their kurakas, excavated ore and sold it to skilled miners,
who reduced it according to the traditional techniques of their craft,
taking a share of the metal for their services. The kuraka then passed the
metal to the encomendero in payment of the tribute assigned his com-
munity, retaining any residual metal for the community.51
In these early decades the Europeans held only the mine claims them-
selves, turning to the Andean miners for the extraction and processing of
the ores. Many of the miners sent to the mines by their kurakas remained
there, paying the entire tribute assessment of their communities in silver
through their labor — a clear adaptation of the traditional Andean mitmaq
colonists sent to exploit particular resource oases. The kurakas sent food-
stuffs and other goods to the market in Potosi, trading them for silver.
Cloth, maize, chunu (freeze-dried potatoes), jerked meat, chili peppers,
and coca obtained from resource areas held by the communities were
sent to Potosi on llama trains, where they were sold to European and
Indian peddlers. The kurakas also rapidly adopted the cultivation of
European products such as grapes (for wine) and cattle, which found a
ready market in Potosi.52 The trade was not a small-scale affair; in the
1560s, when Potosi had already entered into a crisis of production and its
population had begun to decline, a Spanish official noted that the trade
in cloth and foodstuffs amounted to about 300,000 pesos, most of which
was in the hands of the members of Andean society.53
Although in most cases the encomenderos depended upon the Indi-
ans to produce the tribute goods however they saw fit, in some cases
the Spaniards became active entrepreneurs, introducing new goods and
new techniques of production and using their access to Indian labor.
Sometimes they enjoyed the participation of their kurakas, and some-
times they operated independently. Mit'a laborers assigned to an enco-
mendero household could also be used for other purposes by enterpris-
51
Andean mining techniques of the conquest period are described in Carlos Sempat Assadourian,
"La producci6n de la mercancia y dinero en la formacidn del mercado interno colonial," Econ-
omia, I, 2 (Lima, August, 1978), 9—55.
52
John V. Murra, "Aymara lords and their European agents at Potosi," Nova Americana, I(i)
(Turin, 1978), 231—243.
53
Juan de Matienzo, Gobiemo del Peru (I$6J), ed. and prologue by Guillermo Lohmann Villena
(Lima-Paris, 1967), 132.
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 94° Karen Spalding

ing Spaniards, and the conquerors found many people, voluntarily or

involuntarily cut off from their own communities, who were ready to
adapt to the culture of the invaders and learn the skills that helped
them survive in a new milieu. It is not easy to distinguish between a
labor force that still functioned according to traditional norms and a
labor force that was mobilized on European terms, but a few examples
should suffice to give an idea of the variety of activities initiated by the
encomenderos.
A list of the encomiendas of Cusco prepared for Pedro de la Gasca in
1542 offers some insight into the sources of encomendero income. The
document lists about sixty distinct grants, many of them originally as-
signed by Francisco Pizarro and later transferred, fused, or split among
new holders in the course of the civil wars. It ranks the grants by
estimated value to the holder, listing the number of people in each
encomienda and the use made of them. The major sources of income for
the encomenderos of Cusco in the 1540s were mining and coca leaf. The
encomenderos demanded a fixed number of baskets of coca from their
people per season, and they then sold the leaf to merchants who sent it
to the mining areas. The people of Cusco provided about 10,000 baskets
of coca per harvest to their encomenderos, and some of the most highly
valued encomiendas were those in which the sole source of income noted
was in coca. Other encomenderos regularly sent people to mine silver in
Porco, or gold in Carabaya and Guallaripa — the latter mines in the
encomienda of Francisco Pizarro. The income from ten encomiendas came
solely from gold mines worked by the populations in their own respective
lands.54 In other cases the encomenderos drew upon Indian labor to
introduce productive activities that reproduced those they knew in Eu-
rope. In 1539 Nicolas de Ribero, an encomendero and councilman of
Lima, formed a fishing company with another Spaniard to provide fresh
ocean fish for the city. Ribero contracted to provide eight fishermen to
his partner, Juan Quintero, who agreed to run the operation and oversee
the costs of the enterprise. In 1543, Dona Inez Munoz, the widow of
Martin de Alcantara, gave power of attorney to Ribero and a companion
to use the Indians of her encomienda as miners. That same year, 1543,
Francisco de Ampuero, another encomendero of Lima, set up a partner-
ship with a blacksmith, who sold the lands and the shop equipment to
his new partner. Ampuero was to provide ten Indians to work in the

54
Rafael Loredo, Alardesy derramas (Lima, 1942), 126-131.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 941

shop, and the two agreed to share all profits equally.55 Lucas Martinez
Vergazo, holder of a large encomienda in Arequipa, organized an inte-
grated productive operation centering around the mines he controlled in
Tarapaca that included a mill, a cordage manufactory, a vineyard, a
ranch, and several ships that plied the coast between Quilque, the port
of Arequipa, and Ilo, in northern Chile, and that probably reached Lima
as well.56
By the 1550s the organization of production through the encomienda
was working smoothly. The encomenderos appropriated goods produced
by the Indians as tribute and turned them into profits through the
intermediartion of merchants, without fundamentally altering the pro-
ductive system of Andean society. The great majority of these goods were
traditional products of Andean society that could be converted into
merchandise by transporting them to the new Spanish urban centers,
particularly Potosi, where they were sold to the European population and
its Andean employees permanently attached to these centers. Even trans-
portation was provided through tribute assessments, in the form of req-
uisitions of llamas that first packed the goods to market and were then
transformed into merchandise themselves for their meat. A closer look at
one of these traditional Andean goods, cloth — a product highly valued
by Andean and European society alike — provides insight into the com-
mercialization of traditional goods for European profit. Andean clothing
consisted of straight panels that when shorter and narrower were turned
into breechcloths and sleeveless shirts for men, and when longer and
wider were wrapped around the body and pinned for women. Cumbi (a
hispano-Quechua form of q'umpt), fine tapestry cloth woven by skilled
weavers, was a prized gift - a mark of honor and status to receive and to
use. It was also prized by the Spaniards. The rougher cloth worn as
workaday clothing found a ready market in Lima, in the mining regions,
and in the settlements of Chile to the south, where it was bought by
Spaniards to clothe the native people working as household servants, as
miners, and in other activities. Some of the Europeans established obrajes
(mills or workshops) to produce cloth, sending Indians to work at looms
brought from Europe. But in the decades immediately following the

55
The Harkness Collection in the Library of Congress. Documents from Early Peru. The Pizarros and
the Almagros (1^31-1^8) (Washington, D.C., 1936), 101, no, 128.
56
Efrain Trelles Arfategui, "Lucas Martinez Vergazo: funcionamiento de una encomienda peruana
inicial," thesis (Department of History, Pontificia Universidad Cat61ica del Peru, 1980), 32—41.
The thesis was published by the Catholic University of Lima (1983) under the same title.
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 94 2 Karen Spalding

Spanish invasion, a far more common way of obtaining piece goods was
to get them directly from the native peoples as tribute, relying on tradi-
tional household production.
The activities of Maria Suarez, wife of an encomendero in Huanuco,
provide a clear picture of the transformation of Andean cloth into a
European commodity. In 1567 the Indians of her husband's encomienda
brought her 100 pieces of women's clothing in tribute. She sent them to
a merchant, Salvador Reyes, who had contracted to give the Indians 250
pesos in a marked bar of silver for the cloth. The Indians were ordered
to turn the bar of silver over to her upon delivery of the cloth to Reyes.
Reyes regularly bought tribute goods from Suarez. On January 17, 1567,
a few days after the transaction just described, he paid the kurakas of her
husband's encomienda yj^ pesos in a bar of silver for 150 pieces of tribute
cloth, which the kurakas. delivered to Maria the same day. A few days
later a merchant from Geneva arrived in Huanuco and picked up the
tribute clothing as well as cotton cloth and cumbi in order "to bring it
from this city to the City of the Kings [Lima] and from there to the
kingdom of Chile in the first ship leaving for those kingdoms and there
sell it at the best prices I can obtain."57
But the fit between the encomienda and the organization of local
societies was far from exact. Even under the Inka many Andean polities
were large, with a population that rivaled that of many contemporary
European states. Their size made possible the accumulation that underlay
the lavish public display that was part of the role of the leaders of Andean
societies. As the numbers of Spaniards demanding encomiendas grew,
Pizarro, as well as the authorities who succeeded him, often divided the
subjects of a kuraka among several Spaniards. The greatest spokesman
for native interests in Peru, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, complained
in 1550 that the Spanish often divided a polity, which he called a prov-
ince, into as many as three or four encomiendas. He railed about "the
injustice against human and divine law and right that is done by taking
away the vassals and towns of a supreme lord, because they are divided
into as many lords as there are Spaniards receiving [an encomienda], and
each of the leaders who were once subject to the supreme lord becomes
himself an independent lord, and neither he nor his Indians obey [the
supreme lord] any longer."58
57
Libro Notarial de Hernando de Cacalla, Archive of Guillermo Gayoso G., Huanuco, Peru, Book
4 [1567], folios 1, 44.
58
Quoted in Carlos Sempat Assadourian, "Dominio colonial y senores etnicos en el espacio an-
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dino," Transiciones (Lima, 1994), 157.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—i$8o) 943

