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Fall of Civilizations Podcast
12. The Inca - Cities in the Cloud
03:20:54
High up on the craggy peaks of the Urubamba Canyo…
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- [00:25]
Paul Cooper
In the year 1911, the Young Explorer Hiram Bingham was exploring the mountainous cloud forests of Peru. He was chasing a rumor that had been circulating for many years, a rumor that an entire lost city might lie somewhere high in the Peruvian Andes, in a valley known as Urubamba. Bingham was scared, skeptical. But upon hearing a tip from a local guide, he decided to climb to the top of the precarious mountain trail and investigate. He later wrote about how his journey unfolded.
- [01:10]
Hiram Bingham
So lofty are the peaks on either side that although the trail was frequently shadowed by dense tropical jungle, many of the mountains were capped with snow. There seemed to be little in the way of ruins, and I began to think that my time had been wasted. However, the view was magnificent. On all sides of us rose the magnificent peaks of the urubamba Canyon, while 2,000ft below us, the rushing waters of the noisy river.
- [01:42]
Paul Cooper
Bingham climbed a little higher, hacking through the dense forest and fighting off the effects of altitude sickness that would often creep up on travelers in the high passes of the Andes. And soon he stumbled across something that must have made his heart skip a beat.
- [02:05]
Hiram Bingham
Presently, we found ourselves in the midst of a tropical forest, beneath the shade of whose trees we could make out a maze of ancient walls, the ruins of buildings made of blocks of granite, some of which were beautifully fitted together in the most refined style of Inca architecture.
- [02:26]
Paul Cooper
Bingham was impressed, but the more he explored, the more he realized that this was no mere scattering of ruins.
- [02:36]
Hiram Bingham
A few roads farther along, we came to a little open space on which there were two splendid temples or palaces. The superior character of the stonework, the presence of these splendid edifices, and of what appeared to be an unusually large number of finely constructed stone dwellings led me to believe that this might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America.
- [03:01]
Paul Cooper
His track turned into a frenetic scramble as crumbling ruins gave way to yet more and more ruins, and it became clear that a large settlement did indeed lie here under the dense scrub and undergrowth.
- [03:19]
Hiram Bingham
For an hour and 20 minutes we had a hard climb. A good part of the distance we went on all fours, sometimes holding on by our fingernails. Here and there, a primitive ladder made from the roughly notched trunk of a small tree was placed in such a way as to help one over what might otherwise have been an impassable cliff. The heat was excessive.
- [03:44]
Paul Cooper
The ruins that Bingham had discovered were the remains of a royal estate of the kings of a people known as the Inca. It had lain completely abandoned for nearly four centuries on top of the craggy peaks of the Urubamba Valley. Today, it is one of the most recognizable and distinctive ruined places in the world, and it is known as Machu Picchu. It had once been an outpost of an empire that stretched right across the continent of South America and formed its most extensive and sophisticated civilization. An empire that had tamed one of the most hostile environments on Earth. As Bingham explored the overgrown ruins over the following weeks and months, clearing away the vegetation that rolled over these ancient walls, he must have asked himself, how had the people of this region built such a mighty fortress in the clouds? How had this great city gone undiscovered for so many centuries? And with no signs of war or destruction on its stones, what in all the world had happened to the Inca people of the cloud forest? My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at the story of the Inca Empire. I want to explore how this unique culture grew up in one of the most extreme mountain landscapes that our planet can provide. I want to explain how they built the largest empire to ever arise in the Western Hemisphere. And I want to tell the story of how their society finally came to an end in the most dramatic and cataclysmic way imaginable. The Andes Mountains are the largest continental mountain range in the world. They stretch more than 7,000km across the South American landmass from north to south, a distance that stretches about a sixth of the way around the circumference of the Earth. They form part of the eastern edge of what's called the Pacific Ring of Fire, a nearly continuous chain of volcanic belts, lava filled oceanic trenches, and towering mountains that stretches right around the coast of the Pacific Ocean. This is one of the most seismically active areas in the world, with around 90% of the world's earthquakes and about 75% of its volcanoes occurring along this enormous ring. Since their formation around 10 to 6 million years ago, these soaring peaks have had a dramatic effect on the circulation of the Earth's atmosphere, and they have given rise to some of the world's most extreme landscapes. To the east, they act as a wall to the continent's rainclouds, pooling and gathering them and resulting in the vast jungle rainforest of the Amazon, home to over 400 billion trees. Although the Andes Mountains sit right beside the Pacific coast and are nearly 3,000 kilometers from the Atlantic, still more than 90% of the water that falls in these mountains will drain into the Atlantic Ocean. These rainwaters follow the enormous watercourse of the Amazon river and bring a superabundance of life to this vast plain. But the land on the Pacific side of the mountains couldn't be more different. In fact, the desert that has formed on the western side of the mountains is the driest place on Earth, and it is known as the Atacama. The Atacama Desert may be the oldest desert on Earth and has experienced its extreme climate for at least the last 3 million years. It's so dry because the winds that blow up the coast of Chile and Peru are cold winds from the Antarctic, parched of any moisture by the sub zero conditions of the Pole, the Atacama is so arid that even though it contains several mountains higher than 6,000 meters, many are still completely free of glaciers. Some weather stations set up in the desert in modern times have never detected any any rain. This extreme aridity, as well as its broken rocky landscape, means this desert is frequently used as a filming location for science fiction films set on the planet Mars. In fact, in 2003, a team of scientists even went out into the driest parts of the Atacama Desert and repeated the same tests that the Mars Viking rovers had used to try to find life on the surface of the Red Planet. The tests returned negative, detecting no signs of life. But across this desert, about 40 rivers do flow down from the mountains. These desert rivers form form rich oases. And for at least the last 10,000 years, humans have made their home here. This was one of the last stops on humanity's journey. Of more than 30,000 kilometers from the deserts of Ethiopia. Many common plants were domesticated and farmed in these valleys, which receive virtually no rainfall. Foods like avocados, peanuts, beans, squash, peppers, sweet potatoes, and a variety of fruits, including pineapples and guavas. And it's in these fertile river valleys that the very earliest civilizations of this region began. In Inca conceptions, the universe was created by a God named Viracocha. He also created mankind and crafted humans out of stone, as one surviving Inca hymn recounts.
- [11:51]
Unnamed Inca Historian
O creator, root of all, Viracocha, end of all Lord in shining garments, who infuses life and sets all things in order, saying let there be man, let there be women, molder maker to all things you have given life. Watch over Them keep them living prosperously, fortunately in safety and peace.
- [12:24]
Paul Cooper
In fact, the Inca were only the latest in a long string of human civilizations that rose and fell in the region of the Andes. The coastal basin of the Atacama Desert is thought to be one of the few so called cradles of civilization in the world. Along with others like Mexico, the Indus Valley, the basin of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in China and the Tigris Euphrates Valley in Mesopotamia. All places where city dwelling human societies have independently risen up. Some memory of these early days is recalled in the Incas version of their own history known as the Chronicle of the Incas.
- [13:15]
Unnamed Inca Historian
In ancient times they say, the land and the provinces of Peru were dark and neither light nor daylight existed. In this time there lived certain people who had a lord who ruled over them and to whom they were subject. The name of these people and that of their ruler have been forgotten.
- [13:35]
Paul Cooper
Today we do know the names of some of these peoples and some of the best known of these early precursors are the Moche and the Nazca. During a period roughly equivalent to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, that is between around 400 BC and 500 AD, the Moche and the Nazca achieved a high degree of organization and sophistication and expanded their territories across the deserts of the Atacama. They became experts at directing water in the dry landscape, building long canals and rivulets of stone, and soon began to expand their settlements into the foothills and the mountain valleys of the Andes. The Nazca are most famous for the hundreds of remarkable patterns and images that they drew in the landscape of the coastal deserts. This is a rough terrain broken by stones and rubble. And so to ease travel and trade between their settlements, the Nazca cleared long roads in the desert. But soon these desert lines seem to have taken on a more decorative and perhaps mystical significance. The Nazca constructed these lines with simple tools and careful planning, clearing away the rocks and rubble of the desert and revealing the lighter coloured sand beneath. Some of these vast patterns are nearly 400 meters long or the length of four football pitches. Hundreds are simple geometric designs, While more than 70 are depictions of animals including hummingbirds, spiders, fish, condors, monkeys, lizards and humans, as well as an assortment of trees and flowers. These vast shapes in the sand were invisible from ground level, but they could be seen from the sharply rising foothills and mountains that rose out of the desert. We don't know the full significance of these lines, whether religious or to mark the positions of the stars at certain times of the year, or simply as ostentatious expressions of wealth and power. But if you've ever drawn a picture into the sand of a beach and then climbed up onto the cliff to see it from above, you'll understand this impulse, although on a scale hundreds of times larger. These kinds of vast public works were possible because of the increasing social centralization of these empires. But for reasons we don't entirely understand, both of these early societies soon passed out of history and into dust. While the civilization of the Andes may have begun on the fringes of the desert, it's in the mountains that it reached its most astonishing heights. A short distance inland from the coast, the towering wall of these mountains rises sharply. This is a landscape that is exceptionally hard to live in. It's made up of high, craggy peaks of sandstone, limestone and granite, and less than 2% of its total area is at all suitable for growing food. The elevation changes dramatically over short distances, with the highest peaks towering up to 6,700 meters, or 22,000ft, roughly 2/3 the cruising altitude of an airliner. The steep, rocky slopes of the Andes hold very little fertile soil, and even at the bottom of its valleys, it's rare to find any fertile earth. The mountains above 4800 metres are capped with snow and ice all year round, while the snows creep much lower in the winter months. For the people who lived here, altitude was one of the primary ways they measured their landscape. The people of the Andes divided the mountains into distinct zones by height. There was the Quechua zone, between about 2 and 3,000 meters above sea level, which contained warm valleys free of frost, many of them suitable for growing maize and other lowland crops. Above that was the Sunni zone, at about 3 to 4,000 meters. On these steep slopes, potatoes were the primary crop. Higher still was the zone known as Puna. Agriculture was impossible here, but there are vast, frosty grasslands where herds of alpaca and llama could be grazed in great numbers, crucial for their wool and meat. Also raised for meat were guinea pigs, which were cheap to raise and maintain, happily ate grains too coarse or bitter for humans, and reproduced extremely rapidly. Life for these early people was hard. Infant mortality was so high in the Andes that Inca children were not given a name until their third birthday, and until then were simply referred to with the fitting name Wawa. This rugged landscape was no place for individualism. There were no horses or oxen in the Americas that could help its people carry heavy loads or pull ploughs, so fields had to be turned by human hands. A Group of farmers worked much faster than one on his own, and the dry, cold valleys needed irrigation canals dug through stone and rock, enormous labours that required large work gangs. And so, to survive in this tough environment, people needed to pull together. This reciprocal economy formed the basis of the highly controlled and centralized empires that would follow and would form the hallmark of Andean society right through its history. These early valley settlements were joined by a precarious strand of pathways and roads that traced narrow lines through the mountains. The steep, narrow river gorges were home to quick, flowing rivers and could only be crossed at certain points where it was possible to build a bridge. This meant that there was often only one road between one town and another, a fragile web that slowly turned the landscape of the mountains into a traversable network. Along these roads, the people of the Andes would trek with caravans of llamas. These camelid animals are incredibly strong for their size and are capable of carrying loads of up to 40kg across some of the world's toughest terrain. As a pack animal, they are also essentially self sufficient, since they were able to eat any of the coarse grasses growing along the mountain roads. Travelers didn't need to bring along any food for their animals, saving precious space for cargo. Along this complex and sophisticated trade route. Coca leaves, tobacco and bright feathers passed west out of the jungle, while maize, seashells and dried fish passed east from the coast. This system saw seashells decorating the clothes of people who lived a thousand miles from the sea, and bright tropical feathers decorating the hair of people who had never laid eyes on the jungle. One of the first great cities of this region was called Tiwanaku, and it grew up in what is now western Bolivia, near the vast shores of the body of water known as Lake Titicaca. This is the largest lake in South America and one of the highest in the world today, straddling the borders of Bolivia and Peru. This lake is so vast that it's often impossible to see the other side. And so, in the craggy landscape of the Andes, it forms a completely unique place, where the narrow valleys and jagged peaks suddenly give way to blue open skies. The placid surface of the lake reflecting it like a mirror and a horizon vanishing into the distance. For the whole history of the people of the Andes, this lake would hold a special place in their imagination and would form the center point of their mythology. The city of Tiwanaku held vast pyramid structures and impressive carved gateways cut from solid blocks of stone, weighing up to 66 tonnes. It was home to as many as 20,000 people and formed one of the first capitals of the Andes. In the Inca creation story, we can see the cultural debt they owed to Tiwanaku. They believed it was the place where. Where light was first brought to the world, when before there had been only darkness.
- [24:27]
Unnamed Inca Historian
During this time of total night. They say that a lord emerged from a lake in this land of Peru. They say he brought with him a certain number of people and went to the place near the lake where today there is a town called Tiwanaku. There, they say that he suddenly made the sun and day and ordered the sun to follow the course that it follows. Then they say he made the stars and the moon.
- [24:53]
Paul Cooper
From the Inca perspective, the light of civilization had been created at Tiwanaku. By the time that the Inca ruled the Andes, this ancient city was already a series of ruins. When the Inca first stumbled upon it, they would have found the ancient city abandoned, a chaotic mess of broken blocks of masonry. The high grassy plains littered with the fragments of monumental statues, shattered fragments of stone heads staring out of the walls. To the Inca, the meaning of this place was clear. This must have been the workshop where the creator God Viracocha had worked to create the world. And these stone statues were his first failed attempts at creating human life.
- [25:50]
Unnamed Inca Historian
He made some people from stone as a model of those that he would produce later, together with a chieftain to govern and rule over them. And many women, some pregnant and others delivered. When he made all these of stone, he set them aside and then made another province, forming them of stones.
- [26:10]
Paul Cooper
In the Sumerian legends, the people of Mesopotamia recounted how the God Enlil created man out of clay, an idea that lived on in the Hebrew Bible. Clay was the element of ancient Mesopotamia. It was the substance that built their houses, their pots and tools, the substance that allowed them to develop writing. But in the Andes, the element that the people knew best was stone. In the Andes, stone was everywhere. It towered over you on either side, in the valleys. It lay waiting for you if you dug too deeply into the thin soil. It was what you had to cut through to build canals, to build your houses and temples. It even came tumbling and crashing down the mountainsides when earthquakes rocked the ground beneath your feet. So perhaps it's no coincidence that the Inca believed themselves to have been crafted from stone. It's in this city of Tiwanaku that the art of stone carving reached its earliest heights. Today, a great monument known as the Gate of the sun still stands in ruins, covered with 48 intricately carved figures, perhaps representing something like the signs of the zodiac. The city of Tiwanaku was grand, with its elites living inside a fortified artificial island guarded by four high stone walls surrounded by a moat. But after a time, Tiwanaku also faded into obscurity. Still, its influence on the region was enormous, and all the civilizations that followed would retain something of its unique cultural imprint. One of these civilizations was the Wari. The Wari were experts at water control, and they marshalled enormous work gangs to build vast reservoirs and aqueducts that cut through the dry coastal plains and transformed the landscape of the low Andes. The Wari tamed the desert, building aqueducts up to 40km long to divert the sparse waters towards their cities. But they were never ornate or showy builders like the people of Tiwanaku. Their buildings were rough constructions, pulled together out of uncarved fieldstones and locked together with mud for mortar. But they still liked to build big. The walls of their cities were sometimes 2 to 3 meters thick and up to 12 meters high. The Inca built on the foundations laid by the Wari, sometimes quite literally. At certain sites, you can see the walls of the Wari, built from small stones, but with Inca additions, extending and upgrading them in their distinctive signature style of massive megalithic stones. For reasons we don't quite understand, the Wari soon embarked on a rapid series of expansions that saw their power spread across the Andes. Some have guessed that they might have adopted a new expansionist religion that drove them to conquer their neighbours. Others have speculated that climate shifts may have reduced the habitability of their traditional desert territory, meaning that expansion may have been a matter of survival. Either way, they were incredibly successful. Between the mid 6th to mid 7th century, while Europe continued to reel from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, the Wari expanded across the hostile mountains of the Andes and brought people after people under their banner. And wherever the Wari went, they built terraces. Each terrace was a remarkable feat of engineering and displayed an intimate knowledge of the soil and the plants that grew in it. The walls of these terraces were sloped backwards, angled to hold in the earth and resist earthquake damage. They were floored with broken stones for drainage, which were then covered by gravel and sand. Finally, the Wari would gather rich topsoil, digging it up from the lower elevations and the river valleys and carrying it up the mountain paths, laying it out to form the top layer of the terrace. This was constantly fertilized and turned over to aerate the soil. The stone walls of the terraces absorb the heat of the sun during the day and then slowly release it into the earth throughout the night, when frosts in the mountains could be severe. This technique allowed the people of the Andes to grow food at even the highest altitudes and transformed these rocky slopes into shelves of fertile land. In this manner, tomatoes, squashes and pumpkins, even types of tobacco, were grown in the high peaks of the Andes. One remarkable site, known as Moray, is thought to be a kind of laboratory where the Andean people could develop new strains and hybrids of crops for growing at high altitudes. Murai is a breathtaking series of circular terraces, looking at first glance something like a roman Amphitheater. About 30 meters deep. Murai is located at a height of 3 and a half thousand meters above sea level. But its descending terraces act as a kind of artificial climate, with each terrace increasing the temperature as you descend in steady increments. In fact, the temperature difference from the top to the bottom of this well can be as much as 15 degrees Celsius. These ingenious techniques made the people of the Andes some of the earliest masters of bioengineering, and meant that their farmers could practice a strategy of resilience through diversity. The people of the Andes cultivated more than a thousand varieties of potatoes and over 150 varieties of maize. They would sometimes plant as many as 200 varieties of potato in a single field, each with different levels of frost resistance, different levels of drought resilience, and immune to different blights. These foods could be naturally freeze dried in the cold, dry mountain air, allowing them to be stored for years on end and ensuring that even in the immensely changeable environment of the Andes, any crisis could be ridden out. The cryptic indigenous document known as the Warochiri Manuscript, pays tribute to the hard work of these ancient ancestors who made the rocky landscape of the Andes bloom.
- [34:08]
Unnamed Inca Historian
In very ancient times, when a great number of people had filled the land, they lived miserably, scratching and digging the rock faces and ledges to make the terraced fields. These fields, some small, others large, are still visible today on all the rocky heights.
- [34:29]
Paul Cooper
And it wasn't only in the realm of terrace building that the Wari passed on their knowledge to the Inca. They also pioneered the kind of administrative empire that would lay the blueprint for what the Inca achieved. In every new town and city that the Wari folded into their empire. They built an administrative building built to a standard plan, suggesting a high degree of centralization in the empire. The imperial power of the Wari lasted for more than 400 years, but for reasons we can never entirely know, around the year 1000, it rapidly came apart. By the year 1100, all of the major Wari centres were abandoned and never reoccupied. The Wari empire passed into dust, but its legacy continued. The Wari had introduced the idea of an empire that would unite the territories of the Andes. And now some of their former client states would try their hand at taking up their mantle. What followed was centuries of fragmentation and warfare in the mountains as rival states competed to fill the power vacuum that the Wari had left behind. From these wars, the Inca would rise. They would model themselves, both culturally and politically on the Wari, even dressing their nobles in woven tunics descended from Wari traditional dress. They built their imperial capital of Cuzco modeled on the Wari cities. And all of this was designed to send a clear message. The days of chaos are coming to an end. The heirs of the old empire have arrived to bring order once more. And these heirs are the people of the Inca. I want to take a moment here to discuss the sources available to us. The Inca never developed a written language and so kept no written records. They recorded their extensive epic poetry, their messages and administrative information in a remarkable system of rope knots known as khipus. These khip used knots of different sizes, positions and colors to represent different information. And these could be decoded by people initiated in their art, who were known as khipu kamaioks. One early eyewitness named Hernando Pizarro records seeing these khipu kamayoks at their mysterious work.
- [37:35]
Atahualpa
They count by certain knots on cords and so record what each chief has brought. When they had to bring us loads of fuel, maize, chicha or meat, they took off nuts or made nuts on some other part so that those who have charge of the stores keep an exact account.
- [37:55]
Paul Cooper
These quipu have never been deciphered in modern times, and it's unclear how much information they actually encoded. It's possible that they were used as memory joggers, which could help someone to recite poetry or messages they had committed to memory. If you had to remember hundreds of lines of poetry by heart, you can imagine that it might help to write down the first word or letter in each line. And it's possible that the khipu operated in something like this way. But this means that the khipu isn't much good unless the person who created it is there to decipher it. And in the years since the fall of Inca society, the knowledge of how to read the quipu has been lost. This means that the earliest documents we have to learn from were made by Europeans and were written during their invasion of the Inca lands. These sources generally fall into three categories. These are eyewitness accounts in the form of Spanish chronicles and memoirs, accounts written after the conquest by Spaniards and other Europeans, and finally, the accounts of native authors in the decades following the conquest who were trained to write in Spanish schools. The Catholic Church also kept voluminous records about Inca culture, beliefs and religious practices. Somewhat ironically, these accounts were designed to make these practices easier to eradicate. But today they form some of the most useful documents for understanding the lives and beliefs of these ancient people. There are only six known eyewitness accounts of the Inca at the time of the Spanish contact. Four of these were written immediately after the conquest. They are vivid and detailed, but of course are coloured by the worldviews of their authors and the role they played in the destruction of Inca society. Two further eyewitness accounts were written many decades after the conquest and are generally considered less reliable. There's also a huge confusion of secondary sources written by people who didn't witness the events of the conquest and simply interviewed others. And many of these are considered highly unreliable. But a couple do stand out. One of these is the Spaniard Juan de Batanzos. He was one of the few Spaniards who became fluent in the Inca language of Quechua and married an Inca princess who had, quite astonishingly, also been previously married to both of the great players in this drama, the last Inca king, Atahualpa, and the Spanish conquistador Pizarro Betansos. Knowledge of the Inca language, his interviews with his wife and his exceptional understanding of the culture of the Andes led to a book called the Narrative of the Incas, which relates Inca history as told to him by his wife's people. Another crucial account is that of Pedro Cieza de Leon, a Spanish Jew who had converted to Christianity in order to be allowed to travel to the New World and become a conquistador. He wrote down a number of remarkable documents, known as the Chronicles of the Inca, in which he documents everything he could learn about how the Inca people thought of their own history. But he makes no secret of the fragmentary and unreliable nature of some of what he heard. As he writes in one of his chapters.
- [42:00]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
These Indians have no letters and can only preserve their history by the memory of events handed down from generation to generation, and by their songs and khipus. I say this because their narratives vary in many particulars, some saying one thing and others giving a different version.
- [42:22]
Paul Cooper
Indigenous accounts are often fraught and difficult to interpret. One remarkable hybrid document was dictated by the Inca king named Titu Cusi, who after the conquest, narrated his firsthand account of the Spanish invasion to a missionary named Fray Marcos Garcia. The resulting book is called An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru and was published nearly 40 years after contact in 1570. This document captures an incredible snapshot of the confusion and fear of first contact. But even Taitu Kusi recognises the difficulty in accurately reporting events from so long ago.
- [43:13]
Atahualpa
As the memory of men is frail and weak, it would be impossible to remember everything accurately with regard to all our great and important affairs, unless we avail ourselves of writing to assist us in our purposes.
- [43:31]
Paul Cooper
And one final document, known as the Warochiri Manuscript, gives us just a glimpse into the lives and beliefs of these Andean peoples prior to contact with Europeans. The book was compiled in the 16th century, a full 70 years after contact, and under the supervision of the Spanish cleric Francisco de Avila, who believed the people of the Andes to be engaged in devil worship. But despite these complications in its creation, the book does attempt to record all that the surviving Andean people of Warochiri Province remembered about the myths, religious notions and traditions of their people, and paints a vivid picture of what life was like for people like the Inca. Together, these fraught and difficult accounts come together to paint a picture of what happened to bring South America's largest empire crashing down. In the Inca conception of their own history, their story began with a small band of highlanders who migrated to a place called Cusco, a warm valley in the highlands of southern Peru. This valley is around 40 km long and drained by the Watanay River. We don't know when this band of settlers may have arrived or even if this event happened at all, but estimates for when it may have been usually land around the year 1200 in Europe. @ the time, the English crusader King Richard the Lionheart had just died, passing the throne to the infamous King John. To the east, Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Shogun of Japan, had toppled the emperor and turned himself into a military dictator. And somewhere in the high Andes, a band of travelers settled down in a place that they would soon call home. The Inca creation myth describes the scenes that these first migrants would have seen upon their arrival.
- [45:53]
Unnamed Inca Historian
In the place which is called today the great city of Cusco, there was a small town of about 30 small, humble straw houses. The rest of the area around this town was a marsh of sedge with sharp edged leaves.
- [46:09]
Paul Cooper
Houses of this time were built from rough stones, carved into well fitted but irregular shapes and thatched with a kind of mountain grass known as ichu, which grows up to a meter tall in the mountains above an altitude of three and a half kilometres. The straw from this grass was used for a wide variety of purposes by the Inca and was gathered as soon as the rainy season ended in May. The name of the new Inca capital, Cusco, comes from the Quechua name, Cusco Huancar, or the Rock of the Owl. The site of Cusco had long stood at the crossroads of empires. It lay right at the point where the territories of the Wari and the Tiwanaku had crossed, meaning that it benefited from both of their influences and formed a kind of hybrid culture. According to one legend, the story of the Inca people began when a cave opened up in this region and four men, all brothers, walked out of it, along with their wives. One of these was named Agaroce.
- [47:25]
Unnamed Inca Historian
Then Ayaroce stood up, displayed a pair of large wings, and said he should be the one to stay at Guanacaure as an idol in order to speak with their father, the sun. Then they went up on top of the hill, Aaroche, raised up in flight toward the heavens so high that they could not see him. The son had ordered him to go to the town that they had seen. There they would find good company among the inhabitants of the town. After this had been stated, Ayaroche turned into a stone, just as he was with his wings. There, Manco Capac and his companion, with the help of the four women, made a house. Having done this, Manco Capac planted some land with maize.
- [48:10]
Paul Cooper
Another origin myth states that the Inca began on an island in Lake Titicaca and were then given the task of civilizing the world of the Andes. They then migrated northwards to the site of Cusco, using a golden staff to test the ground everywhere they went. On arrival in Cuzco, the staff sank into the ground and they knew that this would be the place they would call home, wherever they really originated. These stories give us a glimpse of how the Inca viewed themselves, and it's an image we might find familiar from countless other empires throughout history. They believed that it was their destiny to expand and conquer and to bring civilization to the peoples that surrounded them. And their achievements were remarkable. They would soon embark on a rapid expansion that would see them grow to become the greatest empire ever seen in the Western hemisphere. In what may have been as little as 50 to 80 years. The INCA credit this expansion to the work of one great king, a man called Pachacuti Inca. Yapanqui. In Quechua, his name means he who overturns time and space, and According to traditional understanding, Pachacuti was a figure, something like Alexander the Great, a conqueror of unmatched skill and energy. If the Inca chronicles are to be taken as fact, then during his reign, Cuzco grew from a small town into the capital of an empire that covered nearly the whole of western South America. Pachacuti was born in Cuzco, in the palace known as the Cusicancha. As he grew up, he would have gazed out over the hills as the sun washed the grassy valley's sides and watched birds fly over the yellow thatched rooftops of the city. And perhaps it's here that he began to dream of what a power this city could one day become. As a boy, it's recorded that he learned history, laws and language. But Pachacuti was not intended for the throne. That honour lay with his older brother, Urko, who his father had named as his heir. But Pachacuti's time would come when the Inca faced a desperate threat. Sometime in the early 15th century, a people known as the Chanca invaded the lands of Cuzco. Their armies marched into the fertile valley and surrounded the capital. Pachacuti's father, the king, and his brother, the crown prince, both fled, believing the city to be lost. But Pachacuti stayed behind. The Inca army must have been on the verge of desertion, but according to the story, Pachacuti stood up on the walls and rallied the Inca soldiers behind him. When the Chanca fell on the city walls, he led them in a bitter defence and, against all the odds, managed to repel the invaders. It's said that Pachacuti fought so fiercely that even the stones of the mountains rose up to fight the Chanca invaders. Reading between the lines, I think it's possible that the Chanca army was caught up in one of the frequent earthquakes and landslides that rock this region. And this may have contributed to the failure of their invasion. Whatever the cause, Pachacuti's victory was so celebrated that his father had little choice but to name him his successor. Around the year 1438, from the moment he became king, Pachacuti embarked on a series of grand construction projects, rebuilding Cuzco after the war with the Chanca and turning it into a city that would be the envy of the entire region. And he led his inspired Inca army in an astonishing series of victories that stretched their territory even further. Part of Pachacuti's success seems to have been that wherever he conquered, he also built. He constructed vast irrigation channels and cultivated terraces in every territory he expanded into. And during his reign, the road system of the Inca expanded dramatically until it stretched more than 5,000km from Ecuador to Chile, allowing his army to travel quickly to wherever it was needed. Cieza de Leon describes this ambitious building work in his chronicles of the Inca.
- [53:31]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
The Empire of Peru is so vast that the Incas ordered a road to be made. There were built from half league to half league, small houses, well roofed with wood and straw lining the roads at regular intervals. The order was that in each house there should be two Indians with provisions stationed there by the neighbouring villages. In this way the lords were kept informed of all that happened in every part of the empire and they arranged all that was needful for the ordering of the government.
- [54:09]
Paul Cooper
Milestones were placed about every seven kilometres along these roads, marking the distances to the next city for weary traveller and the emperor. Pachacuti was also a poet with many traditional Inca poems attributed to him. Among these are hymns to the God Viracocha asking for blessings for his people.
- [54:48]
Unnamed Inca Historian
Lord Viracocha. Who says let there be day, let there be night who says let there be dawn, let it grow light. Who makes the sun your sun move happy and blessed every day, so that man whom you have made has light.
- [55:11]
Pizarro
Kiyari Kanchari.
- [55:15]
Paul Cooper
But Panchakuti was also capable of extremely ruthless tactics. As the Inca empire expanded, peoples who repeatedly refused to bow to his rule were forcefully relocated, dragged from their homes by Inca soldiers and sent to far flung corners of the empire as colonists. But the expansion of the Inca empire was not always violent. Pachacuti relied on an intricate intelligence network of spies and informants who would infiltrate neighbouring states and bring back reports to him on their power and wealth. He would then send messages to the rulers of these kingdoms and send them luxurious gifts such as high quality textiles and coca leaves. As Siezer de Leon recalls, they always.
- [56:13]
Unnamed Inca Noble
Arranged matters in the commencement of their negotiations so that things should be pleasantly and not harshly ordered. They marched from Kuz Kur with their army and warlike materials until they were near the region they intended to conquer. Then they collected very complete information touching the power of the enemy. The Inca sent special messengers to the enemy to say that he desired to have them as allies and relations, so that with joyful hearts and willing minds they ought to come forth to receive him in their province and give him obedience as in the other provinces, and that they might do this of their own accord. He sent presents to the native chiefs.
- [56:54]
Paul Cooper
The promise of this gesture was clear. Join the Inca empire and I will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. It seems that most of the neighbouring rulers accepted this offer and were peacefully folded into the empire. But it wasn't without an implicit threat. Refusal to accept Inca rule resulted in an invasion and any rulers who resisted were executed. Without exception, the Inca army at this time was a fearsome force. Any commoner could be conscripted as part of the Inca system of organized labour and every able bodied man was expected to take part in a war, at least in some capacity, at least once in their life. And the Inca army could could reach the astonishing size of 140,000 men. The Inca had no iron or steel and had no real technological advantage over other cultures in the Andes. So they often relied simply on their sheer force of numbers to overwhelm their opponents. Their weapons were hardwood spears launched using spear throwers, arrows and javelins, slings as well as clubs and maces made from the hard wood of the chonta palm with blunt or spiked heads made of copper or bronze. They wore armour made of wood and animal skin, sometimes lined with these metals. And on their backs, warriors wore small round shields made of woven palmwood slats and cotton. Their favourite tactic was to ambush their enemy in steep valleys, rolling rocks down the hillside and trapping them in avalanches. They would march into battle to the beating of drums, the blowing of trumpets made of wood, conch, shells or horn. The army must have made a tremendous sight when it all massed together and marched off to war. War. And it's not hard to see why many kingdoms elected to take the Inca paycheck rather than face them in battle. The logistical network that supported the army was no less impressive. Inca soldiers marched along immaculately maintained highways through the mountains, over bridges, across the towering gorges along the road. They were sheltered in barrack like shelters called tambos and were fed from the well supplied storehouses called colchas. Because of this talent for organization, the Inca army was able to move faster and amass a greater force than any of their rivals. Once the Inca had taken control of a town, whether peacefully or by force, they would always build one of their large fortified storehouses or colkers, just outside it. These they would fill with food, freeze dried potatoes and corn, beans, dried meats and other long lasting foods, as well as clothing, blankets and shawls, even sandals, which would then be distributed to the population. The capacity of this storage system was staggering. In just one region known as the Mantaro Basin, There were nearly 3,000 of these storehouses with a capacity of 170,000 cubic meters. Or around 70 Olympic swimming pools. These Colca storehouses were always placed in ostentatious positions on top of hills or on the side of cliffs so that everyone in the valley below could see them. The message they were designed to convey was, are now part of the Inca Empire. The empire will provide for you. All your troubles are over. As part of their policy of expansion, the Inca practiced an incredibly inclusive attitude to religion. Like everything else, religious belief in this region was incredibly diverse. The Warochiri manuscript records some of the extreme variation from town to town in the myth of just one goddess named Chaupi Namka, and how she relates to other gods and mythical figures.
- [61:45]
Unnamed Inca Historian
In each village and even region by region, people give different versions and different names, too. People from Mama say one thing and the Cheka say another. Some call Chaupi Namka the sister of Periya Kaka. Others say she was Tamta Namka's daughter. Others still say she was the son's daughter. So it is impossible to decide.
- [62:09]
Paul Cooper
In this atmosphere of extreme religious diversity, the Inca saw benefits to absorbing the gods of others into their pantheon. In territories they conquered, local religions and cults were allowed to continue, and where possible, were actually folded into the existing mythos of the Inca. When they conquered the people of Warochiri province, for instance, they happily took on their God, named Pachacamak. He became a God of the Inca too, although, of course, the creator God Viracocha kept his prime position. In the Waruchiri manuscript, the people of this province even attribute the many victories of the Inca to the help of their God and his son, Makawisa.
- [63:00]
Unnamed Inca Historian
When Tupac Inca Upanqui was king, they say he first conquered all the provinces, then rested happily for many years. But then enemy rebellions arose from some provinces. These people didn't want to be the peoples of the Inca. The Inca mobilized many thousands of men and battled them for a period of 12 years. The Inca, grieving deeply, said, what will become of us? He became very downhearted. One day, he thought to himself, why do I serve all these gods with my gold and my silver? Enough. I'll call them to help me against my enemies. Makhawisa arrived and sat at the end of the gathering.
- [63:42]
Paul Cooper
The Inca king goes on to plead with the gods to help him in putting down these rebellions. Some of them make excuses, telling him that they are too powerful and their fury would destroy not just the rebellious provinces, but the entire land. But soon the Warochiri God Makhawisa speaks up.
- [64:06]
Unnamed Inca Historian
Inca midday sun. I will go there. I'll go and subdue them for you right away, once and for all. As soon as they brought him up a hill, Makhawisa began to rain upon them. Makhwisa reduced all those villagers to eroded chasms by flashing lightning and pouring down more rain and washing them away in a mudslide. Striking with lightning bolts, he exterminated all the great lords and other strange strong men. Only a few of the common people were spared.
- [64:37]
Paul Cooper
The result of this miraculous intervention is that the Warochiri God is welcomed with open arms into the Inca religious system.
- [64:47]
Unnamed Inca Historian
From that time onward, the Inca revered Pariaka even more and gave him 50 of his retainers.
