Conquistadors The Rise and Fall_4of6_The Inca Conquest
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Mexico, 1521.
00:09Over a mere 24 months, Hernan Cortes had gone from being one of Cuba's many inconsequential
00:16royal bureaucrats to the first governor of New Spain.
00:21His power, his fame, secured by a remarkable conquest over the city of Tenochtitlan.
00:29The Aztec kingdom lay in ruins whilst the fearsome Spanish empire flourished like never
00:35before.
00:37The New World, a land of unimaginable opportunity, a fabulous vista of golden cities, bejeweled
00:46palaces brimming with treasure, free to those brave enough to cross the ocean and take it.
00:54At least, this was the tall tale that had enraptured Europe, capturing the imagination
01:00of the ambitious, arousing the appetites of the ruthless.
01:06Amongst them, an impoverished Spanish peasant, Francisco Pizarro.
01:12Pizarro trekked south, where he would encounter the largest civilization on earth, an indigenous
01:20people who would fight back, resisting the Spanish for decades, whilst war, disease
01:27and death rained down upon them.
01:31Francisco Pizarro was about to face the mighty Inca.
01:45Cortes's expedition is going to be kind of like a catalyst.
01:50That enormous wealth that the people who were associated with Cortes gained, all the conquistadors
01:56and all the colonists want to repeat.
02:00But the truth of the matter is that very few people were even able to come close.
02:05Many expeditions ended in total failure and ruin or loss of life for the people involved.
02:13The firm grip of the conquistadors already keenly felt across Central America.
02:19By the early 1520s, the port settlement of Panama City was a crucial transit point for
02:26the gold and silver being shipped back to the old world.
02:30It also provided a stable base from which to launch new expeditions.
02:37The establishment of a colony in Panama and the exploration of the Pacific is going to
02:42be the way that Spaniards are going to actually get in contact with indigenous societies in
02:48South America, in the Andean region, that is going to pique their interest to further
02:53explore southwards.
02:57From the humid slums of Panama City, one man was listening carefully for whispers of these
03:04exotic golden cities to the south, Francisco Pizarro.
03:10He was born only a few miles from Hernan Cortes, amidst the squalor of poverty in a
03:17desolate Extremadura.
03:21Francisco Pizarro is in many ways kind of like the opposite of Hernan Cortes.
03:27While Cortes was at least kind of low nobility, Francisco Pizarro came from very humble origins.
03:34He arrived in 1502 in the Ovando expedition in the same fleet that brought Bartolome de
03:39las Casas to Hispaniola.
03:43He had staged Indian wars in the Caribbean, on the north coast of South America, and ultimately
03:50in Panama in Central America too, where he comes to hold a municipal position in the
03:55town council of Panama.
03:56So he's very, very experienced.
03:59But Pizarro was engaged in the horribly violent and destructive conquest of indigenous peoples
04:07in this area, slaughtering some, enslaving the rest, and through torture forced them
04:12to tell them where they had their gold treasures hidden.
04:16Would then go to the graves of the ancestors of these people, dig them up, take the gold.
04:22Pizarro was himself investigated for being a particularly brutal contributor to this
04:28violence.
04:29It's in Panama that the Spanish hear the first faint rumors of a second great empire
04:36to the south, associated originally with the name Biru, that then becomes the name Peru.
04:42Pizarro, with two key companions, Diego de Almagro and Hernando de Luque, are the first
04:48two who think, we should look into this, this is worth pursuing.
04:57Having spent his twenties battling through the Americas as a low-ranking conquistador,
05:02Pizarro was finally ready to rise to glory and make his name one which would never be
05:09forgotten.
05:11With Mexico already claimed by Cortes, he would push south, deeper into the unknown
05:18than any other European before him.
05:22Meanwhile, other conquistadors based across Central America were competing to be first
05:29to claim the riches promised in unexplored regions beyond the Yucatan Peninsula.
05:37In Mexico City, the brutal Pedro de Alvarado, a rival of Pizarro, readied his next expedition.
