We've already spoken a little about the
great man model of history when telling the story
of Pachacuti’s remarkable conquest of the Andes.
The great man theory was an idea that gained currency
in the 19th century and argued that history was a product of the impacts
of great men, unique individuals who were highly influential
due to their natural abilities, their heroic courage,
or their superior intellects. This is a model that for good reason
has fallen out of favor among historians, but it can still be hard to explain
certain moments in history where events really did seem to turn on
the determination, and sometimes the obsession, of a single
person. In this story, that person will be a
Spaniard by the name of Francisco Pizarro.
Pizarro was born in the Extremadura region of southeastern Spain, a region
whose name comes from the Latin phrase ‘extrema
et dura’, that is ‘remote and hard’, and it gives you a pretty good idea
of what life was like here through most of its history.
The land was dry and tough in the summer, and the people here were often poor.
Pizarro was born in the most humble conditions
imaginable. There were no official documents recording his birth,
suggesting that he may have been an illegitimate child,
perhaps abandoned and taken in by his adoptive
family of peasant farmers. His adopted mother worked as a servant
while his father was a soldier who had earned himself the nickname The
Roman for his exploits fighting in Italy.
Pizarro had no education and began his life
herding pigs in the town of Trujillo. As a teenager he joined the army, wanting
to follow in his father's footsteps, and he was immediately swept up in the
campaign known as the Reconquista, or the
re-conquest. This saw the Muslim kingdoms of southern
Spain conquered by Spanish armies and brought
under the rule of a Spanish monarch. We don't know
exactly where Pizarro fought on this campaign,
but it's likely that he saw some of these famous battles
and may have even participated in the capture of the final Muslim capital of
Granada. The mythology of the Reconquista has a
prominent place in the imaginations of Spanish people
around this time, and the Spanish would carry it with them
into the New World. In fact, whenever Pizarro and his men
encountered the temples of the Inca and other peoples, they would
refer to them in their writing as mosques. When the dust from
the war of Reconquista settled and the financial opportunities for mercenaries
began to dry up in Spain, Pizarro made the decision to cross over to the
New World. In the year 1502, he sailed to Hispaniola,
the island that had become the first European foothold
in the Americas. There, he became a member of the governor's bodyguard and earned a
reputation as a woodsman and a fierce fighter of
native people. Pizarro had a character that was well
suited to the brutal world of the Spanish colonies. He earned a
considerable fortune as a slaver, a plantation owner, and a trader.
In the New World, Pizarro achieved a level of wealth
and status that would have been impossible in Spain,
where the entrenched class system meant he would always be treated as a peasant.
The New World suited him. He seems to have fostered
no desire to ever return to his homeland, and instead spent his days surrounded by
slave women and all the trappings of wealth in the
New World. But it's clear there was also something
of an itch in him that his life there couldn't
quite scratch. It seems he wanted not just to be
wealthy and comfortable, but to be respected, even
feared. He wanted an achievement that he could throw in the faces of all
those nobles back home who once would have looked
down on him from such a height. But all of Pizarro's
early attempts at adventuring would meet with disastrous failure. He set off on a number of different
expeditions into the New World, among them one led by the Spaniard
Alonzo de Ojeda, who set up a colony in what is today
Colombia and Venezuela. Pizarro was paid no wage for the
expedition, instead being promised a percentage of
the total treasure that the expedition brought back. But
Ojeda's expedition was poorly managed. The colony of San
Sebastian that they founded was built in a low-lying swampy region,
beset with mosquitoes and disease. These were the same conditions that had
caused the Inca armies of the Emperor Huayna Capac such
difficulties. The indigenous people here regularly
shot at the Spanish with arrows dipped in poison,
and the colony offered no wealth, no gold or
silver, and barely supported the meager existence of its colonists.
San Sebastian was eventually abandoned, and Pizarro soon discovered that it's
not much use having a percentage of the expedition's earnings
if its earnings are roughly zero. Disconsolate but not discouraged, he soon
departed for Colombia and from there, joined the explorer Vasco
Núñez de Balboa, and sailed to modern-day
Panama. Although the Spanish didn't know it yet,
this was the thinnest point of the American continent. Here, the
Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are only 50 kilometers
apart, and it's at this crossing point between
the oceans that the destiny of Pizarro and the fate
of the Inca would be sealed. Balboa and Pizarro set about the
settlement of Panama with the usual destruction and
enslavement that accompanied all European settlement
in the New World. There, they set up the colony
of Tierra Firme, but still no one knew how much land existed behind the long
coast of the Americas. It's recorded that one local chief
called Comogre seems to have decided to
cooperate with them, and offered to pay them off in both gold
and information. It's here that the Spaniards
first heard of the existence of another ocean to the west,
as one Spanish conquistador Pascual de Andagoya recalls in this letter to
the Spanish king. They say that the people of the other
coast are very good and well-mannered, and I am told that the
other sea is very good for canoe navigation,
for that it is always smooth and never rough like the sea on this side,
according to the Indians. I believe that there
are many islands in that sea. They say that there are many large pearls and
that the chiefs have baskets of them. In one version of
the story, the chief Comogre's son is said to have
burst out in a rage when the Spanish kept demanding gold
from his father, and let out this fuming proclamation.
If you are so hungry for gold that you leave your lands to cause
strife in those of others, I shall show you a province where you can
quell this hunger. The idea of a mythical city of gold
lying just beyond the horizon was a common theme
of the Spanish settlement of the Americas.
The king of this place became known as El Hombre Dorado,
or El Rey Dorado, the golden man or king. This was a mythical character
who was supposed to bathe himself in gold dust,
and over time the legends became more outlandish
until El Dorado went from being a man to a whole city, then a kingdom,
and finally an entire empire of gold. It's not hard to see how this piece
of folklore would have emerged. Whenever native people discovered the
European obsession with the precious metal gold,
they would often assure them that there was plenty of gold just over
the next hill, if only they would pack up and leave
them in peace. Whether Comogre and his son really knew
about the Inca and the gold that decorated their
temples high in the Andes or whether they were just
trying to get the Spanish to move on, we can never know, but the result was the
same. Balboa organized an expedition to cross
the isthmus of Panama and reach what he called the
‘other sea’. Pizarro was a captain of this expedition.
Hacking their way through the dense jungle of the interior of Panama,
thick with mangroves, vines, and strangler figs,
the conquistadors nearly cooked in their armor.
They were plagued by mosquitoes and disease,
but finally they cut through the last bit of jungle
and saw a vast body of water stretching out,
boundless and blue into the horizon. The life of a conquistador in the New
World was violent and ruthless. They lived largely
beyond the reach of the law, and often the greatest dangers
came from the other conquistadors around them.
Pizarro had been Balboa's friend for many years,
but when the opportunity came to betray him, he
didn't hesitate. In one of the routine power struggles that took place here
at the edge of the world, Pizarro was ordered to arrest Balboa.
The man was later executed. For his services
in this coup, Pizarro was given a swampy bit of land to call his own,
and he settled down to the life of a colonial baron.
He retired from soldiering, and perhaps this is where
he might have stayed. That is, if it wasn't for the news
that would soon come trickling down the coast from Mexico
about the incredible exploits of one of his distant
cousins, a man named Hernan Cortes, who had taken 600 men and with them,
toppled an empire. For many historians, the comparisons
between Francisco Pizarro and Hernan Cortes are obvious.
As we saw in Episode 9, Cortes had led a tiny army
and with them, captured the Aztec king Moctezuma,
toppling the greatest indigenous empire of Mexico.
Cortes was now considered a hero in the Spanish court,
and his exploits were legendary. Pizarro was a second cousin of Cortes
and seven years older than him, and he openly admired his
over-achieving relation. They were both from that same hard region
of Extremadura in Spain and had both set sail to explore the New World,
living in Hispaniola at the same time. But there are also some significant
differences in these characters, as the historian W.H. Prescott
recounts. Pizarro seems to have had the example of his
great predecessor before his eyes on more than one occasion, but he fell far
short of his model, for his coarser nature and more ferocious temper often
betrayed him into acts most repugnant to sound policy
which would never have been countenanced by the conqueror of Mexico.
Cortes was a member of the noble Hidalgo class.
He had a legal education and worked as a notary
and treasurer. The letters he wrote to King Charles V are one of the great
sources of information about the conquest of Mexico, and while
we may not always trust his account of events,
he does speak to us out of history with a commanding voice,
explaining his motivations, his desires, and his
fears. But Pizarro is more of an enigma. In fact, he was illiterate and could
neither read nor write. All we learn about his motivations
comes from those who accompanied him and wrote down their accounts.
By the year 1521, the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan
had been conquered by the Spanish and reduced to a smoking ruin.
All of Spain and its colonies were buzzing with this news,
and the fame and wealth that Cortes won in this expedition
seems to have reignited Pizarro's lust for adventure. By this time, he was in middle age. From
depictions of him at the time, we can see he was a man with a thick
beard and a flat face with wide, spreading cheekbones and a
lantern jaw. His cousin Pedro Pizarro described him
in the following way. He was a very Christian man
and very zealous in the service of his majesty. He was tall and spare,
having a good face and a thin beard. Personally,
he was valiant and vigorous, a truthful man.
It was his custom whenever anyone asked him for anything always to say
no. He said this in order that he might not fail to keep his word,
and though he said no, he always did in the end what was asked of him
if there were not reason against it. In 1522, just one year after he heard
news of Cortes' exploits, Pizarro returned to adventuring. He
joined a company heading south along Panama's Pacific coast,
determined to find out the truth about the rumoured cities of gold that
were supposed to lie to the south in a land that had attained a
semi-mythical status for them, and which was called Biru. While Cortes' expedition had been a
relatively amateur affair, with very few
professional soldiers, Pizarro's men were even more of a rough
bunch. He had about a hundred men with him, many
of whom signed up to escape debts or to avoid
being put in jail for various crimes. These were stragglers and ruffians
rather than soldiers. They had enough money for only two ships,
and they set sail in November, 1524.It was the worst possible season
for sea travel, and Pizarro's usual bad luck prevailed.
Rain and storms hammered their ships, and they quickly ran out of supplies.
The men ate raw crabs and shellfish as well as berries from the shore, which
turned out to be poisonous and made them severely ill.
Pizarro's expedition crept along the Pacific coast
of South America for more than a year, experiencing misfortune after misfortune,
with one of their ships making regular supply runs
back to Panama. But eventually, in the year 1526,
they came across something they had never seen before
in the Americas. It was a native boat with a sail. When they stopped the craft, they found
that the boat was a raft carrying 20 indigenous people
as well as a great variety of jewelry and cloth,
and other decorative items like belts, necklaces, and pins
made of gold and silver and inlaid with gems.
Their clothes were finally embroidered, decorated with patterns of birds, flowers,
and animals. The Spanish asked where these goods had
come from, and the people gave the answer they had
been waiting for; they said it had all come from a wealthy
land that lay to the south, a land called Peru.
The news lit a fire under Pizarro, but his men were sick and tired of the
expedition. Their misfortunes continued, and soon
news returned to them that the governor of Panama had ordered
their return. When his men heard the news, they were
overjoyed, as Cieza de Leon recalls. Pizarro was downcast when he saw they
all wanted to go. He quietly composed himself and said
that of course they could return to Panama, and the choice was theirs.
He had not wanted them to leave because they would have their reward
if and when they discovered a good land. As for himself, he felt that returning
poor to Panama was a harder thing than staying to face
death and hardship. Pizarro shared something of Cortes'
passion for dramatics, and one instance has
passed into legend and idiom. He took his sword and drew a line in the
sand, and gave his men the following
announcement. Friends and comrades, on
that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion,
and death. On this side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru
with all its riches. Here, Panama and its poverty.
Choose. Each man, what best becomes a brave Spaniard?
For my part, I go south. Most of Pizarro's men were not won over
by this piece of oratory. Only 13 men stepped over the line,
but it was enough for his journey to continue. In the year 1528, Pizarro reached the
Incan town of Tumbes, today located on the border between
Ecuador and Peru. Here, finally,
was evidence of the wealthy empire he had been promised.
Tumbes was a magnificent port city. The old Inca king Tupac Yapanqui had
built a strong fortress there, along with a fine temple staffed with
500 virgins who served the sun god. The town was well
supplied with water from several aqueducts, and the historian W.H.
Prescott recalls the reaction of the Spanish to this
site. The Spaniards were nearly mad with joy at
receiving these brilliant tidings of the Peruvian city.
All their fond dreams were now to be realized, and they had at length reached
the realm which had so long fitted in visionary
splendor before them. The people of Tumbes received Pizarro
and his men politely and graciously.
They even gave Pizarro two boys who he took with him back to Panama
and taught to speak Spanish. He would use them as translators
throughout the following years, and all of this was
very convenient for Pizarro and played directly into his plans,
as the chronicler Naharro recalls. It was manifestly the work of heaven
that the natives of the country should have
received him in so kind and loving a spirit as best fitted
to facilitate the conquest. Encouraged and reeling from the
magnitude of his discovery, Pizarro sailed further up the coast and
everywhere he saw small towns and coastal hamlets.
Everywhere he went, the people told him that they were part
of a great empire whose capital lay far up in the high mountains. They told
him stories of the glittering city of gold
where the great Emperor Atahualpa ruled. They saw the enormous networks of
aqueducts that made even the coastal deserts bloom,
and the well-maintained roads linking the settlements.
Pizarro now felt that he had evidence enough
to confirm the rumors, but his tiny force had no hope of making anything of his
discovery. He returned to Panama and began to
prepare for another final voyage. The arrival of the Spanish at Tumbes
caused a ripple of consternation in the Inca lands.
The entire region was wrecked by the destruction of the civil war
that had followed the death of the emperor Huayna Capac,
along with the spreading plague that had brought such desolation.
The Huarochiri manuscript recalls the opportunistic struggle of this time
with a note of disdain. After Huayna Capac had died, people scrambled
for political power, each saying to their others, “Me first, me
first!” It was while they were carrying on this
way that the Spanish appeared. The Inca ruler and chronicler named
Titu Cusi, who had been a boy at the time of the
invasion, recounted his memories of that time
in a remarkable document almost 30 years later.