In order to understand how the events of this period affected the

productive capacities of Andean societies, we have to look at the intimate
connections between their political and economic organization. The Inka
state limited the authority exercised by the "supreme lords," or rulers of
local polities before the expansion of the Andean state, and there is
considerable evidence that the disintegration of the state was seen by
many as an opportunity to reassert past authority, or even expand it.
The key to how the fragmentation of Andean polities occurred is
precisely the fact that Fray Domingo noted: The Spaniards were able to
find native aspirants to power with whom they could operate effectively.
Europeans would function with any leader who could assure them a
regular supply of goods and resources; they were not concerned with the
social and political mechanisms that governed the extraction of those
goods and resources.
Spanish descriptions of the functions of the kuraka in Andean societies
emphasized the managerial function of these figures. According to Juan
de Matienzo, "their function is to be idle and drink, and to count and
divide up; they are very capable at this - more so than any Spaniard."59
On his (or, more rarely, her) managerial ability depended the prosperity
of the group, which was reaffirmed in the generosity that kept commu-
nity members responding to his "requests" for support and service.
Generosity created obligations, which in turn made it easier for a leader
to expand demands for service. Ultimately, the ability - and the support
- of a kuraka was measured by the prosperity of the people he ruled. A
leader who was truly worthy of the support of others was expected to
demonstrate his wisdom and skill not only to the people from whom he
claimed labor but also to the ancestors who were the guardians of the
group's patrimony, and who expressed their opinions through the forces
that affected everyone's lives: nature and climate, even accident and
chance.60 Such a person could become, according to tradition, not only
a powerful kuraka but even an ancestor, revered, mummified, and hon-
ored after death (like the one mentioned at the beginning of Chap. 15).
The tale of Tutay Quiri (Jaqaru? Tutay Kiri?), an ancestor-deity of
Huarochirf, is an example. Tutay Quiri was a son of Paria Caca, one of
the regional deities or huacas honored by the Inka. He was a successful

59
Matienzo, Gobiemo del Peru, 21.
60
The stories collected in Huarochiri contain examples of this kind of largesse, which can also be
found throughout the colonial period. See also Susan E. Ramirez, "The 'Dueno de India':
Thoughts on the consequences of the shifting bases of power of the 'Curaca de los Viejos Antiguos
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Cambridge under the Spanish
Core terms in sixteenth-century
of use, available Peru," HAHR 67(4) (1987), esp. 586—592.
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521630757.014
 944 Karen Spalding

war leader, who led his people in the conquest and incorporation of
coastal polities before Huarochiri was incorporated in its turn into the
Inka state. His success as a war leader multiplied his own and his
descendants' access to productive resources and labor; his deeds were
celebrated in songs and rituals; and after his death he became a revered
ancestor to whom his people turned for guidance. The story appears to
be a myth, but there may have been a real Tutay Quiri. In 1611 a Spanish
priest described what he was told was the mummy-bundle of Turauquiri
[sic], which "although he died more than 600 years ago was so intact in
body that it is amazing."61 Such were the horizons open to the successful
leader.
A leader who failed to protect the people he or she represented was
held responsible for that failure. In a situation like that of the conquest
period, with social disruption, war, epidemics, and the demands of the
Spanish invaders, it was not easy for a leader to buffer his people against
the forces that assailed them. The traditions also included stories of
kurakas whose decisions brought ill fortune rather than prosperity, and
who were punished by their people for their failure. Miguel Cabello
Balboa relates the story of a kuraka of Lambayeque on the north coast
who attempted to move the image of his ancestor, founder of his line, to
another settlement. His act was followed by 30 days of rain and a year of
sterility and hunger — a good description of the shift in oceanic currents
called "El Nino," which periodically devastates the normally rainless
coastal plain in Peru. The priests of the ancestor/regional deity, with the
elders of the community, deposed the kuraka and killed him by throwing
him into the ocean with his hands and feet bound.62 The penalty for a
leader's failure to retain the support of his community remained high
during the conquest period. The Augustinian missionaries in Huama-
chuco reported in the 1560s that "every year a cacique [kuraka] is elimi-
nated [by poison], and some they don't let live even a year."63 And even
when people did not express their rejection in so final a manner, a leader
could find himself unable to claim the support of his people just when

61
The exploits of Tutay Quiri are the subject of chapters 9 and 12 of The Huarochiri manuscript.
The comment on the preservation of Tutay Quiri's body is contained in the "Carta del padre
Fabian al arzobispo," Jose Marfa Arguedas (ed.), Hombresy dimes de Huarochiri: narracidn quechua
recogida por Francisco de Avila (1598?) (Lima, 1966), 252.
62
The story is told by Miguel Cabello Balboa, Misceldnea Antirtica: una historia del Peru antiguo
[1586] (Lima, 1951), 327-329, and also by Maria Rostworowski, Curacas y sucesiones, costa none
(Lima, 1961), 44.
6}
Agustinos [1561], Relacidn, 37.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (I$OO-I$8O) 945

he needed it most. There were many complaints from kurakas that their
people no longer obeyed them as they had in the time of the Inka, and
a kuraka on the north coast specifically linked that unwillingness to his
inability to maintain the largesse and display that he associated with high
rank. In his view it was because of the limits imposed by the Spaniards
that his people no longer obeyed him.64
The leaders of Andean polities were increasingly caught between the
expectations of their own people and the demands made by the growing
Spanish population. A kuraka who failed to cooperate with the Spanish
encomendero could find himself replaced by a more compliant aspirant,
and those in turn might find themselves caught in the same bind. A
kuraka of Reque, who gained his position through the intercession of a
faction of the people with the Spaniards, held it no more than 5 or 6
months, because the rest of the people refused to obey him, saying that
he was a tyrant. They killed him, replacing him widi the son of the
deposed leader.65
We can clearly see a scramble among the members of the Andean elite
to maintain or extend their authority during this period, at the same
time as other aspirants to power tried to take advantage of new circum-
stances to replace them. When Guaman Poma complained of a "world
upside down," he was describing a situation in which people who held
to more traditional definitions of rank and status were scandalized by
others whom they saw as usurpers flourishing on disorder.
But in this general picture of confusion and changing avenues of access
to power, one shift remains striking in its consistency: the elimination of
women from power. It has been argued that the expansion of the Inka
state turned parallel gender hierarchies in Andean societies into hierar-
chical ones in practice despite preserving ideologies of gender equality.66
But while it can be argued that a woman's role in the Inka state did not
include access to authority and power, there is clear evidence of women
who held and exercised authority in their own right when the Spaniards
entered the Andes. In the north, incorporated into the expanding state
late in that state's relatively short history, there were female kurakas who
held and exercised authority on their own rather than providing legiti-

64
Ramirez, "The 'Dueno deIndios," 600.
65
Rostworowski, "Testimony of Dona Maria Atpen, cacica of the village of Collique," Curacas y
sucesiones, 65.
66
Irene Silverblatt, Moon, sun, and witches: Gender ideologies and class in Inca and colonial Peru
(Princeton, 1987), esp. 40-108.
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 946 Karen Spalding

macy to power exercised by their husbands or male kin. A dispute over

the position of kuraka in Reque at the beginning of the seventeenth
century described several female kurakas who governed and administered
their communities. In two of these cases, witnesses testified that the
women succeeded their fathers, exercising full authority. Another woman
who was kuraka of her settlement in the 1590s noted that she was received
by other — male — kurakas and was given the hospitality due her by
virtue of her rank.67 In the case of one who married a man who did not
share her status, the encomendero obtained a provision from the viceroy
to permit her husband to govern along with her. But by the seventeenth
century, women who claimed the title of kuraka no longer exercised
authority or power. Although women could inherit the position, it was
actually exercised by their husbands, and even their claim to the position
was made by male guardians in their name. Access to authority seems
clearly to have been open to both genders in at least some Andean polities
in the conquest period, but to have been eliminated within a half-century
after the European invasion. The elimination of women from access to
positions of authority was clearly a priority for the Spaniards. (Beyond
the bounds of Inka power, but within the Andes of what is now Colom-
bia, colonial rule also undid the matrilineal political order of the Bogota
savannah.)
The paucity of information on the relationship between authority and
gender in the decades following the Spanish invasion does not necessarily
lead to the conclusion that Andean societies, like the Spaniards, regarded
authority as inherently a male role. In fact there is considerable evidence
of women exercising political authority. The lack of data may suggest
rather that gender was not of major importance in an individual's ability
to claim — and enforce — authority. A leader had to be able to elicit the
support of others for activities that increased the prosperity of the group
as a whole. A leader was a kinsman, one who claimed the role of family
elder by virtue of his or her abilities. Principles of social organization, or
the rules of interaction that are described by anthropologists, are not
followed automatically by the people who profess them. The members of
any society use the rules or principles that define how people should
behave toward one another as strategies, not prescriptions. A member of
the society who used these principles creatively and skillfully could take
advantage of the opportunities offered by daily life to increase the rewards

67
Rostworowski, Curacasy sucesiones, 32, 65.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—i$8o) 947

defined as desirable by the culture. The language itself expresses the

assumption that prosperity and success is part of and equivalent to the
size of the kin group. People owed service and support, including labor
time, to the senior members of their household, as well as to their ayllu.
Guaman Poma added that a man who had numerous children became a
leader, or mandoncillo, and those who could claim a family of fifty or
more (a number also described as an ayllu) became lords of their com-
munities.68 According to Guaman Poma, such success in maintaining the
unity of an extended household was rewarded by the Inka, but the
traditions of Huarochiri make it clear that before the Inka appeared,
family groups also secured the same things for themselves and their
descendants by conquering other groups.69
Successful leadership in the Andean societies of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries can be seen as the ability of the leader to negotiate
effectively in the complicated web of human - and extrahuman - inter-
action. In the absence of the ability to call upon coercive force, the
individual who hoped to be remembered in her society had to be able to
convince others that personal support was in the interest of the group as
a whole. A leader reflected in his or her own person the behavior and
values seen as desirable and productive in Andean society. If we look
closely at the kind of behavior expected of a family member by Guaman
Poma, as well as that of political leaders and even deities, there is a real
overlap. Again the language provides evidence for this equivalence. Ku-
raka, the Quechua term used by the Spaniards to designate a political
leader, also referred to both age (eldest) and rank, suggesting that people
applied the same norms to the behavior of their leaders as to their kin.
Kin should be able to expect maintenance and support from one another,
and the ability to provide that support could raise a lower-ranked brother
to a position of authority in the group.70 And if he or she were able to
negotiate the complicated social interactions necessary to gain support
from human and superhuman alike, he could become a villca (Quechua
or Aymara willkd), a person so powerful that he is accorded the status of
a regional deity or deity. Such a person understood the reasons for
accident and misfortune and the ways to prevent them, in contrast to the

