Conquistadors The Rise and Fall Episode 4 The Inca Conquest
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00:00Mexico, 1521.
00:10Over 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.
00:42A fabulous vista of golden cities, bejeweled palaces brimming with treasure, free to those
00:50brave 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.
01:46Cortes' expedition is going to be kind of like a catalyst.
01:51That 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
03:40las 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.
04:00But 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, would then go to the graves of the
04:18ancestors 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
04:41Peru.
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
05:57of it is Pedro de Alvarado, who was a captain of Cortes' expedition and then kind of like
06:04went on 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 Central Valley of Mexico and that he brought with himself a
06:22great number of indigenous allies.
06:26Especially people from Tlaxcala and Huejotzinco.
06:30These were indigenous allies that came with him and became de facto conquistadors by their
06:35own 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 in 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
07:18to accept Spanish dominance.
07:21The conquest of the Maya was complicated because the Maya were very divided.
07:26It had to be done piece by piece.
07:30Spread across Mesoamerica for millennia, the Maya lived complex, class-based lives.
07:36They were farmers, inventors, artists and architects, building spectacular limestone
07:42temples and crafting exquisite art out of jade.
07:47They traded with the Aztecs, yet there's little evidence to suggest they encountered
07:52or even knew of the Inca.
07:55It was a very, very fraught conquest, very violent, very brutal, and it took many years
08:01to be accomplished.
08:05The Maya were using bows and arrows, they used arrowheads made of flint that disintegrated
08:11in the body after impact.
08:12They caused these horrible wounds.
08:15The Spaniards could not find water.
08:19Their armor was useless because it was too hot and humid, and they routinely lost over
08:24and over again.
08:25So we get a sense of how these military incursions, despite a great deal of energy being put into
08:31them, can really fail quite remarkably.
08:35Spaniards have a lot of trouble really succeeding on their own terms, at their own game, if
08:40you will, because of the military resources of people like the Maya.
08:51In the 1540s, Spaniards return after disease has worked its way through, and even then
08:58there's remarkable resistance.
09:00There's a huge uprising in 1546 where all of the Maya coordinate in order to kill everything
09:07Spanish that they can get their hands on.
09:09Not just people, they kill pets, they pull out Spanish plants.
09:14It's a kind of attempt to root them out, quite literally, to pull them up by the roots.
09:19That gives us a sense of just how persistent their resistance was to Spanish rule.
09:27The final Maya kingdom to fall under the control of the Spanish was that of the Itza Maya in
09:33northern Guatemala in 1697.
09:37We think about conquistadors and we think about a complete victory over indigenous people.
09:43So there are enormous swaths of land and places and indigenous communities who were never
09:48fully under the control of the Spaniards.
09:50The conquest, as it were, came in phases, came in stages.
09:54The further one went into the interior, the fewer and fewer representatives of Spain or
10:00Spanish settlements one could find.
10:04So the acts of conquistadors can be quite incomplete in many ways sometimes.
10:14Francisco Pizarro's early expeditions down the Pacific coast are extremely difficult.
10:19The conditions are terrible.
10:21Many of his men die not only from attacks from indigenous people along the coast, but
10:26from disease, and the majority of them actually simply from starvation.
10:30These are desperate expeditions that almost fail.
10:34In 1524, Pizarro was finally ready to sail into the unknown.
10:40But his maiden voyage would soon collapse into a crushing failure.
10:45A handful of survivors marooned on an island, others fleeing to the safety of Panama.
10:51But Pizarro would not accept defeat.
10:54With defeat came ever more shame.
10:59In 1526, he sailed for Colombia.
11:03His crew struggled to navigate the perilous swamps which clung to the coast.
11:07A tropical hell, buzzing with insects and wild beasts, sickness and an unbearable heat
11:14pushing his men dangerously close to their breaking point.
11:19Pizarro finds himself with his men marooned on a small island, the Isla del Gallo, and
11:25he's facing a mutiny from his companions who say, Pizarro, there's nothing down here.
11:31There's no New Mexico down here.
11:33We're all going to die.
11:34Let's go back to Panama.
11:37The story goes that Pizarro draws his sword, draws a line in the sand, and says to his
11:44men, beyond this line lies glory and riches beyond your wildest imaginations.
11:52Beyond the line lies poverty and obscurity.
11:56You must make your choice.
11:58And it's said that just 13 of his companions crossed the line in the sand.
12:02They became Los Trece de la Fama, the famous 13.
12:10After Pizarro's second expedition down the coast in 1526 to 1527, when he finally stumbles
12:16on the northern anchor town of Tumbes, he now knows that it's true, that there is another
12:24large indigenous empire or state to the south.
12:27He doesn't know anything about it this time, but he's seen enough to be intrigued.
12:30Tumbes is a significant town.
12:33He's seen gold and silver treasures there.
12:35It's clear that there's something there, there's something going on there that he wants to
12:38look into further.
12:40So it is in this juncture that he's going to go back to Spain, recruit his brothers,
12:47and also get unofficial permission from the king to conduct the expedition to the Andes,
12:53right, to the area where today we know as Peru.
12:56The fact that he's got a formal contract, that he's been appointed to undertake this
13:00task by the king, puts him in a much better legal position than had been the case for
13:05Cortes in Mexico.
13:07Nobody can challenge Pizarro's right to lead the conquest and to be governor of Peru from
13:13this point on.
13:23December 27th, 1530.
13:27The determined conquistador set off on his third and final attempt to breach the south.
13:35His three ships loaded with heavy weaponry, 180 men and 27 horses.
13:43He had come ready for conflict, prepared to encounter a highly developed civilization
13:50willing to fight for its survival.
13:54The Inca, similar to the Aztec empire, rose to prominence relatively quickly.
14:02The Inca empire, over approximately 150 to 200 years, had expanded first from this core
14:09around Cusco to adjacent valleys in the central highlands.
14:15South towards what's now Bolivia, eventually all the way down to where central Chile and
14:20to the north of what's now Argentina, but also north along the Andes.
14:25Its boundaries crossed all kinds of geography and topography, almost impossible to govern,
14:31and yet they did.
14:32The ruling Inca probably numbered no more than 150,000, but they ruled over an empire
14:36of about 12 million.
14:38Tremendously wealthy, powerful.
14:42One 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.
14:52The total distance of that road system was probably about 40,000 kilometers, and these
14:57were highly impressive pieces of engineering.
15:00They were paved with stone where necessary.
15:03They crossed ravines.
15:05They crossed bridges.
15:06They had to penetrate through sheer cliff faces.
15:09They went through tunnels.
15:11And so the Inca road system is one thing that distinguishes the Incas from other native
15:15peoples in the Americas.
15:16There was nothing really comparable in the Aztec empire.
15:21The actual wars of conquest that the Inca accomplished towards neighboring peoples provided
15:28the food crops, the fish, the gold and the silver that provided an economic basis for
15:35the empire.
15:37The Inca conquered other regions.
15:40Some of those regions became their close allies and benefited from this situation, don't get
15:44me wrong, but they also had polities, ethnic groups, particularly along the coast, particularly
15:49in the far north, who were foes, who weren't happy with the situation, and who were ready
15:55to revolt when the opportunity came.
15:59The Inca saw themselves as the children of the sun himself, and inheriting the power,
16:07the authority, the radiance of the sun, and made a point to dress themselves in gold,
16:14and to ornament the most important buildings, sometimes covering entire walls in gold plate
16:20and gold leaf.
16:22The empire, in times of need, provided communities with food and medicine and military assistance.
16:29It was very bureaucratic, but they also had developed these amazing methods of farming
16:35in this very rugged terrain.
16:37They had created sort of a tiered system of farming that controlled both flooding, but
16:41could also provide crop variation that fed this vast empire of 12 million people.
16:51Following his success at the Battle of Puna, Pizarro continued his quest along the Ecuadorian
16:57coastline, his confidence bolstered by a healthy battalion of reinforcements.
17:02He and his men arrived once again to the coastal settlement of Tumbes, expecting to find the
17:09bustling port.
17:11He finds to his astonishment that Tumbes lies in ruins.
17:15It's been sacked and destroyed, most of its population have departed.
17:20What's happened in the meantime is that there's been a civil war within the Inca Empire, a
17:25great conflict between two rival contenders for the crown.
17:30In 1493, the Inca Empire came under the steady rule of Huayna Capac.
17:36His realm, a 2,000 mile stretch of territory.
17:41But Europe was closing in, and yet it wasn't the conquistadors who would first breach his
17:47peaceful kingdom.
17:50Sometime in the mid-1520s, before Pizarro showed up himself on the north coast of Peru,
17:55Huayna Capac got sick with an illness that nobody had seen before.
