A Very Unusual Wedding

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“The Marriage of Captain Martin de Loyola to Beatriz Clara Coya, Princess of Peru.”

Yes, he’s a grandnephew of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Yes, she was a royal Inca maiden (ñusta), the daughter of Sayri Tupac, an Incan king, and Cusi Huarcay, his queen (Coya) and blood sister.

(In a VERY unusual move, after Sayri Tupac and Cusi Huarcay converted to Christianity and were baptized, the pope granted a dispensation to allow them to have their marriage convalidated; and in fact, the Bishop of Cuzco remarried them with a Catholic nuptial Mass in 1558. It’s usual for pagan natural marriage to be convalidated, but not brother-sister marriage! OTOH, I don’t think they were having any more children at that point, so maybe that’s why. Also, to be fair, about half the Spanish royalty back then were such cross-cousins that they might as well have been siblings, so the Pope was probably a bit resigned.)

Captain Martin Onez Garcia de Loyola came to Peru at the age of 17, as part of the new viceroy’s staff. He gained his fame in 1572, for capturing the rebel king Tupac Amaru and his camp.

Beatriz’s dad the king had died in 1561, at which point Beatriz and her dad’s money were put into Spanish guardianship, and Beatriz was put into a convent school. Cusi Huarcay betrothed her daughter to Cristobal Maldonado, a relative of the Maldonado family that was housing her. This was taken badly by the Spanish, who sent the Maldonados away and put Beatriz back into the convent. Cusi Huarcay remarried to a Spanish soldier, but she was still never allowed to go home to Vilcabamba.

The Spanish then made a treaty with some of the Incan holdouts, which promised her betrothal to an Incan prince, Quispe Tito, son of the royal claimant Titu Cusi Yupanqui.

But a few years later, when the new viceroy asked if she would rather stay in the convent or marry. Beatriz said she’d rather marry, and the viceroy married her to Captain de Loyola. She was only 15 or 16, and her husband was about 21.

The viceroy conferred Peruvian estates on them (which was good, because Martin’s side of the family wasn’t the money/land side). They seem to have been happy together.

He was made the Spanish governor of Chile in 1592, and she came with him to La Concepcion. He named a town and a fort after his wife. Unfortunately, he was killed by the Mapuche and his head was taken and kept by them, only to be returned to the Spanish years later. He died on Christmas Eve, 1598.

The princess returned to Lima, where she died two years later, in 1600.

Her daughter lived on. She had been born in 1593, and was now about 7 years old. To prevent political problems, and because she didn’t have much maternal family that was still alive, she was sent to Spain to be raised by the Loyolas. (And honestly, there’s not a ton of difference between living up in the Andes and living in the Pyrenees, except that Lima was a crazy town for women back then.)

She arrived in Valladolid, Spain, in 1603. It was the royal capital at the time. The king assigned her guardianship to Juan de Borja de Castro, the Conde of Mayalde, who was one of her dad’s cousins by marriage. (His first wife was Lorenza de Onaz y Loyola, daughter of Beltran Ibanez de Loyola, who was the ruling lord of Loyola, and hence the land/money side of the family. She had died in 1575.) Juan was the second son of St. Francis Borgia. His wife at the time, who survived him, was Francisca de Aragon y Barreto, and her kids succeeded him.

Juan died in 1606, when Ana was about 13. The king set her up with her own household, where she lived with her nurse, her butler, and her doctor. In 1610, Ana received a court ruling that returned her the income from her towns in Peru, which probably improved her finances a lot. When she turned 18, the king picked out a husband for her.

So the other marriage shown is the later marriage, in 1611, of Don Juan Enriquez de Borja to Martin and Beatriz’ daughter, Ana Maria Lorenza Garcia Sayri Tupac de Loyola y Coya Inca.

Juan was the grandson of St. Francis de Borja y Aragon, who took on the dukedom of Gandia, after Francis abdicated to become a Jesuit. His parents were Alvaro de Borja y Castro, a diplomat, and Elvira Enriquez de Almansa y Borja, who was Marquesa of Alcanices in her own right. (Yup, his parents were cousins. Spanish nobility, just like the royalty.)

These influential new relations complained to the Spanish king about the many historical wrongs done to the Peruvian people, and got their new daughter-in-law tons of political concessions. Her domains were made free of taxes and of the viceroy and governor’s control, which is quite a lot to get. The situation was supposed to go on as long as the “princess of Peru” had descendants, which unfortunately only lasted until 1741. You could definitely write an alternate history if the domain had survived.

Recently, in 1982, King Juan Carlos reassigned the title to a lady of the House of Loyola, but since Spain doesn’t own Peru anymore, it’s strictly honorary.

Anyway, all this made St. Iggy and St. Frank not just fellow Jesuits, but posthumously, family! Multi-racial family! (Several ways, through more than one marriage, too.) Which is why they are in the picture together.

But yeah, the Spanish were all such racists, blah blah blah.

After King Philip II gave the title and lands to Ana, she and Juan traveled to Peru in 1615. They lived in Lima for five years, and then moved to the Yucay Valley in 1620. In 1627, they moved back to Madrid, where Ana died and was buried. The couple had 8 kids. Three became nuns, and two died childless as knights of Calatrava and Santiago, respectively. The kids’ family name was “de Borja y Loyola-Inca.”