In it, he recalls the shock and confusion that the arrival of the Spanish caused,
as messengers burst into his father's palace with the
news. They reported having observed that
certain people had arrived in their land, people who were very different from us
in custom and dress. When my father heard this, he was beside
himself and said, “How dare those people intrude into my
country without my authorization and permission? Who are these people and
what are their ways?” The messengers answered, “They claim to
have come by the wind. They are bearded people, very beautiful
and white. They eat out of silver plates. Even their
sheep who carry them are large and wear silver
shoes. They throw thunder like the sky.” Titu Cusi even captures what it was
like to see the Spaniards reading for the
first time. We have witnessed with our own eyes that
they talk to white cloths by themselves, and that they call some of us by our
names without having been informed by anyone,
and only looking into the sheets which they hold in front of them.
Another later chronicler, Father Bernabe Cobo,
recounts similar scenes of fear and confusion.
The messengers who were much alarmed and frightened
as by something that they had never dreamed of,
told the Inca how some strange people never seen before had landed on the
beach. These men were stuffed into their
clothes which covered them from head to foot.
They were white and had beards and a ferocious appearance.
When the Inca asked from what part of the world they
had come, he was told that the messengers only knew that the strangers traveled
across the sea in large wooden houses.
As in the conquest of Mexico, Inca sources
recall the appearance of signs and portents
before the arrival of the Spanish. An eagle
had been seen being attacked by condors above the main square of Cusco. Comets
were sighted across the Andes, and many had reported seeing a blood-red
circle enveloping the moon. But no one knew what the arrival of
these foreigners could mean. In Panama, Pizarro finally sailed back
into port to the astonishment of many of the
people there. It had been more than 18 months since
they'd last been heard from, and most had assumed that he and his
meager crew had been lost at sea. But news of his
discovery didn't create the explosion of interest
that he had hoped. In fact, the governor of Panama refused
him permission to go on any more expeditions.
Pizarro was frustrated. The temptation of that
faraway empire, along with all its gold and glory,
began to possess him. We can imagine him lying awake at night in the hot Panama
air, listening to the whining of mosquitoes overhead and the cackling of
spider monkeys in the trees outside his cabin, all the while
thinking about the glory that might await him
far away on the shores of the other sea. In 1528, he decided to take a drastic
course of action. He would make his way back to Spain, with
the intention of gaining an audience with the king and queen
who ruled from their opulent court in Toledo.
The journey across the Atlantic could take six weeks
if the weather was good, and as long as two to three months
if it wasn't. Since he had last been to Spain,
Pizarro must have found it a much changed place.
He had known it as a wealthy medieval state,
but in the last three decades it had become the bustling hub
of a colonial empire. Its ports had swollen
with the vast wealth coming in on its treasure ships,
and now enormous thousand-ton galleons carrying hundreds of cannons would have
towered over the roofs of its houses. To this rough peasant farmer used to
life on the frontiers, the exquisite finery of the royal court
must have been staggering. It would have been an
incredible moment for this poor swineherd approaching the
royal couple surrounded by their finery, and given a
hero's welcome. The conqueror of Mexico, Hernan Cortes,
was at that time resident in the Spanish court, and his
presence may have gone some way to sway the royal couple into meeting
this man. Pizarro presented the king and queen
with gold and jewels, exotic birds and embroidered
cloth, even the fleece of a llama, along with a
newly drawn map of Peru. The royal couple must have
looked at these treasures hungrily. The capture of Mexico
only eight years before had swollen the royal treasury,
and now this commoner was offering to conquer
yet another indigenous empire and bring back
even more treasure. In 1529, on July the 26th, the queen of Spain
signed a charter authorizing the invasion of Peru,
which they had already decided to rename. Without the Inca having the slightest
knowledge of it, their land had been renamed New Castille
with the stroke of a pen 10,000 kilometers
away. Because you are Captain Francisco Pizarro, a resident of
Tierra Firme, called Castilla del Oro, you have taken
the charge of going to conquer, discover, pacify, and populate the coast
of the south sea of said land to the eastern part.
The queen also made Pizarro a knight of the Order of Santiago,
Spain's highest order of knighthood, established in the Middle Ages
to protect pilgrims. He was effectively being appointed
a crusader, and the crown gave Pizarro several Dominican monks to take with him
to underscore that he was on a religious mission. They gave him a
license to buy artillery in Panama, as well as
25 horses from Jamaica, and 30 African slaves from Cuba, their
foreheads branded with the letter R, showing that
they were royal possessions. But other than this, the
monarchy offered no direct support, instead promising as
usual that the men could keep a share of any
loot that their campaign acquired. For them, Pizarro's expedition
was low risk and potentially very high reward. By January 1530, Pizarro had returned to
Panama and prepared his expedition. He brought with him his fifteen-year-old
cousin Pedro as an assistant, who would later write
one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the
invasion. But Pizarro had his usual run of bad
luck on the voyage. Strong headwinds blowing up the Pacific
Coast stopped his progress for nearly two
weeks, and storms ravaged their ships. But finally,
he arrived back at the port town of Tumbes.
What he found there astonished him. The formerly booming town
was now completely abandoned. Francisco Xerez recalls the eerie sight
that the Spanish found. The town of Tumbes was destroyed.
It seemed to have been an important place, judging from some
edifices it contained. It had open courts and rooms,
and doors for defense, and was a good fortress against Indians.
The natives say that these edifices were abandoned by reason of a great
pestilence and by reason of the war. Only four or five of the largest houses
and the walls of the fortress remained standing,
and these were greatly damaged and looted of
all their finery. When the Spanish landed, they managed to find some locals hiding
nearby, who told them that in the civil war
raging over the empire, Tumbes had been loyal to King Huascar in
Cusco, and armies loyal to Atahualpa had punished them by destroying the town.
Pizarro was distraught. He'd spent much of the tough voyage encouraging his
men with stories of the rich town of Tumbes,
and now it was nothing but a pile of rubble.
He must have known that his position was precarious
and that his soldiers wouldn't remain loyal long
if he couldn't show them results. He knew that the capital of a great empire
lay somewhere up in the mountains, and after some time
recuperating in the ruins of Tumbes, he resolved
to march up into the hills and find it. Pizarro set out on the 16th of May, 1532,
with a company of 187 men made up of 62 cavalry and
102 foot soldiers, three artillery operators
with cannons, and twenty men with crossbows. Ahead of them lay a journey of
more than 2,000 kilometers across harsh,
arid deserts and snow-capped mountains. But the events
that would lead to the final fall of the Inca Empire
had now truly begun. It's not clear why Atahualpa allowed
Pizarro to found his settlement on the coast,
or to march unhindered into the mountains.
In the centuries since the conquest, many have proposed
their theories. Some chroniclers at the time
claimed that the Inca believed the Spanish to be gods.
