Hello and welcome to Western Sieve. Episode two hundred and fifty eight the end
of the Inca. Manco Inca barely outlived Francisco Pizarro barely Gonzalo Pizzaro's efforts to
rest control of Peru from Charles the Fifth ended in April of fifteen forty eight.
Now all the Pizzaros are dead, except Hernando, who was still in
prison outside Madrid. With Manco dead, the only person left to lead the
Inca was his ninety year old son. Today we finished off our series on
the conquest of the Inca and reflect a bit on the similarities and differences between
our two great conquistadors, Cortez and Pisaro. In the decades that followed the
deaths of Manco Inca and Gonzalo Pizaro, Spain's control over the former Inca empire
gradually increased. A succession of capable of governors and an influx of hundreds and
then thousands of other Spaniards who poured in saw the situation very much stabilize.
It is a bit amazing to think that in fifteen thirty two, Francisco Pizarro
invaded Peru with one hundred and sixty eight men. By Manko's death in fifteen
forty four, there were over five thousand Spaniards in Peru. By fifteen sixty
that number had more than doubled to ten thousand. Peru continued to be administered
by a royal viceroy under the supervision of the Spanish Crown. As more and
more Spaniards poured into Peru, they continued to construct cities and towns, and
to supervise the extraction of precious metals, the cultivation of crops, and the
collection of tribute. The much larger native population simply labored on, having exchanged
one master for another. The exchange wasn't an equal one, though, as
the natives who now paid tribute to the Spanish had far fewer rights, paid
far greater tribute, and received far less than they had well under the control
of the Inca. In fact, the native inhabitants of Peru now received virtually
nothing from their new overlords. The roughly five hundred Spanish uncle me and those
who made up a mere five percent of the total Spanish population in Peru.
Wrote one observer quote, it is true that what they pay in tribute and
taxes, they endure great difficulty and hardship. Not only is there nothing left
over for them, that's the inca that would allow them to rest, but
there is also nothing that allows them to endure the time of necessity or illness
as we Spaniards have or feed or raise their children with. They live in
poverty and lack the necessities, and they never finish paying the debts the tributes.
We can see that they are wasting away and being consumed very rapidly because
of the many aggravations they suffer. They grieve because of the misery and servitude
they are in. Even during their festivals, they weep and their songs are
full of sorrow because the tributes they pay to the Spaniards have incapacitated them.
They've come to believe that for as long as they have and their sons and
their descendants live, they will have to work for the Spaniards. End quote.
Still, Peru continued to have two opposing emperors, at least for the
moment, one in the jungle and another in Cusco under Spanish domination. This
was the case until Manko's brother Paolo finally died in fifteen fifty nine. Manko's
son back in the jungle, had died only one year before of some unknown
illness. He might have been poisoned. The jury still out on that one,
and so out in said jungle. Titu Kusi, another of Manko's sons,
the one who had actually been captured for a period of time, and
the one from whom we get most of our narrative from the Inca side,
became the new emperor and wasted no time resuming the guerrilla war with the Spaniards.
The new emperor was shortly thereafter land to rebellions in what is today Chile
and central Peru, though how much control Titu Kousi might have exercised in either
region is subject to serious questioning. Spain had by now lost interest in expensive
military operations deep in the jungles of eastern Peru. The government now preferred very
much to negotiate with Titu. It wanted him to give up his jungle kingdom
and returned to Cousco as a puppet king. Titu was always clever enough to
keep the Spanish thinking he might come to terms, always to back out at
the last moment. Finally, in fifteen sixty nine, Titukusi did sign a
peace treaty with the Spanish in fifteen seventy He was trying to figure out how
to get his people adjusted to the new reality of a post conquest Peru when
Titukusi suddenly died. It was in May of fifteen seventy one that Tito began
complaining of chest pains and was bleeding from the nose. At sunrise, he
was dead the next morning. His sudden death left an already reeling people further
shocked. Titucusi's younger brother, tupac Amaru, now became the emperor of the
Inca. Tupacmaru, whose name means royal serpent, was twenty seven years old
at the time. Frankly, back in Cusco, most of the Spaniards were
totally unaware of all these changes in the jungle and didn't really care. Just
three months earlier, a new vice roy arrived in Lima who would transform relations
between the indigenous natives and the occupying Spanish. His name was Francisco de Toledo.
