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Tupac-Amaru now determined on an extensive campaign. After an attack on Cuzco, he marched with 60,000 Indians to besiege La Paz itself, while the isolated Spanish forces were overwhelmed in all directions. La Paz succeeded in resisting the desperate onslaught of the Indian army, and the tide of fortune now turned against the Inca leader.
Then, taking the name of his ancestor, Tupac-Amaru, he proclaimed himself the chief of all those who were in rebellion against the Spaniards. His error seems to have been in not fraternizing with the creoles, or white natives of the country, who hated the Spaniards as bitterly as the Indians themselves.
In 1780 there began a memorable insurrection of the persecuted natives. It was especially notable as being led by a direct descendant of the Inca Tupac-Amaru, who had been beheaded by the Spaniards in 1562. This noble Indian, the last of the Incas, had been well educated by the Jesuits in Cuzco, and became the cacique of Tungasac.
No, what I mean is that I am not the only one now alive in whose veins the old blood of the Incas flows. Tupac, yonder, is the son of the son of the son of that Tupac-Amaru who died torn asunder in the square of Cuzco, because he had dared to raise the Rainbow Banner in the Land of the Four Regions, and called the Children of the Sun to revolt against their oppressors.
When Tupac-Amaru, who believed himself to be the legitimate heir to the empire of the Incas, made the conquest of several provinces of Upper Peru, in 1781, at the head of forty thousand Indian mountaineers, all the whites were filled with alarm.
It was on November 4, 1780, that Tupac-Amaru, by which name he was now universally known, made his first move. Gathering some trusty men about him, he captured a Spanish corregidor, Arriaga, and, charging that official with offences against the Indians, caused him to be executed. On this the Indians flocked to their new defender's standard, and he was soon at the head of 6,000 men.
After his death, however, in 1561, his successor, Don Zuñiga, Count de Nieva, was assassinated almost as soon as he took possession of his post. It was during the government of one of Zuñiga's successors, Toledo, that the young Inca, Tupac-Amaru, was executed in the great central square of Cuzco. The horror which this act is said to have instilled in the minds of the Indians is indescribable.
Condorcanqui had received a far more generous education than the majority of his fellows, and had studied at the College of San Bernardo, in Cuzco. He spoke the Castilian tongue perfectly, and was thus enabled to hold a minor official post in the Spanish service. Claiming descent from the Royal Incas, he subsequently added the name of Tupac-Amaru to his own.
Ullullo led me first to the house of a man named Tupac Rayca, who was chief among the Indians of the town. He was great-grandson of that ill-fated Tupac-Amaru, who, as you know, had revolted many years before against the oppressors of his race, and for this, after being forced to watch the torture and murder of his wife in the square of Cuzco, had himself been torn limb from limb by horses.
Tupac-Amaru, who himself was not destitute of intellectual cultivation, began with flattering the creoles and the European clergy; but soon, impelled by events, and by the spirit of vengeance that inspired his nephew, Andres Condorcanqui, he changed his plan.
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