• In 1532 Inca emperor Atahualpa traveled to Cajamarca to meet with the band of Spaniards led by Francisco Pizarro. At the meeting, Pizarro’s men captured Atahualpa. Before the capture, a remarkable exchange took place. The priest accompanying Pizarro, Friar Vicente de Valverde, read to Atahualpa, through a translator, a document prepared in Spain in 1513 called the Requerimiento. The document presented core Christian teachings about Jesus Christ and explained the establishment of the Roman Church, led by the pope, who granted Spanish emperor Charles V the right to conquer and Christianize the Americas. Conquistadors were legally obligated to read the Requerimiento in front of witnesses before waging a war of conquest. A portion of the friar’s reading and Atahualpa’s response are related here by Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of an Andean woman and a Spanish soldier, who published a history of the Inca Empire and the Spanish conquest in 1609.

Friar Vicente de Valverde Presents the Requerimiento

“It is proper that you should know, most famous and most powerful king, that it is necessary that Your Highness and all your subjects should not only learn the true Catholic faith but that you should hear and believe the following. . . .

Therefore the holy pope of Rome . . . has conceded the conquest of these parts to Charles V, . . . the most powerful king of Spain and monarch of all the earth. . . . The great emperor Charles V has chosen as his lieutenant and ambassador Don Francisco Pizarro, who is now here, . . . so that Your Highness and all your realms will become tributaries; that is to say, you will pay tribute to the emperor, and will become his vassal and deliver your kingdom wholly into his hands, renouncing the administration of it, as other kings and lords have done. . . . If you seek obstinately to resist, you may rest assured that God will suffer that you and all your Indians shall be destroyed by our arms, even as Pharaoh of old and all his host perished in the Red Sea.”

The Inca Atahualpa Responds

“I will be no man’s tributary. I am greater than any prince upon the earth. Your emperor may be a great prince; I do not doubt it, when I see that he has sent his subjects so far across the waters; and I am willing to hold him as a brother. As for the pope of whom you speak, he must be crazy to talk of giving away countries that do not belong to him. For my faith, I will not change it. Your own God, as you say, was put to death by the very men he created. But mine . . . [pointing to the sun] still lives in the heavens, and looks down upon his children. . . .

You threaten us with war and death . . . and say that I must renounce my kingdom and become the tributary of another, either willingly or by force. Whence I deduce one of two things: either your prince and you are tyrants who are destroying the world, depriving others of their realms, slaying and robbing those who have done you no harm and owe you nothing, or you are ministers of God, whom we call Pachacámac, who has chosen you to punish and destroy us. . . . [If so,] you should therefore act like divine messengers and ministers and put a stop to the slayings and lootings and acts of cruelty. . . .

You have mentioned five great men I should know. The first is God three and one, or four, whom you call the creator of the universe: he is perchance the same as our Pachacámac and Viracocha. The second is he whom you say is the father of all other men on whom they have all heaped their sins. The third you call Jesus Christ, the only one who did not lay his sins on the first man, but he was killed. The fourth you call pope. The fifth is Charles, whom you call the most powerful and monarch of the universe and supreme above the rest, without regard for the other four. If this Charles is prince and lord of the whole world, why should he need the pope to give him a new grant and concession to make war on me and usurp these kingdoms? If he has to ask the pope’s permission, is not the pope a greater lord than he, and more powerful, and prince of all the world? Also, I am surprised that you say that I must pay tribute to Charles and not to the others, for you give no reason for paying the tribute, and I have certainly no obligation whatever to pay it. If there were any right or reason for paying tribute, it seems to me that it should go to the God you say created everyone and the man you say was the father of all men and to Jesus Christ . . . and finally it should go to the pope who can grant my kingdoms and my person to others. But if you say I owe these nothing, I owe even less to Charles, who was never lord of these regions and has never set eyes on them. . . .

I wish also to know about the good man called Jesus Christ who never cast his sins on the other and who you say died — if he died of a sickness or at the hands of his enemies; and if he was included among the gods before his death or after it. I also desire to know [if] you regard these five you have mentioned to me as gods, since you honor them so. For in this case, you have more gods than we, who adore only Pachacámac as the Supreme God and the Sun as the lower god, and the Moon as the Sun’s wife and sister.”

Sources: Excerpts “It is proper that you should know” and “You threaten us with war” from Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas, and General History of Peru, translated by H. V. Livermore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). Used by permission of the University of Texas Press; excerpt “I will be no man’s tributary” from William Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, vol. 1. 1892 [1847], p. 370.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS