Becoming Inca: Juan Bustamente Carlos Inca and the Roots of the Great Rebellion

Abstract

Inca nobles were prominent colonial petitioners for royal mercedes. Their high visibility and persistent claims to a special place in the colonial order, based on their descent from sovereign Inca emperors and past service to the Crown, ensured that the question of political alternatives to normative colonial arrangements would remain alive in the public domain. This article explores the career of one Inca pretendiente, Juan de Bustamante Carlos Inca, the Crown's response to his petitioning, and the significance of his own quest for a better understanding of the ambitions and motives of José Gabriel Túpac Amaru on the eve of the 1780 rebellion. Politically, Bustamante's attempt to win succession to the Marquesado de Oropesa and its entail brought into public view a 1555 cédula of Charles V empowering the then leading Inca noble, Alonso Tito Atauchi—and all his successors—to raise an army on the king's behalf during any crisis within the Viceroyalty of Peru. Bustamante's quest thereby compelled the Crown to confront the potential for political destabilization of Inca succession at the precise moment that the Bourbon dynasty embarked upon an unpopular root-and-branch reform of its empire. The 1555 cédula was the prime source of Túpac Amaru's claim to be rightful heir to the Marquesado—in effect, the version of an Inkarrí that he adopted stemmed in the first instance from the Crown.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous CLAR referees for constructive criticism and to Blanca Tovías for a critical reading, all of whose suggestions have measurably improved the final version of this article.

Notes

1. There is no space here for an extended discussion of the historiography on colonial Incas and their search for place, nor for an exhaustive list of pertinent works. Indispensable is the landmark study of David Garrett 2005. The pioneering studies of Dunbar Temple 1937, 1938–1940, 1948a, 1948b, 1949, 2009; Valcárcel 1947, 1949, 1970a, 1970b, 1977; Rowe 1954, 1982; and Villanueva 1958, remain valuable. Any list would include, inter alia, Alaperrine-Bouyer 2007; Amado 2003; Bradley and Cahill 2000; Burga 1988; Cahill 2006; Decoster 2002; Dueñas 2010; Flores 1987; Nowack 2003; O'Phelan 1984; Zighelboim 2010.

2. The Mayorazgo and Marquisate of Oropesa comprised the entailed lands and indigenous communities—these held in encomienda—bounded by the four colonial reducciones of Santiago de Oropesa (Yucay); San Bernardo de Urubamba; San Benito de Alcántara (Huayllabamba), in the Vilcanota Valley; and San Francisco de Maras, located on the saddle between the Vilcanota and Jaquijahuana Valleys. The last Marqués was Pascual Enríquez de Almansa y Borja, 9^th Duke of Medina de Ríoseco, and 9^th Marqués de Alcañices. The best introduction to the Mayorazgo and Marquisate and related issues is Lohmann 1948, 5–116; Hemming 1970, 451–53; also Cahill 2004, 9–35.

3. Valcárcel 1970a, 59–68; Valcárcel 1970b, 81–90; Valcárcel 1977, 19–24. See also Valcárcel 1947; CDIP 1971, 845–90; Rowe 1982, 65–85; Busto Duthurburu also follows the nationalist line (1981, 101–5). Rowe exculpates Túpac Amaru from any vulgar personal interest in the considerable wealth attaching to the Marquisate.

4. Túpac Amaru's straightened financial situation was in great part due to legal expenses and his residence in Lima for eight months, the duration of his litigation before the Real Audiencia of Lima.

5. Zighelboim mentions another litigant for the Marquisate in the mid-1770s: Domingo Ucho Ampuero Inga (2010, 44).

6. Burkholder 1980 remains the best study of a colonial pretendiente. Zighelboim notes that ‘los solicitantes eran muchos y los favorecidos pocos’ (2010, 61). For the Bustamante case, see especially Dunbar Temple 1947 and Zighelboim 2010; the latter traces in great detail the administrative process of Bustamante's search for grace and favor, his efforts as mediator on behalf of indigenous nobles, and establishes connections between news of Bustamante's partial success, indigenous nobility, and the abortive conspiracies of Lima and Huarochirí in 1750. See also the brief references to the case in Garrett 2005, 200–2; and Dueñas 2010, 61, 67.

7. AGI-AL, leg. 472, consulta de cámara of 4 November 1733; AHN-C, leg. 201601, ‘Puntual indice de varias cartas …,’ 20 October 1751.