68
Huaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Coronica, 188.
69
See The Huarochiri manuscript, chapters n and 12 (79-83).
70
In The Huarochiri manuscript, 79—80, the exploits of the ancestor-leader of a putative "younger"
lineage raised his group's status by conquering and incorporating other groups, who in turn
recognized his lineage as senior.
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 948 Karen Spalding

false villca described in one of the myths of Huarochirf, who "spent his
life deceiving a whole lot of people with the little that he really knew."71
The terms villca and camac (Quechua kamaq, 'able to impart specific
spiritual force') were applied to human beings as well as deities or natural
forces, and they carried the sense of a being whose true ability and power
was sufficient to command authority in human and superhuman society
alike.72
I suspect that the importance to the Spaniards of defining what kinds
of authority were legitimate in Andean societies had little to do with the
internal structure of those societies and the ways in which people gained
and exercised authority. If we want to understand the "career paths"
followed by Andean political leaders, we would do better to look more
closely at the ways in which people responded to the crisis of the six-
teenth century. The Spaniards made strenuous efforts to impose a vision
of a highly stratified social system in which access to authority was
restricted to a specific group of people who could be defined and codified
according to European notions of hereditary authority. But a close ex-
amination of the evidence on the internal organization of Andean socie-
ties at the time of Spanish contact suggests that the prosperity and success
of societies of varying extent in the Andes depended heavily upon the
abilities of those who held authority to negotiate successfully with the
touchy, competitive, status-conscious members of the world they inhab-
ited, a world that included both beings who moved in the society of the
living and those that existed elsewhere. To be successful in this task,
leaders needed all the help they could get.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that authority and leadership
in Andean societies was a complex process of negotiation and interaction
among many people. This process included the local elders who spoke
for the lineages and nested kin groups, or ayllus on a more minimal level,
as well as the variety of specialists whose function was to communicate
with the regional deities and ancestors and to interpret the messages
transmitted to their descendants. Authority did not inhere in a specific
individual or lineage but was constantly negotiated and adjusted as peo-
ple dealt with the conditions of their lives. This characteristic of Andean
societies made it extremely difficult for the Europeans to transform these

71
The Huarochiri manuscript, 55.
72
The term is defined by Frank Salomon in The Huarochiri manuscript, 46 (note 44); see also 55—
56.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 949

societies into a docile peasantry on the European pattern, but it also

played an important part in the ability of Andean groups to respond
rapidly, and often effectively, to the cataclysmic changes that affected
their world during the sixteenth century.
It has been suggested that the authority of a kuraka in his or her
community was rooted in that figure's function as mediator between the
community, however defined, and the powers outside that community.73
Despite the efforts of the Spaniards to limit that function to a few clearly
defined and specified individuals, many members of local Andean socie-
ties seem to have played a part in achieving consensus. The Spaniards
were told that a kuraka was selected by the other recognized leaders and
had to show evidence of personal ability.

All those who were lords showed great zeal that they be succeeded by a person
who was sufficient enough to command and who would conserve his authority
[senorio], and thus during their lifetime they would choose from among all the
principales of their jurisdiction the one who was most capable and of the best
customs.74

As we might expect, authority was not unqualified; a kuraka had to

retain his ability to claim support from his people. Authority in Andean
society was conditional and dependent upon performance. The Inka state
seems to have tried, with some success, to limit the exercise of authority
to particular lineages or groups, but while the state supported the kurakas
in most cases, it also tried to assume the function of protector of com-
munity interests when needed. The skills described as part of the attrib-
utes of a "good kuraka" — management, mediation, persuasion, mobili-
zation, and provision of support — were the same skills expected of a
family elder, and of the regional deity priests who interpreted the mes-
sages of the ancestors to their descendants. Under normal circumstances,
there was probably agreement in general on the qualities of leadership,
and even the personnel. But under extraordinary conditions, when the
world turned "upside down" and normal behavior failed to ensure pros-
perity or even survival, the social organization that structured access to
authority was open-ended enough to permit the emergence of a variety

73
T h e c o m m e n t has been made by Franklin Pease, Curacas, Reciprocidady Riqueza, 38-40, as well
as by Ramirez, "Dueho de Indios" 587-592, although Ramirez limits herself to the kurakas role
in the material world.
74
Santillan, "Relaci6n del origen, descendencia, politica y gobierno d e los Incas," Tres relaciones de
antiguedades peruanas, q u o t e d b y Susan Ramirez, "Dueno de Indios" 590 (my translation).
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 Karen Spalding

of responses to the new circumstances. Rather than attempt to determine

whether the "social climbers" bitterly denounced by Guaman Poma were
better or worse than the traditional kurakas who could trace their au-
thority to the period of Inka rule or even prior to Inka expansion, I
suggest that we recognize the capacity of Andean social organization to
permit — or even foster - the emergence of a wide variety of responses to
the crisis of Inka disintegration and European invasion.

INNOVATION AND STRATEGIES OF UNITY

People interested in the native response to the European invasion of the
Americas frequently marvel at what they see as the inability of the native
societies to unite against their invaders. The European conquest of the
Americas succeeded only because the Europeans were joined by formi-
dable native forces, it is argued; the Native Americans - in this case, the
Andeans - "should" have realized the threat posed by the outsiders and
set aside their internal squabbles to repel the invaders. Such an argument,
offered with a variety of refinements by people whose training and
sophistication ranges from that of college freshmen to historians and
other scholars with decades of research experience, is not only pointless
but ignores the fact that human beings learn by experience, making sense
of new situations in terms of the explanations available in their own
culture. There is evidence that during the period between 1531 and the
1570s, there were efforts, albeit limited, among members of Andean
societies to develop strategies that involved setting aside dominant cul-
tural patterns of competition and rivalry in order to forge alliances across
ethnic groups.
Some of the story of those strategies can be told, although we still lack
the kind of detail that can be obtained from the letters and memos of
royal officials and other Spaniards. The strategies do not tell a story of
pan-Andean ethnic unity, any more than the actions of local polities
during the Spanish invasion reflect a uniform attempt by local polities to
rid themselves of Inka domination; such interpretations view the six-
teenth century through the matrix of the twentieth. On the basis of the
written sources, the most that can be argued is that tentative attempts to
argue an all-Andean position were developed in alliance with the faction
of the Church that sought to eliminate the encomienda.
Individual clerics reached the Andes with Francisco Pizarro, and the
secular struggle among the Spaniards monopolized both local attention
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 951

and the historical record for more than a decade after 1533. By the 1540s,
however, a number of men in the Andes, primarily members of religious
orders, had become fluent in Andean languages, primarily Quechua and
Aymara, and had developed relationships with members of Andean soci-
eties. Domingo de Santo Tomas, the great Dominican associate of Las
Casas and later bishop of Charcas, was in Peru by the 1540s and took a
vocal and active part in the complicated struggle to define the relation-
ship between Andean and Spaniard that continued to the 1580s. A cul-
tural as well as political champion of Andean societies' capacity to func-
tion as polities worthy of crown recognition, he had already published a
dictionary and a grammar of Quechua at the strikingly early date of 1560.
Carlos Sempat Assadourian, who has subjected the data from this
period to a searching cross-examination, argues that an alliance was
developed in Peru during the 1550s that brought together members of
the religious orders, primarily Dominicans and Franciscans, and a few
members of the audiencia (board of governing judges), with members of
the Andean elite in an effort to limit and contain the demands of the
encomenderos for goods and labor from native communities.75
It fell to the "Pacifier" Pedro de la Gasca to reorganize Peru after the
crown finally suppressed the wars among Spaniards. In order to make it
possible for him to regain royal control of the Andes, La Gasca had been
granted unlimited authority, even to the extent that the crown provided
him with signed decrees that he could fill in as he felt necessary. Although
Gasca's primary task was the defeat of the Spanish rebels, there is some
evidence that he — and the king himself — had listened to the complaints
of native exploitation. While Gasca bought the allegiance of the rebels
with grants of encomienda, he also moved to limit exploitation by putting
ceilings on what the encomenderos could demand from the people under
their authority. His choice of pro-indigenous assistants for the task of
counting the native population and assessing tribute is an indication of
his sympathies.76
As Sempat has pointed out, however, Gasca's sympathies did not
translate into any real change for the members of Andean societies. Gasca
75
The anides by Carlos Sempat, published between 1982 and 1987, are included in Transiciones
hacia el sistema colonial andino (Lima, 1994). See esp. "Dominio colonial y senores £tnicos en el
espacio andino" (151—171), and "Los senores etnicos y los corregidores de indios en la conforma-
ci6n del estado colonial" (209—292).
76
The general visita was done by Santo Tomas, the head of the Dominican order in Peru, Tomas
de San Martin, Archbishop Loayza, and Hernando de Santillan, a lawyer of the colonial high
court, or audiencia— all people known to historians as "defenders" of the Indians.
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 952. Karen Spalding

paid a high price for peace, and continuing pressure from armed and
vocal Spaniards who insisted upon what they saw as their "rights" in the
Andes convinced him of the necessity of moving slowly and cautiously,
postponing reform for the future. Tributes left intact many of the prac-
tices denounced as excessive. Even so, regulation still provoked opposi-
tion from resident Spaniards, not only encomenderos but also the large
numbers of people who depended for their livelihoods on the encomen-
deros.
Other aspects of Gasca's reorganization of Peru added to the burden
carried by members of Andean societies. Gasca multiplied encomienda
grants by dividing native ethnic groups among several encomenderos,
which fragmented Andean holdings as well as undermining the authority
of the Andean elites. He also found employment for potential Spanish
rebels by sponsoring new expeditions of exploration and conquest despite
general agreement that the expeditions were among the most important
contributors to the destruction of the Andean population. He stated
openly that he saw no immediate alternative to his actions, informing
the crown that while the tribute assessments specified in 1549 were still
excessive and unjust, even these limited reductions provoked resistance
from the "citizens" {encomenderos) and from "all the other people sup-
ported by the encomendeors from their extortion of the Indians of their
encomiendas." He further counseled that in the future, tribute adjust-
ments no longer be done in a block but "in response to the protests of
the repartimientos against their current assessments, little by little and one
by one, with new information, reducing the tributes for one citizen at a
time and not for all."77
We have as yet no specific data that describes the activities of the
Andean members of the znu-encomendero coalition. It is clear that the
alliance between Spaniards and Andeans was limited, and that many of
the objectives that emerge from letters and reports were not shared by
all. Some friars in orders like the Dominicans enlisted the support of the
Andean elite because they were well aware of the authority of the kurakas,
and they hoped to enlist them in converting the members of native
society to Christianity. The orders' hopes of building a power base
sheltered from the power of the Archbishopric of Lima may also have
played a part. Some kurakas were initially favorable to the Christian

77
Documentos relativos a don Pedro de la Gasca y a Gonzalo Pizarro I, 506-507, cited by Sempat,
180.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 953

missionaries; however, they tested the Christian God (or, if we include

the other denizens of the Christian pantheon, the Virgin, Christ, and the
Saints) against the regional deities in an effort to determine how best to
ensure the prosperity of both themselves and their communities. And
when the Christian Gods failed to protect against epidemics or end
exploitation, the kurakas returned to the ancestors and the regional
deities. Within a few decades their erstwhile allies would be reviling them
for apostasy and idolatry (see Chap. 15).
Still, for a few years, some kurakas struggling to prevent the fragmen-
tation of their societies together with the loss of their own authority and
privileges joined the clerics to petition the Spanish crown to defend the
natives against the heirs of the conquistadores. Leaders of a large number
of ethnic groups, some of them traditional enemies, met in 1562 at the
site of San Pedro Mama near Lima, the location of an important female
regional deity also described as the wife of Pacha Kamaq. Of that meeting
we know only that the kurakas gave power of attorney to eight Spaniards,
one of whom was Domingo de Santo Tomas, to represent their interests
in Madrid.78
Leaders of Andean communities agreed to act together in this instance
in an effort to convince the Spanish authorities to drop their project of
resettling and reorganizing local communities. The kurakas tried to pres-
ent a united front to the Spaniards on other issues as well. In 1558 the
kurakas of the northern Andean coast met to try to reduce the movement
of people from the jurisdiction of one lord to that of another. Their
objective in this case was to prevent people from leaving their commu-
nities and to prohibit other kurakas from luring them away.79 The best-
known example of united action is the offer in 1560 by a group of
kurakas, through the intermediary of Santo Tomas, of a donation of
800,000 pesos if only the crown would reject efforts of the encomenderos
to turn the encomienda into perpetual grants.80
It is easier to discern the signs of some common purpose in the
Andean elite, who had access to Spaniards with status and authority in
their own society, than to find any such evidence among those members
of Andean society not seen as powerful by the new rulers. The clear
evidence of large-scale migration, sometimes along pre-Spanish routes of
78
Sempat, "Los senores £tnicos," Transitions, 227-228; John V. Murra, "Waman Puma, etnografo
del mundo andino," in Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva cordnico y buen gobierno (Mexico City,
1980), xviii — xix.
79
Ramirez, "El 'Dueno de Indios" 603. 80 Spalding, Huarochiri, 149.
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 954 Karen Spalding

contact and exchange and sometimes not, is a sign that all sorts of people
were engaged in efforts to improve their situations rather than passively
awaiting their fates. But where should we look for signs of a more
conscious effort to develop common strategies?
Ideological forces could still bring together people of distinct ethnic
groups. Important regional deities drew people seeking advice and coun-
sel from distant areas. The priests of these regional deities received the
offerings on behalf of the deity, transmitted the question, and, often in a
trance, interpreted the regional deity's response. At the apex of Inka
society, Spanish destruction moved fast. By the 1550s little was left of
Cusco's great solar temple, and its complex galaxy of aligned shrines
could be served clandestinely at best. But the crisis of the disintegration
of the Inka state and the Spanish invasion apparently brought in its wake
a multiplication of regional deities. New regional deities were recognized
by ritual specialists, who defined for people the sacred qualities of stones
or other odd objects. In Huamachuco the Catholic missionaries reported
that after the initial destruction of Catequil, the primary regional deity,
stones that were defined by local ritual leaders as sons of the regional
deity began to appear, until there was no settlement without two or three
of them. The harassed missionaries burned more than 300 of these "sons
of Catequil" in the short decade following their arrival in the region in
1551. 81
In the 1560s there were indications that several of the most important
regional deities began to emerge as foci around which people gathered,
convinced that a return to traditional ways might protect them from the
Spaniards. In 1564 a Catholic priest reported a religious movement in the
southern highlands that was given the name Taki Unquy (colonial spell-
ing: Taqui Oncoy) in the region of the city of Huamanga (today Ayacu-
cho). Our only information on the phenomenon is contained in four
reports of service to the state, submitted by a Spanish priest named
Cristobal de Albornoz in support of his four - successful - petitions for
promotion. It is perhaps unfortunate that data on the movement are
contained only in a kind of record that by its very nature is often of
dubious veracity, and in fact some doubt has been cast on the truthful-
ness of Albornoz's depiction of his own role in the discovery and sup-

81
Agustinos [1561], Relacidn, 21.

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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—i$8o) 955

pression of the Taki Unquy.82 Almost surely he exaggerated its strategic

potency against the viceroyalty.
But while much of the testimony on the movement was offered by
Spaniards whose understanding of Andean practice can be questioned,
at least one witness, a local priest named Geronimo Martin, who served
as Albornoz's interpreter and interrogator of the Indians, was referred to
by both Albornoz and all witnesses as one of the finest linguists in the
Andes. Martin's description of Taki Unquy omits many statements that
have drawn scholarly attention, among them assertions of speaking in
tongues, possession, and other actions that bring to mind contemporary
European discourses on witchcraft.83 He simply describes a movement
spread by "many natives" who counseled their fellows to abandon belief
in God and his commandments, to avoid the Spanish churches, confess
with native priests rather than Catholic clerics, and follow the customs
of penance used in the time of the Inka, including not eating salt, chili
pepper, or maize, and avoiding intercourse with their women. The na-
tive priests predicted that "Titicaca," "Tiahuanaco," and other major re-
gional deities were about to defeat the Christian God and create a new
world, punishing all who did not support the regional deities by turning
them into guanacos, deer, vicuna, and other animals - transformations
described in the only description of Andean religion written from a per-
spective that is at least partially non-Christian.84 I suspect that the Taki
Unquy may well prove to be an example of the efforts of the priests of
major regional deities, who had dealt with pan-Andean issues and strat-
egies in the past, to develop a multipolity strategy.

82
Gabriela Ramos, "Polftica ecleciastica y extirpaci6n: discursos y silencios en torno al Taqui
Onqoy," in G. Ramos and Henrique Urbano (eds.), Catolicismo y Extirpation de ldolatrias, Sighs
XVI—XVIII (Cusco, 1993), 137-165. The article also appeared in the Revista Andina 10(1) (1993),
147-169.
83
The European model and probably the inspiration for accusations of idolatry in Europe from the
fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries was a manual for inquisitors written in i486 by the
Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, entitled The Malleus Maleficarum
[The Hammer of Witches], which provided detailed descriptions of possession and other practices.
Originally written in Latin, there are various translations of The hammer of witches; see, for
example, the translation by Montague Summers (London, 1928).
84
Testimony of Ger6nimo Martin, "Information de Servicios (Huamanga, 1570)," in Luis Millones
et al., El retorno de las huacas. Estudiosy documentos sobre el Taqui Onqoy, sigh XVI (Lima, 1990),
130; for a myth in which people are punished by being transformed into animals, to be eaten by
humans, see The Huarochiri manuscript, 59.

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 956 Karen Spalding

DESTRUCTURATION AND DISINTEGRATION

Whether from the perspective of Andean societies or European invaders,
scholars have generally agreed that Andean colonial society was in crisis
by the 1560s. Despite the external efficiency of the plunder economy,
which seemed to permit Spaniards to use the Andean productive system
for their own benefit through the encomienda without destroying the
productive capacity of local societies, the relationship between Andean
and European societies was both conflictive and fragile. The value of an
encomienda to an enterprising and creative encomendero was undeniable,
and it is clear that members of Andean society also accumulated goods -
particularly coined silver - from their activities. Kurakas in particular
became wealthy in European terms; by 1588 Don Diego Caqui, the son
of a kuraka of Tacna, owned four vineyards and a winery, a llama train
to transport wine to Potosi for sale, and two frigates as well as a small
sloop for commerce between Tacna, Arica, and Callao.85 There were
enough accumulated resources in the Andean communities for the ku-
rakas to be able to offer the crown a huge sum in 1560 to reject the
encomendero petitions to make their encomienda awards permanent. And
the accumulated resources of the local communities by the end of the
sixteenth century were large enough to attract the attention of the colo-
nial authorities. They appropriated them, using them to form the caja de
censos de indios, which functioned as a mortgage fund for Europeans,
providing low-interest loans, the income from which was officially sup-
posed to be used to help the local communities that had provided the
capital to meet their tribute payments and other expenses.86
Although it is obvious that the Andean productive system, reoriented
to European objectives, could generate considerable surplus, the plunder
economy was not self-sustaining. The continued production of goods
that the Spaniards could turn into commodities for a European market
depended upon the capacity of Indian societies to reproduce their own
numbers and continue to meet the demands of the Europeans. But that
capacity depended heavily upon the labor of all members as well as upon
85
Steve J. Stern, "The variety and ambiguity of native Andean intervention in European colonial
markets," in Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris (eds.), Ethnicity, markets, and migration in the
Andes: At the crossroads of history and anthropology (Durham, 1995), 77.
86
Vilma Ceballos L6pez, "La Caja de Censos u su aporte a la economia colonial (1565-1613),"
Revista del Archivo Nacional del Peru 26(2) (1962), 269-352. As might be expected the Spanish
borrowers often failed to make interest payments, as well as defaulting on repayment of the
principal, leaving the Caja de Censos depleted by the end of the seventeenth century.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 957

the careful husbanding of goods and resources. It could be undermined

by the loss of resources in labor through either death or failure to
participate in the reciprocity that was the organizing principle of the
productive system. Accumulated resources that were withdrawn from the
Andean economy to the European also undermined the capacity for the
redistribution that made it possible to claim labor. And the rapid growth
of the Spanish population in the Andes, all of it either supported, directly
or indirectly, by die encomienda system or else in direct competition with
it, made these problems even more acute. All of these factors, as well as
political conflicts among various Spanish factions involved in defining
the colonial system, played important parts in the developing crisis of
the 15 60s.
The demographic disaster of the sixteenth century has been largely
explained as the result of the absolute decline of the native Andean
population, decimated by war, overwork, abuse, and most importantly,
epidemic disease. Despite the evident drop of the Andean population,
the crisis was due not as much to the alarming decimation of the native
Andean population as to the squeeze between falling Indian population
and the rapidly growing numbers of Spaniards in the new kingdom. This
in turn was not absolute, because the number of Spaniards was and
remained tiny in comparison to the native populations among which
they moved. Rather, the Indian population drop was social - the product
of the fact that the plunder economy functioned on the basis of the
exploitation of many people by a few, and of the assignment of thousands
of people to be used by one encomendero for his own and his household's
profit. From the time of the initial assignments of encomiendas by Fran-
cisco Pizarro, the total number of encomiendas changed little while the
number of Europeans competing for them multiplied. The encomienda
offered a promise of riches to the recipient who managed it well, but it
excluded those who did not enjoy those grants from access to wealth in
excess of that which they could gain by their own efforts and personal
skills and labor. Save for those few people satisfied with a modest living —
and they were few in the gold-rush atmosphere of the conquest period —
access to an encomienda was the major (and in most cases the only)
avenue to wealth and position.
In this context the flood of Spaniards to Peru from the Caribbean,
from the Isthmus, and from Spain takes on new meaning, for it put
pressures upon an economy organized on the basis of the exploitation of
many people by a privileged few. In 1536 there were approximately 500
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 958 Karen Spalding

encomenderos in a total Spanish population of about 2,000 in Peru. In

the following two decades, the total number of encomenderos remained
constant while the Spanish population grew rapidly: by the 1540s the
encomenderos accounted for only about one-eighth of the total Spanish
population, and by 1555 they made up only slightly more than 6 percent
of all Spaniards in Peru.87 The growing volume of Spanish hopefuls was
accompanied by an inflation in the social status expected of an aspirant
to an encomienda or its equivalent in Peru. Men who could prove their
presence in Peru during the first few years after the European invasion
were generally assured of encomiendas, although those who chose the
losing side in the civil wars lost theirs in the redistributions made by
Vaca de Castro and Pedro de la Gasca. These redistributions incorporated
newer arrivals, generally with claims to social status in Spain; also, the
viceroys who came to Peru from the middle of the century brought
kinsmen and clients whose social rank in Spain inflated their claims for
consideration. By 1556 the only men eligible to receive encomiendas were
court nobles from Spain, men who had served the crown in the civil
wars, the first conquerors, or men in Peru before 1540.88
The authorities in charge of the political structure of the plunder
economy following the civil wars were well aware of the dangers repre-
sented by the growing numbers of ambitious and often unruly men of
arms in Peru, even though they themselves brought additional kinsmen
and clients with them to the new kingdom. When these people could
not find employment or support from the encomenderos, they turned to
raiding and plundering. The Marques de Canete, viceroy from 1556 to
1560, wrote the crown from Seville before his departure for Peru com-
plaining, "I am informed that there are more than 3,000 men in Peru,
all well armed, who expect to be rewarded for their services."89 His
sources informed him well.
But despite the threat to political authority posed by Spaniards who
were prepared to fight one another over encomiendas, many of the Span-
iards who emigrated to the Andes by 1540s sought their livelihoods
without reference to the encomienda system. By the 1560s there was a
substantial Spanish population in Peru that not only did not live from
the surplus extracted through the encomienda system but was also in open
87
James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, I$}2-I$6O: A colonial society (Wisconsin, 1968), 12.
88
Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 18.
89
Carta de S. M. del Virrey Marques de Canete, Panama, 11 de marzo de 1556," in Roberto Levillier
(ed.), Gobemantes del Peru, I, 259.
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 959

and often antagonistic competition with the members of traditional An-

dean society. In Lima there were only 32 encomenderos in a Spanish
population of 2,500 in 1569 — between 1 and 2 percent of the total
population. In Potosi, the second-largest urban center in Peru, there were
none at all.90 And Lima and Potosi together contained more than half
the total Spanish population of Peru in 1569, offering a market for goods
and services that was greater than all of the other centers combined. The
people who sought to make their living by producing for that market
were not part of the conquest elite. They held no encomiendas and could
hope for none. They were settlers of all kinds: small farmers, peddlers,
merchants, professionals, and even priests trying to make enough to
support their families and kin and retire in comfort. And by the 1560s
they were finding it very difficult to make a living.
The factional struggles among the Spaniards in the Andes focused the
attention of Spanish authorities upon the encomienda system, and they
drew people with widely varying objectives and agendas into the debate
over whether or not to build the colony around an elite whose power
rested in its control of the native population. Whatever their other
characteristics and failings, the royal officers sent to the Andes between
1544 and 1560 all seem to have been instructed to try to limit the
exploitation of the Andean population. Definitions of what that exploi-
tation consisted of varied wildly, however. Niinez Vela brought the New
Laws. Gasca, whose primary charge was the defeat of Gonzalo Pizarro,
seems to have favored the anti-encomienda faction, championed by a
vocal segment of the religious. The Marques de Cafiete, third viceroy of
Peru, took further steps to reduce tribute payments and eliminate per-
sonal services provided by Indians, although he limited his measures to
encomiendas that had fallen vacant, avoiding confrontation with the en-
comenderos who took arms to defend their "rights" against the crown
once again in 1554, only 4 years after Gasca left Peru to assume a position
in the Council of the Indies. Until King Charles I abdicated and passed
the crown of Castile and Portugal to his son Philip II in 1556, the forces
concerned with the condition of the native peoples seem to have re-
mained important in Spain.
Philip II was faced with a government in bankruptcy, however, as well
as expensive political projects of his own, and he initially seemed willing

Juan de Salinas Loyola, "Las encomiendas del Peru, 1569," in Marcos Jimenez de la Espada (ed.),
Relaciones geogrdficas de Indias 1 (Madrid, 1881), 56.
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 960 Karen Spalding

to augment his finances by granting authority over distant people to their

Spanish overlords. He asked a council of theologians in 1553 to determine
the justice of selling the vassals of the Church to raise moneys for the
war against the Turks. Philip's interest was further stimulated by an offer
presented by a representative of the Peruvian encomenderos, promising 5
million ducats in exchange for making encomienda grants permanent,
with full civil and criminal jurisdiction - in other words, transforming
them into feudal principalities. Despite royal pressure and the guarded
and conditional approval of the clerical lawyers, the Council of the Indies
resisted the project.91
In several articles Carlos Sempat has laid out the basic outline of
the campaign against the encomienda in the Andes, as well as the frag-
ile alliance between the kurakas and the Church in that campaign. The
story is an extremely complicated one, not least because the agendas of
the allies were contradictory. The clerics, or at least some of them, ini-
tially supported the kurakas efforts to gain Spanish recognition and
protection of their own privileges, as well as protection against chal-
lenges to their authority from other members of Andean society. The
kurakas petitioned the Spanish authorities to "preserve our good cus-
toms and the laws that existed and continue to exist, and are just for
our government and ourselves, as well as the other customs from be-
fore our conversion."92 Domingo de Santo Tomas and other clerics in-
itially supported the efforts of the kurakas to enlist the Spaniards in
preserving and reinforcing their authority. The clerics argued that the
kurakas were the foundation of local social order, arguing that their
authority should be confirmed and reinforced. The Church even went
so far as to use the confessional to reinforce chiefly authority as they
saw it. In the instructions to clerics on how properly to interrogate the
Indians in the confessional prepared by the Peruvian Church, the
priest was instructed to include a question about proper respect for the
kuraka in the questions relating to the observance of the fourth com-
mandment: "Thou shalt honor thy father and mother."93 Some ku-
rakas were appointed to positions of political authority, holding the of-

