All language subtitles for 4.The Inca Conquest

Mexico, 1521.

Over a mere 24 months, Hernan Cortes had gone from being one of Cuba's many inconsequential

royal bureaucrats to the first governor of New Spain.

His power, his fame, secured by a remarkable conquest over the city of Tenochtitlan.

The Aztec kingdom lay in ruins whilst the fearsome Spanish empire flourished like never

before.

The New World, a land of unimaginable opportunity.

A fabulous vista of golden cities, bejeweled palaces brimming with treasure, free to those

brave enough to cross the ocean and take it.

At least, this was the tall tale that had enraptured Europe, capturing the imagination

of the ambitious, arousing the appetites of the ruthless.

Amongst them, an impoverished Spanish peasant, Francisco Pizarro.

Pizarro trekked south, where he would encounter the largest civilization on earth, an indigenous

people who would fight back, resisting the Spanish for decades, whilst war, disease

and death rained down upon them.

Francisco Pizarro was about to face the mighty Inca.

Cortes' expedition is going to be kind of like a catalyst.

That enormous wealth that the people who were associated with Cortes gained, all the conquistadors

and all the colonists want to repeat.

But the truth of the matter is that very few people were even able to come close.

Many expeditions ended in total failure and ruin or loss of life for the people involved.

The firm grip of the conquistadors already keenly felt across Central America.

By the early 1520s, the port settlement of Panama City was a crucial transit point for

the gold and silver being shipped back to the old world.

It also provided a stable base from which to launch new expeditions.

The establishment of a colony in Panama and the exploration of the Pacific is going to

be the way that Spaniards are going to actually get in contact with indigenous societies in

South America, in the Andean region, that is going to pique their interest to further

explore southwards.

From the humid slums of Panama City, one man was listening carefully for whispers of these

exotic golden cities to the south, Francisco Pizarro.

He was born only a few miles from Hernan Cortes, amidst the squalor of poverty in a

desolate Extremadura.

Francisco Pizarro is in many ways kind of like the opposite of Hernan Cortes.

While Cortes was at least kind of low nobility, Francisco Pizarro came from very humble origins.

He arrived in 1502 in the Ovando expedition in the same fleet that brought Bartolome de

las Casas to Hispaniola.

He had staged Indian wars in the Caribbean, on the north coast of South America, and ultimately

in Panama in Central America too, where he comes to hold a municipal position in the

town council of Panama.

So he's very, very experienced.

But Pizarro was engaged in the horribly violent and destructive conquest of indigenous peoples

in this area, slaughtering some, enslaving the rest, and through torture forced them

to tell them where they had their gold treasures hidden, would then go to the graves of the

ancestors of these people, dig them up, take the gold.

Pizarro was himself investigated for being a particularly brutal contributor to this

violence.

It's in Panama that the Spanish hear the first faint rumors of a second great empire

to the south, associated originally with the name Biru, that then becomes the name

Peru.

Pizarro, with two key companions, Diego de Almagro and Hernando de Luque, are the first

two who think, we should look into this, this is worth pursuing.

Having spent his twenties battling through the Americas as a low-ranking conquistador,

Pizarro was finally ready to rise to glory and make his name one which would never be

forgotten.

With Mexico already claimed by Cortes, he would push south, deeper into the unknown

than any other European before him.

Meanwhile, other conquistadors based across Central America were competing to be first

to claim the riches promised in unexplored regions beyond the Yucatan Peninsula.

In Mexico City, the brutal Pedro de Alvarado, a rival of Pizarro, readied his next expedition.

His sights set on Guatemala and its fragmented population of Maya.

The conquest of Guatemala is fascinating to me in part because the Spanish protagonist

of it is Pedro de Alvarado, who was a captain of Cortes' expedition and then kind of like

went on his own to actually do the conquest of Guatemala.

So we have a veteran of a previous expedition becoming the leader of a new expedition.

