Transcript of 644. The Fall of the Incas: Empire of Gold (Part 1)

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My name is Martin. I'm a soldier of Spain, and that's it. Most of my life I've spent fighting for land, treasure, and the cross. I'm worth millions. Soon I'll be dead, and they'll bury me out here in Peru, the land I helped ruin as a boy. This story is about ruin, ruin and gold. More gold than any of you will ever see, even if you work in a counting house. I'm going to tell you how 167 men conquered an empire of 24 million. Then things that no one has ever told, things to make you groan and cry out, I'm lying. Perhaps I am. The air of Peru is cold and sour like in a vault, and wits turn easier here even than in Europe. But grant me this. I saw him closer than anyone and had cause only to love him. He was my altar, my bright image of salvation, Francisco Pizarro. And the only wish of my life is that I'd never seen him. That is the beginning of Peter Schaffer's play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. It was written for the National Theater in 1964. An English play, which is why that Spanish soldier has an English accent, just for people who are wondering.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun was then made into a Hollywood film, and it star Robert Shore as Francisco Pizarro or Dominic as his hispanophiles would call him Francisco.

Very good film. Very nice.

But we're I'm going to call him Francisco Pizarro in this. Also, very improbably, coming off the Sound of Music, Christopher Plummer as Atahualpa, the great Inca. It has to be said that he has a much deeper tan and a much smoother chest than he had in The Sound of Music. It is actually quite shocking to think that from that film, which came out in 1969, he would go on to play the Duke of Wellington in Waterloo, which came out the following year. So slightly mind boggling. But listen, we're not talking about films because this series is going to be one of the most epic, one of the most astonishing we've ever done. It tells the story of one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole of world history, isn't it? Yes.

The Exoticism and the drama of the story captured by that play, which is a brilliant play, by the way. This is the story of the conquest of the Empire of the Incas, an empire that stretched from north to south some 2,500 miles. It was the longest empire in history. It ruled millions of people, probably not 24 million, as they claim in the play, but still a lot. It's conquered by a few hundred Spanish conquistadors, so fewer than 200, really. It's an adventure story with an amazing range of characters. So two of them you've mentioned, the doomed Emperor Atahualpa, played by Christopher Plummer, and the man in that reading, the illiterate Spanish Bucaneer, Francisco Pizarro. But it's one of these hinge moments in world history. It's a landmark in the story of colonialism. Actually, I thought of this as the third part of a trilogy. In February 2023, we did a series about Columbus's Voyage as to the Caribbean. That was episode 306 onwards. They love us to give the numbers, Tom. Then in the autumn of 2023, we did an epic series, at that time, our longest, about the Fall of the Aztecs, the Conquest of Mexico.

That was number 385 onwards.

We've said that the Conquest of Peru is one of the most extraordinary stories ever told. But the mad thing is, is that the Conquest of Mexico is as well.

Yeah. And this is the sequel, really. I mean, it really is the sequel because everybody who's taking part in this adventure has that model in their minds.

So what would you call it? Alien Contact 2?

Yes, I guess so. It's the return of the King to the two towers of the fall of the Aztecs.

And the amazing thing about this is it's one of those sequels that is just as good as the prequel.

Definitely it is. Definitely. So we're a few years after the fall of the Aztecs. We'll be telling the story of Pizarro's His first expeditions in the 1520s, his arrival in Peru in 1532, the capture and murder of the Inca Emperor Atahualpa, the battle for the Inca capital of Cusco, the flight of the Incas into the jungle, and the story of the legendary city of Vilcabamba, which was the last refuge, the lost refuge, actually, of the last Incas. It's a very, very melodrama story, and we shouldn't waste any more time before plunging right in. Maybe Tom, we should start with our protagonist. That's man that Martin, who you voice so splendidly, is talking about in that introduction. This is the conquistador who changed the lives of millions of people, Francisco Pizarro. Francisco. Yeah. As in the Aztec series, we will be trying to reflect the linguistic diversity of the newly united Spain by doing a huge range of Spanish accents from different regions.

And pronunciations.