18:01This illness, we're pretty sure, was smallpox, perhaps mixed with measles as well.
18:09He died, and unfortunately for him and for his dynasty and for the empire, also gave
18:15the disease to his heir apparent, leaving the question, who's going to succeed Huayna
18:21Capac?
18:22Who's going to become the next Inca?
18:25A civil war broke out between that of Atahualpa and that of Huascar.
18:31Emerging victorious from that conflict is Atahualpa.
18:35He is now the new Inca emperor.
18:39And as part of his campaigning in the late stages of the Inca civil war, he finds himself
18:44in one of the major Inca towns on the Inca highway, Cajamarca, in the northern Peruvian
18:49highlands.
18:51This tussle for power had thrown the Inca kingdom into disarray, whilst disease tore
18:57through the population.
18:59A 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, they encountered
19:20an empire in crisis.
19:23Now this is the best news that Pizarro can possibly have received.
19:29Instead of encountering a solid empire ruled by an experienced emperor, he finds an empire
19:35riven by internal conflict and ruled by a highly inexperienced ruler who's only been
19:40Inca emperor for several months.
19:42So it was also an empire that had been pushing its edges, pushing its edges, pushing its
19:46edges.
19:47The Cañari, the Chachapoyas, and the Cayambes are three examples of peoples to the north
19:54of the empire who were engaged in wars against their conquests by the Inca themselves, who
20:01then rapidly allied themselves with the Spanish during the conquest, and that's a crucial
20:06thing to understand.
20:08Two factions of the Inca and the Spaniards themselves mutually trying to manipulate the
20:13situation to gain an upper hand.
20:17Pizarro abandoned the smoldering ruins of Tumbes, chopping his way inland, only stopping
20:24to establish Peru's first Spanish settlement, San Miguel de Piura.
20:31He soon grew restless, keen to continue on his quest.
20:35So Pizarro and his men undertake the arduous journey on foot and on horseback following
20:42the Inca road system on their journey from the coast up into the highlands.
20:47Pizarro, with less than 200 of his men, arrived at the deserted highland town of Cajamarca
20:54on November 15th, 1532.
20:59But up above them, in the hills, awaited an incredible military force.
21:04The colossal army of the new ruler of the Incas, Atahualpa.
21:16They find the Inca town deserted, Atahualpa and his forces have withdrawn some miles across
21:22the valley, but they also find, to their astonishment and to their terror, that he has an army encamped
21:29around him that was tens of thousands strong, perhaps as many as 80,000 men.
21:34The Spaniards tell us that the Inca tents covered the hillsides like forests.
21:40They take possession of the town, they move into its central square, and they spend a
21:45miserable sleepless night, but they're also working out their plan for the following day.
21:53The Spanish soldiers were gripped by fear, the air dense with anxious anticipation of
22:00a battle they surely could not win.
22:04Pizarro knew that a fight would prove fatal for him and his men.
22:10Only his cunning could prevail here.
22:14If they have to fight this vast Inca army on the plains in the valley outside the town,
22:18they're doomed.
22:20Everything depends on enticing Atahualpa into the town, into Cajamarca, and getting him
22:26to come into the square where the Spaniards have laid their trap for him.
22:31And on the following day then, the 16th of November, Pizarro sends a series of delegations
22:36out to meet Atahualpa, who's taking the waters at some Inca baths two or three miles across
22:42the valley.
22:47Towards the end of the evening, the emperor and the forces around him set themselves in
22:52motion across the plain towards the town.
22:57Atahualpa's glittering procession was heading straight for the centre of Cajamarca, where
23:02Pizarro was waiting.
23:06People swept every last straw or stone from the path as he came.
23:11He was preceded by hundreds of dancers and musicians.
23:16There's about 6,000 people in the procession.
23:20And eventually, this procession reaches the city and Atahualpa moves into the central
23:26square.
23:27Now all is set for the Spaniards to spring their trap.
23:31Hidden in the shadows with his 200 men, Pizarro dispatched a priest to greet Atahualpa.
23:39He would deliver the demands of Catholicism to the Inca king.
23:43There would be no negotiation with Spain's one true god, or King Charles of Iberia.
23:51He exhorts him to convert to Christianity and he hands him a breviary, a book of doctrine.
23:58Atahualpa looks at the book and then he casts it on the ground in apparent disgust.
24:04And this is the signal.