You have also the fact that in the conquest of Guatemala, Pedro de Alvarado departed from

Mexico City or from the Central Valley of Mexico and that he brought with himself a

great number of indigenous allies.

Especially people from Tlaxcala and Huejotzinco.

These were indigenous allies that came with him and became de facto conquistadors by their

own right.

The Spanish promised the Tlaxcalans all sorts of benefits by continuing on this voyage of

exploration and subjugation.

So the key strategy in Central America was alliance building and using other indigenous

groups in sort of attempting to marshal the rivalries for their own benefit.

Alvarado was painfully ignorant to the scale of the conflict he was about to inflict on

the New World.

Kickstarting a 170-year war fought with tenacious resistance by an indigenous people who refused

to accept Spanish dominance.

The conquest of the Maya was complicated because the Maya were very divided.

It had to be done piece by piece.

Spread across Mesoamerica for millennia, the Maya lived complex, class-based lives.

They were farmers, inventors, artists and architects, building spectacular limestone

temples and crafting exquisite art out of jade.

They traded with the Aztecs, yet there's little evidence to suggest they encountered

or even knew of the Inca.

It was a very, very fraught conquest, very violent, very brutal, and it took many years

to be accomplished.

The Maya were using bows and arrows, they used arrowheads made of flint that disintegrated

in the body after impact.

They caused these horrible wounds.

The Spaniards could not find water.

Their armor was useless because it was too hot and humid, and they routinely lost over

and over again.

So we get a sense of how these military incursions, despite a great deal of energy being put into

them, can really fail quite remarkably.

Spaniards have a lot of trouble really succeeding on their own terms, at their own game, if

you will, because of the military resources of people like the Maya.

In the 1540s, Spaniards return after disease has worked its way through, and even then

there's remarkable resistance.

There's a huge uprising in 1546 where all of the Maya coordinate in order to kill everything

Spanish that they can get their hands on.

Not just people, they kill pets, they pull out Spanish plants.

It's a kind of attempt to root them out, quite literally, to pull them up by the roots.

That gives us a sense of just how persistent their resistance was to Spanish rule.

The final Maya kingdom to fall under the control of the Spanish was that of the Itza Maya in

northern Guatemala in 1697.

We think about conquistadors and we think about a complete victory over indigenous people.

So there are enormous swaths of land and places and indigenous communities who were never

fully under the control of the Spaniards.

The conquest, as it were, came in phases, came in stages.

The further one went into the interior, the fewer and fewer representatives of Spain or

Spanish settlements one could find.

So the acts of conquistadors can be quite incomplete in many ways sometimes.

Francisco Pizarro's early expeditions down the Pacific coast are extremely difficult.

The conditions are terrible.

Many of his men die not only from attacks from indigenous people along the coast, but

from disease, and the majority of them actually simply from starvation.

These are desperate expeditions that almost fail.

In 1524, Pizarro was finally ready to sail into the unknown.

But his maiden voyage would soon collapse into a crushing failure.

A handful of survivors marooned on an island, others fleeing to the safety of Panama.

But Pizarro would not accept defeat.

With defeat came ever more shame.

In 1526, he sailed for Colombia.

His crew struggled to navigate the perilous swamps which clung to the coast.

A tropical hell, buzzing with insects and wild beasts, sickness and an unbearable heat

pushing his men dangerously close to their breaking point.

Pizarro finds himself with his men marooned on a small island, the Isla del Gallo, and

he's facing a mutiny from his companions who say, Pizarro, there's nothing down here.

There's no New Mexico down here.

We're all going to die.

Let's go back to Panama.

The story goes that Pizarro draws his sword, draws a line in the sand, and says to his

men, beyond this line lies glory and riches beyond your wildest imaginations.

Beyond the line lies poverty and obscurity.

You must make your choice.

And it's said that just 13 of his companions crossed the line in the sand.

They became Los Trece de la Fama, the famous 13.

After Pizarro's second expedition down the coast in 1526 to 1527, when he finally stumbles

on the northern anchor town of Tumbes, he now knows that it's true, that there is another

large indigenous empire or state to the south.