De Toledo was fifty six years old. He was firm and a disciplinarian.
He was appointed for one reason, to settle the problem of the rebellious
natives in Peru. Toledo firmly believed that the indigenous Inca were an inferior people.
They were children who needed to be ruled, but who also might,
if converted to Christianity and properly taught, could someday enjoy a few of the
benefits of European civilization. So, of course, to put it in modern
parlance, we would say Toledo was a racist, though that's not a term
he would have understood, and frankly, it's I suppose just a bit lazy
to label everyone from the distant past with pejoratives to make ourselves feel better today.
After all, what are they going to say about you and I in
four hundred and fifty years. Still, make no mistake about it, Toledo
believed that the Anka were inferior and had been ordained by God to be ruled
by a superior civilization, ie the Spanish. The rebel Inca kingdom in the
jungle had to be crushed and the Inca converted to Christianity and mass for there
to be any prayer pun intended of saving them. So it was that Toledo
decided that there would be no more treaties. There would be no more negotiation,
whoever was the present emperor of the Inca, whoever them might have been.
And note the Spanish definitely still thought it was Titukuzi in fifteen seventy one
that person needed to be killed. This was the state of affairs in July
of that year. By May of fifteen seventy two, Toledo had assembled an
army of two hundred and fifty armored Spaniards supported by two thousand native auxiliaries.
He ordered this army to advance at once to the jungle, find the emperor,
kill him, and finish off his rebel state once and for all.
Sometime in early June, the army crossed into Kambamba again. I don't even
know how many times the Spanish have sent an army into this valley. At
this point, despite a valiant native resistance, the campaign was a foregone conclusion.
The invading army was well equipped, and this time it was determined to
see the job done. The Spaniards quickly took Viticos and then approach to via
Kambamba itself. On June twenty fourth, fifteen seventy two, Quote General Martin
Huarto dea Bierto ordered that all the men formed themselves into companies, with their
captains and Indian allies, with their generals and with their banners. They marched
off, taking the artillery with them. At ten o'clock in the morning,
they marched into the city of v Kambamba, everyone on foot, for it
is most rugged and wild country and is in no way suitable for horses.
Due the Spaniards found that they hidden capital Gonzalo Pisato had sacked thirty three years
earlier, now lay desolate, smoldering and empty. In a report the Spanish
general later submitted to Vice Roy Toledo Abierto stated that he and his men quote
found Via Kabamba abandoned, with around four hundred intact houses, and their shrines
and idolatries were just here as they had been before the city was captured.
We found the houses of the Inca emperors burned, and all the Indians warriors
as well as peasants, had fled to wherever they could end. Quote.
One Spanish chronicler marveled at how when the Spaniards arrived quote, the entire town
was found to be sacked so thoroughly that if the Spaniards and their auxiliary Indians
had done it, it could not have been worse. All the Indian men
and women had fled and had hidden themselves in the jungle. Taking everything they
could. They torched and burned the rest of the corn and food that was
in the storehouses, so that when the expedition arrived, it was still smoking,
and the Temple of the Sun, where their principal idol was located,
was burned. The Incas had done the same when General Gonzalo Pisaro had entered
the city, and the lack of food had forced Gonzale's expedition to return and
leave the country in the emperor's power. The Incas expected in a similar manner
that when the Spaniards presently found no food nor anything else with which to subsist
upon, that they would turn back and leave the land, that they would
not stay there, nor would they settle it. And for this reason the
Indians fled, setting fire to everything that they had been unable to carry away
with them. By now, the Spaniards learned that Titukusi was dead and that
a new emperor, Chubakamaru, had been crowned. But neither the new emperor,
nor his attendants, nor the temple priests, nor the priest stesses,
nor anyone else who had inhabited the city could be found. Despite the Inca's
sacking of their own capital. One chronicler described some of what the Inca had
left behind, quote, the town has where it would be better to say,
have had a location half a league one point seven five miles wide,
like the layout of Cusco, and a long distance in length. In it.