24:05They spring their trap to the Spanish war cry of Santiago and launch a furious assault
24:12on the gathered Inca hordes in the tight space of the central square of Cajamarca.
24:19Gunfire stunned the unarmed Inca, their celebratory procession torn apart by Pizarro's cavalry.
24:27Spanish steel splitting native flesh, invaders hacking at the flailing limbs of Atahualpa's
24:33loyal attendants who bravely sacrificed their own lives to preserve his.
24:39Fear struck at the hearts of the Inca, curdling with confusion and horror at the carnage unfolding
24:46around their sacred ruler.
24:49Pizarro's instinct had been to devastate his enemy through shock and uncompromising violence.
24:57And it worked.
24:59It's a terrible massacre.
25:01But the key point is that they must capture Atahualpa alive.
25:06Everything hangs on this.
25:07This is central to Pizarro's plan.
25:11The Incas flood out onto the plain to be pursued by Spaniards on foot and on horseback, slaying
25:17as 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, including much of the high
25:30nobility of the empire.
25:31And the emperor himself is a captive.
25:37Atahualpa was held captive at Cajamarca for some nine months.
25:46He rapidly came to understand that the Spaniards were obsessed with precious metals.
25:51They were obsessed with gold.
25:52They were obsessed with silver.
25:54And he felt he could use this to his advantage.
25:57He raised his arm as high as he could on the wall and said, I will fill this room once
26:02with gold and twice over with silver.
26:05But the Spaniards don't believe this can be possible.
26:07They think it's bluff.
26:09They think it's bluster.
26:12And 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 tons, never mind the silver.
26:32It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in today's money.
26:38One fifth of that was due to Charles V as his royal right, the royal fifth.
26:43But the rest of it was distributed between Pizarro and his men at Cajamarca, fewer than
26:48170 of them, many of whom then passed from poverty to undreamt of riches in a matter
26:56of weeks.
26:58The idea was that once the ransom was paid, that the Spanish would go on their way and
27:03leave Atahualpa and his allies to their own problems.
27:08But that's not what happened.
27:10Pizarro decided to execute Atahualpa.
27:15The months dragged on following the massacre, Pizarro's suspicion of Atahualpa becoming
27:21ever more intense.
27:23Paranoid, the Spaniard dreamed up a series of weak, spurious charges against the Inca
27:29ruler, guilty the inevitable verdict.
27:35His sentence, death.
27:38They give him two choices.
27:41He is to be burned alive, or if he converts to Christianity, he can be garroted and strangled.
27:49And Atahualpa ultimately chooses the second option, to be garroted, not because he fears
27:54the flames, but because it is vitally important to him that his body is preserved so that
27:59it can be mummified and held in reverence by his descendants, as had those of all previous
28:06Inca emperors.
28:08Thus dies the last Inca emperor of an independent empire at just the age of 31.
28:16Inca autonomy is never fully recovered from that point on.
28:30The empire was really held together by the cement of this internal core of Inca bureaucracy
28:35and royalty.
28:36Once they dissipated, the strands that held the empire together fell apart, and the Spaniards
28:42quickly established control and dominance over the native people, and quickly put the
28:47imprint of the Spanish society, culture, and empire into the region.
28:54Atahualpa has often been portrayed as naive, foolhardy, or even foolish.
29:03He's an Inca emperor, at the height of his power, and at the head of an army that numbered
29:08tens of thousands strong, and yet he processes voluntarily right into Cajamarca, into the
29:15central square, and places himself within the trap that the Spaniards have laid for
29:20him.
29:21But if you think about it, it wasn't really naive or foolish at all.
29:26What would have been foolish would have been to attack these strangers when nothing was
29:31known about them, little real conversation had been had with them, and it wasn't clear
29:35who they were or where they came from.
29:40The very concept of people coming from outside those regions was alien to the Incas, and
29:47this is what made the judgment call that Atahualpa had to make so very, very difficult.
29:52It was impossible for him to know what Francisco Pizarro and his men represented or whether
29:57they were a threat.
29:58They clearly had some potent weapons, but there were only a few of them.
30:01They didn't seem terribly threatening.
30:06After the death of Atahualpa, the Spaniards need to find a replacement.
30:10They still need an Inca emperor.
30:12The Inca empire still exists.
30:14The number of Spaniards in Peru is still very, very low.
30:18There's very few of them, just a few hundred.
30:20So they have to have an emperor through whom to govern, and they actually end up appointing
30:26a series of figures for this role.