05:44His sights set on Guatemala and its fragmented population of Maya.
05:50The conquest of Guatemala is fascinating to me in part because the Spanish protagonist
05:56of it is Pedro de Alvarado, who was a captain of Cortes' expedition and then kind of like
06:04went of his own to actually do the conquest of Guatemala.
06:07So we have a veteran of a previous expedition becoming the leader of a new expedition.
06:12You have also the fact that in the conquest of Guatemala, Pedro de Alvarado departed from
06:18Mexico City or from the center valley of Mexico and that he brought with himself a great number
06:23of indigenous allies, especially people from Tlaxcala and Huejotzinco.
06:30These were indigenous allies that came with him and became de facto conquistadors by their own right.
06:39The Spanish promised the Tlaxcalans all sorts of benefits by continuing on this voyage of
06:45exploration and subjugation.
06:48So the key strategy in Central America was alliance building and using other indigenous
06:55groups and sort of attempting to marshal the rivalries for their own benefit.
07:03Alvarado was painfully ignorant to the scale of the conflict he was about to inflict on
07:07the New World.
07:09Kickstarting a 170-year war fought with tenacious resistance by an indigenous people who refused
07:17to accept Spanish dominance.
07:20The conquest of the Maya was complicated because the Maya were very divided.
07:25It had to be done piece by piece.
07:29Spread across Mesoamerica for millennia, the Maya lived complex, class-based lives.
07:35They were farmers, inventors, artists and architects, building spectacular limestone
07:42temples and crafting exquisite art out of jade.
07:46They traded with the Aztecs, yet there's little evidence to suggest they encountered
07:51or even knew of the Inca.
07:55It was a very, very fraught conquest, very violent, very brutal, and it took many years
08:00to be accomplished.
08:04The Maya were using bows and arrows, they used arrowheads made of flint that disintegrated
08:10in the body after impact.
08:12They caused these horrible wounds.
08:15The Spaniards could not find water.
08:18Their armor was useless because it was too hot and humid.
08:22And they routinely lost over and over again.
08:25So we get a sense of how these military incursions, despite a great deal of energy being put into
08:30them, can really fail quite remarkably.
08:34Spaniards have a lot of trouble really succeeding on their own terms, at their own game, if
08:39you will, because of the military resources of people like the Maya.
08:50In the 1540s, Spaniards return after disease has worked its way through.
08:56And even then, there's remarkable resistance.
08:59There's a huge uprising in 1546 where all of the Maya coordinate in order to kill everything
09:06Spanish that they can get their hands on, not just people.
09:09They kill pets, they pull out Spanish plants.
09:13It's a kind of attempt to root them out, quite literally, to pull them up by the roots.
09:18That gives us a sense of just how persistent their resistance was to Spanish rule.
09:26The final Maya kingdom to fall under the control of the Spanish was that of the Itza Maya in
09:32northern Guatemala in 1697.
09:36We think about conquistadors and we think about a complete victory over indigenous people.
09:42So there are enormous swaths of land and places and indigenous communities who were never
09:47fully under control of the Spaniards.
09:49The conquest, as it were, came in phases, came in stages.
09:53And the further one went into the interior, the fewer and fewer representatives of Spain
09:59or Spanish settlements one could find.
10:03So the acts of conquistadors can be quite incomplete in many ways sometimes.
10:13Francisco Pizarro's early expeditions down the Pacific coast are extremely difficult.
10:18The conditions are terrible.
10:20Many of his men die not only from attacks from indigenous people along the coast,
10:25but from disease, and the majority of them actually simply from starvation.
10:29These are desperate expeditions that almost fail.
10:33In 1524, Pizarro was finally ready to sail into the unknown.
10:39But his maiden voyage would soon collapse into a crushing failure.
10:44A handful of survivors marooned on an island, others fleeing to the safety of Panama.
10:50But Pizarro would not accept defeat.
10:53With defeat came ever more shame.
10:58In 1526, he sailed for Colombia.