8. On the strange career of Melchor Carlos Inca, see Dunbar Temple 1948a, 112–56.

9. AGI-AL, leg. 472, consulta of Consejo de Indias, 22 June 1747. See also Dunbar Temple 1947, 287–88. Simultaneously, Bustamante attempted, unsuccessfully, to recover the property of Melchor Carlos Inca. It should be noted that most historians now accept that Alonso Carrio de la Vandera, and not (the probably fictitious) Don Calixto Bustamante Carlos Inca, was the author of the Lazarillo de Ciegos Caminantes.

10. AGI-AL, leg. 472, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

11. The bulk of the documentation submitted by Bustamante over three decades is located in the AHN, Sección Consejos, legs. 20157 and 20161, with Bustamante's last representation in 1764: AHN-C, leg. 20157, no. 18. His claim to the Marquisate and to be the first among Inca nobles thus remained in play almost to the point at which José Gabriel Túpac Amaru and the Betancur family began to jostle for pre-eminence.

12. AHN-C, leg. 201601, ‘R[ea]l Arbol Genealogico de los Reyes y Emperadores Yngas que fueron de los Reinos del Perú, y de sus Descendientes: Padres y Abuelos del Ynga. D[o]n Juan de Bustamante Carlos Ynga. Pretendiente: Al Marquesado, y Estado de Oropesa: Por derecho de sangre,’ c.1750, for Bustamante's detailed family tree.

13. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

14. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

15. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

16. Dunbar Temple notes that from this genealogical moment, ‘Carlos’ became a patronym, joined with that of ‘Esquivel’ (after Carlos Inca's wife), such that ‘Carlos de Esquivel’ was borne as surname by at least two generations of descendants of that branch of the Incan imperial descent (1947, 285).

17. Dunbar Temple 1947, 294: the Consejo's fiscal argued against the attempt of the Duque de Granada de Egas, who had earlier inherited the Mayorazgo from the Loyola family, to accede to the mayorazgo and Marquisate of Oropesa, pointing out that the Duque had no link with Beatriz Coya, to whom the Marquisate had been conceded, and that ‘es preciso tenga S.M. presente que D. [Bustamante] Carlos Inga, gentilhombre de boca, residente en esta Corte, pretende también el Marquesado y aunque por ser descendiente natural no tiene derecho, no hay duda que tiene sangre de la familia a que le fué concedido.’ This question of illegitimacy was crucial, but in any case was only one of several factors in the Council's decision: another related dictamen of the fiscal is at AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

18. CDBTU 1980–1982, 2:649.

19. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

20. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

21. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

22. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747. It is unclear why the Council should have recurred to the Viceroy of New Granada rather than his counterpart in Peru, but probably relates to a delay in the handover of vice-regal command in Peru in 1745, the year in which the Marqués de Villagarcía was succeeded (from December 1745) by José Antonio Manso de Velasco, soon to become Conde de Superunda. Moreover, Cartagena was an alternative point of departure for Spain, through which Bustamante passed and for some years resided. Bustamante was aware of the Council's request (‘secretamente’) for information (Zighelboim 2010, 36). Note the similarity of the Council's comment on the persistence of the ‘memory of the ancient kings’ and its potentially deleterious political ramifications, with that expressed by royal officials in the wake of the 1780 rebellion. This sentiment was regularly echoed throughout the colonial era: e.g., Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta, Bishop of Cuzco, observing that on festive days the Inca nobility carried their own banners ‘with the sculpted images of their Gentile kings’: AGI-AC Cuzco, leg. 29, Moscoso to Josef Antonio de Areche, 13 April 1781. It was precisely because of the tenacity of the Inca nobles’ group memory of their erstwhile ‘kings’ that Intendant Benito de la Mata Linares in 1785 (unsuccessfully) attempted to abolish the institution of the Twenty-four Electors: see AGI-AC, leg. 35, Mata Linares to Gálvez (No. 11), 6 August 1785; Mata Linares to Gálvez (No. 28), p. 81.

23. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

24. One ducat was worth approximately 1.3787 pesos of eight reales: one ducat=375 maravedís; one peso of 8 reales=272 maravedís. The amounts awarded to Bustamante thus were c. 2,750 and c. 5,500 pesos respectively. By the eighteenth century, the ducat, originally a gold coin, was merely a unit of account: see Lynch 1989, xi.