- [64:55]
Paul Cooper
This open mindedness allowed the Inca to incorporate a vast and diverse range of peoples into their empire and expand rapidly. When they conquered the lands of the central Peruvian coast around the year 1470, they took one great temple to the God Pachacamac that contained a famous oracle. During their occupation of the area, they allowed the temple's priests to continue worshipping their own gods, although they did add an additional few buildings to allow worship of Inca gods like Viracocha to take place there as well. And of course, one of the most remarkable outposts that the emperor Pachacuti built is the one that opened this episode. Around the year 1440, he ordered the construction of the outpost in the Peruvian cloud forests that would one day be known as Machu Picchu. Perched on a mountain ridge rising half a kilometre above the valley floor, with steep cliffs plunging down on either side. It's not clear exactly what this town was designed for. It was never self sufficient, relying on constant supplies ferried up to it from the valley floor. And so it must have served a very specific purpose. Some believe it may have been a royal retreat chosen for the beauty of its location, while others argue that it may have been a plantation or trading post for high value commodities like coca leaves, which the Inca chewed and brewed into tea for a mild narcotic effect. More than a hundred steps of white granite connect the town's temples and houses, its water reservoirs, terraces and its temple to the sun. In its day, it must have been a magnificent sight, with its rooftops of itchu thatch gleaming bright in the sun, its fields overflowing with corn and potatoes, while herds of llama zigzagged up the narrow mountain roads to supply it with all the necessities of life. And the clouds rolled endlessly over its grassy slopes. The reign of the great king Pachacuti saw the kingdom of Cuzco reorganized into an entity known by its people as Tawantinsuyu. In Quechua, this means four regions together, and has been translated as something like the Realm of the four Parts or the Land of the Four quarters. This was now a stable imperial state made up of a central government ruling over four provincial governments. Chinchasuyu in the northwest, Antisuyu in the northeast, Kuntisuyu in the south, and Kulasuyu in the southeast. The roads leading to each of these four provinces all met at a crossroads in the central plaza of the city of Cuzco, where the babble of dozens of languages would have been heard on the streets. In Quechua, the word Inca meant lord, and at this time, it also began to be used about the particular ethnic group or caste that ruled the empire from the city of Cuzco. It's not clear how many of these people there may have been, but estimates range from about 15,000 to 40,000. But they would soon rule over an empire of more than 10 million people. And the king who reigned in Cuzco would soon be known as the Sapa Inca, or the Lord without Equal. As with many aspects of folkloric history, it's possible that Pachacuti's achievements have been exaggerated. Mythical retellings of history naturally tend towards what's called the great man theory of history. Simply put, it just makes a better story to imagine that one hero is responsible for the construction of an empire. It's possible that Inca expansion should actually be credited to the reign of several kings and with various less glamorous economic and social developments. But whether this is true or not, Pachacuti's name would forever be inscribed in the memories of the people of the Andes. This great poet king of the Inca died around the year 1471, and on his deathbed, he is said to have uttered the following.
- [70:01]
Atahualpa
I was born as a lily in the garden, and like the lily I grew. As my age advanced, I became old and had to die, and so I withered and died.
- [70:16]
Paul Cooper
The son of Pachacuti, a man named Topa Inca, followed in his father's footsteps to expand the empire even further, until only one true rival existed in the region. A people known as the Chimu. These were a desert people who built the vast triangular mud brick city of Chanchan on the coast of northern Peru. The Chimu had grown rich, diving for the highly prized shells of the mollusc spondylus that thrived off their desert coast. Their divers paddled out in boats and sank to the bottom of the ocean with Stones tied to their feet, holding their breath for minutes at a time beneath the waves. Whole sections of the Chimu city of Chanchan were given over to the industry of shell production, where the mollusks were cleaned out, the shells were polished and carved, and from there distributed and sold to the whole region. The Chimu dressed their priests and kings in remarkable gold decorations and were perhaps the last powerful rival to the Inca. But by the year 1470, the Chimu too were conquered and Inca power in the region was now all but unchallenged. At Cuzco, the Incas celebrated their imperial ascendancy with the construction of an enormous ceremonial center, as well as an imposing structure that they called the Puma's head, or in Quechua, Sacsayhuaman. We don't know entirely the function of this structure due to its towering walls. Later European observers would refer to it as a fortress, but it may have also served a religious function. Sacsayhuaman was the largest megalithic structure ever built in the Western Hemisphere. Its walls are built of vast interlocking stones, carved so perfectly that they fit together without mortar, so closely that it's impossible to fit even a pin between them. Centuries of expertise at stone carving culminated here in some of the finest stoneworking ever seen, slaved over by vast work gangs of conscripted labourers. We can only guess at the enormous human cost that moving these stones must have incurred. The Inca moved them without pack animals, using only mats of wooden logs and ropes and the muscle power of thousands of workers. One 16th century Spanish observer, Pedro Pizarro, would later write an eyewitness account of what Sacsayhuaman must have looked like in its golden age.
- [73:23]
Unnamed Inca Noble
On top of a hill, they had a very strong fort surrounded with masonry walls of stones and having two very high round towers. And in the lower part of this wall, there were stones so large and thick that it seemed impossible that human hands could have set them in place. They were so close together and so well fitted that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints. The whole fortress was built up in terraces and flat spaces.
- [73:52]
Paul Cooper
The estimated volume of stone used in its construction is over 6,000 cubic meters. Estimates for the weight of the largest andesite block go as high as 200 tons, or about 100 times the weight of the average stone used to build the pyramids of Giza. The closeness of the stones and their lack of regular order are thought to be an adaptation developed over centuries to help these walls survive the devastating earthquakes that regularly rock the Cusco region. It's said that during an earthquake, the stones of these walls dance in their place, jittering and juddering, but always falling back to where they began. Cuzco wasn't a city in the way we think of one. As a center of trade. There were no markets or squares, no workshops or places of business. It was forbidden for foreigners and commoners to stay in the city overnight. And it was home purely to the temples and priests, as well as the king in his palace and the officials of the empire. At its heart was the coricancha, or the golden enclosure, what the Spanish would refer to later as the Temple of the Sun. This was the spiritual and ceremonial heart of the empire, and during the most important rituals, the mummified remains of dead emperors would be brought out into the main square, where crowds of thousands would come to see them. The chronicler Pedro de Sieze de Leon recorded the magnificence of the corycancha's appearance based on the evidence given to him by Cuzco's surviving Inca princes and the few remaining eyewitnesses who had seen the temple in its glory days.
- [75:54]
Unnamed Inca Noble
Its Circumference is some 400 paces, surrounded by a high wall of the finest masonry and precision in all Spain. I have not seen anything to compare to these walls, nor the placement of their stones. The stone is somewhat black in color, rough, yet excellently cut. At mid height runs a band of gold of some 17 inches in width and two in depth. The doors and arches are also embossed with sheets of this metal. In one of these houses, the grandest of all, was the figure of the sun, of great size and made of gold and encased with precious stones. There also were placed the mummies of the Incas who had reigned in Cuzco, each surrounded by a great quantity of treasure.