11:02His crew struggled to navigate the perilous swamps which clung to the coast.
11:07A tropical hell, buzzing with insects and wild beasts.
11:11Sickness and an unbearable heat pushing his men dangerously close to their breaking point.
11:18Pizarro finds himself with his men marooned on a small island,
11:22the Isla del Gallo, and he's facing a mutiny from his companions who say,
11:28Pizarro, there's nothing down here. There's no New Mexico down here.
11:32We're all going to die. Let's go back to Panama.
11:36The story goes that Pizarro draws his sword, draws a line in the sand,
11:42and says to his men, beyond this line lies glory and riches beyond your wildest imaginations.
11:50Behind the line lies poverty and obscurity. You must make your choice.
11:56And it's said that just 13 of his companions crossed the line in the sand.
12:01They became Los Trece de la Fama, the famous 13.
12:08After Pizarro's second expedition down the coast in 1526 to 1527,
12:14when he finally stumbles on the northern anchor town of Tumbes,
12:18he now knows that it's true that there is another large indigenous empire or state to the south.
12:26He doesn't know anything about it this time, but he's seen enough to be intrigued.
12:30Tumbes is a significant town. He's seen gold and silver treasures there.
12:34It's clear that there's something there, there's something going on there that he wants to look into further.
12:39So it is in this juncture that he's going to go back to Spain,
12:43recruit his brothers, and also get unofficial permission from the king
12:49to conduct the expedition to the Andes, right, to the area where today we know as Peru.
12:55The fact that he's got a formal contract, that he's been appointed to undertake this task by the king,
13:00puts him in a much better legal position than had been the case for Cortes in Mexico.
13:06Nobody can challenge Pizarro's right to lead the conquest and to be governor of Peru from this point on.
13:22December 27th, 1530.
13:26The determined conquistador set off on his third and final attempt to breach the south.
13:33His three ships loaded with heavy weaponry, 180 men and 27 horses.
13:41He had come ready for conflict, prepared to encounter a highly developed civilization willing to fight for its survival.
13:52The Inca, similar to the Aztec empire, rose to prominence relatively quickly.
14:00The Inca empire, over approximately 150 to 200 years, had expanded first from this core around Cusco
14:09to adjacent valleys in the central highlands.
14:13South towards what's now Bolivia, eventually all the way down to central Chile and to the north of what's now Argentina,
14:20but also north along the Andes.
14:24Its boundaries crossed all kinds of geography and topography, almost impossible to govern, yet they did.
14:31The ruling Inca probably numbered no more than 150,000, but they ruled over an empire of about 12 million.
14:37Tremendously wealthy, powerful.
14:41One of the things the Incas are best known for is their road system.
14:45They developed a very extensive series of roads and highways and paths.
14:51The total distance of that road system was probably about 40,000 kilometers.
14:56And these were highly impressive pieces of engineering.
15:00They were paved with stone where necessary.
15:02They crossed ravines. They crossed bridges.
15:05They had to penetrate through sheer cliff faces.
15:08They went through tunnels.
15:10And so the Inca road system is one thing that distinguishes the Incas from other native peoples in the Americas.
15:15There was nothing really comparable in the Aztec empire.
15:19The actual wars of conquest that the Inca accomplished towards neighboring peoples
15:26provided the food crops, the fish, the gold and the silver that provided an economic basis for the empire.
15:35The Inca conquered other regions.
15:38Some of those regions became their close allies and benefited from this situation, don't get me wrong.
15:44But they also had polities, ethnic groups, particularly along the coast, particularly in the far north,
15:49who were foes, who weren't happy with the situation and who were ready to revolt when the opportunity came.
15:58The Inca saw themselves as the children of the sun himself.
16:04And inheriting the power, the authority, the radiance of the sun
16:09and made a point to dress themselves in gold
16:12and to ornament the most important buildings,
16:16sometimes covering entire walls in gold plate and gold leaf.
16:21The empire, in times of need, provided communities with food and medicine and military assistance.
16:28It was very bureaucratic.
