Almagro's return to Cuzco in 1537 initiated the civil wars—seven between that year and 1554—which at one time threatened to tear the New Castile from any allegiance to the Old, and which saw the death in battle of the first Viceroy from Spain, the execution of Almagro by Pizarro, and his own assassination by Almagro's mestizo son. By 1550 the shrewd and resolute little lawyer Pedro de la Gasca had restored royal power, in the form of an Audiencia which was able to cope with the last two risings, in the interim (1552–6) between the death of the second and the arrival of the third, the first effective, Viceroy. But the victory of law in the abstract was secured only by discarding the particular ‘New Laws’ intended to protect the Indians against their brutal exploitation by the encomenderos to whom Pizarro had parcelled out land and serfs.

The bloody details of these coups and counter-coups do not concern us, except for one ‘campaign’ in which hardly any blood was shed: the competition for command of the sea between the royalist leaders and Gonzalo Pizarro, brother and successor of Francisco and at least strongly tempted to set up as an independent, and undeniably wealthy, monarch. Just as the civil wars in general are a preview of post-Independence internal strife, so this episode is a preview of the paramount importance of seapower in the Wars of Independence and the 1879–81 War of the Pacific. All three emphasise the fact that the littoral communities, till at least the end of last century, were really to all intent islands, ‘oases’, or ‘compartments’ freely accessible only by sea.^[46]

Gonzalo was able to secure the King's ships off Peru, and to build others, and correctly decided to seize Tierra Firme, or at least the Isthmus, to forestall- 75 -a counter-attack. His captains twice occupied Panama; they did not take over the administration, but men were sent across the Isthmus to Nombre de Dios, and there was some seizing and burning of ships on the Nicaraguan coast. But when la Gasca arrived at Panama, with offers of amnesty and annulment of the hated New Laws, Gonzalo's fleet went over. He made the mistake of burning five ships at Callao, to prevent desertions; and with nothing to stop it, the now royalist fleet proceeded methodically down the coast. Whatever local successes the Pizzarists might achieve, they had no possibility of reinforcements. Panama was the key—the only blood spilt was in a skirmish at Nombre de Dios—and the events there the turning-point. But as Garcilaso sums up, ‘it was the revocation [of the New Laws] and the general pardon that fought the war and gave the empire to La Gasca.’

The Peruvian conquistadores have traditionally been regarded as a rough, not to say ruffianly, lot; and certainly Pizarro was well below the moral and intellectual stature of Cortes. But Lockhart has shown that they were much more a fair cross-section of Spanish society than has been generally believed, and beneath the savage tumults the solid work of colonisation was going on. This was based, it is true, on extremely brutal exploitation of the Indians; against the greed of the men-on-the-spot and the need of the Treasury, the numerous and sincere royal ordinances to remedy abuses were simply unenforceable. ‘Though the King's allies always won in the civil wars, the King's legislation was soundly defeated’ and the 500 encomenderos became virtually absolute lords of the land, and of Indian lives, while ‘Conversion of the Indians seems to have become a major casualty’^[47]—and this last, in the eyes of respectable Spain, was the justification of the Conquista.

Between 1532 and 1548 fourteen towns were founded, most of which remain important. Perhaps about a quarter of Spanish males were really rootless adventurers; but of something over 4000 Spaniards in Peru in 1555, about 500 were artisans (though the backbone of the artisan labour force was Negro), and there were probably over 750 women; there were respectable Spanish matrons—one or two—at Piura and Jauja as early as 1533 and 1534. By 1537 Lima had already 2000 Spanish vecinos (burgesses), while Callao, in 1537 merely ‘a tavern by the sea’, was developing into a flourishing port, striving to secure autonomy from the Lima town council.^[48] But the beginnings were nasty and brutish: in 1535 it was forbidden to throw dead Indians into the Lima streets: penalty, twenty pesos.^[49] Nevertheless, twenty years after Cajamarca there was an articulated and ordered society in Lima and the major towns.