"His Majesty's Most Loyal Vassals": The Indian Nobility and Tupac Amaru

On November 4 , 1780 , the cacique of Tungasuca, Don José Gabriel Túpac Amaru, seized Don Antonio de Arriaga, the Spanish governor of Tinta province (Peru), as he passed through the pueblo. For the next six days, Túpac Amaru held Arriaga prisoner, as a huge crowd assembled in the pueblo. Proclamations were read denouncing Arriaga's abuses and claiming that "[t]hrough the King it has been ordered that there no longer be sales tax, customs, or the Potosí mita and that Don Antonio Arriaga lose his life because of his harmful behavior."¹ Túpac Amaru forced Arriaga to send for weapons and money in order to arm the cacique and his followers. On November 10 , Arriaga was hanged in front of the crowd; immediately after, the rebels headed north down the Vilcanota Valley toward the city of Cusco, sacking the great textile factory of Pomacanchis on their way. Caciques from nearby pueblos actively joined or were caught up in the rebellion, and the forces grew dramatically.² Within a week of Arriaga's capture, the upper Vilcanota Valley was in open revolt.

After receiving news of Arriaga's execution, Cusco's city council met on November 12 and sent a regiment to quash the rebellion. At the forefront were Cusco's Inca nobles, who rejected Túpac Amaru almost to a one.³ To the south, the Indian nobility of the Titicaca basin also proved staunch foes of the rebellion. It was not for want of appeals from Túpac Amaru: as he marched down the Vilcanota he sent letters—alternatively cajoling and threatening—to leading Inca nobles and highland caciques asking them to join him.⁴ Don Pedro Sahuaraura Tito Atauchi Ynga, the cacique of Oropesa and the commissary of Cusco's regiment of Indian nobles, immediately forwarded the letter he received to the bishop, saying, "I leave marching with my people in search of the rebel, the infamous José Tupa Amaro, cacique of Tungasuca, who deserves an exemplary punishment for the perpetual discouragement of others."⁵ Sahuaraura and his troops, along with the city's Indian nobility, joined the royalist regiment and met Túpac Amaru's forces at Sangarará on November 19. The royalists were routed, Sahuaraura was killed, and the pueblo church was torched, killing those who had sought refuge inside. Túpac Amaru proclaimed himself Inca, the legitimate heir of indigenous imperial authority. So began the Great Rebellion, which lasted for three years and constituted the largest open challenge to Spanish rule in the Americas between the conquest and independence, in large part because it helped to spark, and converged with, a parallel rebellion started in Upper Peru by the Cataris (a Potosino cacical family) in January 1781.⁶

While Túpac Amaru was vilified in the remaining decades of Spanish rule and largely ignored for the following century, since the 1940 s, historians of all stripes have viewed him heroically.⁷ To nationalists, Túpac Amaru shines as a protonationalist, anticolonial leader who embraced both creole and Indian followers while rejecting Spanish rule. Some see the episode as a precursor to the wars of independence.⁸ To Marxists and neo-Marxists, Túpac Amaru stands as a revolutionary leader at the head of an Indian peasantry that rose en masse against colonial exploitation.⁹ Scholars of a more indigenist bent have viewed the rebellion as a rejection of both colonial and creole rule; the inevitable result of the profound injustices of colonial society, the Great Rebellion represents the reassertion of indigenous Andean ideals of time, space, and social relations or an eighteenth-century revival of Inca identity among Andean indigenous elites.¹⁰ Others have combined these two strains to locate the rebellion in a larger "Age of Andean Insurrection," in which violent rejection of the colonial order by Peru's indigenous peoples...