" The story is told in Sempat, "Los senores etnicos," Transiciona, 221-225. I suspect that the role
of Gasca in the Council of the Indies may be important here; in any case the council felt die
issue to be important enough to oppose their sovereign's expressed wishes.
92
Sempat, "La renta de la encomienda en la decada de 1550: piedad cristiana y desconstrucci6n,"
Transitions, 160; see also John V. Murra, "Waman Puma, etn6grafo del mundo andino."
93
Doctrina Christiana y caucismo para instruction de indios [1584]. Facsimile of the trilingual text
issued by order of the III Provincial Council of Lima (Madrid, 1992).
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-i$8o) 961

fice of alcalde mayor de Indios ('superior native magistrate') in specified

urban areas. The kurakas actively solicited positions of this kind from
the 1550s, and Canete made a couple of appointments, but most ap-
pointments of Andeans as native magistrates were made only after the
kurakas lost the chance to influence the overall political outlines of the
viceroyalty.94
For a decade after the defeat of the encomenderos' revolt captained by
Gonzalo Pizarro and the imposition of a formal tribute system by Pedro
de La Gasca, the alliance of clerics, members of the audiencia of Lima,
and kurakas held together and, with the support of the superior authori-
ties — governors and viceroys — sent from Spain, began to cut back the
sum of goods and labor legally granted the encomenderos. As Gasca
himself had recommended, the tribute assessments set by Gasca in 1549
were gradually reduced, on a piecemeal basis, frequently as a result of
kuraka petitions.95
The encomenderos did not submit calmly to the reduction of their
income or power, however, and an armed rebellion in 1553—1554 captained
by Francisco Hernandez Giron, while quickly defeated, was blamed by
the authorities on the Indians and their supporters for pushing the
encomenderos too far and too fast. The audiencia of Lima, governing as
interim between the death of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and the
arrival of his successor, suspended tribute reassessments and reinstated
the exactions set by La Gasca in I549-96
The Marques de Canete, third viceroy of Peru, renewed the process
of tribute revision, although his instructions warned him to proceed with
caution. But while the authorities in Madrid still appeared to be focused
on the threat to royal control represented by the encomendero faction, the
alliance between the kurakas and their Spanish allies disintegrated in the
course of the decade. The kurakas did not prove to be the means to
introduce Christianity in the Andes for which the clerics had hoped.
Even those whose conversion to Christianity was sincere — and there is
94
See Spalding, Huarochiri, 220-222; also Walder Espinosa Soriano, "El Alcalde Mayor Indigena
en el Virreinato del Peru," Anuario de Estudios Amsricanosvj (i960), 183-300.
95
See Sempat, "La renta de la encomienda," Transiciones, 178—90, for a comparison and discussion
of the tribute assessments of Gasca and later assessments.
96
Sempat, " L a renta d e la e n c o m i e n d a , " Transiciones, 182—184. Sempat notes that t h e Indians
participated actively in the suppression of the Hernandez Gir6n revolt, as evidenced by the
petitions for reward for services later presented by various kurakas in support of the request for
privileges or other rewards. A careful reading of these petitions, several of which are specified by
Sempat, might throw additional light on the strategies of the members of Andean societies during
this period.
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 962 Karen Spalding

evidence that the new faith drew real converts in the Andes — were often
rejected by the people. Philip II's succession to the throne, and his
demand for a profitable resolution of the political conflict in the Andes,
undoubtedly contributed to the tendency of the clerics to pull away from
a cause that seemed increasingly doomed, in order to salvage something
of the main cause for which they had fought. Complaints about abuse of
the members of local communities by the kurakas grew. Many insisted
that local elites had taken advantage of the defeat of the Inka to appro-
priate to themselves powers they never held under Inka rule. Some even
argued that it was useless to reduce tribute assessments because the
kurakas took everything the natives saved, treating them worse than the
encomenderos had earlier.97
The political shift initiated by Philip II became clear with Viceroy
Canete's replacement by the Conde de Nieva in 1561. In 1555 the royal
instructions given the Conde de Nieva stated that the major priority of
the crown was the christianization of the natives, but by the time Nieva
received his instructions, the crown expressed concern only about the
state of the treasury and sent a royal commission to Peru to investigate
the question of granting perpetual jurisdiction to the encomenderos for a
price.98
The kurakas meetings and their efforts to present their case to the
crown in Spain through the clerics, especially Domingo de Santo Tomas,
could not reverse the political shift underway in Peru and in Spain. The
attack upon Andean traditions by the representatives of royal authority
was clear long before the arrival in 1569 of Francisco de Toledo, fifth
viceroy and official author of the colonial system in the Andes. Openly
contradicting longstanding orders against permitting the imposition of
personal services by the natives, Nieva argued in 1562 that the Indians
should be "encouraged" to work in the mines, as long as they were well
treated and paid, saying that "without the mines there [is] no Peru."
And because Indians were "naturally lazy," they would have to be forced
to go to the mines. He also insisted that it was useless to reduce tribute
assessments, because any reductions would reduce the natives' incentive
to work, and they would be appropriated by the kurakas for themselves."
97
See the statements of the first Archbishop of Lima, Rodrigo de Loayza, in Sempat, "Sefiores
etnicos," Transiciones, 210.
98
Spalding, Huarochiri, 149—155; Sempat, "Sefiores etnicos," Transiciones, 229-235.
99
Sempat, "Sefiores etnicos," Transiciones, 229-231.

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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 963

Nieva attacked all who opposed him, insisting that the kurakas were
thieves seeking to rob the state and that the friars were attempting to
usurp royal authority. His own greed, however, exceeded the limits of
past practice and brought down the hopes of the encomenderos with him.
The crown discovered that the viceroy, as well as the royal commission-
ers, had accepted bribes, sold encomiendas and offices on a vast scale, and
even attempted to smuggle their new fortunes back to Spain piecemeal
to conceal them. The commissioners were arrested as they left their ship
in Seville, and orders were given for the arrest of Nieva in Peru, who
conveniently died before he could be arrested.100
Viceroy Francisco de Toledo has gone down in Peruvian historiogra-
phy as the great organizer, the architect of the colonial system, but the
destructuration of Andean societies was largely accomplished by the time
he reached the region. Toledo left a body of bureaucratic decrees that
have been lauded from his day to the present as a model of centralized
and efficient political organization. He organized the forced labor that
underlay the silver production of the mines of Potosi, and he decreed the
resettlement of the members of native societies in concentrated settle-
ments from which tribute and labor service could be more easily ex-
tracted. He reinforced the system of rural governors (corregidores) that his
predecessor had begun. But within a decade of Toledo's departure, the
new Indian settlements were losing their population, and the Spanish
officials appointed to represent the interests of the colonial government
were becoming famous for their exploitation of the people they adminis-
tered. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, proposals
for reform referred to the "golden age" of political centralization under
Toledo and insisted upon the need to reimpose his organization. But the
proof of Toledo's accomplishments has been limited to descriptions of
the laws and decrees issued under his signature, with little evidence of
their enforcement. It can be argued that Toledo, a political realist, un-
derstood the dilemma of the crown. In order to maintain royal authority
in the Andes, either the representatives of the crown had to be rewarded
with incomes that met their expectations, or the crown had to turn a
deaf ear to what, three centuries later, would be defined as corruption
and share both its authority and its income with those responsible for

Ismael Sanchez Bello, "El gobierno del Peru, 1550-1564," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 17
(i960), 497.

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 964 Karen Spalding

enforcing its rules. The choice was to share both royal income and royal
authority with the Spaniards in the Andes, at the expense of the members
of Andean societies.
While the Andean societies of the sixteenth century were gradually
transformed into subordinate, "colonial" societies during the decades of
struggle that followed the European invasion, the image of what native
societies were like, not only before but after that invasion, is the product
of the virtually complete control of the record by the colonial authorities.
Beneath the official record that portrays the members of Andean societies
as a peasantry on the European model but with a few exotic differences,
such as language, dress, and certain customs, the members of those
societies absorbed their defeats and discovered other strategies (see Chap.
15) to advance or defend their interests.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Although the Spanish penetration of the Americas has never lacked its
historians, until the last several decades, the perspective from which
events have been seen has been almost exclusively European. In recent
decades, however, there has been a growing body of work seeking to
understand the crisis of the sixteenth century from an Andean perspec-
tive. Many studies that are primarily concerned with Andean societies
before European contact, discussed in previous essays, also contain valu-
able insights on the interaction of Europeans and Andeans in the six-
teenth century. In particular, see the work of Maria Rostworowski, whose
contributions, carefully built on a solid foundation of careful, clearly
presented documentary research, promise to remain indispensable while
more theoretical and interpretative studies are replaced by new contribu-
tions. Fifteen valuable articles on Inka and regional elites, land tenure,
and local ethnicities that originally appeared between i960 and 1990 have
been collected and published as Ensayos de historia andina: ilites, etnias,
recursos (Lima, 1993). The collection includes studies of the visitas and
tribute assessments imposed by Pedro de La Gasca in 1549, the first
systematic data on the structure of Andean societies in that Francisco
Pizarro's first visitas have not appeared.
Other material that deals with the European invasion from the per-
spective of the Andean societies include Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian
peoples and the challenge of Spanish conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Wiscon-
sin, 1982, 1993), and Karen Spalding, Huarochiri: An Andean society under
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 965