- [76:42]
Paul Cooper
From its seat at Cusco, the Inca empire expanded until it encompassed a truly vast expanse of territory and ruled over as many as 12 million people. This enormous swathe of land was nearly 10 times the size of the Aztec Empire in Mexico, with twice the estimated population. At 2 million square kilometres, it covered a landmass equal to the Western Roman Empire in Europe and the Qin Empire in China. It reached as far north as the jungles of southern Colombia and stretched south over barren coastal desert and snowy mountains to about 100 km south of Santiago in central Chile. It was actually one of the few empires in history to ever stretch so far from north to south. Most powers stretch horizontally from east to west in the same direction as the planet's rotation. And the reasons for that aren't hard to see. Most cultures prefer not to go too far outside the climate they used to. In the Northern Hemisphere, that means if you go north, things get colder and darker, and as you go south, things get hotter. But going east or west doesn't tend to change the climate all that much. But the Inca bucked that trend. Their empire stretches from north to south for an astonishing 4,000km, or about a tenth of the way around the globe. In Europe, this is enough to stretch from the snowy tundras and icy glaciers of Iceland down to the baking desert sands of the Western Sahara. In North America, this would get you from Canada's Hudson Bay, where polar bears wander across the frozen waters down to the balmy beaches of Jamaica. But in the Andes, it's the mountains themselves that form the largest consistent environment. And it's across these that the empire of the Inca spread. The Inca were deeply suspicious of the Amazon rainforest and the foothills that descended down into it. They called this region rupa Rupa, meaning hot hot, which gives you a sense of how they felt about it. The hills that looked out over the forests are known as the eyebrow of the jungle, jutting out as they do over the cloud forest below. The Inca tended to keep well clear of the rainforest's dark, shady depths. They traded with its people for brightly coloured macaw feathers, and on a number of occasions, seemed to have attempted to spread their empire down into the forest with military power. But what little information we have about these expeditions tells us that they invariably met with disaster. But the Inca were fascinated by this place, by the exotic animals and plants that flourished in the Amazon basin. The jaguars, snakes and tropical birds of the jungle appear constantly in Inca art, high up in their mountains. The Inca economy is one of the most fascinating aspects of their society, to the extent that we can fit its structure into modern definitions. Many have described it as an early example of state socialism or even communism. As far as we can tell, the idea of private property didn't exist in Inca society, and they progressed on the basis of shared ownership of assets, resources and the means of production. When an Inca couple got married, they were given a house and a plot of land by the state, which they would use to produce enough food to support themselves. The state provided them with seeds and tools, and whenever the couple had a child, they were given another bit of land to help feed it. Each family was also provided with two llamas, which were good for transportation and wool, and also produced manure for their fields. In return, the family would give over all the Food they didn't eat into the common storehouse, and instead of taxes, they contributed directly with labour, agreeing to perform a service known as mitta whenever called upon. This would involve labouring on a construction project for part of the year, or working in a particular workshop making cloth or pottery. Say, if they were a fast runner, their service might be to work as a message carrier on the roads, or if they were strong and able bodied, to fight in the army. While performing this work, all food and accommodation was provided by the state. Inca nobles were exempt from this labour tax and also any officials who were responsible for more than a hundred people. Other than food and water, cloth was perhaps the most important resource in the Andes. It was crucial for clothing, of course, but was also needed for making containers to store and transport food. The bulk of this textile manufacture was done by women, who were provided with all the raw materials involved in spinning, dyeing, weaving and plaiting to produce thread, cloth and rope. Andean society required millions of meters of thread, and the women of this region would have gone about the streets with their drop spindles, devices that allowed them to spin while walking around and taking care of their other duties. The hierarchy of this society was rigidly enforced and peasants had little independence or power. The authorities even conducted inspections of people's homes to ensure that commoners did not own any gold or silver, have any valuable clothing or keep more than 10 animals. This entire system of organized labour was centrally planned from Cusco and quite remarkably operated without a single word ever being written down. All the information on how many taxpayers there were, the number of men available for military service, the quantities of cloth and food produced and required, the numbers of children and elderly people. All of this was recorded on the quipus, those systems of knots that could only be interpreted by a learned kipukamayok. With its sprawling territory, its well oiled, centrally coordinated economy, and its state of the art road network, the Inca empire was now at the height of its power and confidence. But events were already brewing in the wider world that would soon bring them into contact with powers far outside their past experience, and which would ultimately lead to the wholesale collapse and disintegration of their entire society. If we were to soar over the city of Cuzco in the year 1500, we would see it in the throes of an impressive and sombre procession. The Inca king at the time, a man named Uena Capacity, was returning to the city at the head of a massive army after conquering a fierce people known as the Chachapoyas in the Cloud forests to the north. The chronicler Siesa de Leon recalls what a royal procession of this period looked like.
- [85:03]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
Round the litter marched the king's guard with the archers and halberdiers, and in front went 5,000 slingers, while in the rear there were lancers with their captains. On the flanks of the road and on the road itself, there were faithful runners who kept a lookout and announced the approach of the Lord. So many people came out to see him pass that the hillsides were covered and they all blessed their sovereign, raising a great cry and shouting.
- [85:39]
Paul Cooper
But the army was not in a mood of celebration. In fact, all the soldiers, even the king himself, were weeping. Their faces were painted black. That's because the emperor's mother, the Empress Mama Oklo, had recently died, and his war in the jungle hills had been waged partly in order to gain the tributes needed to stage her funeral. Coca leaves, ceremonial foods, and captives who were destined to become the servants of his mother's mummified body. In preparation for the festival, the entire ceremonial court was purified with ceremonies and sacrifices. This melancholy ceremony passed through the gate of Cuzco and up the road to the Corycancha, the golden temple where the mummy of the Queen Mother would be placed. The drums and conches and other instruments would have sounded a mournful tune as the king approached his palace and the lands of the Inca all joined together in mourning. Although the Inca had no way of knowing it. On the other side of the ocean, some 10,000 kilometers to the east, preparations for another, very different procession were taking place in a city known as Rome. For the Christians of Europe, the new year was drawing close, and the year 1500 AD would be a milestone date, a millennia and a half after the date given to the birth of Jesus Christ. In the Christian world, the half millennium marked a time of enormous change. The Catholic monarchs of Spain had recently conquered the last Muslim kingdom in Europe, capturing the city of Granada in southern Spain and unifying the Iberian peninsula under a Christian king. New lands had been discovered on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and European settlement of the Caribbean had begun. But the ancient holy city of Jerusalem had also fallen to a new rising power, the Ottoman Empire. The ancient Christian capital of Constantinople had fallen only decades before, with Ottoman influence now growing in Eastern Europe. Far from bringing good Christian morals to the New World, settlers like Columbus had become notorious for their use of slavery and torture, refusing to baptize local people in order to justify their continued enslavement. The pope at the time, Alexander vi, was a member of the powerful Borgia noble f family and was infamous for fathering several children by various mistresses. Dark, momentous things seemed to be happening in the world, and people became obsessed with one passage in the Book of Revelations that referred to the end of the world coming at the half time after the time. This was believed to refer to a millennium and a half since the date of the Nativity. To mark the occasion in the year 1500, the painter Botticelli painted a grand artwork showing the Nativity scene being attended by angels and included the following apocalyptic inscription in Greek above.
- [89:24]
Unnamed Inca Noble
This picture. At the end of the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro in the half time after the time, painted according to the 11th chapter of St. John in the second woe of the Apocalypse during the release of the devil for three and a half years.
- [89:44]
Paul Cooper
When Rome's River Tiber flooded in the year 1497 and months later, the Papal fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo was struck by lightning. Rumours spread that the half millennium would bring death and devastation, perhaps even the coming of the Antichrist and the end of days. But the beleaguered Pope Alexander was determined that the celebrations would mark the dawn of a new beginning for the Christian world. In the final days of the year 1499, the city of Rome was cleared of litter and its vagrants and homeless were driven from the streets for a remarkable ceremony to mark the half millennium. The Pope had decided to demolish a wall that bricked up the entrance to St. Peter's known as the Golden Gate, supposedly the one through which Christ himself had passed when he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the Pope was surrounded by a choir singing hymns, among them notably Psalm 118.
- [90:58]
Unnamed Inca Historian
Open for me the gates of the righteous. I will enter and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord through which the righteous may enter.
- [91:11]
Paul Cooper
Carrying a mason's hammer in hand, the Pope stood from his throne and approached the old bricked up wall. Then he struck it three times. A team of masons joined in to finish the job, and they all crashed through the ancient doorway in what must have been a burst of dust and rubble, smashing their way into the new half millennium. The end of days did not come for Christian Europe at the year 1500. But there is a bitter irony that they were in fact about to unleash a wave of destruction on the other half of the world that would match anything described in the Book of Revelations for the empire of the Inca. The clock was now ticking and the funeral procession that passed through the streets of Cuzco. The soldiers with their faces painted black, the blowing of conches and everyone present weeping. All of it may as well have been mourning for the entire society that ruled over the mountains of the Andes. The Inca emperor at the time of the half millennium was a man named Wena Capac, whose name meant the young, mighty one. He had come to power at the age of 25, in the year 1493, just one year after Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Caribbean. The Emperor Huayna Capac was a conqueror by nature. During his long reign, the Inca army was constantly on the move and the empire expanded further into present day Chile and Argentina. He soon became hell bent on subjugating the tropical northern territory of what is now Ecuador and Colombia. These wars in the jungle were bitter and difficult, a quagmire that must have sapped the energy and strength of the empire. The terrain here was difficult, covered in dense forests, forest and mangrove swamps, and the Inca soldiers were not used to the climate. But Uena Capac refused to give in. He spent as much as 10 years waging his war in the north. And all this time his messengers would have travelled back and forth along the long Inca road network, carrying orders from the king and bringing back news from his administrators in Cuzco. This constant warfare must have become a daily fact of life in the empire that everyone simply grew to accept. Many young people in Cuzco would not have remembered a time when the king had resided in the capital or when the empire had known peace. We don't know for sure, but while leading his armies through the forests of Colombia, it's possible that the Inca Huayna Capac may have heard rumours. Rumours of a strange and mysterious power growing even further to the north. Strangers who had arrived by boat and who brought a wave of destruction in their wake. Whole villages were being wiped out, laid low by some mysterious force. Perhaps Uena Capac dismissed these rumours at first, that is, until one day he began to develop a fever, the likes of which the Inca had never encountered before. His condition rapidly deteriorated, and in the year 1527, the Sapa Inca Huena Capac, the emperor of all the Andes, died suddenly of this mysterious disease in the jungle, a thousand miles from home. And perhaps it's on his deathbed that those rumours came back to him about the strangers who had been sighted far in the north. One Inca chronicler, Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, recorded what were supposedly the dying words of Uena Capac that take the form of a prophecy of doom.
- [95:46]
Atahualpa
Our Father the Son has revealed to me that after the reign of 12 Incas, his own children, there will appear in our country an unknown race of men who will subdue our empire. I think that the people who came recently to our own shores are the ones referred to. The reign of the 12 Incas ends with me. I can therefore certify to you that these people will return shortly after I have left you, and that they will accomplish what our father, the son, predicted they would.