Some indigenous chronicles like that of Titu
Cusi repeated this idea, although his account
is full of flattery for the Spanish, and perhaps he can't entirely be trusted on
this point. As we've seen in the conquest of Mexico
and the Aztec Empire, there's really little first-hand
evidence that indigenous people considered
Europeans to be divine, and if this was their initial impression,
it's one that they quickly dispensed with, as
Cieza de Leon recalls. As these Spaniards were so free
from all restraint and held the honor of the people so
lightly, in return for the hospitality and friendliness with which they were
received, the Indians saw how little reverence the
Spaniards felt for the sun and how shamelessly and without the fear
of god they violated the women, began to say that such people were not
sons of god but that they were worse than Supais,
which is their name for devil. The most likely answer is that Atahualpa
was simply too busy to deal with the Spanish. He was
engaged in a full-scale war for the survival of his kingdom
against his brother Huascar in the central Andes.
The chronicler Juan de Betanzos, who interviewed his Inca
in-laws in the 1550s about their memories of those days,
records that the news about Pizarro's landing
reached Atahualpa at exactly the moment that he heard of his brother's surrender
and capture, a moment of victory that must have
occupied all his thoughts. When Pizarro began his march up into the
hills, Atahualpa was just then in the middle of
a march of his own, a triumphal procession back to Cusco
with his army to destroy the last remaining noble
families loyal to his brother Huascar, to strip
Cusco of its wealth, and drag all its gold
back to his home of Quito where he would declare himself
the emperor of the Inca. The arrival of this small group of
foreigners was certainly a curiosity for him, but
there's no indication he considered them a threat,
or even considered them much at all.
They were very few in number, they weren't outwardly aggressive,
and his only concern must have been to prevent them from intervening
in the final stages of this civil war. Titu Cusi even records that Atahualpa was more
interested in hunting the Europeans’ horses,
which he believed to be a new kind of llama.
He brought no weapons for battle or harnesses for defense,
only knives and lassos for the purpose of hunting this new kind of llamas,
not concerned about the few people who'd come, or interested in who they were.
They brought only the knives for skinning and quartering the animals.
Atahualpa agreed to meet with the Spanish, and sent an envoy of guides with
instructions to lead them to a small town known as
Cajamarca. This was one of the stops along Atahualpa's
tour of the country, where he was already scheduled to
conduct a ritual in which he presented ceremonial weapons
to the local youths. Agreeing to meet the Spanish was a show
of friendship, but it's clear that Atahualpa also wanted
to give them a show of force. In the heart of his empire,
faced with the full might of the Inca army,
any aggression by these mysterious foreigners could be swiftly crushed.
Atahualpa seems to have determined to make Pizarro his subject,
and if that didn't work, he would kill him.
But things would not go according to his plan. Pizarro and his men traveled slowly
along the Inca roads, passing inland through the desert
forests of the Amotape Hills, and stopping every now and then at Inca
towns and storehouses. They were supported by a team of
enslaved men and women from Africa and Central
America, and by some locals that they had either
convinced or forced to follow them. Along the way,
when Pizarro met with any resistance, he made a point
of burning local chiefs alive, and he made an extensive use of this
terror tactic throughout his campaign. Over the course of this journey, he
burned dozens and maybe hundreds of men alive at the
stake. On their journey, they saw the desert
landscape watered by extensive irrigation systems,
with crops and animals in abundance. As they climbed higher into the
mountains, they marveled at the sophisticated bridges that crossed the
tumultuous mountain rivers, many built of stone, and some woven
out of ichu grass. Francisco Xerez notes the fine roads leading up through
the mountains. The road to Chinca passed through many
villages, and led from the river San Miguel. It was
paved and bounded on each side by a wall. Two carts could be driven abreast upon
it. From Chinca it led to Cusco, and in
many parts of it, rows of trees were planted on either
side for the sake of their shade on the road. As the Spaniards went, they learned more
about the lands ahead, sometimes through torturing locals, other
times from local lords who simply hated Atahualpa,
who had been loyal to Huascar and wanted to see their new emperor
fall. They found out that this King Atahualpa
ruled from a city called Cusco, and that he held a vast army
that could easily destroy them all. From one local lord, they heard about the
recent civil war. They saw the bodies of recently executed
men hanging by their feet at the entrance of
one town, and heard that this was a punishment for
backing the losing side in this war, as Francisco Xerez recounts. Until a year ago, all of those towns had
been for the king of Cusco, the son of the old king of Cusco, until
his brother Atahualpa rose up, and he has come
conquering the land, taking great tributes and services, and
every day he commits great cruelties on them. Despite all these warnings, Pizarro
decided on a course of action. He would meet this Inca king and
take him prisoner. In this plan of action, Pizarro was
clearly imitating his cousin Hernan Cortes,
who had effectively kidnapped the Emperor Moctezuma
and used him to take control of his empire.
But Cortes hadn't invented this tactic, and it was actually extremely common
among all the early colonists of the Americas.
Pizarro himself had a long history of hostage-taking
in Nicaragua and Panama, and it was common to capture local chiefs
and force their tribes to pay a ransom to get them back.
If this King Atahualpa was as rich as Pizarro had heard,
then the ransom to be gathered from his capture would be truly
enormous. The climb into the mountains was difficult.
As the roads soared higher into the rocky passes,
Pizarro's horsemen had to dismount, and led their horses
up narrow trails so steep that in some places,
they had been carved into stone staircases.
Higher up, the snows were an unfamiliar challenge
after so many months fighting through baking tropical heat,
as Francisco Xerez records. The cold is so great on these mountains
that some of the horses accustomed to the warmth of the valleys
were frostbitten. At one point, some food and supplies
arrived for the Spanish from Atahualpa, along with his wishes that
they should come to meet him soon. Finally,
after weeks of travelling, the Spanish found their way
to the wide valley where the town of Cajamarca
stood. The bowl of the valley was surrounded by
green hills, and the valley bottom was marshy,
fed by the waters of three rivers. When Pizarro and his men finally arrived
at Cajamarca, they found the army of the Emperor
Atahualpa encamped in the hills outside the town,
numbering anywhere between 50,000 to 80,000 men. These were the crack troops of
the Inca, battle-hardened from their campaigns in
the civil war. They must have looked with curiosity but also a little derision
at the ragtag group of Spanish soldiers, filthy from their weeks on the road, pink
in the face and out of breath in the mountain air,
many of them covered with boils and sores from
tropical diseases. They must have looked like a sorry lot
to the grand army of the Inca. Francisco Xerez recounts the
tense atmosphere on Pizarro's arrival. The governor arrived at this town of
Cajamarca on Friday the 15th of November, 1532,
at the hour of vespers. In the middle of the town there was a great
open space surrounded by walls and houses.
The governor occupied this position, and sent a messenger to Atahualpa
to announce his arrival to arrange a meeting
that he might show him where to lodge. Meanwhile,
he ordered the town to be examined, with a view to discovering a stronger
position where he might pitch the camp.