25. Domínguez 1992, 218: ‘los gentileshombres, los altos cargos palatinos, veían diaramente al rey, estaban en condiciones mucho más favorables para negociar sus asuntos y obtener pingües cargos que los que se encastillaban en sus pequeñas cortes provincianas.’ Dunbar Temple has it that Bustamante's personality was ‘la del típico perulero, palaciego intrigante y obstinado, que consiguió obtener gran influencia en la Corte’ (1947, 285). There is really little evidence for this view, though Bustamante does seem to have been an effective spokesman at court on behalf of at least one group of Inca nobles, for all that his own pretensions brought only consolation prizes, albeit substantial, despite his decades of petitioning and lobbying.

26. AHN-C, leg. 201601, ‘Puntual indice de varias cartas …,’ 20 October 1751: ‘Cuyos originales presenté en las propias Reales manos de su Magestad, día 29 de Mayo de 1750.’

27. On an earlier occasion, when in 1736 Bustamante was imprisoned at the instance of creditors (notably his father-in-law, Agustín Chirinos), in Cuzco's public jail, he was released upon complaining that the corregidor of the city had not taken cognizance of his noble fueros or privileges, not the least of which was freedom from imprisonment for civil offences. The Crown acknowledged that Bustamante should enjoy pro tempore the ‘privilege of noble’ until the contrary could be proved against him; in doing so, it adverted to ‘the hijos dalgo of Castile, whose fuero the Indian nobles enjoyed’: AGI-AL, leg. 472, consulta of Consejo de Indias, 22 June 1747. For more details on this episode, see Dunbar Temple 1947, 289–91.

28. AHN-C, leg. 20161, ‘Don Juan de Bustamante Carlos Inca con el Fiscal sobre la posesión y sucesión de los Estados de Oropesa, y otras cosas,’ Twenty-four Electors to the king, 31 May, 1753. The second part of the documentation on Bustamante's attempt to win the Marquesado de Oropesa is in Consejos, leg. 20157. Among the signatories was Cayetano Tupa Guaman Rimachi Inga, who was Comisario de los Ingas Nobles in 1780, and a somewhat aggressive spokesman for the Electors; he denounced José Gabriel Túpac Amaru after 1780, but in any case appears to have favored Diego de Betancur well before the rebellion.

29. AGI-AL leg. 1565, informes of cathedral chapter, 8 June 1755 and 19 June 1756.

30. The racist accusation cum insult was not uncommon in colonial Cuzco. For another case, see CDBTU 1980, 2:243: ‘… there is no noble Indian in the eight parishes of this city [of Cuzco], they buy nobility for money.’ This recalls some passages in Garcilaso, Comentarios Reales (referring to the use of a royal insignia): ‘they say that now, in these times, many Indians wear them calling themselves descendants of the royal blood of the Incas; most make fun of them, because that blood has been almost completely extinguished’ (book 6, ch. XXVIII); (on the results of Atahuallpa's massacre of Huascar's kinsmen and kinswomen) ‘in such manner the entire royal blood of the Incas was extinguished and eradicated within the space of two and one half years’ (book 9, ch. XXXVII). Garcilaso soon resiled from this view by adding a coda to his manuscript noting that in 1603 there remained no less than 567 heirs to the Inca ‘throne’ by the male line.

31. AGI-AL, leg. 472, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

32. AGI-AL, leg. 472, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.

33. AGI-AL, leg. 472, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747. These lineages or ‘descendencias’ refer to the colonial version of the panacas—usually called ‘casas’ pertaining to each respective Inca—the lineage groups formed on the death of each Inca ruler to care for his momia and to administer the lands he had accrued during his reign. There were twelve of these during the colonial era (see anon) and the mention of only eleven suggests either that no panaca had been formed for Huascar, slain early in his reign, or merely that there was no head of the panaca at the time of drawing up the petition examined by Garcilaso, Melchor Carlos Inca and Alonso de Mesa. Given the importance of the petition, however, it would have been extraordinary had the colonial ‘panaca’ of Huascar not participated. By the eighteenth century, there was a ‘casa de Huascar Inca,’ such that there were twelve ‘casas.’ For the early colonial transition, see Amado 2003.

34. For details of this episode, see Iwasaki 1986.

35. AGI-AL, leg. 472, dictamen of fiscal, 24 September 1760.

36. AHN-C, leg. 201601, ‘Puntual indice de varias cartas …,’ 20 October 1751, f. 17r.

37. Similarly, ‘los Caziques, y Nobles Indios de Lima, por ellos, y en nombre de todos los demas de el Perú,’ sent their congratulations: see ibid., f. 4v.

