History - Peru - page 1023

TUMULTUOUS COLONY

Following Atahualpa's death, the Spanish got to work consolidating their power. On Janu-
ary 6, 1535, Pizarro sketched out his new administrative center in the sands that bordered
the Río Rímac on the central coast. This would be Lima, the so-called 'City of Kings'
(named in honor of Three Kings' Day), the new capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, an em-
pire that for more than 200 years would cover much of South America.
It was a period of great turmoil. As elsewhere in the Americas, the Spanish ruled by ter-
ror. Rebellions erupted regularly. Atahualpa's half-brother Manco Inca (who had originally
sided with the Spanish and served as a puppet emperor under Pizarro) tried to regain con-
trol of the highlands in 1536 - laying siege to the city of Cuzco for almost a year - but was
ultimately forced to retreat. He was stabbed to death by a contingent of Spanish soldiers in
1544.

Throughout all of this, the Spanish were doing plenty of
fighting among themselves, splitting up into a complicated
series of rival factions, each of which wanted control of the new
empire. In 1538, De Almagro was sentenced to death by stran-
gulation for an attempt to take over Cuzco. Three years later,
Pizarro was assassinated in Lima by a band of disgruntled De
Almagro supporters. Other conquistadors met equally violent
fates. Things grew relatively more stable after the arrival of
Francisco de Toledo as viceroy, an efficient administrator who
brought some order to the emergent colony.
Until independence, Peru was ruled by a series of these
Spanish-born viceroys, all of whom were appointed by the
crown. Immigrants from Spain held the most prestigious posi-
tions, while criollos (Spaniards born in the colony) were con-
fined to middle management. Mestizos - people who were of
mixed blood - were placed even further down the social scale.
Full-blooded indígenas resided at the bottom, exploited as peones (expendable laborers) in
encomiendas, a feudal system that granted Spanish colonists land titles that included the
property of all the indigenous people living in that area.
Tensions between indígenas and Spaniards reached a boiling point in the late 18th cen-
tury, when the Spanish crown levied a series of new taxes that hit indigenous people the
hardest. In 1780, José Gabriel Condorcanqui - a descendant of the Inca monarch Túpac
Amaru - arrested and executed a Spanish administrator on charges of cruelty. His act un-

Important Inca
Emperors
» Manco Cápac (c 1100s),
Cuzco's founder
» Mayta Cápac (1200s), began
expansion
» Inca Yupanqui (1400s),
'Pachacutec'
» Huayna Cápac
(1400-1500s), expanded north
» Atahualpa (1497-1533), last
sovereign