Sebastián de Belalcázar

Jiménez de Quesada shortly finds his control challenged by two rival expeditions converging on the same spot from different directions.

One is led by Nikolaus Federmann, a German in Spanish service who arrives from western Venezuela, and the other by Sebastian de Belalcazar (or Benalcazar), a former lieutenant of Pizarro coming north from Quito who has founded Popayan and Cali on the way.

Instead of fighting among themselves for the spoils of the Muiscas, the three conquistadors refer the matter to authorities in Spain, who, not wanting any one conquistador to become too powerful, place a fourth party in charge instead.

However, Jimenez de Quesada is granted other privileges and is one of those who continues the work of exploration and conquest.

Francisco Pizarro and his brothers Gonzalo, Juan, and Hernando, attracted by the news of a rich and fabulous kingdom, had left the impoverished Extremadura, like many migrants after them.

In 1529, Francisco had Pizarro obtained permission from the Spanish Monarchy to conquer the land they called Peru.

According to historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea, Peru is neither a Quechuan nor a Caribbean word, but Indo-Hispanic or hybrid.

Pizarro’s Spanish army, following a long and difficult journey from Panama throughout which many had fallen to disease and other hazards, had docked at the Inca city of Tumbes in April.

Here, some gold, silver, and emeralds are procured and dispatched to Almagro, who had stayed in Panama to gather more recruits.

Sebastián de Belalcázar had soon arrived with thirty men.

Born Sebastián Moyano in the province of Córdoba, Spain, in either 1479 or 1480, he had taken the name Belalcázar after the name of the castle-town near to his birthplace in Córdoba.

According to various sources, he may have left for the New World with Christopher Columbus as early as 1498, but Juan de Castellanos will write that he killed a mule in 1507 and fled to Spain for the West Indies due to fear of punishment, and as a chance to escape the poverty in which he lived.

An encomendero in Panama in 1522, he had entered Nicaragua with Francisco Hernández de Córdoba in 1524 during the conquest of Nicaragua, and had become the first mayor of the city of León in Nicaragua.

He remained there until 1527, when he left for Honduras as a result of internal disputes among the Spanish governors.

Briefly returning to León, he then sailed to the coast of Peru, where he unites with Pizarro’s expedition.

Received with quiet hostility by Incas who had perhaps been alerted to the acts of pillage and plunder committed on the fringes of the Empire by the invaders, the Spaniards, deeming it unsafe to remain in Tumbes, relocate their camp to …

…the nearby island of Puna in preparation for an assault on the Inca city.

Initially, the Spanish occupation of the island proceeds without bloodshed.

The natives of Puna are a warrior people who, reluctantly bowing before the might of the Inca Empire, had intermittently accepted the status of tributary state, though periods of friction and even open warfare had frequently erupted with the Incas out on the mainland.

The path to war is first triggered by Pizarro's native interpreters, who warn him, perhaps falsely, that several Punian chiefs have gathered to plan an insurrection.

Pizarro has the chiefs captured, interrogated, and, apparently satisfied with their guilt, delivered to their traditional enemies at Tumbes where they are duly massacred by the Incas.

According to Spanish sources, the warrior class of Puná, maddened with rage, immediately rush to arms and storm the Spanish camp, charging in the thousands.

It seems that the diminutive Spanish force will surely be overwhelmed and scattered, but what the Spaniards lack in numbers they make up for in armaments and discipline.

As the natives approach, many are met head on with deadly rows of lowered pikes, the use of which the Spanish had long mastered in the great wars of Italy and Flanders.

Other Punians, charging in confused masses, are cut down and slaughtered in vast numbers by the concerted volleys of orderly musketeers.

At length, Hernando Pizarro, sensing the enemy falter, musters his cavaliers to his standard and spurs his horse into a charge.

The Spanish cavalry slices through the native ranks with devastating effect.

Within minutes, the Punians are in full rout.

The natives of Puná, having regrouped in the island's forests, have waged a guerrilla war with some success, destroying Spanish provisions and waylaying several scouts.

However, two Spanish ships with reinforcements, under Hernando de Soto, whose patron Pedro Arias Dávila had died in 1531, soon arrive by sea (with at least a hundred volunteers and several horses).

In return for the use of his ships, Pizarro appoints de Soto his chief lieutenant.

On these ships, the Spaniards, bound for more fruitful conquests on the Peruvian mainland, embark without incident and sail back …

…towards Tumbes, arriving here on May 16, 1532, only to find the place deserted and destroyed.

Their two fellow conquistadors they expected to find have disappeared or died under murky circumstances.

The local chiefs explain that the fierce tribes of Punians had earlier attacked them and ransacked the place.

Unknown to Pizarro, as he was lobbying for permission to mount an expedition, his proposed enemy was being devastated by the diseases brought to the American continents during earlier Spanish contacts.

When Pizarro lands on the coast of the Gulf of Guayaquil in 1532, he finds Peru vastly different from when he had been there just five years before.

Amid the ruins of the city of Tumbes, he tries to piece together the situation before him.

From Felipillo and Yacané, the two young local boys whom he has taught to speak Spanish in order to translate for him, Pizarro learns of the civil war and of the disease that is destroying the Inca Empire.