38. Similarly, ‘los Caziques, y Nobles Indios de Lima, por ellos, ff. 7–8v. This from the leading noble Nicholas Ximenez de Cisneros Sahuaraura Inca, Elector and descendant of Huayna Capac and Paullu Inca. Joseph Tambohuacso Inca, distinguished cacique of Pisac, Taray and San Salvador in the Urubamba Valley, was the other correspondent Elector (ff. 8–9v) to treat Bustamante as Marqués.

39. Among the indigenous elites who wrote to him, six nobles were addressed by Bustamante as ‘relative (pariente),’ as well as a ‘first cousin (primo hermano)’ and as ‘cousin (primo).’ See also Zighelboim on this false rumor (2010, 50). It was not necessarily the case, however, that those described as ‘pariente’ were either directly related or afines, but rather the term may have been just a courtesy among Inca nobles. When José Gabriel Túpac Amaru was asked after his capture in 1781 why he had addressed the Ugarte brothers, suspected of rebel sympathies, as ‘primo,’ he replied that he used it in recognition of the Ugarte family's known Incan bloodlines: see AGI-AL, leg. 1056, ‘Testimonio que contiene varias confeciones, declaraciones, y otras diligencias de las causes del revelde Don Gabriel Tupa-Amaro, su muger Micaela Bastidas, Mariano Banda, y José Estevan Escarsena …,’ 1 May 1781, f. 29. Similarly, José Gabriel addressed his adversary, the loyalist cacique Eugenio Sinanyuca, as ‘primo,’ a tribute to his shared nobility. There was no question of any direct relations of parentesco between José Gabriel, on the one hand, and the Ugartes and Sinanyuca, on the other.

40. On Andrea Chirinos, see Dunbar 1947, 289–91.

41. Arvisa was the nephew of Juan Antonio de Ugarte, Provisor of the Cuzco diocese in the 1740s, who left his nephew 100,000 pesos with which the Arvisa family established their fortunes (notably the Lucre obraje). The Ugarte clan stemmed from the conquistador Juan Celiorigo de Pancorvo, and two lineal descendants married Inca noblewomen. For Arvisa's Incan credentials, see AHN-C, leg. 201601, ‘Puntual indice de varias cartas …,’ 20 October 1751, f. 17r.; AGI-AC, leg. 25, ‘Informe de la Real Audiencia sobre los méritos de Don Antonio, y Don Gregorio de Viana y Picoaga,’ 10 July 1796; ADC-RA/O, leg. 30, ‘Expediente seguido […] el Teniente Coronel Don Francisco Picoaga con sus hermanas […] sobre las cuentas de la Administración de los bienes y albaceasgo de su madre Doña Juana Arriola …,’ 17 April 1798.

42. AHN-C, leg. 201601, ‘Puntual indice de varias cartas …,’ 20 October 1751. Their purpose in writing, however, is not specified. Both Moscoso, resident in Lima, and the (unnamed) Jesuit Rector of Lima, were Bustamante's apoderados.

43. AHN-C, leg. 201601, f. 11r. This was Don Silvestre de Betancur y Cabrera. It is uncertain, albeit probable, whether he was related to the Cuzco Betancurs. He also shares a surname with Bustamante's wife, Andrea Chirinos de Cabrera; it is similarly unknown, but much less likely, whether Don Silvestre and Doña Andrea were related.

44. AHN-C, leg. 201601, ff. 11r–12v, 17r–18v.

45. AHN-C, leg. 201601, ff. 15r–16r. These were Don Juan Simon Urgel de la Cruz, allegedly ‘cacique and governor’ of Bogotá, and Don Joseph Adrian de Rivera, ‘indio noble, cazqiue principal, y gobernador [of Cartagena de Indias] y demas pueblos, y Capitan de los Naturales de ellos.’

46. AHN-C, leg. 201601, f. 14r. The threatened closure was perhaps connected to the devastation of the city in 1746, which served to draw the parlous state of religious institutions to the attention of Viceroy Superunda, whose task it was to rebuild the city of Lima. For the earthquake (and tsunami) and its effects, see Relación 1983, 66–78; Walker 2008.