- [96:27]
Paul Cooper
Whether or not these were actually his dying words, they certainly show the apocalyptic mood that had begun to sink in among the snowy peaks and deep valleys of the Andes mountains. Within a few weeks, the emperor's mummified body began its 2,000 kilometer journey south to Cuzco. His lords carried him on a throne bound tightly in white cloth. The procession traveled along the great Chinchasuyo road that separated the coastal plains and the towering mountains above. A caravan of lords and warriors, porters and lamas, slowly climbing up through the terraced roads and canyon valleys. When they arrived back in Cuzco, they found the city a devastated place. While the king had been away, the plague had reached the capital city and killed countless numbers of its citizens, along with many lords and officials. The entire empire was reeling from the destruction, and bodies must have piled up in the streets, with hardly enough people left to carry them away. In some areas, as many as nine out of every 10 people died in one moment of lucidity during his fever, the emperor Uena Capac, had chosen his son Ninnankuyusi to ascend the throne as the next Sapa Inca. But this was to be an ill fated choice. Ninnan Kuyusi was an infant and he died only days after his father, possibly of the same disease. The empire was without a ruler, and now multiple claimants to the throne were gathering their armies. Within a year, the Inca realm would be torn by a civil war that would result in the deaths of tens of thousands of its people and the sacking of many of its cities. While diseases like the one that had felled their emperor were only just beginning their spread around every town and city in the mountains before the Inca had even set eyes on a single European, the contact of the two worlds had unleashed chaos. Back in the traditional capital of Cuzco, one of Huayna Capac's sons, named Huascar, declared himself the rightful ruler. But in the rebellious northern region of Quito, another of his sons was in charge of a sizable army. This man's name was Atahualpa, and it's in his hands that the Inca empire would finally crumble into ash and flame. In his work, A True Relation of the Conquest of Peru, the eyewitness Francisco Lopez de Jerez gives the following description of the Inca prince Atahualpa.
- [99:42]
Unnamed Inca Noble
Atahualpa was a man of some 30 years of age, of fine appearance and disposition, somewhat stocky, his face imposing, beautiful and ferocious, his eyes bloodshot.
- [99:55]
Paul Cooper
Atahualpa was a fierce and tenacious battlefield commander who led the battle hardened troops that had been fighting in the jungle war in the north. Ignoring his older brother Huascar's claim to the throne, he declared himself the rightful ruler of the northern region of Quito. The Inca empire had now effectively been divided in two, and a tense stalemate emerged that would last for five years. Wasgar, ruling from the old city of Cuzco, was by any measure the most legitimate and legal king of the Inca. He was four or five years older than his half brother Atahualpa. But although he was a brave commander, he had a mild and gentle temper. But Atahualpa was of a very different temperament, as the historian W.H. prescott.
- [100:56]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
Warlike, ambitious and daring, he was constantly engaged in enterprises for the enlargement of his own territory. His restless spirit excited some alarm at the court of Cuzco.
- [101:13]
Paul Cooper
Before long, the land was once again plunged into war. It's said that Atahualpa was captured early on on and placed in a wooden cage. But he managed to escape and return to his armies. His soldiers were battle tested and they were also remorseless and brutal in their tactics. When Atahualpa captured the city of Tumebamba, it's recorded that he put its inhabitants to the sword and burned all of its houses and temples to the ground. His campaign of destruction continued into the south. As Cieza de Leon recalls, many Indians.
- [101:56]
Unnamed Inca Noble
Tell about how to quell the king's anger. They sent a large group of children and carrying green bouquets in their hands and palm leaves to ask for his grace and friendship and to look beyond any past injuries. With so many cries, they begged him, and with such humility that it would be enough to break even hearts of stone. But they made little impression on the cruel man Atahualpa, because they say that he ordered his captains and people to kill all those who had come, which was done sparing only a few children and the sacred women of the temple.
- [102:32]
Paul Cooper
Some of these Spanish sources certainly have incentive to exaggerate the brutality of Atahualpa, considering the role they would later play in bringing about his downfall. But I think it's clear that he was at least very ruthless in the prosecution of his campaign. One story even recounts him burying some rebel chieftains alive. As Juan de Batanzos recounts, he said.
- [103:01]
Unnamed Inca Noble
That he planted that garden with people of evil hearts. He wished to see if they would produce their evil fruit and works.
- [103:11]
Paul Cooper
These tactics, however brutal, do seem to have worked. By the spring of the year 1532, Atahualpa had pushed south until he was within a few kilometres of the capital of Cuzco. His older brother, Huascar, hastily gathered all the troops he could from the countryside, many of them untrained men and boys. But it would not be enough. The two armies met on the plains of Kipan, each with around 60,000 soldiers. The booming of their voices and battle cries, the bashing of wooden shields and the thundering of drums. The clatter of bronze maces, javelins and arrows. When the two armies met, Atahualpa's experienced troops prevailed and Huascar was defeated. He was taken prisoner and placed in a cage, just as Atahualpa had been. Atahualpa also seems to have purged members of the royal court, who may have had stronger claims to the throne than he did. As Francisco Jerez recalls, To ensure the.
- [104:25]
Atahualpa
Obedience of the country, he tried to get rid of all pretenders to the crown. He did not spare even the illegitimate princes, because perhaps one or other of them might like to follow in his evil example. These executions and persecutions lasted for several years.
- [104:48]
Paul Cooper
Atahualpa was now well on his way to becoming the 13th Sapa Inca, the next in a line of kings that stretched back a hundred years to the reign of the poet king Pachacuti. He made the astonishing announcement that he intended to move the Inca capital from its ancestral heartland of Cuzco to his own hometown of Quito. He would uproot the entire Inca nobility, strip Cuzco of its wealth, and turn Quito into a capital that would dwarf it in magnificence. Atahualpa must have been riding high. His land may have lain in ruins, his people may have been ravaged by disease and war, but the entire world now seemed to bow down beneath him. He wasn't to know that events in the world outside had already overtaken him and made his victory over his brother all but irrelevant. A shadow was now stretching over all the lands of South America. Soon it would grow to cover the Andes. Within only a matter of days, they would encounter another power that would outmatch them in technological sophistication and that would arrive with only one goal in mind to topple the empire of the Inca and conquer these lands for themselves. The Inca didn't know it yet, but this power had already landed on their continent, and soon they would meet it face to face. 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 favour 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 Extrema Dura 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 are 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 Reconquest. 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 Alonso 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 a 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 Nunez 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 kilometres 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 Komogre, 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, Pascal de Andagoya, recalls in this letter to the Spanish.
- [114:25]
Atahualpa
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.
- [114:54]
Paul Cooper
In one version of the story, the chief Camogre'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.
- [115:09]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
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.
- [115:22]
Paul Cooper
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. And 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 Kamogre 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 conquistadores 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 Cortez, 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 nine, 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 overachieving 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.
- [119:40]
Atahualpa
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.
- [120:03]
Paul Cooper
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 spread cheekbones and a lantern jaw. His cousin, Pedro Pizarro, described him in the following.
- [121:33]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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.
- [122:03]
Paul Cooper
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. Pissarro'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 finely 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.
- [124:58]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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.
- [125:25]
Paul Cooper
Pissarro 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.
- [125:44]
Atahualpa
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.
- [126:15]
Paul Cooper
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 Tumbez, today located on the border between Ecuador and Peru. And here, finally, was evidence of the wealthy empire he had been promised. Tumbez 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.
- [127:16]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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.
- [127:31]
Paul Cooper
The people of Tumbez received Pizarro and his men politely and graciously. The people of Tumbez 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 Naaro recalls, it was.
- [128:02]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
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.
- [128:14]
Paul Cooper
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 rumours, 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 Toombez 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 Waro Chiri manuscript recalls the opportunistic struggle of this time with a note of disdain.
- [129:46]
Unnamed Inca Historian
After Huayna Capac had died, people scrambled for political power, each saying to their Me first, me first. It was while they were carrying on this way that the Spanish appeared.
- [130:00]
Paul Cooper
The Inca ruler and chronicler named Taitu 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.
- [130:25]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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? 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.
- [131:01]
Paul Cooper
Taitu Kusi even captures what it was like to see the Spaniards reading for the first time.
- [131:09]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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.
- [131:24]
Paul Cooper
Another later chronicler, Father Bernabe Kobo, recounts similar scenes of fear and confusion.
- [131:33]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
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. And when the Inca asked from what part of the world they had come, he was told that the messengers only knew that the strangers travelled across the sea in large wooden houses, as in.
- [132:11]
Paul Cooper
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 Cuzco. 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 meagre 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 26, 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 Castile with the stroke of a pen 10,000 kilometres away.
- [136:26]
Unnamed Inca Historian
Because you are Captain Francisco Pizarro, a resident of Tierra Ferme, 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.
- [136:45]
Paul Cooper
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. Fought 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 15 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 Tumbez. What he found there astonished him. The formerly booming town was now completely abandoned. Francisco Jerez recalls the eerie sight that the Spanish found.
- [138:47]
Unnamed Inca Noble
The town of Tombez 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 a war.
- [139:11]
Paul Cooper
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, Tumbares had been loyal to King Huascar in Cuzco 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 Tumbez 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 Tumbez, he resolved to march up into the hills and find it. Pizarro set out on 16 May 1532 with a company of 187 men made up of 62 cavalry and 102 foot soldiers. Soldiers, three artillery operators with cannons and 20 men with crossbows. Ahead of them lay a journey of more than 2,000 kilometres 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 Taitu 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.