They used to raise parrots, hens, ducks, local rabbits, turkeys,
pheasants, curasaos, macaws, and a thousand other kinds of birds of
diverse and showy colors that are very beautiful to see. The houses and storage
huts are covered in good thatch, and there are numerous guava, peak hands,
peanuts, papayas, pineapples, avocados, and many other cultivated in wild
trees. The palace of the Inca emperor had different levels and was covered in
roof tiles, and the whole palace was painted with a great variety of paintings
in their manner, which was something worth seeing. The town had a large
square good enough for a number of people, where they used to celebrate and
even race horses. The doors of the palace were made a very fragrant cedar,
which there is a great quantity of in that land, and some of
the roofs were of the same wood. The Incas barely missed the luxuries,
greatness, and sumptuousness of Cusco in that distant or better said, exiled land,
because everything they wanted to have from outside of Via Kambamba the Indians brought
to them for their contentment and pleasure. Due General Aberto sent out a couple
of small mobile forces in different directions, hoping to capture the Inca leaders and
especially their new emperor, Tobakamaru, who was rumored to be fleeing with his
pregnant wife. One unit formed under the command of a young, ambitious captain
named Martin Garcia de Loyola, a man eager to prove himself and who picked
a select number of forty men in a petition he later submitted to the king.
Garcia de Loyola made a clear what had motivated him and many of the
other Spaniards to join Abeto's expedition. Quote when war was declared by the Vice
roy against the Inca Emperor, who was discovered to be in the province of
Via Kambamba, working against your Majesty, many rewards were offered in your royal
name to those who participated, and in particular, an income of a thousand
pasos was promised annually from tribute paying Indians to the person who captured the Inca
Emperor. End quote. Whoever captured the Inca Emperor, in other words,
was to be granted and encomienda and encomienda with enough natives to guarantee a lifetime
of income of one thousand pasos around ten pounds of gold per year, a
grant that could then be passed on to one additional lifetime of the recipient's son,
daughter, so on and so forth. The ensuing pursuit of the emperors
through the jungle was brutal. As the Spanish continued downriver, they came upon
various natives whom they captured and tortured in an effort to discover the whereabouts of
the emperor. They learned that they were gradually closing the distance, quickening their
pace. The Spaniards now began their chase their quarry by both day and night,
guided by local Indians and lighting their way late at night with torches as
the orange flames illuminated the strange, eerie black jungle, The Spaniards sometimes froze
momentarily as unseen beasts suddenly crashed noisily away. Finally, after a chase that
lasted for more than two hundred miles, the Spaniards glimpsed a small brick lit
fire ahead in the jungle. Moving cautiously with drawn swords, Garcia de Loyola
and his men immerged into a small clearing, where they found tupac Amaru and
his pregnant wife huddled beside a camp fire. The two royal fugitives probably looked
up bleakly as the bearded men emerged in the darkness the fire, causing the
steel of their swords and breastplates to glisten. There in the middle of the
night, deep in the Amazon rainforest, the thirty five year long Spanish campaign
to destroy the rebel province of v Kambamba and to seize its last remaining inca
emperor had finally come to an end. On September the twenty first, fifteen
seventy two. The Spanish army returned to Cousco victorious. As tupac Amaru was
led away in chains. The exalted soldiers were treated to celebrations that lasted well
into the night. Tupac Amaru was given a show trial. He did not
comprehend Spanish jurisprudence, nor did he speak Spanish, so the whole thing was
a farce. The verdict guilty was a foregone conclusion. After three days of
trial, the judge sentenced the last emperor of the Inca to death. The
Spanish did not waste time, and the next day a simple scaffold stood in
the center of the town square. According to eyewitnesses quote, so many natives
attended the death of their king and lord that those were present say that it
was only possible to push through the streets and squares with the greatest of difficulty,
And since there was no room left to stand, the Indians climbed on
the walls and roofs of the houses. Even the many large hills they can
be seen from the city were packed with Indians. The open spaces, roofs
and windows in the parishes of Carmeneca and San crist Ball were so crowded with
spectators that if an orange had been thrown down it, it could not have
reached the ground anywhere. So densely were the people packed Endote Tupac's hands were
bound and another rope secured to his captors lest anyone attempt an escape. According
to one eye witness quote, as the multitude of Indians who completely fold up
the square saw that sad and deplorable spectacle, and knowing that their lord and
Inca was about to die there, they deafened the skies and made them resound
with their cries and uproar. Tupac Umaru's relatives who were near him celebrated that
sad tragedy with tears and sobbing, and then, according to a different chronicler,
tupac Amaru, the last Inca Emperor, address the crowd. Lords.