The Emperor Atahualpa was still in seclusion
as part of the ritual he was conducting, and he didn't hurry out to meet the
Spanish. Pizarro approached from the northwest
along the old imperial highway, and when they arrived, he ordered his
artillery men to set up their cannons on the
ceremonial plaza in the middle of the city, in full view
of the encamped Inca army. The Inca soldiers
must have looked on with curiosity, but they
did nothing to stop them. That night, a storm came in over the
hills, bringing rain and hail. The hailstones
must have plinked and plunked on the helmets and
armor of the Spanish as they encamped among the temple stones
and gazed with narrowed eyes at the lights of the Inca camp,
which must have stretched across the hills for a distance of miles,
as Xerez recalls. All the men were on foot outside the tents,
with their arms consisting of long lances like pikes
stuck into the ground. There seemed to be upwards of 30,000 men in the
camp. In the morning, they rode out to meet
Atahualpa. At first, he continued to play it cool,
and showed little interest in them. In fact, he
acted bored by their presence. Then he complained that they had treated
some of his people poorly on the coast, burning people alive and abusing the
priestesses in the temples. He even produced an iron collar that had
been brought to him, and that he said the Spanish had forced
one of his allies to wear. Pizarro denied all this, and promised
that all he wanted was to swear loyalty to Atahualpa and
fight on his behalf. The Inca
emperor soon let down his guard, and began to warm to the idea of
welcoming the Spanish as subjects. He suggested
that they should go together and crush a local chief
who was defying his rule, and Pizarro happily agreed, saying that all the job
would take would be ten Spanish horsemen. Atahualpa
found this funny, and to seal the deal, they drank
maize beer together from golden cups that Pizarro must have noticed with some
interest. Then, they agreed to meet again in the grand plaza of Cajamarca the
following day. Both men left the meeting satisfied.
Atahualpa seems to have set his fears aside,
while Pizarro returned to his camp to hatch his plan
for the following day. As the sun rose, still under cover of
darkness, Pizarro and his men set their trap.
He hid his cavalry inside the great halls that surrounded the plaza,
while his artillery pieces were loaded and readied to fire on top of the
ceremonial temple. Now, all they had to do
was wait. But Atahualpa as usual was in no hurry. Pizarro and his men
waited and waited, and then finally, as the afternoon grew late, they heard
the sound of the vast Inca army drawing near.
Many of the Spanish soldiers were terrified.
Their lookouts announced that Atahualpa had arrived
at the head of his army. But Atahualpa for his part made a number
of bad decisions. He had originally planned
to enter the city with a troop of his well-armed soldiers,
but his meeting with Pizarro the previous day seems to have set his mind
completely at ease. At the last minute, he elected instead to march into
Cajamarca with only his ceremonial troops and
servants, most of which were unarmed. Xerez
recalls the colorful scene that unfolded before the Spanish
as the Inca king entered the courtyard, resplendent
in full ceremonial dress. First came a squadron of Indians dressed
in a livery of different colours like a chessboard.
They advanced, removing the straws from the ground and sweeping the road.
Next came three squadrons in different dresses, dancing and singing,
then came a number of men with armor, large metal plates, and crowns of gold
and silver. Among them was Atahualpa in a litter
lined with plumes of macaw's feathers of many colours, and adorned with plates
of gold and silver. The Inca army behind them was also not
prepared for a battle, and were instead arraigned for a
ceremony. They were stretched out in a long column
along the road approaching the city, which cut a narrow
path over the marshy land, and many of them
would not even have realized that something was wrong
before it was too late. When Atahualpa and his ceremonial guard
entered the plaza, Pizarro gave the order to attack.
All at once, the Spanish unleashed hell. The cannons would have gone off with a
terrifying crack, and cannonballs would have whizzed into
the Inca lines, smashing bodies and bones to pulp as they went.
Spanish arquebuses fired into the Inca procession,
and then the cavalry hiding in the temples came
charging out. The Spanish horses, guns, and cannons were three weapons that
the Inca had never even imagined, let alone encountered
before, and the effect of being attacked with
all three at once must have simply frozen them in their
tracks. Francisco Xerez writes about the
pandemonium that unfolded in the main square of
Cajamarca. Then the guns were fired off, the
trumpets were sounded, and the troops, both horse and foot, sallied forth.
On seeing the horse's charge, many of the Indians who were in the open space
fled, and such was the force with which they ran that they broke down part of
the wall surrounding it, and many fell over each other. The
horsemen rode them down, killing and wounding and following in
pursuit. The infantry made so good an assault upon those that remained in such
a short time, most of them were put to the sword. The Emperor Atahualpa's escort stampeded
in a panic back towards the rest of their still
advancing army, and the resulting collision of
people saw many crushed underfoot. Francisco Xerez
recalls the panic that overtook them. So great was the terror of the Indians at
seeing the governor force his way through them,
at hearing the fire of the artillery and beholding the charging of horses,
a thing never before heard of, that they thought more of flying to save their
lives than of fighting. The Spanish cavalry rode back and forth
through the throngs of fleeing Inca, and slaughtered as many as
7,000 of them over the following two hours,
as the sun set red over the city. The death toll amounted to something
like 40 dead for each Spanish soldier. The Inca
chronicler Titu Cusi records the panic that spread
through the Inca ranks. The Indians were thus penned up like
sheep in this enclosed plaza, unable to move
because there were so many of them. Also, they had no weapons, as they had not
brought any, being so little concerned about the
Spaniards. The Spaniards stormed with great
fury to the center of the plaza where the Inca's seat was placed.
Titu Cusi recalls bitterly the slaughter of that day.
Because the Indians uttered loud cries, they started killing them with the
horses, the swords, or guns like one kills sheep
without anyone being able to resist them. Of more than 10,000, not even
200 escaped. As darkness fell, Atahualpa himself was
captured, and Pizarro ordered his men to fall back
into the temple. There, the Inca emperor seethed, stunned
and speechless. We can only imagine the shock
and rage he must have felt, to have fought for so long against his brother
Huascar, to have the crown of the empire come
so close to his grasp, to have sacrificed so much, only to have this bolt from the
blue strike him down. He must have sat there
in pure disbelief, trying to understand what
had just happened. Francisco Xerez captures some of this in his account. The governor went to his lodgings with
his prisoner Atahualpa, despoiled of his robes, which the Spanish
had torn off in pulling him off the litter.
The governor presently ordered native clothes to be brought, and when Atahualpa
was dressed, he made him sit near him, and soothed his
rage and agitation at finding himself so quickly fallen from his higher state.
Pizarro, himself likely a little stunned at the speed and the totality of his
victory, is recorded to have swelled with a
number of incredible boasts. Among other things, the governor said to
him, “Do not take it as an insult that you've
been defeated and taken prisoner, for with the Christians who come with me,
though so few in number, I have conquered greater kingdoms than
yours and have defeated other more powerful lords than you,
imposing upon them the dominion of the emperor, whose vassal I
am, and who is the king of Spain and of the universal world.
We come to conquer this land by his command.” What happened next has passed into
legend. Francisco Xerez recounts the glorious
promises that Atahualpa made. Atahualpa feared that the Spaniards would
kill him, so he told the governor that he would give his captors a great quantity
of gold and silver. The governor asked him, “How much can you
give and in what time?” Atahualpa said,
“I will give gold enough to fill a room 22 feet long
and 17 wide, up to a white line which is halfway up the wall.”
