The trial of the Sapa Inca begins…
September 1572 CE
The trial of the Sapa Inca begins a couple of days later.
Convicted of the murder of the priests in Vilcabamba, of which he was probably innocent, Tupac Amaru is sentenced to be beheaded.
Numerous Catholic clerics, convinced of Tupac Amaru's innocence, plead on their knees that the Inca be sent to Spain for a trial instead of being executed, but to no avail.
Tupac Amaru is on September 24, 1572, ridden into the central square of Cuzco on a mule, hands tied behind his back and a rope around his neck.
Surrounded by hundreds of guards with lances and watched by a crowd of ten thousand to fifteen thousand, the prisoner, accompanied by the Bishop of Cuzco, mounts the black-draped scaffold in front of the main cathedral.
A "multitude of Indians, who completely filled the square, saw that lamentable spectacle [and knew] that their lord and Inca was to die, they deafened the skies, making them reverberate with their cries and wailing."
(Murúa) As reported by Baltasar de Ocampa and Friar Gabriel de Oviedo, Prior of the Dominicans at Cuzco, both eyewitnesses, the Sapa Inca raises his hand to silence the crowds, and his last words are “Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta;” Mother Earth, witness how my enemies shed my blood.
Toledo soon afterward initiates a roundup of royal descendants, banishing several dozen, including Tupac Amaru's three-year-old son, to Mexico, Chile, Panama and elsewhere.
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