- [142:05]
Unnamed Inca Noble
Spaniards were so free from all restraint and held the honour 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.
- [142:31]
Paul Cooper
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 Batanzos, 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 Cuzco with his army to destroy the last remaining noble families loyal to his brother Huascar. To strip Cuzco 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 Kusi even records that Atahualpa was more interested in hunting the Europeans horses, which he believed to be a new kind of llama.
- [144:17]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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 had come or interested in who they were. They brought only the knives for skinning and quartering the animals.
- [144:33]
Paul Cooper
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 travelled 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 Itchu grass. Francisco Jerez notes the fine roads leading up through the mountains.
- [146:59]
Pizarro
The road to Chincha passed through many villages and led from the river of San Miguel. It was paved and bounded on each side by a wall. Two carts could be driven abreast upon it. From Chincha, it led to Cuzco, and in many parts of it, rows of trees were planted on either side for the sake of their shade on the road.
- [147:24]
Paul Cooper
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 Cuzco, 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 Jerez recounts.
- [148:15]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
Until a year ago, all of those towns had been for the king of Cuzco, the son of the old king of Cuzco, 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.
- [148:39]
Paul Cooper
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 Jerez records.
- [150:11]
Pizarro
The cold is so great on these mountains that some of the horses accustomed to the warmth of the valleys were frost bitten.
- [150:21]
Paul Cooper
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 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 Jerez recounts the tense atmosphere on Pizarro's arrival.
- [151:55]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
The governor arrived at this town of Cajamarca On Friday, 15th 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 strong, stronger position where he might pitch the camp.
- [152:34]
Paul Cooper
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 clinked and plonked, looked on the helmets and armour 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 Jerez recalls.
- [153:42]
Pizarro
All the men were on foot outside the tents with the arms consisting of long lances like pike stuck into the ground. There seemed to be upwards of 30,000 men in the camp.
- [153:56]
Paul Cooper
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 10 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. And 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. Jerez recalls the colorful scene that unfolded before the Spanish as the Inca king entered the courtyard resplendent in full ceremonial dress.
- [157:17]
Pizarro
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 line with plumes of macaw's, feathers of many colors and adorned with plates of gold and silver.
- [157:50]
Paul Cooper
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 realised that something was wrong before it was too late. When Atahuallpa 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 Jerez writes about the pandemonium that unfolded in the main square of Cajamarca.
- [159:16]
Pizarro
Then the guns were fired off, the trumpets were sounded, and the troops, both horse and foot, sallied forth. On seeing the horses charge, many of the Indians who were in the open space fled, and such was the force with which they ran. They broke down part of the walls 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 that in a short time, most of them were put to the sword.
- [159:48]
Paul Cooper
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 Jerez recalls the panic that overtook them.
- [160:07]
Pizarro
So great was the terror of the Indians at seeing the governor forces wade 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.
- [160:27]
Paul Cooper
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.
- [160:56]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
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 centre of the plaza where the Inca's seat was placed.
- [161:24]
Paul Cooper
Taitu Kusi recalls bitterly the slaughter of that day.
- [161:30]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
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.
- [161:48]
Paul Cooper
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 Waskar, 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 Jerez captures some of this in his account.
- [162:37]
Pizarro
The governor went to his lodging with his prisoner Atawalba, despoiled of his robes which the Spaniards had torn off in pulling him out of the litter. The governor presently ordered native clothes to be brought, and when Atahualba was dressed, he made him sit near him and soothed his rage and agitation at finding himself so quickly fallen from his high estate.
- [163:02]
Paul Cooper
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.
- [163:13]
Pizarro
Among many other things, the governor said to him, ah, do not take it as an insult that you have 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, defeated other more powerful lords than you, imposing upon them the dominion of the emperor, whose vassal I am and who's king of Spain and of the universal world. We come to conquer this land by his command.
- [163:47]
Paul Cooper
What happened next has passed into legend. Francisco Jerez recounts the glorious promises that Atahualpa made.
- [163:59]
Pizarro
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 what time? Atahualpa said, I will give gold enough to fill a room 22ft 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 golden vessels, such as jars, pots, vases, besides lumps and other pieces. As for silver, he said that he would fill the whole chamber with it. Twice over he undertook to do this in tomb months. The governor told him to send off messengers with this object, and that when it was accomplished, he need have no fear.
- [164:57]
Paul Cooper
And 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.
- [165:14]
Pizarro
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 all to be put in the house where Atahualba had his guard until he had accomplished what he had promised.
- [165:47]
Paul Cooper
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 Cuzco 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 Cuzco 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 Spaniards 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 favour. 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 centres of Cuzco or Quito. And 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 favour. 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 Cuzco, 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 Cuzco, would soon become more confident in speaking to Pizarro and his men, and they happily began to spread rumours 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 rumour that Pizarro seems to have buried believed. Regardless of its truth, Pizarro made a rash and impulsive decision, as Francisco Jerez recalls.
- [171:09]
Pizarro
Then the governor, with the concurrence of the officers of His Majesty and of 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 Attah Woolpa 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 burnt, 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.
- [171:55]
Paul Cooper
Showing any feeling on the Inca side, the chronicler Titu Cusi, a nephew of Atahualpa, relates these events briefly and with little colour.
- [172:08]
Unnamed Spanish Chronicler
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.
- [172:27]
Paul Cooper
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 brother brothers named Tupacualpa, 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 Yapankwi. He was the father of the chronicler Taitu 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 Cuzco 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 forest. 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.
- [174:20]
Atahualpa
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. And 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 Cuzco and to kill all of us Spaniards who were there.
- [174:50]
Paul Cooper
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 Vilca. In fact, for at least the next 50 years, the Spanish fought a running series of guerrilla counterinsurgencies against the Inca, struggling to pacify a land that they had long since declared conquered. As the French monk and explorer Marcos de Niza.
- [175:44]
Unnamed Inca Historian
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. And eventually the people decided that they would rather die fighting than put up any longer with what was being done to them.
- [176:17]
Paul Cooper
In the year 1616, the Quechuan nobleman Philippe 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 throated denunciations of the colonial system ever written by one of its subjects.
- [176:50]
Atahualpa
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. And if they rebelled and attempted to kill their persecutors, they would certainly go to their death on the gallows.
- [177:32]
Paul Cooper
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 10 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 Jerez put this achievement bluntly.
- [178:05]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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.
- [178:19]
Paul Cooper
The chronicler Cieza de Leon even places Pizarro on the pedestal of heroes like Alexander the Great.
- [178:29]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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.
- [179:05]
Paul Cooper
But Pizarro's days of glory would be short lived. In the 10 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 Warochiri manuscript, writing at the end of the 16th century 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.
- [180:31]
Unnamed Inca Historian
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 Warochire 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.
- [181:13]
Paul Cooper
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 Mancio Serra de la Guizamon, whose descent into gambling and vice provost was representative of the later lives of many of these soldiering adventurers.
- [182:06]
Unnamed Inca Noble
At the time the Spaniards first entered the city of Cuzco, the gold image of the sun from its temple was taken in booty by a nobleman and conquistador by the name of Legouzumon, 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.
- [182:28]
Paul Cooper
Greed and corruption also crippled the colony of Peru, now referred to by its new name of New Castile. 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 12 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 nine, he was the captain who had been left behind in Tenochtitlan and who had slaughtered the Mexica people as they celebrated their festival of tosh cattle. 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 Cuzco. 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 Pilco Suny, and they came into possession of modern weapons, including arquebuses, artillery and crossbows. Just one year later, Manco Inca was recorded to be scattered, 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 24th of the year 1572, a Spanish army led by veteran conquistador Martin Artudo 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 Cuzco 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 Cuzco, 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 Cuzco, the entire crowd let out a blood curdling wail of mourning, as one eyewitness named Martin de Marua recalls.
- [187:00]
Unnamed Inca Noble
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.
- [187:41]
Paul Cooper
Then the emperor of the three Inca let out these final words.
- [187:48]
Pizarro
Pachacamag Witness how my enemy shed my blood.
- [187:55]
Paul Cooper
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. And 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 Cortez. 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, Pissarro 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, or a coca 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 2, 1964, the flamboyant explorer and archaeologist Jean 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.
- [193:25]
Hiram Bingham
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 falandor 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 100ft 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 viselike grip. Rattan vines hang down from its upper branches, forming a screen through which we must.
- [194:38]
Paul Cooper
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. 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 hall walls and the walls crumbling as the cloud washed in, relentless and forgetful, over the Hira.
- [196:21]
Atahualpa
Veera. Kacha, 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.
- [196:57]
Unnamed Inca Noble
Lord Viracocha.
- [197:02]
Atahualpa
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 hand. 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, O 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.
- [198:34]
Paul Cooper
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 Selia 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. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me aaulmmcooper and if you'd like updates about the podcast, announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast at fallofsivpod. With underscores separated the words, this podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running, you help me cover my costs and you help keep the podcast ad free. You also let me dedicate more time to writing, researching, recording and editing to get the episodes out to you faster and bring as much life and detail to them as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading on to patreon.com fallofcivilizationspodcast or just google fallofcivilisations patreon that's P A T R E o n for now. All the best and thanks for listening. Sa.