The height would be that of a man's stature and a half.
He said that up to that mark he would fill the room with different kinds of
gold vessels such as jars, pots, vases, besides lumps
and other pieces. As for silver, he said he would fill the
whole chamber with it twice over. He undertook to do this in two months.
The governor told him to send off messengers with this object,
and that when it was accomplished, he need have no fear. Atahualpa made good on his promise.
Over the next months, gold flooded into the town of Cajamarca from all over the
empire until the room was filled with a glittering pile of ornaments and vases. They brought many vases, jars, and pots of
gold, and much silver, and he said that more was on the road.
Thus on some days, 20,000. On others,
30,000. On others, 50,000 or 60,000
pesos of gold arrived in vases, great pots weighing two
or three arrobas, and other vessels. The governor ordered
it all to be put in the house where Atahualpa had his guards
until he had accomplished what he had promised.
This offer by Atahualpa is often portrayed as a desperate bid
by a terrified man bargaining for his life.
But given the hand he was dealt, Atahualpa was actually making
a pretty calculated play. Atahualpa regaled the Spaniards with
tales of the vast wealth of the Inca Empire, and especially
emphasized the city of Cusco as the jewel in its crown. He urged them
to march there and loot it, and here we can see that Atahualpa's shock
was already transforming into a kind of cold
calculation. In fact, he had himself been intending to march
to Cusco and loot it. He conveniently neglected
to mention his own city of Quito to the Spanish,
where he had been intending to move his imperial court.
He had quickly determined the Spaniard's weakness,
that is, their obsession with gold above all
else, and he would play on it in order to buy
time and attempt to tip the scales back in his favor. He knew that filling a room
with gold would take weeks and months, and would give him
the time to dispose of his imprisoned brother and
any other nobles who could still oppose him. Under the
guise of sending out messengers to gather gold,
he could get word out to all corners of his empire,
and the Spanish didn't know that the rainy season
was just beginning in the Andes. Even a short delay
meant that they would soon face increased snowfall.
The high mountain tundras would turn to impassable mud
that would isolate them from their supply lines on the coast.
In addition, the weight of the gold would stop them from moving quickly
and potentially expose them to attack. Atahualpa's promise also ensured that
they would stay in the relatively unimportant town of
Cajamarca to wait for their gold, meaning that they
couldn't march on to the more important centers of Cusco
or Quito. So, Atahualpa's messengers came back and forth to him during his
months of captivity. Only a few days after his capture, he
heard some good news. News of the situation had reached the
soldiers who were transporting his brother Huascar,
and they had immediately executed their prisoner.
Atahualpa was now the only remaining Inca prince
with a strong claim to the throne, and he knew
that the Spanish would need him to rule the empire on their behalf.
In just a matter of days, he had actually turned this situation
quite heavily in his favor, and the best part of the deal was,
the gold that poured in every day to fill that room in Cajamarca
didn't even belong to him. His treasury in the city of Quito
remained untouched while he directed the Spanish to exactly where to find the
gold of his political rivals. They sent out riders to Cusco, and
Atahualpa's soldiers showed them exactly where to loot the
treasures from the fine houses of the nobles still loyal to his
dead brother and any who still challenged his claim.
This was the work not of a desperate man but of an incredibly shrewd political
operator. When the rulers of the powerful city and
shrine of Pachacamac came to meet Pizarro, Atahualpa saw an
opportunity to rid himself of these powerful rivals.
He told the Spanish that these men were thieves and liars,
and that the shrine was incredibly wealthy. Pizarro
obligingly put these lords in chains and sent out horsemen to strip their
temples of their wealth. The Spanish were now a weapon that
Atahualpa could aim at will with just a few words
in the right ears. The problem for Atahualpa was
that others would soon learn this lesson, too. His great rivals, the lords of Cusco,
would soon become more confident in speaking to Pizarro and his men,
and they happily began to spread rumors among the Spanish. They passed on news
that Atahualpa was planning to attack Pizarro,
that an army of 200,000 of his frontier warriors
were marching their way, along with a horde of 30,000
cannibals hungry for Spanish flesh. Fatally for the Inca king, this is one
outlandish rumor that Pizarro seems to have believed.
Regardless of its truth, Pizarro made a rash
and impulsive decision, as Francisco Xerez
recalls. When the governor, with the occurrence of the offices of his majesty
and the captains and persons of experience sentenced Atahualpa to death,
his sentence was that for the treason he had committed,
he should die by burning unless he became a Christian.
They brought out Atahualpa to execution and when he came into the square,
he said he would become a Christian. The governor was informed and ordered him
to be baptized. The governor then ordered that he should not be burned,
but that he should be fastened to a pole in the open space and strangled.
This was done, and the body was left until the morning of the next day.
Such was the end of this man. He died with great fortitude
and without showing any feeling. On the Inca side, the chronicler Titu
Cusi and nephew of Atahualpa, relates these
events briefly and with little colour.
The Spaniard positioned his spies everywhere
and ordered highest alert. Without delay, he had my uncle Atahualpa brought out
of prison into the open and without any resistance, garroted him on a
pole in the middle of the square. The Spanish never made any attempt to
fortify the city against the supposed attack, or to
prepare themselves for battle. Pizarro sent out a scout to determine
whether any army was headed their way, but no sign of it
was ever found. The Spanish dug a grave for Atahualpa and left the
last emperor of the Inca to the worms. After the death of Atahualpa, the Spanish
installed the first of what would be many Inca puppet
emperors, one of Atahualpa's brothers named Tupac
Huallpa, but he died of European diseases in only a matter of months.
Next they crowned one of Atahualpa's brothers,
a man named Manco Inca Yapanqui. He was the father of the chronicler
Titu Cusi, who we've heard a fair amount from
already. He was a loyal puppet king to the
Spanish for a while, but as soon as he saw his opening, he
rebelled. He laid siege to the Spanish in Cusco,
and sent another army to attack the new capital of Lima, too,
resulting in the deaths of as many as 500
European settlers. He set up a rebel state in the remote jungles of
Vilcabamba, where the Andes slope down into the
Amazon rainforest. This was the last fortress of the free
Inca, and they would hold out against the
Spanish for a further 30 years. Pizarro's cousin Pedro
recalls the audacity of this rebellion. Manco Inca took refuge in the Andes
which is a land of enormous rugged mountains
with very bad passes and where it's
impossible for horses to enter. From there, he sent many high-ranking
captains all over the realm in order to gather up
all the natives who could fight and who could go with them to lay siege
to Cusco and to kill all of us Spaniards who were there. As the years passed, countless puppet
emperors would be installed to rule over the Andes, but none of them
lasted for very long. Several were assassinated by their own
people, who looked on them quite rightly as
collaborators with the foreign invaders. Others escaped into the mountains and
became rebel chiefs, raising armies against the
Spanish or fleeing to the free Inca fortress of
Vilcabamba. In fact, for at least the next 50 years,
the Spanish fought a running series of guerrilla
counter insurgencies against the Inca, struggling to pacify a land that they
had long since declared conquered, as the French monk and explorer Marcos
de Niza recalls. It was only because of this maltreatment
that the peoples of Peru were finally provoked into revolt and took up arms
against the Spanish, as indeed they had every cause to do,
for the Spanish never treated them squarely, never honoured any of the
undertakings they gave, but rather set about destroying the
entire territory for no good reason and without any
justification. Eventually the people decided that
they would rather die fighting than put up any longer with what was being done
to them. In the year 1616, the Quechuan nobleman
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, authored a remarkable text
known as The Letter to a King. In it, he recounts the abuses and injustices
of the Spanish colonialists and denounces the hardship
exacted on his people. It amounts to one of the first
full-throated denunciations of the colonial system
ever written by one of its subjects. The Spaniards in Peru should be made to
refrain from arrogance and brutality towards the
Indians. Just imagine that our people were to
arrive in Spain and start confiscating property, sleeping
with the women and girls, chastising the men, and treating
everybody like pigs. What would the Spaniards do then? Even if
they tried to endure their lot with resignation,
they would still be liable to be arrested, tied to a pillar,
and flogged. If they rebelled and attempted to kill their persecutors,
they would certainly go to their death on the gallows. Francisco Pizarro had dreamed of one day
surpassing his younger cousin Cortes in the glory of conquest,
and by many measures, he had. He had destroyed an
empire ten times the size of the Aztec Empire
with about a third of the manpower, and he had done so
at an enormous distance from the nearest friendly port in Panama.