There will be no internal consistency, but a word of warning for our American listeners, we will not be pronouncing them in the strange way that you do. So you just have to suck that up. Pizarro, hero, villain, it's for the listeners to decide. He's born in 1478 or so in a place called Trujillo in extremaedura, which is the wild west of Spain.

Has a lot of storks.

Yes, exactly. A lot of castles. It's sun-bleached. It's a very poor country, very violent, bandits.

Spaghetti Western, isn't it?

Spaghetti Western territory, yes. It's the place that basically you leave if you to be successful, which is why so many of the conquistadors, Enan Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, most famously, came from extramadure.

You can leave because it is a land that breeds tough men.

Francisco is the illegitimate son of an infantry officer who belonged to the minor nobility. His mother was a servant girl with whom this infantry officer had a liaison. She brought him up. He never learns. He's very unlike Hernán Cortés. He never learns to read and write. Later on, people People would say to mock him that he was a former pig herder. He'd herded pigs in the fields, which is perfectly plausible because there's lots of pigs in extreme majority, famous for its ham. But he seems to have been welcome at the Pizarro family mansion in the town square. There, very probably, he first met a distant cousin, a much younger boy called Hernán Cortés, whose mother was a Pizarro and was from the Pizarro clan. In the late '40s, when he was in his teens, he may have gone with his father to in the wars in Italy. Can't be sure. But if he did, he didn't stay there for long. Because if you're from extra madura, if you're keen to seek your fortune, in the '40s, a much more exciting and lucrative place has just opened up. When Pizarro was 14 years old, in 1492, Columbus first sailed to the new world.

When he is 17 years old, so in 1495, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella basically scrap Columbus's properly and open up the Indies to any Spaniard who will pay them a share of the profits. So this is now the gold rush, as it were, is on. And by the end of the 15th century, hundreds of Spaniards, people from Pizarro's background, are seeking their fortune on Hispaniola and on Cuba and on the other Caribbean islands. And Pizarro is one of them. He actually went before Cortés did. He landed on Hispaniola in 1502, and he became a soldier, and he made a name for himself a man who will do what needs to be done. Basically, doing what needs to be done is massacring the local people, the Taínos.

Just to add a interesting detail on that, that there's going to be a lot of massacring coming. But a person who sailed with him on that expedition to Hispaniola was Bartolome de las Casas, the man who, in due course, will become the great spokesman of the rights of the native peoples in America. That is going to be an enduring tension throughout the course of Spanish history in the new world in the 16th century, which we should not forget about.

I think as with the Aztec series, if you just think of the Spanish as blood-soaked, greedy, that's not quite right. They were always arguing about what to do, but also they're a huge theme of this series as it was in the previous one. They're very legalistic. They're always arguing about the legal ramifications of what they're doing, and they're always traveling with notaries and stuff.

This whole mad thing where they have to read out a statement inviting the Native to become Christians and submit to the Spanish king, which obviously is gibberish to the people who are listening to it. But that is going to be an ongoing theme, isn't it?

Now, a big theme of the conquistadors experience was that so many of them, this is the age of printed books, so many of them arrive in the new world with their heads full of chivalric fantasies. They're expecting to fight monsters and rescue maidens, and they're very excited at the thought of adventure. Pizarro, of course, is different. He may know of such things, but he has never read one, and he never will because he still can't read and write. Actually, some historians, and indeed some Spanish chroniclers who later very harsh about him, treat him as an illiterate thug. I think that's a little bit harsh. I think he's a much more straightforward man than Cortés. Cortés was very feline, wasn't he? He was vulpine.

Yeah, he was. Very Machiavel.

Yeah. Pizarro is not a Machiavel. He's a strong man. He's a big bloke. He's very tough. Everyone says he's daring. He's more conservative than Cortés, so he wears black at austere black and white costume which he wears all his life.

Like Philip II?

Yeah. His pleasure is just simple, playing bowls, ball games.

Do you think the sense of him as an illiterate thug is reflecting class bias then on the part of chroniclers who despise him for his illiteracy?