He doesn't know anything about it this time, but he's seen enough to be intrigued.

Tumbes is a significant town.

He's seen gold and silver treasures there.

It's clear that there's something there, there's something going on there that he wants to

look into further.

So it is in this juncture that he's going to go back to Spain, recruit his brothers,

and also get unofficial permission from the king to conduct the expedition to the Andes,

right, to the area where today we know as Peru.

The fact that he's got a formal contract, that he's been appointed to undertake this

task by the king, puts him in a much better legal position than had been the case for

Cortes in Mexico.

Nobody can challenge Pizarro's right to lead the conquest and to be governor of Peru from

this point on.

December 27th, 1530.

The determined conquistador set off on his third and final attempt to breach the south.

His three ships loaded with heavy weaponry, 180 men and 27 horses.

He had come ready for conflict, prepared to encounter a highly developed civilization

willing to fight for its survival.

The Inca, similar to the Aztec empire, rose to prominence relatively quickly.

The Inca empire, over approximately 150 to 200 years, had expanded first from this core

around Cusco to adjacent valleys in the central highlands.

South towards what's now Bolivia, eventually all the way down to where central Chile and

to the north of what's now Argentina, but also north along the Andes.

Its boundaries crossed all kinds of geography and topography, almost impossible to govern,

and yet they did.

The ruling Inca probably numbered no more than 150,000, but they ruled over an empire

of about 12 million.

Tremendously wealthy, powerful.

One of the things the Incas are best known for is their road system.

They developed a very extensive series of roads and highways and paths.

The total distance of that road system was probably about 40,000 kilometers, and these

were highly impressive pieces of engineering.

They were paved with stone where necessary.

They crossed ravines.

They crossed bridges.

They had to penetrate through sheer cliff faces.

They went through tunnels.

And so the Inca road system is one thing that distinguishes the Incas from other native

peoples in the Americas.

There was nothing really comparable in the Aztec empire.

The actual wars of conquest that the Inca accomplished towards neighboring peoples provided

the food crops, the fish, the gold and the silver that provided an economic basis for

the empire.

The Inca conquered other regions.

Some of those regions became their close allies and benefited from this situation, don't get

me wrong, but they also had polities, ethnic groups, particularly along the coast, particularly

in the far north, who were foes, who weren't happy with the situation, and who were ready

to revolt when the opportunity came.

The Inca saw themselves as the children of the sun himself, and inheriting the power,

the authority, the radiance of the sun, and made a point to dress themselves in gold,

and to ornament the most important buildings, sometimes covering entire walls in gold plate

and gold leaf.

The empire, in times of need, provided communities with food and medicine and military assistance.

It was very bureaucratic, but they also had developed these amazing methods of farming

in this very rugged terrain.

They had created sort of a tiered system of farming that controlled both flooding, but

could also provide crop variation that fed this vast empire of 12 million people.

Following his success at the Battle of Puna, Pizarro continued his quest along the Ecuadorian

coastline, his confidence bolstered by a healthy battalion of reinforcements.

He and his men arrived once again to the coastal settlement of Tumbes, expecting to find the

bustling port.

He finds to his astonishment that Tumbes lies in ruins.

It's been sacked and destroyed, most of its population have departed.

What's happened in the meantime is that there's been a civil war within the Inca Empire, a

great conflict between two rival contenders for the crown.

In 1493, the Inca Empire came under the steady rule of Huayna Capac.

His realm, a 2,000 mile stretch of territory.

But Europe was closing in, and yet it wasn't the conquistadors who would first breach his

peaceful kingdom.

Sometime in the mid-1520s, before Pizarro showed up himself on the north coast of Peru,

Huayna Capac got sick with an illness that nobody had seen before.

This illness, we're pretty sure, was smallpox, perhaps mixed with measles as well.

He died, and unfortunately for him and for his dynasty and for the empire, also gave

the disease to his heir apparent, leaving the question, who's going to succeed Huayna

Capac?

Who's going to become the next Inca?

A civil war broke out between that of Atahualpa and that of Huascar.

Emerging victorious from that conflict is Atahualpa.

He is now the new Inca emperor.

And as part of his campaigning in the late stages of the Inca civil war, he finds himself

in one of the major Inca towns on the Inca highway, Cajamarca, in the northern Peruvian

highlands.

This tussle for power had thrown the Inca kingdom into disarray, whilst disease tore

through the population.

A perfect storm brewing, ideal for Pizarro and his army of conquistadors.

The Spaniards, when they arrived on the coast of Peru in the early 1530s, they encountered

an empire in crisis.

Now this is the best news that Pizarro can possibly have received.

Instead of encountering a solid empire ruled by an experienced emperor, he finds an empire

riven by internal conflict and ruled by a highly inexperienced ruler who's only been

Inca emperor for several months.

So it was also an empire that had been pushing its edges, pushing its edges, pushing its

edges.

The Cañari, the Chachapoyas, and the Cayambes are three examples of peoples to the north

of the empire who were engaged in wars against their conquests by the Inca themselves, who

then rapidly allied themselves with the Spanish during the conquest, and that's a crucial

thing to understand.

Two factions of the Inca and the Spaniards themselves mutually trying to manipulate the

situation to gain an upper hand.

Pizarro abandoned the smoldering ruins of Tumbes, chopping his way inland, only stopping

to establish Peru's first Spanish settlement, San Miguel de Piura.

He soon grew restless, keen to continue on his quest.

So Pizarro and his men undertake the arduous journey on foot and on horseback following

the Inca road system on their journey from the coast up into the highlands.

Pizarro, with less than 200 of his men, arrived at the deserted highland town of Cajamarca

on November 15th, 1532.

But up above them, in the hills, awaited an incredible military force.

The colossal army of the new ruler of the Incas, Atahualpa.

They find the Inca town deserted, Atahualpa and his forces have withdrawn some miles across

the valley, but they also find, to their astonishment and to their terror, that he has an army encamped

around him that was tens of thousands strong, perhaps as many as 80,000 men.

The Spaniards tell us that the Inca tents covered the hillsides like forests.

They take possession of the town, they move into its central square, and they spend a

miserable sleepless night, but they're also working out their plan for the following day.

The Spanish soldiers were gripped by fear, the air dense with anxious anticipation of

a battle they surely could not win.

Pizarro knew that a fight would prove fatal for him and his men.

Only his cunning could prevail here.

If they have to fight this vast Inca army on the plains in the valley outside the town,

they're doomed.

Everything depends on enticing Atahualpa into the town, into Cajamarca, and getting him

to come into the square where the Spaniards have laid their trap for him.

And on the following day then, the 16th of November, Pizarro sends a series of delegations

out to meet Atahualpa, who's taking the waters at some Inca baths two or three miles across

the valley.

Towards the end of the evening, the emperor and the forces around him set themselves in

motion across the plain towards the town.

Atahualpa's glittering procession was heading straight for the centre of Cajamarca, where

Pizarro was waiting.

People swept every last straw or stone from the path as he came.

He was preceded by hundreds of dancers and musicians.

There's about 6,000 people in the procession.

And eventually, this procession reaches the city and Atahualpa moves into the central

square.

Now all is set for the Spaniards to spring their trap.

Hidden in the shadows with his 200 men, Pizarro dispatched a priest to greet Atahualpa.

He would deliver the demands of Catholicism to the Inca king.

There would be no negotiation with Spain's one true god, or King Charles of Iberia.

He exhorts him to convert to Christianity and he hands him a breviary, a book of doctrine.

Atahualpa looks at the book and then he casts it on the ground in apparent disgust.

And this is the signal.

They spring their trap to the Spanish war cry of Santiago and launch a furious assault

on the gathered Inca hordes in the tight space of the central square of Cajamarca.

Gunfire stunned the unarmed Inca, their celebratory procession torn apart by Pizarro's cavalry.

Spanish steel splitting native flesh, invaders hacking at the flailing limbs of Atahualpa's

loyal attendants who bravely sacrificed their own lives to preserve his.

Fear struck at the hearts of the Inca, curdling with confusion and horror at the carnage unfolding

around their sacred ruler.

Pizarro's instinct had been to devastate his enemy through shock and uncompromising violence.

And it worked.

It's a terrible massacre.

But the key point is that they must capture Atahualpa alive.

Everything hangs on this.

This is central to Pizarro's plan.

The Incas flood out onto the plain to be pursued by Spaniards on foot and on horseback, slaying

as they go.

The Spaniards only cease the killing with nightfall.

And by that point, between 4,000 and 6,000 Incas are dead, including much of the high

nobility of the empire.

And the emperor himself is a captive.

Atahualpa was held captive at Cajamarca for some nine months.

He rapidly came to understand that the Spaniards were obsessed with precious metals.

They were obsessed with gold.

They were obsessed with silver.

And he felt he could use this to his advantage.

He raised his arm as high as he could on the wall and said, I will fill this room once

with gold and twice over with silver.

But the Spaniards don't believe this can be possible.

They think it's bluff.

They think it's bluster.

And eventually, Atahualpa has kept his word.

He fills this room once with gold and twice over with silver.

This was the largest ransom in history.

The gold alone weighed six tons, never mind the silver.

It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in today's money.

One fifth of that was due to Charles V as his royal right, the royal fifth.

But the rest of it was distributed between Pizarro and his men at Cajamarca, fewer than

170 of them, many of whom then passed from poverty to undreamt of riches in a matter

of weeks.

The idea was that once the ransom was paid, that the Spanish would go on their way and

leave Atahualpa and his allies to their own problems.

But that's not what happened.

Pizarro decided to execute Atahualpa.

The months dragged on following the massacre, Pizarro's suspicion of Atahualpa becoming

ever more intense.

Paranoid, the Spaniard dreamed up a series of weak, spurious charges against the Inca

ruler, guilty the inevitable verdict.

His sentence, death.

They give him two choices.

He is to be burned alive, or if he converts to Christianity, he can be garroted and strangled.

And Atahualpa ultimately chooses the second option, to be garroted, not because he fears

the flames, but because it is vitally important to him that his body is preserved so that

it can be mummified and held in reverence by his descendants, as had those of all previous

Inca emperors.

Thus dies the last Inca emperor of an independent empire at just the age of 31.

Inca autonomy is never fully recovered from that point on.

The empire was really held together by the cement of this internal core of Inca bureaucracy

and royalty.

Once they dissipated, the strands that held the empire together fell apart, and the Spaniards

quickly established control and dominance over the native people, and quickly put the

imprint of the Spanish society, culture, and empire into the region.

Atahualpa has often been portrayed as naive, foolhardy, or even foolish.

He's an Inca emperor, at the height of his power, and at the head of an army that numbered

tens of thousands strong, and yet he processes voluntarily right into Cajamarca, into the

central square, and places himself within the trap that the Spaniards have laid for

him.

But if you think about it, it wasn't really naive or foolish at all.

What would have been foolish would have been to attack these strangers when nothing was

known about them, little real conversation had been had with them, and it wasn't clear

who they were or where they came from.

The very concept of people coming from outside those regions was alien to the Incas, and

this is what made the judgment call that Atahualpa had to make so very, very difficult.

It was impossible for him to know what Francisco Pizarro and his men represented or whether

they were a threat.

They clearly had some potent weapons, but there were only a few of them.

They didn't seem terribly threatening.

After the death of Atahualpa, the Spaniards need to find a replacement.

They still need an Inca emperor.

The Inca empire still exists.

The number of Spaniards in Peru is still very, very low.

There's very few of them, just a few hundred.