The writer Francisco Xerez put this achievement
bluntly. When in ancient of modern times has so great an enterprise been
undertaken by so few against so many odds,
and to so varied a climate and seas, and at such
great distances conquer the unknown? The chronicler Cieza de Leon even places
Pizarro on the pedestal of heroes like Alexander
the Great. Many nations have excelled others and
overcome. The few have conquered the many before.
They say Alexander the Great, with 33,000 Macedonians, undertook to
conquer the world. So with the Romans too, but no nation
has with such resolution passed through such labors,
or such long periods of starvation, or covered such immense distances
as the Spanish have done. In a period of 70 years,
they have overcome and opened up a new world greater than the one of which we
acknowledge, exploring what was unknown and never
before seen. But Pizarro's days of glory would be
short-lived. In the ten years that he ruled over Peru,
he presided over the steady collapse and disintegration
of the entire society that he had once heard
such incredible stories about. Much of the local population was reduced
to the level of serfs serving European lords. The Europeans
systematically stripped the temples and palaces of the Inca,
demolishing their cities stone by stone, and reusing the material to build their
own palaces and churches. Despite the
destruction of their society and the repression that they suffered,
the people of the Andes would continue to fight
to keep their indigenous culture and the memory of their history alive. The writers of the enigmatic document
known as the Huarochiri manuscript, writing at the end of the 16th century
and under the direction of that Spanish priest who considered their old gods to
be devils, wrote the following introduction to
their book, which to this day stands as one of the greatest sources of
information about the lives of these mountain people
before the arrival of Europeans. If the ancestors of the people called
Indians had known writing in earlier times, then the lives
they lived would not have faded from view.
As the mighty past of the Spanish is visible until now,
so too would theirs be, but since things are as they are, and since nothing has
been written until now, I set forth here the lives of the
ancestors of the Huarochiri people who all descended from one forefather.
What faith they held, how they lived from their dawning age onward,
those things and more. Village by village, it will all be written down. A fifth of the gold that Pizarro had
accumulated at Cajamarca was sent back to the Spanish
crown. The rest Pizarro kept. He melted much of
it down into ingots and divided it among his men.
They were now richer than many of them had ever imagined possible.
Some returned to Spain while others stayed behind
in Peru and established themselves as colonial lords.
One chronicler wrote in ironic terms about the fate of one of these
conquistadors who returned home, a man named Mansio Serra de Leguizamón,
whose descent into gambling and vice was representative of the later lives of
many of these soldiering adventurers. At the time the Spaniards first entered
the city of Cusco, the gold image of the sun from its
temple was taken in booty by a nobleman and conquistador by the
name of Leguizamón who I knew and was still alive when I came to Spain.
He lost it in a night of gambling, giving rise to the joke
‘he gambled the sun before the dawn.’ Greed and corruption also crippled the
colony of Peru, now referred to by its new name of New
Castille. As news of Pizarro's conquest spread,
Spaniards from all across the colonial Americas
began to flock to Peru. In 1534, a large fleet of twelve
ships arrived that was led by a man named Pedro de Alvarado. He
was a feared conquistador who had joined Cortes on his conquest of
Mexico. As we saw in Episode 9, he was the captain who had been left
behind in Tenochtitlan, and who had slaughtered the Mexica
people as they celebrated their festival of Toxcatl.
Since then, he had developed a reputation for his cruelty.
He arrived in Peru with hundreds of Spanish men and women,
along with a sizable number of slaves, artillery,
crossbows, and war dogs. A full party of settlers prepared to colonize
this new land. He was among the first to follow in
Pizarro's footsteps, but he would be far from the last. Before long, these new arrivals came into
conflict, and the colony was plunged into civil
war. Soon, Pizarro was fighting one of his
former captains over who would rule in Cusco.
The reign of the conquistadors in Peru was not the enlightened rule of the
glorious crusading Christian knights that they had imagined, but resembled
something like rival mafias fighting over gangland
territory. These wars further devastated the land,
and left what remained of the monumental works of the
Inca in ruins. The free Inca in the rebel city of
Vilcabamba soon learned to bridge the technological
divide with the Spanish, and it took them only a couple of
decades. As early as 1537, the king Manco Inca
defeated the Spanish at Pilcosuni, and they came into possession
of modern weapons including arquebuses, artillery, and crossbows. Just one year
later, Manco Inca was recorded to be skilled
enough to ride a horse into battle. In the early 1540s,
several Spanish refugees would teach Inca
warriors how to use Spanish weapons, and by the 1560s,
it was recorded that many Inca had developed considerable skill
in using early firearms and riding horses.
But it would not be enough. The last Inca ruler
to lead the free city of Vilcabamba was a man
named Tupac Amaru. On June the 24th of the year 1572,
a Spanish army led by veteran conquistador
Martin Hurtado de Arbieto, made a final advance
on the Inca's remote jungle capital. The city finally fell to Spanish cannons,
and the Inca king Tupac Amaru fled the city.
He was finally caught by the Spanish in the year 1572,
and marched back to Cusco to face a military trial
with five of his generals. These generals were all
hanged, while Tupac Amaru was sentenced to be beheaded.
On the day of his execution, a scaffold was erected
in front of the main cathedral in the central square of Cusco,
all draped in black cloth. It's reported that between 10,000 to
15,000 people came out to watch, and the plaza was so
densely crowded that the chief officer of the court had
to ride his horse through the people to clear a path. Tupac Amaru
was carried through the crowd with his arms tied behind his back.