Yes, a little bit. There's so much feuding that once people have fallen out with Pizarro. They say, Oh, you're a former pig herder. You can't even read. You're just a bruiser. All of this. But actually, at the time, his men generally saw him as an easygoing. I mean, definitely the Italians didn't, but his men saw him as an easygoing chap. One of the things about the conquest of the Incas, a lot of the conquistadors wrote memoirs about their time in Peru. Of course, those memoirs may be fictionalized or may be distorted, but there were really interesting insights into what went on.

You have a critical mass of accounts, you guess. I mean, they can't all just be made up, right?

No. One Spanish chronicler and one memoir said, He was a good companion without any vanity or pomposity. A later chronicler, who was actually half Inca, called Garthilazzo, said he was kindly and gentle by nature and never said a hard word of anyone. I mean, how kindly and gentle Pizarro was, we shall discover. He is a soldier's son from a very violent part of Spain. This is a very violent business, and Pizarro, as we will find out, will do whatever it takes, and he will kill whomever he needs to kill in order to get out on top.

There is your shout line for the film. He will kill whoever he must to come out on top.

Okay. Wow. I can see it now. Who is he played by? Robert Shore. I like Robert Shore as an actor. For the next 20 years or so, he's in the Caribbean. He's a pretty obscure figure. We talked in the Columbus and Aztec series about the conquistadors and how they operated these chains of conquest. They would basically have rival networks of entrepreneurial freebooters and adventurers and whatnot who would be engaged in island hopping across the Caribbean, getting closer and closer to the American mainland. Obviously, the most celebrated of all these networks, of all these operations is Cortés' when Cortés went from Cuba to Mexico and then from there into Central America. Pizarro joins a different company from his cousins, a company operating much further south, and they're basically hacking their way through the jungles of Central America and Panama and stuff.

Which is lacking in the splendid civilisations that Cortés finds. There is a It's a slight sense that there's a bit of luck, isn't there?

Completely. It's like you're a venture capitalist and you're investing in tech firms, and some of them will pay off and some of them won't, and Pizarro's has not really paid off. That said, he's part of the group that become the first European to lay eyes upon the Pacific.

Yeah, so not Stout Cortés, as John Keats said. Got it wrong.

No, it's Balboa. Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who leads that operation. And here's a very good example of how the conquistadors' lives work. Pizarro is standing with him when they look out on the waters of the Pacific. And six years later, it is Pizarro who arrests Balboa and brings him for execution in Panama because of the endemic feuding that is always tearing the conquistadors apart. So they're basically always worried. You can team up with somebody and go on some amazing expedition and risk your life and whatnot. And three years later, that person will sink a knife into your back and steal all your money. Or you'll be involved in 20 years worth of lawsuits in in Spain.

Or you'll die of some hideous disease in the jungle.

All of these things will happen in this series. If we fast forward now to the beginning of the 1520s, Pizarro, who's now in his early 40s, has settled in the boom town of Panama City. Panama Our city is booming, but it's a pretty rough. It's a place of pub brawels and stuff.

Star Wars bar.

The cantina in Star Wars, exactly. Pizarro has done pretty well for himself. He has his own estate, which is called an Encomienda, which comes with a grant of indigenous laborers who basically are as close to slave labor as you can get, really. But Pizarro is restless, and the puzzle for historians is working out why he's so restless. Because at this age, in your early forties, most conquistadors say, That's it now. I'm not trudging through jungles with loads of leaches again. I've had enough. I've made a little bit of money.

Is it his Pothos?

Yeah, Alexander.

Alexander, the great style, yearning. I suppose because he's illiterate, he doesn't have that massive Alexander, the great vibe.

I think actually the Pothos, I think you're underrating it, Tom. Pizarro has quite modest personal tastes. He's not a man given to luxury. He's not a man given to display. He looks quite conservative. He's not married. He doesn't have children. It's not like he's interested in piling up gold for his descendants.

He has a yearning.

Yeah, a thirst to make a name for himself, a thirst for glory.

Maybe that's the subtitle of the film.