So they have to have an emperor through whom to govern, and they actually end up appointing

a series of figures for this role.

They're known as the puppet emperors, and the first and, in many respects, the most

important is a man called Manco Inca.

So Manco Inca is another son of the previous Inca emperor Huayna Capac, so he is an Inca

prince of the blood, and he's chosen by the Spaniards to play this role of being puppet

Inca.

With Manco Inca installed as their puppet leader, the Spaniards established Cuzco as

their inland base.

Great hunks of their terrain were confiscated, their treasure plundered, the Inca unable

to hold back a merciless Spanish force.

Pizarro undoubtedly owed much of his brutal success to a surprising form of European weaponry.

There's a question to the extent to which military technology and military tactics

helped the conquistadors succeed in Peru and other parts of the Americas.

One weapon that isn't written about nearly as much in these stories, in part because

they didn't have the prestige of the horse, is the importance of dogs that the Spanish

brought along with them in these battles.

Spanish Mastiffs, these huge dogs with powerful jaws, are even now a highly valued breed.

It's associated with being in the nobility and the aristocracy in Spain even now.

Adorned with spiked collars and padded jackets, the war dogs had been trained to attack natives

whilst protecting the Spanish.

These enormous hounds may have terrified the Inca, but at least they could see the great

slobbering beasts sent to track and kill them.

Once again, the merciless spread of European viruses proved to be the conquistadors' closest ally.

The reason that not so many Spaniards, other Europeans, or enslaved Africans they brought

along with them, why they didn't seem to die in this great a numbers when these epidemics

broke out, is because many of them had already had these diseases as children or as adolescents,

and so had some acquired immunity, not an inborn immunity, but an acquired immunity

through their experience living in diseased societies.

The impact of disease is arguably even more serious than in the case of Mexico, and this

is because an old world disease, again possibly smallpox, actually reaches the Inca Empire

some years in advance of the conquistadors themselves.

These virgin soil epidemics move so swiftly through Native American populations, down

into Ecuador and ultimately into the Inca Empire itself, some years in advance of the Europeans.

It was a perfect set of circumstances for the conquistadors.

Not only did they enjoy the advantage of superior weaponry, but they also possessed a biological

upper hand.

By 1535, the shrines and temples of Cusco had been stripped of their gold and silver.

Pizarro needed easy access to the ocean so that this loot could be sent back to the old

world, so shifts his army 350 miles west to establish the permanent capital city of

Lima on the coast.

Bitter resentment flowed through the surviving Inca, who began to form a resistance.

The Spaniards become more and more confident in their position in Peru, and in 1536-37,

Manco Inca decides that he's had enough, and he stages what's known as the Great Rebellion.

They lay siege to Cusco, they lay siege to Lima.

This Great Rebellion is by far and away the closest the Incas ever come to actually driving

the Spaniards from Peru altogether.

One of the things you can see during Manco Inca's Great Rebellion is the ways in which

the Incas have already begun to adapt to the new situation.

They seek to deal with the horses, for example, by digging pits and trenches with stakes in

them with the hope of breaking the legs of the horses or otherwise disabling them and

taking them out of combat.

The fact that the Spaniards have far greater technology, the fact that they can call on

reinforcements from over the sea, the fact that the Inca population has been devastated

by disease, as well as by the civil war and by conquest, means that this movement fails.

Manco Inca flees Cusco with his queen, Cura Ocio, in an attempt to establish a new, independent

Inca state.

But in the chaos, the Spaniards manage to take her captive.

She would have known that the Spanish were frequently willing to employ sexual violence

as a weapon of war and an expression of power.

This is a part of the conquest that's part and parcel of the warfare itself, is one of

the most important stories, one of the dominant stories of the conflict, chaos, and violence

of this era.

In order to prevent violent abuse by her male captors, Cura Ocio covered herself in disgusting

despicable things to translate.

Her own excrement, something else, who knows, but she successfully prevented her rape and

abuse all the way until she arrived in Cusco, where she was executed.