Inca and Spanish rule (Palo Alto, 1984). For a fine introduction to recent
research on native societies, see Stern's Prologue to the second edition of
Huamanga, "Paradigms of conquest: History, historiography, and poli-
tics." Also see Vol. II of the luxury edition of the history of Peru financed
by the Banco Continental: Franklin Pease, Peru, Hombre e Historia: Entre
el siglo XVI y el XVIII (Lima, 1992). And for a narrative introduction to
the story of the European invasion that makes good use of the published
sources available at the time it was written, see John Hemming, The
conquest of the Incas (New York, 1970).
For the chronology of the European invasion, Hemming remains
useful, but the most rewarding sources continue to be the chronicles and
other materials produced by the Spaniards. The first generation of con-
querors in particular saw things and reported incidents that, when reread
in the light of assumptions different from the more "official" interpreta-
tions of events imposed from the 1580s, offer evidence for new interpre-
tations. New editions of these sources, sometimes including material
absent from earlier editions, have made these standard sources more
available. See in particular the description of events prepared by Pedro
Sancho, the secretary of Francisco Pizarro, carried to Spain by Sancho,
undoubtedly with Pizarro's consent, Relacidn de la conquista del Peru
[1534] (Madrid, 1962), and Pedro Pizarro, Relacidn del descubrimiento y
conquista de los reinos del Peru (Lima, 1978). The officially approved
version of the conquest and the struggles that followed was that of Pedro
Cieza de Leon, Cronica del Peru, extremely valuable for the effort Cieza
made to include as much information obtained from Andean sources as
possible. Parts of his history that were thought to be lost have been
recently discovered, and the entire chronicle was edited and published in
four parts by the Catholic University of Peru between 1984 and 1992.
On the "battle of the book," a favorite topic of recent postmodernist
interpretations, see Sabine MacCormack, "Atahuallpa y el Libro," Revista
de Indias 48 (1988), 693-714; Patricia Seed, " 'Failing to marvel': Atahu-
allpa's encounter with the word," latin American Research Review 26(1)
(1991), 7-32.
On Spain there has been much new and exciting work published since
1984. The work of John Elliott, Jaime Vicens Vives, Pierre Vilar, and
Guillermo Cespedes del Castillo remains invaluable; see, for example,
John Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (New York, 1963), 66 and the
essays in his Spain and its world 1500—IJOO (London, 1989). See also John
Lynch, The Hispanic world in crisis and change, 1598-1700 (Oxford, 1969,
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 966 Karen Spalding

1992). The Reconquest is examined from both sides (Christian and Mus-
lim) by Richard Fletcher in The Quest for El Cid (New York, 1989) and
Moorish Spain (Berkeley, 1992). Since the death of Francisco Franco,
there has been a flowering of scholarly research as restrictions on access
to archives and official support for particular historical interpretations
were relaxed, and that work has begun to reexamine traditional positions
on Spanish society and the nature of the Spanish state. See Juan Ignacio
Gutierrez Nieto, Las comunidades como movimiento antisenorial (la for-
macidn del bando realista en la guerra civil castellana de 1520—i$2i (Barce-
lona, 1973) and Stephen Haliczer, The comuneros of Castile: The forging of
a revolution, 14J5-1521 (Madison, 1981); also Helen Nader, Liberty in
absolutist Spain: The Hapsburg sale of towns, 1516-ijoo (Baltimore and
London, 1990). Idea Altman has provided an invaluable study of the
reciprocal relations between Spain and America in the period of the
invasion of the Andes in her work on the movement between Extrema-
dura and America, Emigrants and society: Extremadura and America in the
sixteenth century (Berkeley, 1989). On the transfer of Spanish institutions
to the Andes, and the internal organization of Spanish societies in the
Andes, the standard source is James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A
colonial society (Madison, WI, 1968), and for the biographies of the men
from Spain, his The Men ofCajamarca (Berkeley, 1972).
Despite the attention devoted to the Spaniards, we still know far more
about their quarrels with one another than about their interactions with
the people they encountered in the Andes. While much still remains in
the archives, some historians have published document collections that
contain material on the relations of Spaniards and Andeans before 1560.
See especially, Roberto Levellier, Gobernantes del Peru: cartas y papeles,
siglo XVI. Documentos del Archivo de Indias, 14 vols. (Madrid, 1921—1926).
See also the edition of Francisco Pizarro's actions as governor by Guil-
lermo Lohmann Villena, Francisco Pizarro, Testimonio. Documentos ofi-
ciales, cartas y escritas varios (Madrid, 1986).
On Inka society and the Inka state, there is an immense literature, as
well as a growing body of research that offers new light on the organiza-
tion of the native state and the dynamics that underlay both its expansion
and its rapid disintegration. See Franklin Pease, Los ultimos Incas del
Cuzco (Lima, 1972, 1976); John V. Murra, Formaciones econdmicas y
politicas del mundo andino (Lima, 1975); Nathan Wachtel, Sociedad e
ideologia: ensayos de historiay anytropologia andinas (Lima, 1973); John V.
Murra, Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel (eds.), Anthropological history
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (I$OO-I$8O) 967

of Andean polities (Cambridge, 1986); an English-language translation of

a special issue of Annales (ESC), 33, 5-6 (Paris, 1978); Maria Rostwo-
rowski, Historia del Tahuantinsuyu (Lima, 1988); R. T. Zuidema, Inca
civilization in Cuzco (Austin, TX, 1990); and Thomas C. Patterson, The
Inca empire: The formation and disintegration of a pre-capitalist state (Ox-
ford, 1991). Archaeological research has also made important contribu-
tions to the debate on the mechanisms that underlay the rise and decline
of centralized political systems in the Andes. Christine A. Hastorf, Agri-
culture and the onset of political inequality before the Inka (Cambridge,
1993), relates the distribution of material remains of consumption to
political organization and the consolidation of power in the Central
Andes. Craig Morris and Donald Thompson interpret the archaeology
of a provincial Inka administrative center in Hudnuco Pampa (New York,
1985). On the Inka state outside of the valley of Cusco, see Frank
Salomon, Native lords of Quito in the age of the Incas: The political
economy of North Andean chiefdoms (Cambridge, 1986); and Michael E.
Moseley and Alana Cordy-Collins (eds.), The northern dynasties: Kingship
and statecraft in Chimor (Washington, D.C., 1990). Also see the articles
in George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth (eds.), The
Inca and Aztec states, 1400-1800: Anthropology and history (New York,
1982), especially John H. Rowe, "Inca policies amd institutions relating
to the cultural unification of the empire"; Craig Morris, "The infrastruc-
ture of Inka control in the Peruvian Central Highlands"; and Nathan
Wachtel, "The Mitimas of the Cochabamba Valley: The colonization
policy of Huayna Capac." The relation between the Inka state and the
Andean regional deities is discussed by Thomas C. Patterson, "Pachaca-
mac: An Andean oracle under Inca Rule," in D. Peter Kvietok and
Daniel H. Sandweiss (eds.), Recent studies in Andean prehistory and pro-
tohistory (Ithaca, 1985), 159-176. The collection of articles written by
Carlos Sempat Assadourian between 1982 and 1987 on the transformation
of Andean societies in the sixteenth century and published under the title
Transiciones hacia elsistema colonial andina (Mexico City and Lima, 1994)
are extremely important contributions to our understanding of the Inka
state, as well as the interactions of the members of Andean societies with
the Europeans from the European invasion to the 1580s. This collection
is the only publication dealing specifically with the period covered by
this chapter. On the participation of the Inka in what the Spanish
defined as the conquest, and the Inka saw as the war for control of the
state, see the suggestive discussion in the first article, " 'La gran vejaci6n
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 968 Karen Spalding

u destruicion de la tierra': las guerras de sucesion y de conquista en el

derrumbe de la poblacion indigena del Peru," 19—62.
One of the most important developments in the research on Andean
societies since the 1980s is the growing attention given to the local polities
that were drawn into the Inka state. The publication of the great visitas
of local polities made between 1535 and the 1570s has sparked a great deal
of work on the organization of local Andean societies, and these sources
will continue to be invaluable. See Ifiigo Ortiz de Zuniga, Visita de la
provincia de Leon de Hudnuco en 1562, 2 vols (Huanuco, 1967—1972); and
Garci Dfez de San Miguel, Visita hecha a la provincia de Chucuito por. . .
en el aiio I$6J (Lima, 1964). The diversity of language and culture in the
Andes is persuasively argued by Bruce Mannheim, The language of the
Inka since the European invasion (Austin, TX, 1991), and the great Aymara
and Quechua dictionaries prepared in the sixteenth century contain
much on social organization embedded in the translations offered of both
Andean and Spanish terms. See Diego Gonzalez Holgufn, Vocabulario de
la lengua general de todo el Peru llamado lengua qquichua 0 del Inca (Lima,
1952); Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, Gram&tica 0 arte de la lengua
general de los indios de los reynos del Peru (Lima, 19 51); and Ludovico
Bertonio, Vocabulario de la lengua aymara [1612] (Cochabamba, 1984).
Enrique Mayer offers a reading of a portion of the visita of Huanuco
that applies an ethnographer's eye to the evidence collected in 1567 in
"Los atributos del hogar: economia domestica y la encomienda en el Peru
colonial," Revista Andina, 2(2) (1984), 557—590. Maria Rostworowski has
devoted a great deal of attention to the ethnohistory of regional polities,
especially those of the central and northern coasts of Peru. See Etnia y
sociedad. Costa peruana prehistdrica (Lima, 1977), and Senorios indigenes
de Lima y Canta (Lima, 1978). Her work on the northern coast contains
invaluable data on the presence - and elimination - of female kurakas.
See her discussion of the documents in Curacas y sucesiones, Costa Norte
(Lima, 1961). Irene Silverblatt published a ground-breaking and thought-
provoking study of gender relations in the Andes that expands Rostwo-
rowski's earlier study; see Moon, sun, and witches: Gender ideologies and
class in Inca and colonial Peru (Princeton, 1987). Susan Ramirez also
examined the polities of the north coast in a valuable study of the
pressures on the local elites and the disintegration of their authority, in
"The 'Dueno de Indios': Thoughts on the consequences of the shifting
bases of power of the 'curaca de los viejos antiguos' under the Spanish in
the sixteenth century," HAHR 67(3) (1987), 575-610. Rostworowski's
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500—1580) 969