30:28They're known as the puppet emperors, and the first and, in many respects, the most
30:33important is a man called Manco Inca.
30:38So Manco Inca is another son of the previous Inca emperor Huayna Capac, so he is an Inca
30:44prince of the blood, and he's chosen by the Spaniards to play this role of being puppet
30:51Inca.
30:59With Manco Inca installed as their puppet leader, the Spaniards established Cuzco as
31:04their inland base.
31:06Great hunks of their terrain were confiscated, their treasure plundered, the Inca unable
31:12to hold back a merciless Spanish force.
31:15Pizarro undoubtedly owed much of his brutal success to a surprising form of European weaponry.
31:23There's a question to the extent to which military technology and military tactics
31:28helped the conquistadors succeed in Peru and other parts of the Americas.
31:34One weapon that isn't written about nearly as much in these stories, in part because
31:39they didn't have the prestige of the horse, is the importance of dogs that the Spanish
31:43brought along with them in these battles.
31:47Spanish Mastiffs, these huge dogs with powerful jaws, are even now a highly valued breed.
31:55It's associated with being in the nobility and the aristocracy in Spain even now.
32:00Adorned with spiked collars and padded jackets, the war dogs had been trained to attack natives
32:06whilst protecting the Spanish.
32:10These enormous hounds may have terrified the Inca, but at least they could see the great
32:16slobbering beasts sent to track and kill them.
32:22Once again, the merciless spread of European viruses proved to be the conquistadors' closest ally.
32:30The reason that not so many Spaniards, other Europeans, or enslaved Africans they brought
32:36along with them, why they didn't seem to die in this great a numbers when these epidemics
32:40broke out, is because many of them had already had these diseases as children or as adolescents,
32:48and so had some acquired immunity, not an inborn immunity, but an acquired immunity
32:53through their experience living in diseased societies.
32:58The impact of disease is arguably even more serious than in the case of Mexico, and this
33:02is because an old world disease, again possibly smallpox, actually reaches the Inca Empire
33:09some years in advance of the conquistadors themselves.
33:15These virgin soil epidemics move so swiftly through Native American populations, down
33:20into Ecuador and ultimately into the Inca Empire itself, some years in advance of the Europeans.
33:27It was a perfect set of circumstances for the conquistadors.
33:32Not only did they enjoy the advantage of superior weaponry, but they also possessed a biological
33:38upper hand.
33:47By 1535, the shrines and temples of Cusco had been stripped of their gold and silver.
33:56Pizarro needed easy access to the ocean so that this loot could be sent back to the old
34:01world, so shifts his army 350 miles west to establish the permanent capital city of
34:08Lima on the coast.
34:11Bitter resentment flowed through the surviving Inca, who began to form a resistance.
34:19The Spaniards become more and more confident in their position in Peru, and in 1536-37,
34:26Manco Inca decides that he's had enough, and he stages what's known as the Great Rebellion.
34:32They lay siege to Cusco, they lay siege to Lima.
34:37This Great Rebellion is by far and away the closest the Incas ever come to actually driving
34:42the Spaniards from Peru altogether.
34:46One of the things you can see during Manco Inca's Great Rebellion is the ways in which
34:50the Incas have already begun to adapt to the new situation.
34:53They seek to deal with the horses, for example, by digging pits and trenches with stakes in
34:59them with the hope of breaking the legs of the horses or otherwise disabling them and
35:04taking them out of combat.
35:06The fact that the Spaniards have far greater technology, the fact that they can call on
35:10reinforcements from over the sea, the fact that the Inca population has been devastated
35:14by disease, as well as by the civil war and by conquest, means that this movement fails.
35:21Manco Inca flees Cusco with his queen, Cura Ocio, in an attempt to establish a new, independent
35:28Inca state.
35:30But in the chaos, the Spaniards manage to take her captive.
35:35She would have known that the Spanish were frequently willing to employ sexual violence
35:40as a weapon of war and an expression of power.
35:45This is a part of the conquest that's part and parcel of the warfare itself, is one of
35:51the most important stories, one of the dominant stories of the conflict, chaos, and violence
35:56of this era.
35:59In order to prevent violent abuse by her male captors, Cura Ocio covered herself in disgusting
36:06despicable things to translate.
36:09Her own excrement, something else, who knows, but she successfully prevented her rape and
36:14abuse all the way until she arrived in Cusco, where she was executed.