47. AHN-C, leg. 201601, ff. 16r–17r.

48. These were noblewomen, ostensibly (according to the articles of foundation) the daughters of caciques, which makes comprehensible just why the caciques of the city and cercado of Mexico City actively championed their cause. On this institution, see Muriel 1963. I am grateful to Nancy van Deusen for a copy of this volume.

49. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747. The passage is an epitome of the 1555 cédula and not an extract.

50. See the transcript of José Gabriel's plaint (in Loayza 1946, 5–59), especially 36ff, for Túpac Amaru's remarks: ‘De esta Real Cédula librada a favor de Don Alonso Tito Atauchi […] tengo yo y tienen muchos de sus descendientes testimonio en todo conformes. […] Todos por pública notoriedad, de tradición en tradición, saben que dicha Real Cédula […] se expidió a favor de Don Alonso Tito Atauchi […] en fin que es una cédula tan pública, que todos los descendientes de dicho Don Alonso Tito Atauchi han tenido testimonio de ella, y jamás la han ocultado.’ The context of these remarks was Túpac Amaru's attack on the bona fides of Don Felipe Betancur (and his son-in-law Vicente José García), whom he accused of falsifying their genealogy by allegedly inventing a false Inca forebear, whose name they then inserted into a traslado of the 1555 cédula, substituting it for that of Tito Atauchi.

51. See Hemming 1970, 430, for this anecdote.

52. Bercé 1990. Pretenders proliferated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russia, with twenty-six in the reign of Catherine the Great alone; the best study of the phenomenon is Perrie 1995; Adas 1979 for some of its colonial manifestations. For an interesting, if not altogether convincing attempt to link the most spectacular of the Russian movements—the late eighteenth-century Pugachev rebellion—with the Túpac Amaru and Hidalgo insurgencies, see Meyer 1992.

53. This sentiment was regularly echoed throughout the colonial era: e.g., Juan Manuel Moscoso y Peralta, Bishop of Cuzco, observing that on festive days the Inca nobility carried their own banners ‘with the sculpted images of their Gentile kings’: AGI-AC leg. 29, Moscoso to Josef Antonio de Areche, 13 April 1781. It was precisely because of the tenacity of the Inca nobles’ group memory of their erstwhile ‘kings’ that Intendant Benito de la Mata Linares in 1785 (unsuccessfully) attempted to abolish the institution of the Twenty-four Electors: AGI-AC, leg. 35, Mata Linares to Gálvez (No. 11), 6 August 1785; Mata Linares to Gálvez (No. 28), p. 81.

54. ADC-JAChB, prot. 71, ff. 217–18, información de probanza of Doña Thomasa Medina de Guzman y Atau Yupanqui, 28 December 1778, in which Juan Bustamante Carlos Inga appears (described as ‘español’) as a witness on 23 December 1778. Cf. Dunbar Temple 1947, 296, who asserts that the date and place of Bustamante's death are unknown, but assumes that he died between 1759 and 1765. Zighelboim 2010 has it that Bustamante died in Cuzco in 1765. However, Dunbar Temple also mentions (291n.9) that his estranged wife, Andrea Chirinos, was in 1799 still alive as inmate of the Beaterio de las Nazarenas. They had a son, also called Juan but, according to Dunbar Temple, he died ‘muy niño.’

55. ADC-AGP, prot. 190, s.f., Poder, Don Phelipe Betancur Thupa Amaro to Don Juan Bustamante Carlos Ynga gentil hombre de la boca de su Magestad: ‘para que […] pueda presentarse ante su Magestad y poder recibir de El sus honras y gracias, asi mismo para poder representarlo ante el Consejo Supremo de Indias y su real Camara.’ See also, ADC-JBG, prot. 137, ff. 300–2, Otorgamiento, El General Don Gabriel de Ugarte y Celiorigo, 17 November 1756, the 100 pesos being sent via Don Vicente de Ugarte Gallegos, who was travelling to Spain. The Ugarte family was at the time in the process of becoming the acknowledged ‘first family’ of Cuzco, a mantle previously bestowed on that of the Marqués de Valleumbruoso, and also had Incan bloodlines: see Cahill 1988; Cahill 2006.

56. ADC-JP, prot. 232, ff. 81–82, Poder, Don Joseph Tupa Amaro a Dr. Don Joseph Antonio Garcia, 21 February 1779. This apoderado was no relation of Betancur's representative, Vicente José García Rodríguez.

57. AGI-AL, consulta de Consejo of 22 June 1747.