It is. He will gamble in the next seven years. His health, his life, and most importantly for a conquistador, all his money, on a pursuit of, well, this is the mystery. What? What does he really think he's after? The truth is, he doesn't know. In 1522, so this is just a couple of years after Cortés had arrived in Tenochtitland, the capital of the Aztecs. In 1522, further south, a Basque called Pascal d'Andeguia had sailed southwest from Panama. So if Patabi was very anxious that people understand the geography, because we're not the rest of geography, but we like to dabble in it from time to time. Pascal d'Andeguia had gone southwest from Panama. That's basically down the Pacific side of the top of South America. What is now Columbia. He'd gone along the Coast of Columbia. He was gone for ages. People thought he'd vanished. Then he returned and he said, I've been in the jungle in Colombia, and there are people there. There's not much there, but people say, further south, there is this land called biru. Biru, they say, is a rich and powerful empire, maybe as rich as Mexico.

Dominic, just to ask, there have been no contacts between the Aztecs and the Incas, have there? The geography is just too impenetrable and impossible.

As we will discover, when we get to the Incas, they have basically been living in a vacuum.

Yeah, because they're geographically bound in by sea and mountains and jungle and all kinds of things. Yeah.

Exactly. Pizarro in Panama City, imagine him in his cantina surrounded by aliens. He says, Oh, I like the sound of this. This is the dream that he will chase. In the summer of 1524, he forms a partnership with two friends from Panama City. One of them is a priest called Hernando de Luque, who dabbles in business and has borrowed some money from a judge. The other, a very important person in this story in all six episodes, is an old comrade of Pizarro. He's called Diego de Almagro. He's from rural New Castile. He's a little bit older than Pizarro. He's also illegitimate. He's also illiterate. No, he can't read. He's another very hard man. People said his body was covered with scars from fighting. But he's literally more colorful than Pizarro. He wears very colorful clothes. To read you, because it's important to get all these people in their heads, one chronicler said of Al Magro, He was a man of short stature with ugly features, but with great courage and endurance. He was generous, but was conceited and was given to boasting, letting his tongue run on sometimes without stop. He's short, he's ugly, he's very brave, and he's boastful, and he's always talking about himself.

The film is just writing itself, isn't it? There'd be so many actors who'd want to play that part.

Well, not least because he and Pizarro at this point are great mates. And spoiler alert, it will not last.

Not for long. No honor among thives.

So in November 1524, they set off in three small ships down the Pacific Coast of Colombia. So this is the top left of South America. And this is not a success at all, this voyage. The weather's really bad. They put ashore. They get into a fight with some villages who have got spears and bow and arrows. Al Magro loses an eye. So this is great now because we can picture him with an eye patch. I don't think he did wear an eye patch, but I think for the purposes of the film-What?

So he just had a horrid bleeding soar?

I think so, yeah. Oh, great. I think for Hollywood purposes, the eye patch is important.

Who would play him? Joe Pesky?

I'm thinking the bloke who was Gimli, John Reece Davis.

A Welshman?

Yeah. More Welsh history on the rest of his issues. Too much.

Okay, so he's either Gimli or Joe Pesky.

I think Gimli. I think Genom is Gimli. We still haven't cast Pizarro, but we can work on that during the course of the series. Anyway, They go back to Panama. Pizarro is undeterred. He raises more money. In March 1526, he and El Magro set off again with two small ships, and this voyage will become one of the most celebrated voyages in Spanish history. They go south down the Coast of Columbia, that Western Coast. When they get to the San Juan River, Pizarro goes ashore and camps. El Magro goes back to Panama to get reinforcements. Their pilot, so the guy who's basically piloting the ships, who's a guy called Bartolome Ruiz, he says, I'll take the ships on a little bit, scout on south to see what's there while you guys do what you're doing. Ruiz crosses the equator. Then once he's crossed the equator on the horizon, he sees a ship. It's basically a raft. It's an ocean-going raft.

Like the Conticci.

With cotton sails. He captures this ship. A lot of this people jump over board and stuff to escape him, but not all of them. He can't believe what he finds on this raft. Because as he reports in a letter to Charles IV of Spain, it's full of gold and silver monuments, crowns and diadems, belts and bracelets, tweezers and rattles and strings and clusters of beads and rubies, mirrors and cups and other drinking vessels. Tweeters. Tweeters. Tweeters and mirrors. Brilliant. Tweeters.

The king will be thrilled and have some twizers.