36:21Despite the trauma of losing his wife to the conquistadors, Manco Inca successfully established
36:26his own state in Vilcabamba, part of modern-day Ecuador.
36:32For thirty-five battle-worn years, he and his successors resisted the Spanish invaders.
36:39Meanwhile, discontent was spreading amongst the conquistadors.
36:45Pizarro's habit of awarding huge encomiendas to members of his own family was causing
36:50division and resentment amongst the Spanish adventurers.
36:56Pizarro was gaining some dangerous enemies.
37:01Despite Spanish infighting, in 1572 Manco Inca's stronghold finally fell.
37:09This was the end of the Inca resistance, and the opening of a new chapter of prolonged
37:15catastrophic subjugation.
37:20I think we can state confidently that people's numbered in the millions in the Inca Empire proper.
37:35To be more specific than that is quite difficult, and it's also just as difficult to estimate
37:39how many people were dying from disease, from particular battles, from the famines and the
37:46disruption and the robberies and other aspects of chaos that these wars unleashed.
37:54We can state with some confidence what happened over the longer term.
37:59Over the course of the whole 16th century, at least 70 percent, perhaps over 90 percent
38:05depopulation.
38:06At the same time, you have all these increasing numbers of immigrants who come from other
38:10parts of the Americas, who come from Europe itself, slaves that they brought along from
38:15these regions, and then the children that they began having with the handful of women
38:20that they brought along with them, also as immigrants, but also with the indigenous women
38:24themselves.
38:36Mines heaving with gold and silver dotted the Peruvian landscape.
38:41Spain's focus through its conquistadors would shift.
38:45Their revised mission, an aggressive assault on South America's precious metals, tearing
38:51them from the ground on an industrial scale.
38:56This changed from extracting treasure and human lives to extracting nature itself, beginning
39:08for one of the things that the Andean nations are known for even now, turning them into
39:12some of the most important mineral producers in the world.
39:15I can't emphasize enough how important, first of all, the mining of treasure, but then the
39:21establishing of mines themselves, most famously the Red Mountain, almost a mountain of silver
39:27in Potosi, in what's now Bolivia, and changing the sheer amount of bullion that's available
39:34to make payments in the world economy.
39:39The wealth that came back from Peru were, if possible, even greater than the first wave
39:44of wealth that actually arrived in Spain from Mexico.
39:48In some ways, it's going to lead to actually the depopulation of many areas of the Americas
39:52where Spaniards are going to want to abandon their place of residence and go to Peru because
39:57they're hearing of all the wealth that exists in Peru and they want to be part of it.
40:03The impoverished boy from Estremadura had conquered an empire.
40:09But on June 26th, 1541, a disgruntled group of rogue conquistadors broke into his home
40:17and stabbed him to death.
40:22By dominating Peru and its people, Pizarro had seemingly added nearly 800,000 square
40:29miles of territory to King Charles' empire.
40:34But the quest hadn't been swift, and it hadn't been easy.
40:39And the Inca were far from beaten.
40:47The Inca were not totally defeated for decades, not until the 1570s.
40:58A lot of the fighting was what we would call guerrilla warfare.
41:03These groups who were fighting against the conquistadors became amazingly adept at causing
41:09a lot of damage to their foes with a very small number of soldiers at their disposal.
41:16One of the important things to keep in mind, too, is this is one of the most rugged regions
41:19in the world.
41:21There are so many places that you can hide.
41:24There are so many strong points that one can defend for a long period.
41:31If you've ever been to Machu Picchu, that gives you some sense of how rugged and densely
41:37vegetated these landscapes were, and how difficult it would be for not just an individual but
41:42for entire armies to move around.
41:47Despite this heroic resistance, years of Spanish occupation eventually turned into decades.
41:55With grim inevitability, Inca society and culture gave way to Spanish influence, their
42:03once great civilization transforming irreversibly.
42:10The Inca conquest would open the Americas up to the ravenous greed of Europe, forcing
42:17the conquistadors to find a way to retain control.
42:21Colonization, their culture inextricably woven into the living, ever-evolving ecosystems
42:28of the new world.
42:31But, as generations passed, a bleak set of racial hierarchies began to form.
42:40Whilst the mining of a seemingly endless supply of silver would bring the colonists a new
42:45level of wealth, catapulting the conquistadors to the apex of their powers, and sending them
42:52into the wilderness hunting for more, seizing the Philippine islands and discovering the
43:00largest river on the planet.