When he mounted the scaffold, accompanied by the bishop of Cusco,
the entire crowd let out a blood-curdling wail of
mourning, as one eyewitness named Martín de Murúa
recalls. As the magnitude of Indians who
completely filled the square saw that sad and lamentable spectacle
and knew that their Inca and lord was about to die,
they deafened the skies, making them reverberate with their cries and wailing,
and their relatives who were near cried out with tears and sobs.
Tupac Amaru reached out his hand. He gave a clap,
at which all the people fell silent. This was a manifest sign of the
obedience, fear, and respect that the Indians had for their Incas and
lords. With just a clap, they silenced the cries and tears coming
from the heart that are so difficult to hide. Then, the emperor of the free Inca let
out these final words. “Pacha Kamaq, witness how my enemy shed
my blood.” With him, the Inca line came to an end. Pizarro had wanted to be a conqueror
like Julius Caesar, and in the manner of his death, he got
his wish. He was in his late 60s in June of 1541
when a group of armed men loyal to one of his rivals
burst into his palace with daggers and assassinated him,
stabbing him multiple times. He managed to kill two of his attackers
and wound a third before being stabbed in
the throat and then falling to the floor, where his
attackers flocked around him and struck him again
and again. I wonder whether in those moments he
thought about the Inca emperor Atahualpa, and the look in his
eyes as he had been strangled against that
pole in Cajamarca. Perhaps then he might have
understood what that look meant, to have gained everything you had
ever fought for, only to have it snatched away in the
violent hands of another. In the early 1930s, the sculptor
Ramsay MacDonald created three copies of a bronze statue depicting a European
soldier with sword drawn, riding a horse, the
visor of his swooping 15th century helmet
cocked open. He originally intended to sell the
statue to Mexico as a depiction of the conqueror Hernan
Cortes, but the statue was rejected. Instead,
MacDonald approached the Peruvian government
and sold them the same statue, saying that it could just as easily
depict Pizarro. The statue was erected in the Peruvian
capital of Lima in 1934, and perhaps
it's a fitting piece of irony that even in death,
Pizarro found himself playing the eternal
second place to his younger and more refined cousin. In 2003, facing a rising swell of
popular hatred towards him and a growing sense of
indigenous identity in Peru, Pizarro's statue was
removed from its position beside the government palace
and was placed in a more obscure spot in a nearby park, where it remains to
this day. Since the 19th century, a mummified body
found in the Cathedral of Cusco was claimed to be the body of Francisco
Pizarro, and many people came to pay their
respects. But more modern analysis has shown that
the body belongs to someone else.
As the Inca Empire fractured and collapsed
and its ruins were built over by the Spanish,
only those rare places that the Europeans couldn't reach
or didn't know about were preserved. One of these was the cloud outpost of
Machu Picchu. In fact, the Spanish never even heard
about its existence. Sometime in the 1530s, as the Inca Empire
collapsed, the people who operated it as a royal
retreat or a cocoa plantation stopped receiving
supplies from the rest of the empire. They simply left it behind to crumble
into the hillside. The thatched roofs of this mountainside
town would have been the first to rot and
fall in, with vines and plants taking root among the eaves, putting down
roots, and rotting away the roof beams.
As the cloud rolled in over the hills day
after day, mosses and lichen would have begun to grow over the walls,
and the immaculate terraces would have been completely covered
in a winding growth of weeds. Little by little, the town of Machu
Picchu would have disappeared beneath the shade of the trees until
nothing remained to show that it had been there at all. The site of Vilcabamba, the last fortress
of the Inca where they held out for more than 30
years against the Spanish, was also abandoned and its location
forgotten. Its walls crumbled, and silk cotton trees put their roots
down between its stones. Today, it's located in a place known
as Espiritu Pampa, or the plain of ghosts. On July the 2nd,
1964, the flamboyant explorer and archaeologist Gene Savoy was the
first to travel to these ruins and correctly identify it as the last
Inca stronghold of Vilcabamba. Savoy
writes movingly about the eerie scenes as he traversed this series of
melancholy ruins crumbling beneath the green twilight of
the forest. The Inca road we have been following
comes to a halt. I have the men spread out. It is a half
hour before we find the groups of buildings.
The stonework is of better quality than what we have seen before.
It is evident that the cut white limestone blocks had once fit snugly
together, although many had now been broken by
feeder vines that had wormed their way between the stones and pried them apart.
One of the buildings, a rectangular construction with two doorways,
guards a green lit temple, a high elevated bulwark of stone consisting of
rooms with niches and fallen door lintels,
inner courtyards, and enclosures. It must have been very impressive when the Incas
lived here. A large sacred boulder rests beside one
of the walls. It looks as if it may have fallen from
the top of the platform wall. A magnificent strangler fig with a
spreading crown some 100 feet above our heads locks one of the walls
in a grip of gnarled roots; some of the rocks are squeezed out of
place by its vice-like grip. Rattan vines hang down from its upper
branches, forming a screen through which we must
cut our way. I want to end this episode by reading a
piece of Inca poetry supposedly composed by that great Inca
king Pachacuti Inca Yapanqui in the dawning
age of their empire. It's a prayer to the creator god
Viracocha, asking him to protect and keep the
people of the Andes safe. We can imagine that as their world
began to fall apart, the people of the Andes must have
whispered this prayer to themselves, over their children and their families,
and over the towns and cities nestled in the narrow valleys of the
mountains. As you listen, try to imagine what it
would feel like to watch the great society of the Inca
deteriorate around you beneath the twin forces of plague and civil war.
Imagine watching the greed of the nobles tear your land apart,
while a foreign power with guns and horses
arrives to dictate your fate and demolish your cities brick by brick.
Imagine the sorrow you would feel watching the blooming terraces empty
and fill with weeds, the thatched roofs falling in,
the wind howling through the halls, and the walls
crumbling as the cloud washed in, relentless and forgetful over the hills. Oh, Viracocha, where are you? Outside,
inside, above this world in the clouds, below this world in the shades? Hear me.
Answer me. Take my words to your heart. For ages without
end, let me live. Grasp me in your arms. Hold me in your hands.
Receive this offering wherever you are, my lord Viracocha. In shining clothes, let
man live well. Let woman live well. Let the peoples multiply, live
blessed and prosperous lives. Preserve what you have infused with life
for ages without end. Hold it in your heart.
Before you stand your servants and the poor to whom you have given
life and put in their places, let them be happy and blessed
with their children and descendants. Let them not
fall into veiled dangers along the lonely road.
Let them live many years without weakening or loss.
Let them eat. Let them drink. Oh my lord, my
creator, let them increase so the people do not suffer, and not
suffering, believe in you. Let it not frost.
Let it not hail. Preserve all things in peace. Thank you once again for listening to
The Fall of Civilizations Podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for
this episode; Annie Kelly, Jamie Tanner, Gerald Condlin,
Peter Walters, Lachlan Lucas, and Jimmy Lai. Special thanks
go to Edith Quispe and her grandmother Celia Quispe
for helping us hear the ancient poetry of King Pachacuti
in its original Ayacuchano Quechua. Much of the music for this episode was
composed and compiled by Pavlos Kapralos using authentic Andean
instruments. If you enjoyed these traditional
performances, they will be available to download for all Patreon subscribers.
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