16:30But they also had developed these amazing methods of farming in this very rugged terrain.
16:36They had created sort of a tiered system of farming that controlled both flooding
16:40and rain that could also provide crop variation that fed this vast empire of 12 million people.
16:50Following his success at the Battle of Puna,
16:53Pizarro continued his quest along the Ecuadorian coastline,
16:57his confidence bolstered by a healthy battalion of reinforcements.
17:02He and his men arrived once again to the coastal settlement of Tumbes,
17:07expecting to find the bustling port.
17:11He finds to his astonishment that Tumbes lies in ruins.
17:14It's been sacked and destroyed. Most of its population have departed.
17:19What's happened in the meantime is that there's been a civil war within the Inca Empire,
17:24a great conflict between two rival contenders for the crown.
17:29In 1493, the Inca Empire came under the steady rule of Huayna Capac.
17:35His realm, a 2,000-mile stretch of territory.
17:40But Europe was closing in.
17:43And yet it wasn't the conquistadors who would first breach his peaceful kingdom.
17:48Sometime in the mid-1520s, before Pizarro showed up himself on the north coast of Peru,
17:54Huayna Capac got sick with an illness that nobody had seen before.
18:00This illness, we're pretty sure, was smallpox, perhaps mixed with measles as well.
18:07He died, and unfortunately for him and for his dynasty and for the empire,
18:12also gave the disease to his heir apparent,
18:16leaving the question, who's going to succeed Huayna Capac?
18:21Who's going to become the next Inca?
18:24A civil war broke out between that of Guatahualpa and that of Huascar.
18:30Emerging victorious from that conflict is Atahualpa.
18:34He is now the new Inca emperor.
18:37And as part of his campaigning in the late stages of the Inca civil war,
18:42he finds himself in one of the major Inca towns on the Inca highway, Cajamarca,
18:47in the northern Peruvian highlands.
18:50This tussle for power had thrown the Inca kingdom into disarray,
18:55whilst disease tore through the population.
18:58A perfect storm brewing, ideal for Pizarro and his army of conquistadors.
19:15The Spaniards, when they arrived on the coast of Peru in the early 1530s,
19:19they encountered an empire in crisis.
19:23Now this is the best news that Pizarro can possibly have received.
19:28Instead of encountering a solid empire ruled by an experienced emperor,
19:33he finds an empire riven by internal conflict and ruled by a highly inexperienced ruler
19:38who's only been Inca emperor for several months.
19:41So it was also an empire that had been pushing its edges, pushing its edges, pushing its edges.
19:47The Cañari, the Chachapoyas and the Cayambes are three examples of peoples
19:53to the north of the empire who were engaged in wars against their conquest by the Inca themselves,
20:00who then rapidly allied themselves with the Spanish during the conquest,
20:05and that's a crucial thing to understand.
20:07Different factions of the Inca and the Spaniards themselves
20:11mutually trying to manipulate the situation to gain an upper hand.
20:16Pizarro abandoned the smouldering ruins of Tumbes, chopping his way inland,
20:22only stopping to establish Peru's first Spanish settlement, San Miguel de Piura.
20:29He soon grew restless, keen to continue on his quest.
20:34So Pizarro and his men undertake the arduous journey on foot and on horseback
20:40following the Inca road system on their journey from the coast up into the highlands.
20:46Pizarro, with less than 200 of his men, arrived at the deserted highland town of Cajamarca
20:53on November 15th, 1532.
20:57But up above them, in the hills, awaited an incredible military force,
21:03the colossal army of the new ruler of the Incas,
21:08Atahualpa.
21:15They find the Inca town deserted.
21:18Atahualpa and his forces have withdrawn some miles across the valley,
21:22but they also find, to their astonishment and to their terror,
21:26that he has an army encamped around him that was tens of thousands strong,
21:31perhaps as many as 80,000 men.
21:33The Spaniards tell us that the Inca tents covered the hillsides like forests.
21:39They take possession of the town, they move into its central square
21:43and they spend a miserable, sleepless night.