Despite the trauma of losing his wife to the conquistadors, Manco Inca successfully established

his own state in Vilcabamba, part of modern-day Ecuador.

For thirty-five battle-worn years, he and his successors resisted the Spanish invaders.

Meanwhile, discontent was spreading amongst the conquistadors.

Pizarro's habit of awarding huge encomiendas to members of his own family was causing

division and resentment amongst the Spanish adventurers.

Pizarro was gaining some dangerous enemies.

Despite Spanish infighting, in 1572 Manco Inca's stronghold finally fell.

This was the end of the Inca resistance, and the opening of a new chapter of prolonged

catastrophic subjugation.

I think we can state confidently that people's numbered in the millions in the Inca Empire proper.

To be more specific than that is quite difficult, and it's also just as difficult to estimate

how many people were dying from disease, from particular battles, from the famines and the

disruption and the robberies and other aspects of chaos that these wars unleashed.

We can state with some confidence what happened over the longer term.

Over the course of the whole 16th century, at least 70 percent, perhaps over 90 percent

depopulation.

At the same time, you have all these increasing numbers of immigrants who come from other

parts of the Americas, who come from Europe itself, slaves that they brought along from

these regions, and then the children that they began having with the handful of women

that they brought along with them, also as immigrants, but also with the indigenous women

themselves.

Mines heaving with gold and silver dotted the Peruvian landscape.

Spain's focus through its conquistadors would shift.

Their revised mission, an aggressive assault on South America's precious metals, tearing

them from the ground on an industrial scale.

This changed from extracting treasure and human lives to extracting nature itself, beginning

for one of the things that the Andean nations are known for even now, turning them into

some of the most important mineral producers in the world.

I can't emphasize enough how important, first of all, the mining of treasure, but then the

establishing of mines themselves, most famously the Red Mountain, almost a mountain of silver

in Potosi, in what's now Bolivia, and changing the sheer amount of bullion that's available

to make payments in the world economy.

The wealth that came back from Peru were, if possible, even greater than the first wave

of wealth that actually arrived in Spain from Mexico.

In some ways, it's going to lead to actually the depopulation of many areas of the Americas

where Spaniards are going to want to abandon their place of residence and go to Peru because

they're hearing of all the wealth that exists in Peru and they want to be part of it.

The impoverished boy from Estremadura had conquered an empire.

But on June 26th, 1541, a disgruntled group of rogue conquistadors broke into his home

and stabbed him to death.

By dominating Peru and its people, Pizarro had seemingly added nearly 800,000 square

miles of territory to King Charles' empire.

But the quest hadn't been swift, and it hadn't been easy.

And the Inca were far from beaten.

The Inca were not totally defeated for decades, not until the 1570s.

A lot of the fighting was what we would call guerrilla warfare.

These groups who were fighting against the conquistadors became amazingly adept at causing

a lot of damage to their foes with a very small number of soldiers at their disposal.

One of the important things to keep in mind, too, is this is one of the most rugged regions

in the world.

There are so many places that you can hide.

There are so many strong points that one can defend for a long period.

If you've ever been to Machu Picchu, that gives you some sense of how rugged and densely

vegetated these landscapes were, and how difficult it would be for not just an individual but

for entire armies to move around.

Despite this heroic resistance, years of Spanish occupation eventually turned into decades.

With grim inevitability, Inca society and culture gave way to Spanish influence, their

once great civilization transforming irreversibly.

The Inca conquest would open the Americas up to the ravenous greed of Europe, forcing

the conquistadors to find a way to retain control.

Colonization, their culture inextricably woven into the living, ever-evolving ecosystems

of the new world.

But, as generations passed, a bleak set of racial hierarchies began to form.

Whilst the mining of a seemingly endless supply of silver would bring the colonists a new

level of wealth, catapulting the conquistadors to the apex of their powers, and sending them

into the wilderness hunting for more, seizing the Philippine islands and discovering the

largest river on the planet.