Golden turnip clippers. Very odd.

Maisal hair clippers.

Dental floss thing. Dental floss. Anyway, they've got all this stuff on the boat. These blokes on the boat were taking this to trade all this gold, to trade unbelievably for brightly-coloured fish shells, which they would use as counter.

So this is effectively money.

Yeah, but what this tells Rui is that to trade this for a load of shells means that the people with the gold must have an awful lot of it because they don't prize it that highly. Anyway, for Pizarro and co, this is tremendous news. This is so exciting because this means there clearly is an advanced civilization if they're making golden twizas.

And they got loads of golden rubies and stuff.

Exactly. Ruiz keeps three of the blokes on the raft on afterwards to train as interpreters. Actually, throughout this whole story, There are clearly going to be people interpreting the whole time, and we know virtually nothing about them. The one thing we do know, actually, is the Spanish, unlike in the story of the Aztecs, the Spanish spends a lot of time complaining that their interpreters are useless and they're mistranslating what is being said.

Because there's no equivalent of malinche.

There's no malinche, no.

Cortés' girlfriend, who, for very complicated reasons, can speak all these various languages. But there isn't an equivalent of that in this story, is there?

No, there isn't. There are just generic people who keep getting the Spanish themselves, get them mixed up, as we shall see. But their Spanish do say, and in fact, the Incas later say, God, your interpreters are absolutely useless.

Well, I mean, I don't think you can blame them because they're having to learn a completely new language. How can they be sure that the language is properly spoken.

Yeah, true. I mean, I just think interpreters should do their job, but I have high expectations. Anyway, the Ruiz, the pilot, goes back to the camp and he sees Pizarro and Al Magro turns up from Panama. They're all delighted by the news of the gold. He's the Welsh guy. Al Magro is, yeah, the guy with the eye patch. And Al Magro says, Look, I'll take some of this gold back to Panama. I'll get more recruits. Why don't you guys keep going? See what you can find. So they go on and they decide their rendezvous on this déserted island called the Isla de Diageo, which is on the border, roughly between Colombia and Ecuador. So we're now going down the West Coast of South America. So Pizarro and co go to this island. Al Magro goes to Panama to take the gold back and to get more recruits. When Al Magro gets back to Panama, the governor of Panama says, This is mad. I'm not giving you more people. This is a fool's errand.

But what about the rubies and the gold?

Yeah, he sees that, but he just thinks it's maybe a one-off. It's maybe a one-off. But also the weather, the malaria. We've got stuff going on in Central America that we're busy doing. I'm not throwing more men off, good money after bad, as it were. Now, meanwhile, Pizarro and the on this desert island, the Isla de Gael, they're having a dreadful time. They run out of food, they're living off like, rotten shellfish, mosquitoes are eating them alive, they've all got dysentery, all of this thing. Eventually, they see ships coming towards them, and Pizarro says, Oh, brilliant. These are the reinforcements. These are the new recruits. The ships arrive, and actually, the people on the ships say, No, we've come to take you back home. You're going back to Panama. Pizarro is gutted, he's furious, and this It's an incredibly famous scene in Spanish history. He draws his sword, he gets all his men onto the beach, the men who haven't died of dysentery, and he draws a line in the sand of the beach. He has this fantastic speech, Comrade and friends, On one side lies comfort, on the other lies death, hardship, hunger, nakedness, rain, and abandonment.

On that side, you return to Panama to be poor. On the other, you go to Peru and become rich. The choice is yours.

It's very like when I phoned you to ask if you would like to do a podcast.

God, it is. It drew a line in the sand and said, On that side is comfort, and the other is golden twizers making this reign an abandonment.

And so only 12 crossed, don't they?

Only 12 men crossed.

And one of them is a very cool guy who's a Greek, who's come from Crete.

Pedro de Candia.

Pedro de Candia, who's an expert in artillery and firearms. I just mentioned that artillery and firearms for no particular reason. I mean, it may not have an impact later on in the plot.