You are gathered here from all four Sooyus corners of the Empire. Let it
be known that I am a Christian and that they have baptized me, and
I wish to die under the law of God, and I have to die.
And that everything my ancestors, the Ancas, have told you up to
now that you should worship the Sun God Punchao and the shrines, idle stones,
rivers, mountains and sacred tings is a lie and completely false. When
we used to tell you that we were entering a temple to speak to the
Sun, and that it told you what to do. We said that it
spoke this, and this was a lie because it did not speak. Rather
we did, for it is an object of gold and cannot speak. And
my brother Titukusi told me that whenever I wished to tell the Indians to do
something, that I should enter alone into the Sun Temple, and that no
one was to enter with me, and then afterwards I should come out and
tell the Indians that had spoken to me, and that it had said whatever
I wanted to tell them. Because the Indians performed better when they have been
commanded to do something, they better obey what they venerate. And the god
most venerated was the Sun God. And to Bakamorrow then asked the crowd to
forgive him for having deceived them until now, and to pray for God for
him. He said all this with great royal authority, majesty, nothing artificial
nor contrived. After delivering this what could only be described as a shocking speech
spoken in Inca, so that few Spaniards actually would have understood it, no
doubt stunned his native listeners quote the Inca then received consolation from the fathers who
were at his side, and taking leave of all, he put his head
on the block like a lamb. The executioner then came forward, taking the
hair in his left hand, he severed the head with a knife at one
blow, and held it on high for all to see. As the head
was severed, the bells of the cathedral began to ring, and were followed
by those of the monasteries in the parish churches throughout the city. The execution
caused the greatest sorrow and brought tears to all eyes. And so it was
on September the twenty fourth, fifteen seventy two, thirty six years after manco
Inca had launched the Great Rebellion, the last Inca emperor, Tupac amorrow died,
and that, for all practical purposes, ends our story, at least
for now. Of course, Spanish Peru is going to continue to go on
and develop. Lima will become the great Spanish capital of South America. But
all that's a story for another day. Before we move on, I want
to take a moment and reflect on the two stories the two great conquistadors,
Cortes and Pi sorrow and think about the men who faced off against them,
and see what we can learn from them. First, I think there's a
few generalizations that are important. The first is who is willing to be a
conquistador? Who? That really matters. I think it's oftentimes a misunderstanding of
people looking back at this stage of history who assume the Spanish crown is sort
of pushing these conquista doors to go, giving them plans and maps and so
on and so forth, and saying, well, here's an inca civilization,
why don't you go conquer that one and come back with the money and so
on and so forth. But the reality is is that again Europe is still
grounded in many ways in a medieval, late medieval mentality at this point,
so that sort of idea would have and totally foreign to the monarchies at the
time, certain Spanish monarchy at the time as well. You know, this
is a continuation of the reconquista in so many ways, and to that end,
these are enterprises that are very much driven by the individual in question,
and the people who are willing to go are not the people who already are
fabulously wealthy. The people who are willing to go on these conquests are people
who really don't have anything to lose. It's either go to the New World
or risk your life in the Northern Italian Wars. Those are your two options.
Staying home really isn't a choice. And I think it's fascinating that so
many conquistadors come from what is essentially the same county in Spain, one of
the poorest regions of the country even today, which just goes to show you
that the driving factor in who's going to immigrate and this is going to be
true for a while to the New World is very much We talk about push
pull ideas with immigration, and there's a lot of push going on at this
point. There's a lot of people who leave Europe because they simply don't feel
like they have another opportunity to survive where they are, and that's absolutely the
case for both peace Auto and Cortez. The other broad generalization to talk about
is technology. Of course, I don't think I realized until I really started
looking into this how big of a disparity there was between Europeans and the first
nations of the Americas. The Inca by and large and the Mexica are the
most sophisticated civilizations in the New World. In the late fifteenth century, at
the time Columbus arrives. But even they are essentially Stone Age civilizations. Yes,
the Inca possess some bronze, and so do the Mexica to an extent.
Certainly they have bows and arrows, but it is incredible to think that
you just cannot kill someone with a stone club if they're wearing steel armored,
at least not without tremendous effort. And a steel sword is going to cut
through anything that native warriors bring to bear. So the numbers that you need
are enormous, and even the huge numerical advantages that the Inca and the Mexica
possess are simply not sufficient to overcome such an incredible disparity of technology. And
then there's something that I guess I'll classify as technology, even though it's not
really technology per se, and that's the advantage of horses. I can say
with one hundred and ten percent confidence that prior to beginning the research into these
episodes, I had no idea the pivotal role that horses played in the conquest
of the Mexico Old World Mexico and what is modern day Peru, the Inca
Empire, and really the America's in general, sure, I've seen horses.
I've been around horses, But maybe it's because you know, we're far enough
away from the time period when horses would have actually been used on the battlefield
or used regularly, we don't kind of appreciate the advantage that a mounted man
has on infantry. And I think that that's it's one of those things where
it's it's an exponential benefit. What I mean by that is there's a benefit
for armor, for having armor, there's a benefit for having a steel sword.
There's a benefit for having a horse. But when you put all of
those things together, they become sort of like this multiplier. So instead of
really one plus one plus one, it's one plus one times two and so
on and so forth. It becomes a much more powerful weapon when you put
it all together. And again it's worth remembering that, you know, we're
talking about essentially what are Stone Age peoples here. So if you imagine even
like a Norman proto night, so like an early level medieval night going up
against say an army from ancient Egypt, New Kingdom Egypt, and that's probably
even a more sophisticated army because they have bronze weaponry, but they don't last
a second, not against a fully armored man on horseback. It's just too
devastating. I mean, after all, cavalry is the dominant offensive weapon in
Europe all the way through to the invention of gunpowder, and really even more
than that, the invention of musketry and so on and so forth, because
there's harkle buses, but they're not really effective in terms of their ability on
a battlefield to be used consistently. A man on horseback can charge, rest,
charge again, and so on and so forth. And we see this.
We see it especially in the case of the Inca, because the Inca
start to figure out that there's no way that they can stand against a man
on horseback on level ground time and time again. During the Great Rebellion,
we saw how generals tried to figure out ways to neutralize Spanish cavalry because if
they couldn't do that, then they simply stood no chance. It didn't matter
whether you had them out numbered a thousand to one or ten thousand to one.
Man on horseback was just something that these indigenous armies couldn't overcome unless they
could figure out a way to slow them down or stop the charge. And
I again can tell you I did not appreciate that until doing this research,
just how crucial horses were to the conquest of the New World. The other
thing, of course, is information. The Inca and the Mexica didn't have
writing per se and writing in a way that it was easy to communicate large
pieces of information, sometimes dense information, in a fast manner, and that
matters in a couple of different ways. First of all, it matters because
you're able to communicate more easily between locations. So ostensibly Pissaro can communicate back
to Charles the Fifth in Spain or wherever he happens to be at the moment.
Beyond that, Pizarro can communicate with his brother in Cusco, and Cortez
can communicate with his colony back on the coast to try to get information are
different indigenous rulers. They can get some information, but it's a much more
limited in nature because of how they can transfer it. You know, you
have the keepee, which are sort of like knots. In the Inca case,
that's good for explaining numbers and so on and so forth, but it's
far too cumbersome to try to put together to express big pieces of information.
Where are the Spanish forces, where are they're moving, what are their intentions,
what are their weaknesses? That's too difficult to put together in that system.
So it's a huge limitation again for the first nations peoples of the Americas,
and a big advantage. And the other thing that information gives you is
it gives you institutional knowledge. We kind of talked about this, especially during
the Inca Conquest, where different Inca generals, once they died, you know,
their knowledge, their knowledge died with them. They didn't have the ability
to sort of pass it on to somebody else, and that was a limitation
of course at the Inca command structure as well. But the key here is
an understanding that whatever was learned in one battle or one war, one series
of wars between an indigenous community and the Spanish or another European community, that
was immediately lost when those people died. And the difference is Cortez had a
number of setbacks, but he wrote them down and Pisato, even though he
was illiterate, the men who were with him were not, and they were
able to digest this information and understand what works and what didn't work. When
it came to dealing with the inhabitants of these Mesoamerican civilizations, these empires,
and that gave the klunquistadors a huge leg up, because actually, it turned
out time and time again, these indigenous kings, emperors, and nobles did
tend to operate in similar ways, even though they're part of disparate civilizations.
Now, of course it should go without saying. Another similarity is that Europeans
were inoculated to disease, specifically small box, whereas the communities of the New
World were not. And that was absolutely devastating, and it's always worth pointing
out, and it gets pointed out a lot, so I won't spend a
lot of time on it because I think most people really understand it that huge
numbers of indigenous persons from the New World were wiped out within fifty one hundred
years. And Pisa Hatter walks into a situation in Peru the second time that
he gets there, where Peru and the Inca world has been decimated by smallpox
Cortez after he's forced to flee from tanosht Klan. The reason he's able to
go back and be so successful so easily is because in between the time that
he leaves and the time that he goes back, Tanosh clan is almost wiped
out completely by smallpox. And if that doesn't happen, I'm not sure that
the outcome is exactly the way that he would have planned it. Like horses.
I think the other thing that I learned and hopefully you did as well,
is that this is not a story of Europe versus Mexica or Spain versus
Inca. It isn't because what we have in both cases are many instances of
native collaborators, native groups who are willing to side with the conquistadors. And
that makes a huge, huge difference because it's just too hard to get mass
groups of people across the Atlantic Ocean at this point to sustain that beachhead.
The Europeans are going to be dependent on native peoples to sustain their efforts for
a long time. Yet it takes a really long time for Europeans to start
to develop the sort of population basis necessary to operate without the assistance of the
people who already there. Now that this takes a couple of different ways,
and I think these are a few differences that are worth pointing out, because
when we look at the Mexica you have a situation where you have non Mexica
ethnic groups, the Tasla Cans, for example. This is a group who
has long been subjugated by the Mexica and they're not happy about it. Cortes
sees this, he is able to turn them against the Mexica and convert them
into an ally. On the other hand, Pisaro comes into a situation where
we have a civil war effectively coming to an end, very recently coming to
an end. He recognizes this and notices that there are factions, and so
he tries to play one faction off the other, and it's very successful in
doing so. But without this native collaboration, the conquest of Old Mexico and
the conquest of Peru do not go as easily. So it's a mistake.
I think a lot of times in I'd say overview history textbooks that say Pissaro
conquered the Inca or Cortes and a few hundred Europeans conquered the Aztecs or the
Mexicans, because in reality it was Cortes plus a huge indigenous allied group,
and it was Pizarro plus a huge faction of the Inca providing native auxiliaries.
Now, another thing that's the difference that's worth pointing out that I really did
think is interesting is how the conquest of Old Mexico by Cortes is, you
know, to a large extent of one man show. He's got his various
lieutenants and so on and so forth who work with him, but you know,
he makes the decisions. That's not the case in the conquest of Peru.
There, you it really is the family business, the Pizarro family business.
I said it at the beginning, where you know, you've got four
piece arrows, four brothers. You know, Francisco the elder statesman, the
youngest one, is actually the first to die, and then you have the
two middle brothers, Gonzalo and Hernando, and they all play important roles throughout
the conquest of Peru. So it's interesting to note that difference between how the
Spanish in different situations change based off of the available resources. And I think
that that's very helpful in sort of framing and understanding how things are going to
unfold from here. So where do we go from here? Well, we're
going to do one deep dive next week. This is going to be similar.
Two years ago, I did an episode on Leonardo da Vinci was sort
of a really long look into the career of someone who was very emblematic of
the time period. In that case, it was the Renaissance. Here,
I'm going to look at somebody who I actually think is really a spokesperson for
what it means to be Econquisador, even though he's not successful ultimately. And
that's someone who I learned a lot about in preparing for these episodes, and
who I decided I need to know more about nets here than the De Soto
guy who's going to go looking for his inca empire in the American Southwest and
not find it. So that's what's on for next week. But if you're
looking for more content in the interim, check out all the links in the
show notes linked to the website ad free versions of the show bonus shows there
as well. And then we've also got Western Sieve two point Oh. If
you can't get enough Western Sieve, I've got good news for you. Got
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