21:47But they're also working out their plan for the following day.
21:51The Spanish soldiers were gripped by fear,
21:55the air dense with anxious anticipation of a battle they surely could not win.
22:02Pizarro knew that a fight would prove fatal for him and his men.
22:08Only his cunning could prevail here.
22:12If they have to fight this vast Inca army on the plains in the valley outside the town,
22:17they're doomed.
22:18Everything depends on enticing Atahualpa into the town, into Cajamarca,
22:24and getting him to come into the square where the Spaniards have laid their trap for him.
22:30And on the following day then, the 16th of November,
22:33Pizarro sends a series of delegations out to meet Atahualpa,
22:38who's taking the waters that some Inca baths two or three miles across the valley.
22:46Towards the end of the evening,
22:48the emperor and the forces around him set themselves in motion
22:52across the plain towards the town.
22:55Atahualpa's glittering procession was heading straight for the center of Cajamarca,
23:01where Pizarro was waiting.
23:05People swept every last straw or stone from the path as he came.
23:10He was preceded by hundreds of dancers and musicians.
23:14There's about 6,000 people in the procession.
23:18And eventually, this procession reaches the city
23:21and Atahualpa moves into the central square.
23:25Now all is set for the Spaniards to spring their trap.
23:30Hidden in the shadows with his 200 men,
23:33Pizarro dispatched a priest to greet Atahualpa.
23:37He would deliver the demands of Catholicism to the Inca king.
23:42There would be no negotiation with Spain's one true god,
23:47or King Charles of Iberia.
23:50He exhorts him to convert to Christianity
23:53and he hands him a breviary, a book of doctrine.
23:56Atahualpa looks at the book
23:59and then he casts it on the ground in apparent disgust.
24:03And this is the signal.
24:05They spring their trap to the Spanish war cry of Santiago
24:09and launch a furious assault on the gathered Inca hordes
24:14in the tight space of the central square of Cajamarca.
24:18Gunfire stunned the unarmed Inca,
24:21their celebratory procession torn apart by Pizarro's cavalry.
24:26Spanish steel splitting native flesh,
24:29invaders hacking at the flailing limbs of Atahualpa's loyal attendants
24:33who bravely sacrificed their own lives to preserve his.
24:38Fear struck at the hearts of the Inca,
24:41curdling with confusion and horror
24:44at the carnage unfolding around their sacred ruler.
24:48Pizarro's instinct had been to devastate his enemy
24:52through shock and uncompromising violence.
24:56And it worked.
24:58It's a terrible massacre,
25:01but the key point is that they must capture Atahualpa alive.
25:05Everything hangs on this.
25:07This is central to Pizarro's plan.
25:10The Incas flood out onto the plain
25:13to be pursued by Spaniards on foot and on horseback,
25:16slaying as they go.
25:20The Spaniards only cease the killing with nightfall
25:23and by that point between 4,000 and 6,000 Incas are dead,
25:28including much of the high nobility of the empire,
25:31and the emperor himself is a captive.
25:40Atahualpa was held captive at Cajamarca for some nine months.
25:45He rapidly came to understand
25:47that the Spaniards were obsessed with precious metals,
25:50they were obsessed with gold, they were obsessed with silver,
25:53and he felt he could use this to his advantage.
25:56He raised his arm as high as he could on the wall and said,
25:59I will fill this room once with gold and twice over with silver.
26:04But the Spaniards don't believe this can be possible.
26:07They think it's bluff, they think it's bluster.
26:11And eventually Atahualpa has kept his word.
26:15He fills this room once with gold and twice over with silver.
26:23This was the largest ransom in history.
26:26The gold alone weighed six tonnes, never mind the silver.
26:31It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in today's money.
26:37One-fifth of that was due to Charles V as his royal right, the royal fifth,
26:42but the rest of it was distributed between Pizarro
26:45and his men at Cajamarca, fewer than 170 of them,
26:49many of whom then passed from poverty
26:53to undreamt-of riches in a matter of weeks.