contributions are valuable not only for their hypotheses but for their full
and careful presentation of documentary evidence; see, for example,
Conflicts over coca fields in 16th century Peru (Ann Arbor, MI, 1988), a
case from the Archive of the Indies that provides a vivid example of the
ways in which local polities used both the Inka state and the Spaniards
that succeeded it in their pursuit of their conflict with one another.
Waldemar Espinosa Soriano has also studied the actions of local polities
during the sixteenth century. See, for example, "Los senorios etnicos de
Chachapoyas y la alianza hispano-chacha," Revista Historica 30 (Lima,
1967); Lurinhuaila de Huacjra: un ayllu y un curacazgo Huanca (Huan-
cayo, Peru, 1969); Destruccion del Imperio de los Incas (Lima, 1973); "Los
senorios etnicos del valle de Condebamba y provincia de Cajabamba,"
Anales Cientificos de la Universidad del Centro del Peru 3 (Huancayo,
Peru, 1974). A valuable study of the Ecuadorian Andes that contains
insights into this early period is Karen Viera Powers, Andean journeys:
Migration, ethnogenesis, and the state in colonial Quito (Albuquerque, NM,
1995), as well as her "Resilient lords and Indian vagabonds: Wealth,
migration, and the reproductive transformacion of Quito's chiefdoms,
1500-1700," Ethnohistory 38 (Summer 1991), 225-249; see also Chantal
Caillavet, "Caciques de Otavalo enel siglo XVI: don Alonso Maldonado
y su esposa, Misceldnea Antropologica Ecuatoriana 2 (1982), 38-55; also the
studies included in Vol. I of Segundo Moreno Yafiez and Frank Salomon
(eds.), Reproduccidn y transformacion de las sociedades andinas, siglosXVIa
XX (Quito, 1991). For the southeastern Andes, see Thierry Saignes, Los
Andes Orientales: historia de un olvido (Cochabamba, 1985).
The materials on Andean religion can also reveal a great deal about
social organization. One of the best treatments of the collision between
European and Andean beliefs is Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the
Andes: Vision and imagination in early colonial Peru (Princeton, 1991); see
also "The heart has its reasons: Predicaments of missionary Christianity
in early colonial Peru," HAHR 65(3) (1985), 443-466, and "Pachacuti:
Miracles, punishment, and last judgement: Visionary past and prophetic
future in early colonial Peru," American Historical Review (1988), 9 6 0 -
1006. Our only source on Andean religion in an Andean language is the
collection of myths and tales from the province of Huarochiri collected
at the beginning of the seventeenth century and published in various
editions; the English-language edition also contains valuable notes by
Frank Salomon, The Huarochiri manuscript: A testament of ancient and
colonial Andean religion, transl. Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste
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 97° Karen Spalding

(Austin, TX, 1991), but the records of the activities of priests involved in
the campaign to convert the Andean peoples to Christianity also contain
invaluable information on both Andean conditions and European as-
sumptions. See Lucila Castro de Trelles (ed.), Relacidn de la religidn y
ritos del Peru hecha por ks padres agustinos [1561?] (Lima, 1992); also Luis
Millones et al., El retorno de las huacas. Estudios y documentos sobre el
Taqui Onqoy, siglo XVI (Lima, 1990). And on the relationship between
ideological and political structure, Maria Rostworowski, Estructuras an-
dinas delpoder. Ideologia religiosa y politica (Lima, 1983).
The great "Letter to the King," by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, is
in a class by itself. The facsimile publication of this wonderful source,
Nueva cordnicay buen gobierno (Codexperuvienne illustre) (Paris, 1936), is
long out of print, but see the fine edition prepared by John V. Murra,
Jorge L. Urioste, and Rolena Adorno, Nueva Cordnica y buen gobierno
(Mexico, 1980). See also Rolena Adorno's study of Huaman Poma's life
and writings, Guaman Poma: Writing and resistance in colonial Peru
(Austin, TX, 1986).
The standard source on the demography of sixteenth-century Peru is
Noble David Cook, Demographic collapse. Indian Peru, 1520-1620 (New
York, 1981). Later contributions have contested Cook's data; see, for
example, Carlos Sempat Assadourian, " 'La gran vejacion y destruici6n
de la tierra': Las guerras de sucesi6n y de conquista en el derrumbe de la
poblaci6n indigena del Peru," Transiciones hacia elsistema colonial andina
(Mexico City and Lima, 1994), 19-63. Other authors have reinterpreted
Cook's data in light of other evidence on social structure and migration;
for a fine example of this, see Karen V. Powers, Andean journeys, as well
as Sempat's article, cited earlier. For other sources dealing with Andean
demography, see the Bibliographical Essay accompanying Chapter 15 by
Thierry Saignes, this volume.
Despite the obvious fact that the study of the transformation of
Andean societies after the 1530s must be read through the lens of Spanish
sources, historians have tended to deal with Andeans and Europeans as
operating entirely independently of one another. Some older sources,
however, remain a fine introduction to the arena of forces within which
all residents in the Andes, Andean and Spanish alike, developed their
tactics and strategies. For a survey of that arena, see Guiltermo Lohman
Villena's "Etude preliminaire" to his edition of Juan de Matienzo, Go-
bierno del Peru (1567) (Paris and Lima, 1967), v-ixix. Carlos Sempat's
detailed examination of the participation of members of Andean societies
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 Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500-1580) 971

in the struggles over the encomienda and the organization of colonial rule
views Andeans and Spaniards alike as skilled and determined political
actors. See, especially, "Dominio colonial y senores etnicos en el espacio
andino," in Transiciones hacia el sistema colonial (Mexico City and Lima,
1994), 151-170; "Los senores etnicos y los corregidores de indios en la
confirmation del estado colonial, in" Transiciones hacia el sistema colonial
andina (Mexico City and Lima, 1994), 209—292. In addition to his role
in ending the open political conflict between Spanish factions and im-
posing royal authority, Pedro de La Gasca clearly played a very important
part in the political struggles among Andeans and Spaniards, making a
close look at his life an important part of the story. See Teodoro Hampe
Martinez, Don Pedro de La Gasca, 14P3-1567 (Lima, 1989). See also the
essays by Luis Miguel Glave, published under the title of Trajinantes:
caminos indigenas en la sociedad colonial, siglos XVI/XVII (Lima, 1989).
It has been clear for some years that the economy of the conquest
period not only rested on the labor of the members of Andean societies
but upon Andean technology and productive techniques as well. For a
fine analysis of an Andean encomienda that makes such dependence
entirely clear, see the model study by Efrain Trelles Arestegui, Lucas
Martinez Vegazo: functionamiento de una encomienda peruana inicial
(Lima, 1983; 2nd ed., 1991). Andean productive technologies and their
appropriation by Spaniards are described in Carlos Sempat Assadourian,
"La production de la mercancia dinero en la formation del mercado
interno colonial," Economia 12) (Lima, 1978), 9-55; see also the essays
collected in El sistema de la economia colonial: Mercado interno, regiones y
espacio economico (Lima, 1982). See also Karen Spalding, "Kurakas and
commerce: A chapter in the evolution of Andean society," HAHR 50
(November 1970), 645—664. The active part taken by members of An-
dean society in the colonial economy of the sixteenth century is well-
known by now. See John V. Murra, "Aymara lords and their European
agents at Potosi," Nova Americana 11 (Turin, 1978), 231—243. Steve Stern
discusses the problems of interpreting the data on Andean market activity
in "The variety and ambiguity of native Andean intervention in Euro-
pean colonial markets," in Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris (eds.), Eth-
nicity, markets, and migration in the Andes: At the crossroads of history and
anthropology (Durham, 1995), 73-100.
The political shirts in both Spain and the Andes that undermined the
kurakas' efforts to find a place for themselves in the colonial system are
indicated by Sempat in his articles in Transiciones hacia el sistema colonial
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 97 2 Karen Spalding

andino, but further study of the period between Gasca and Toledo from
this perspective will undoubtedly clarify this story of political defeat and
throw new light on the ways in which the members of Andean societies
understood, and dealt with, the Spanish invaders. I made an initial
attempt to see the period from this perspective in Huarochiri, 136-156,
but the picture is far more nuanced and complex than I understood at
that time. Carlos Sempat has come closer in the essays in Transiciones,
especially chapters 4 and 6; the petitions in the Archive of the Indies for
reward of services submitted to the crown by Andean kurakas, which he
cites, may well prove invaluable in reconstructing the history of the
participation of the members of Andean society in the political struggles
that preceded the administration of the fifth viceroy, Francisco de To-
ledo, and made possible the exclusion of the members of Andean societies
from the colonial system.

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