Upon their fateful departure to Cajamarca on September 24, 1532, Pizarro leaves a lieutenant, Sebastian de Benalcazar, in charge of protecting and developing San Miguel as a Spanish base of operations.

Two years later, Benalcazar will lead the conquering forces that move northward into Ecuador.

Atahualpa is meanwhile resting near Cajamarca, in the Sierra of northern Peru, following the defeat and capture of his brother.

He had known of the arrival of foreign invaders for several months; it is not clear why he did not order their obliteration before they could penetrate into the heart of the empire.

After a march of almost two months, Pizarro arrives in Cajamarca and summons Atahualpa from the nearby thermal baths known today as the Banos del Inca.

Reluctantly, accompanied by several thousands of his best troops, Atahualpa goes to Cajamarca's central plaza, where he is met, not by the conquistadors, but by their chaplain, Fray Vicente de Valverde, who calls upon the Inca emperor to submit to the representatives of the Spanish crown and the Christian god.

Atahualpa replies disparagingly, and, upon his throwing a Christian prayer book to the ground in contempt, concealed Spanish soldiers open fire, killing thousands of Atahualpa's defenders and taking the Inca emperor captive.

This slaughter, called "the decisive battle" of the conquest of Peru by historian Hubert Herring, takes place on November 16, 1532.

A panic-stricken Atahualpa, fearing that Pizarro might be planning to depose him in favor of his rival brother, summons Huascar, at this time imprisoned in Cuzco, to Cajamarca, then orders him to be executed along with hundreds of Huascar's nearest of kin.

It serves the Spaniards' purposes to allow Atahualpa the freedom, from his cell, to command his forces.

Thus continues the rapid annihilation, through a vicious civil war that now overlaps with the Spanish conquest, of the army and leadership of one of the great polities of modern history.

Pizarro is not planning to depose Atahualpa, of course, but to execute him.

First, however, he has Atahualpa fill his cell, once with gold, then twice with silver (estimated at four thousand eight hundred and fifty kilograms of gold and nine thousand seven hundred  kilograms of silver), supposedly as ransom for his release.

Instead the Spaniards garrotte Atahualpa on August 29, 1533, following a mock trial at which he is convicted of every charge that Pizarro can invent for the occasion.

Having deprived the Inca empire of leadership, Pizarro and another conquistador, Hernando de Soto, move south to Cuzco, the heart of Tawantinsuyu, which they capture in November 1533; they then lead their men in an orgy of looting, pillaging, and torture in search of more precious metals.

Belalcázar, Pizarro's lieutenant and fellow Extremaduran, has already departed from San Miguel with one hundred and forty foot soldiers and a few horses on his conquering mission to Ecuador.

At the foot of Mount Chimborazo, near the modern city of Riobamba, he meets and defeats the forces of the great Inca warrior Rumiñawi with the aid of Canari tribesmen who, happy to throw off the yoke of their Inca rulers, serve as guides and allies to the conquering Spaniards.

Rumiñawi falls back to Quito, and, while in pursuit of the Inca army, Belalcázar encounters another, quite sizable, conquering party led by Guatemalan Governor Pedro de Alvarado.

Bored with administering Central America, Alvarado had set sail for the south without the crown's authorization, landed on the Ecuadorian coast, and marched inland to the Sierra.

Pizarro had heard of this competing expedition some time earlier and had sends Almagro north to reinforce Belalcázar.

Together, Pizarro's two representatives manage to convince Alvarado, with the help of a handsome amount of gold, to call off his expedition and allow the "legal" conquest to proceed as planned.

Most of Alvarado's men join Belalcázar for the siege of Quito.

Ruminahui leaves Quito in flames for the approaching conquistadors.

It is mid-1534, and, after the customary orgy of violence, in December the Spanish establish the city of San Francisco de Quito on top of the ruins of the secondary Inca capital.

Belalcázar is soon off on more conquests in Colombia to the north; it is not until December 1540 that Quito will receive its first captain-general in the person of Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother of Francisco.

Belalcázar had headed to Quito, intent on any treasure he could recover.

However, before the Spanish forces could capture Quito, its treasures had been secreted away.

Legend holds that the Inca general Rumiñawi was on his way to Cajamarca with an enormous amount of worked gold for the ransom when he learned that Atahualpa had been murdered.

Accounts of the amount of gold involved varies in different versions of the legend, but all agree that, on the news of Atahualpa's death, Rumiñawi sent the porters East to areas that are to the present day uninhabited and later returned to Quito and hauled more treasures, including tiles of the temple of the Sun and possessions of the ñustas (temple dancers).

The precious horde, known to legend as the Treasure of the Llanganatis, is assumed to had been hidden in a cave, dumped into a lake, or buried in permanent snow cover.

Rumiñawi had ordered the city burned, and the principal ladies of the temples who refused to flee, killed.

The city of Quito founded by Amalgro is later moved to its present location, on a fertile plateau in the Andean highlands of present Ecuador, and refounded on December 6, 1534 by two hundred and four settlers led by Benalcázar.

Belalcázar, on the feast day of Saint James (Santiago) in 1535, establishes the port city of Guayaquil (Santiago de Guayaquil) located on the Guayas River, about forty miles (sixty-five kilometers) from the Gulf of Guayaquil.