26:57The idea was that once the ransom was paid,
27:00that the Spanish would go on their way
27:03to give Atahualpa and his allies to their own problems.
27:07But that's not what happened.
27:09Pizarro decided to execute Atahualpa.
27:14The months dragged on following the massacre,
27:18Pizarro's suspicion of Atahualpa becoming ever more intense.
27:23Paranoid, the Spaniard dreamed up a series of weak,
27:27spurious charges against the Inca ruler,
27:30guilty the inevitable verdict.
27:33His sentence? Death.
27:37They give him two choices.
27:40He is to be burned alive,
27:43or if he converts to Christianity, he can be garroted and strangled.
27:48And Atahualpa ultimately chooses the second option, to be garroted,
27:52not because he fears the flames, but because it is vitally important to him
27:57that his body is preserved so that it can be mummified
28:01and held in reverence by his descendants,
28:04as had those of all previous Inca emperors.
28:08Thus dies the last Inca emperor of an independent empire
28:13at just the age of 31.
28:16Inca autonomy is never fully recovered from that point on.
28:28The empire was really held together by the cement
28:31of this internal core of Inca bureaucracy and royalty.
28:35Once they dissipated, the strength that held the empire together fell apart.
28:40And the Spaniards quickly established control and dominance
28:44over the native people and quickly put the imprint
28:47of the Spanish society, culture and empire into the region.
28:52Atahualpa has often been portrayed as naive, foolhardy or even foolish.
28:59Here's an Inca emperor at the height of his power
29:02and at the head of an army that numbered tens of thousands strong,
29:06and yet he processes voluntarily right into Cajamarca,
29:11into the central square, and places himself within the trap
29:15that the Spaniards have laid for him.
29:18But if you think about it, it wasn't really naive or foolish at all.
29:22What would have been foolish would have been to attack these strangers
29:27when nothing was known about them,
29:29little real conversation had been had with them,
29:32and it wasn't clear who they were or where they came from.
29:36The very concept of people coming from outside those regions
29:41was alien to the Incas, and this is what made
29:45the judgement call that Atahualpa had to make so very, very difficult.
29:49It was impossible for him to know what Francisco Pizarro
29:52and his men represented or whether they were a threat.
29:55They clearly had some potent weapons, but there were only a few of them.
29:59They didn't seem terribly threatening.
30:03After the death of Atahualpa, the Spaniards need to find a replacement.
30:08They still need an Inca emperor.
30:10The Inca empire still exists.
30:12The number of Spaniards in Peru is still very, very low.
30:15There's very few of them, just a few hundred.
30:18So they have to have an emperor through whom to govern.
30:22And they actually end up appointing a series of figures for this role.
30:26They're known as the puppet emperors.
30:28And the first, and in many respects the most important,
30:32is a man called Manco Inca.
30:35So Manco Inca is another son of the previous Inca emperor, Huaynac.
30:42So he is an Inca prince of the blood.
30:45And he's chosen by the Spaniards to play this role of being puppet Inca.
30:57With Manco Inca installed as their puppet leader,
31:00the Spaniards established Cuzco as their inland base.
31:05Great hunks of their terrain were confiscated.
31:08Their treasure plundered,
31:10the Inca unable to hold back a merciless Spanish force.
31:14Pizarro undoubtedly owed much of his brutal success
31:18to a surprising form of European weaponry.
31:22There's a question to the extent to which military technology
31:26and military tactics helped the conquistadors succeed
31:30in Peru and other parts of the Americas.
31:33One weapon that isn't written about nearly as much in these stories
31:37on part because they didn't have the prestige of the horse,
31:39is the importance of dogs that the Spanish brought
31:42along with them in these battles.
31:46Spanish mastiffs, these huge dogs with powerful jaws,
31:51are even now a highly valued breed.
31:54It's associated with being in the nobility and the aristocracy in Spain even now.
31:59Adorned with spiked collars and padded jackets,
32:02the war dogs had been trained to attack natives
32:05whilst protecting the Spanish.
32:09These enormous hounds may have terrified the Inca,
32:13but at least they could see the great slobbering beasts
32:16sent to track and kill them.
32:20Once again, the merciless spread of European viruses
32:24proved to be the conquistadors' closest ally.
32:29The reason that not so many Spaniards,
32:32other Europeans or enslaved Africans, they brought along with them,
32:35why they didn't seem to die in this great a numbers
32:38when these epidemics broke out is because many of them
32:41had already had these diseases as children or as adolescents
32:46and so had some acquired immunity, not an inborn immunity,
32:50but an acquired immunity through their experience
32:53living in diseased societies.
32:57The impact of disease is arguably even more serious than in the case of Mexico
33:01and this is because an old world disease, again, possibly smallpox,
33:06actually reaches the Inca Empire
33:08some years in advance of the conquistadors themselves.
33:13These virgin soil epidemics move so swiftly
33:17through Native American populations down into Ecuador
33:20and ultimately into the Inca Empire itself
33:22some years in advance of the Europeans.
33:26It was a perfect set of circumstances for the conquistadors.
33:31Not only did they enjoy the advantage of superior weaponry,
33:35but they also possessed a biological upper hand.
33:47By 1535, the shrines and temples of Cusco
33:51had been stripped of their gold and silver.
33:55Pizarro needed easy access to the ocean
33:58so that this loot could be sent back to the old world.
34:01So shifts his army 350 miles west
34:05to establish the permanent capital city of Lima on the coast.
34:10Bitter resentment flowed through the surviving Inca
34:13who began to form a resistance.
34:19The Spaniards become more and more confident in their position in Peru
34:22and in 1536-37, Manco Inca decides that he's had enough
34:28and he stages what's known as the Great Rebellion.
34:32They lay siege to Cusco, they lay siege to Lima.
34:36This Great Rebellion is by far and away the closest the Incas ever come
34:40to actually driving the Spaniards from Peru altogether.
34:45One of the things you can see during Manco Inca's Great Rebellion
34:48is the ways in which the Incas have already begun to adapt to the new situation.
34:52They seek to deal with the horses, for example,
34:55by digging pits and trenches with stakes in them
34:59with the hope of breaking the legs of the horses
35:01or otherwise disabling them and taking them out of combat.
35:05The fact that the Spaniards have far greater technology,
35:08the fact that they can call on reinforcements from over the sea,
35:11the fact that the Inca population has been devastated by disease
35:14as well as by the civil war and by conquest
35:17means that this movement fails.
35:20Manco Inca flees Cusco with his queen, Cura Ocio,
35:24in an attempt to establish a new, independent Inca state.
35:29But in the chaos, the Spaniards manage to take her captive.
35:33She would have known that the Spanish were frequently willing
35:37to employ sexual violence as a weapon of war
35:40and an expression of power.
35:44This is a part of the conquest that's part and parcel of the warfare itself.
35:49It's one of the most important stories, one of the dominant stories
35:53of the conflict, chaos, and violence of this era.
35:58In order to prevent violent abuse by her male captors,
36:02Cura Ocio covered herself in disgusting, despicable things to translate.
36:08Her own excrement, something else, who knows,
36:11she successfully prevented her rape and abuse all the way
36:14until she arrived in Cusco, where she was executed.
36:20Despite the trauma of losing his wife to the conquistadors,
36:23Manco Inca successfully established his own state in Vilcabamba,
36:28part of modern-day Ecuador.
36:31For 35 battle-worn years,
36:33he and his successors resisted the Spanish invaders.
36:39Meanwhile, discontent was spreading amongst the conquistadors.
36:44Pizarro's habit of awarding huge encomiendas to members of his own family
36:49was causing division and resentment amongst the Spanish adventurers.
36:55Pizarro was gaining some dangerous enemies.
37:00Despite Spanish infighting, in 1572, Manco Inca's stronghold finally fell.
37:08This was the end of the Inca resistance
37:11and the opening of a new chapter of prolonged, catastrophic subjugation.
37:27I think we can state confidently that people's numbered in the millions
37:31in the Inca Empire proper.
37:34To be more specific than that is quite difficult.
37:37It's also just as difficult to estimate how many people were dying from disease,
37:41from particular battles, from the famines and the disruption
37:46and the robberies and other aspects of chaos that these wars unleashed.
37:53We can state with some confidence what happened over the longer term.
37:58Over the course of the whole 16th century,
38:01at least 70%, perhaps over 90% depopulation.
38:06At the same time, you have all these increasing numbers of immigrants
38:09who come from other parts of the Americas, who come from Europe itself,
38:12slaves that they brought along from these regions,
38:15and then the children that they began having with the handful of women
38:19that they brought along with them also as immigrants,
38:22but also with the indigenous women themselves.
38:27Spain's Conquistadors
38:35Mines heaving with gold and silver dotted the Peruvian landscape.
38:40Spain's focus, through its conquistadors, would shift.
38:44Their revised mission, an aggressive assault on South America's precious metals,
38:50tearing them from the ground on an industrial scale.
38:55This changed from extracting treasure and human lives
39:01to extracting nature itself.
39:06Beginning for one of the things that the Andean nations are known for even now,
39:10turning them into some of the most important mineral producers in the world.
39:14I can't emphasize enough how important, first of all, the mining of treasure,
39:19but then the establishing of mines themselves,
39:22most famously the Red Mountain, almost a mountain of silver in Potosi,
39:27in what's now Bolivia,
39:29and changing the sheer amount of bullion that's available
39:33to make payments in the world economy.
39:37The wealth that came back from Peru were, if possible, even greater
39:42than the first wave of wealth that actually arrived in Spain from Mexico.
39:46In some ways it's going to lead to actually the depopulation of many areas of the Americas,
39:51where Spaniards are going to want to abandon their place of residence and go to Peru,
39:56because they're hearing of all the wealth that exists in Peru,
39:59and they want to be part of it.
40:02The impoverished boy from Estremadura had conquered an empire.
40:08But on June 26th, 1541,
40:11a disgruntled group of rogue conquistadors broke into his home
40:15and stabbed him to death.
40:21By dominating Peru and its people,
40:24Pizarro had seemingly added nearly 800,000 square miles of territory
40:30to King Charles' empire.
40:33But the quest hadn't been swift, and it hadn't been easy.
40:38And the Inca were far from beaten.
40:47The Inca were not totally defeated.
40:50For decades, not until the 1570s.
40:57A lot of the fighting was what we would call guerrilla warfare.
41:02Indigenous groups who were fighting against the conquistadors
41:05became amazingly adept at causing a lot of damage to their foes
41:10with a very small number of soldiers at their disposal.
41:15One of the important things to keep in mind, too,
41:17is this is one of the most rugged regions in the world.
41:20There are so many places that you can hide.
41:23There are so many strong points that one can defend for a long period.
41:30If you've ever been to Machu Picchu,
41:32that gives you some sense of how rugged and densely vegetated
41:36these landscapes were,
41:38and how difficult it would be for not just an individual,
41:41but for entire armies to move around.
41:46Despite this heroic resistance,
41:48years of Spanish occupation eventually turned into decades.
41:53With grim inevitability,
41:56Inca society and culture gave way to Spanish influence,
42:01their once great civilization transforming irreversibly.
42:08The Inca conquest would open the Americas up
42:12to the ravenous greed of Europe,
42:14forcing the conquistadors to find a way to retain control.
42:19Colonization, their culture inextricably woven
42:24into the living, ever-evolving ecosystems of the New World.
42:30But as generations passed,
42:33a bleak set of racial hierarchies began to form.
42:38Whilst the mining of a seemingly endless supply of silver
42:42would bring the colonists a new level of wealth,
42:45catapulting the conquistadors to the apex of their powers,
42:50and sending them into the wilderness hunting for more,
42:54seizing the Philippine islands
42:57and discovering the largest river on the planet.