Pedro de Candia is a giant. So the giant Greek and 11 other blokes cross to Pizarro's side of the line. The rest of them get back on the ship and go to Panama. For the next few months, Pizarro and these men who become immortalized in Spanish paintings and Spanish literature later on as the famous Thirteen or the Immortal Thirteen, they stay on this desert island. And they're almost doing it out of stubbornness because it's not like they're going to go anywhere.

Are they becoming good mates as a result of this? Are they getting on each other's nerves? Are they a band of brothers? What effect do you think it has on them?

I think it probably does create a band of brothers thing because a lot of these people will carry on with Pizarro.

Because that's the striking thing, isn't it? That they really do stick together.

Yeah, they're all in now. They can't back out because they'd look like fools. They'd look like an absolute idiot. They stay on this desert island, Pizarro becoming increasingly emaciated. And then at last, the pilot, Ruiz, He comes back with a ship and says, The governor of Panama said, enough, come home now. You've made your point. ' Basically, no one's going to come and join you. So very despondently, they get on the ships and Pizarro says, before we go home, could we just take one last look south? Can we just have a look and see what's around the headland or whatever? They go on and they go into the Gulf of Guayaquil, which is where Peru and Ecuador meet, so Southern Ecuador, Northern Peru. There they see a town on the Coast, which they end up calling Tombez. They go near the town, two of Pizarro's men go ashore with presence of... The ship clearly has brought them some food. They've got pigs and chickens. They go ashore with the presence of the pigs and the chickens, and the locals are delighted.

So they're not frightened by these pigs. I think if you've never seen a pig before, it'd be unsett.

They don't seem unsettled. They seem delighted. They probably make a nice ham sandwich out of it or something. Anyway, the two blokes come back onto the boat and they say, Oh, my God, this is what we wanted. This is a proper civilization. These blokes have pots, they have nice clothes, they have chiefs, and they talk about a king far away. And best of all, they have very fancy temples decorated with silver and gold. Yeah, that's what Pizarro is thinking. Brilliant. So Pizarro has what he needs. He's got the ship, the evidence of the ship with the tweezers. He's got the evidence of the town where they welcome the arrival of a pig, and they've got temples with gold. And he says, great. And what's more, they pick up from this town, they're either given or they capture two local boys who they call Martineo and Felipillo, like little Philip or little Martin. And These boys, they're going to train as interpreters to add to the ones they've got already. And these boys will play a big part in this story.

Because they've got up actually pretty good, right?

Yeah, well, better than the rest. The Spanish keep mixing them up. So in the Chronicles, the chronicles always disagree Whether it's Martinier or Filippio who's translating. But in a way, they've got translators. The language, and of course, the Spanish don't know what the language is, but the language that they are translating to and from is a language called Quechua, which is a very big Andean language. Pizarro goes back to Panama and he meets his business partners and he says, Look, we've obviously got a lot of potential here for another expedition, but we need to get royal approval because we don't want to go down, find stuff, and then have competitors come down with royal approval to take all the treasure.

It's that legalistic side again.

Exactly. In 1529, in the spring, Pizarro goes back to Spain and he goes to see the king of Spain, the Emperor Charles IV. Who's in Toledo, in the center of Spain. Now, Charles IV is a very, very busy man. He's the king of Spain. He's the head of the house of Habsberg. He's the Holy Roman Emperor. He is currently fighting two very expensive wars Cors. One is against the French in Italy, and the other is against the Ottomans in Eastern Europe. What he wants more than anything is gold and silver from the new world. Pizarro says to him, Your Majesty, I've heard that this place, biru, is Brilliant. I've not been there, but I've heard very good things. They have golden tweezers, they have lovely pots, they have nice clothes, all of this.

Give you your Majesty a pot.

But Charles loves a pot. If he can melt it down into money for his wars. Now, as luck would have it, also in Toledo at the court visiting with a load of gifts for the royal family is Hernán Cortés. He's making one of his periodic returns from Mexico.

Is this where he turns up with loads of Aztec mime artists for the Pope? Their bodies are their tools.

Is he not always traveling with indigenous people? Well, anyway, Cortés has gone down an absolute storm. Because of that, people are very well inclined to the idea of, Oh, there's another Mexico further south. Well, brilliant. In July 1529, the Council of the Indies, which is based in Seville, authorizes Pizarro to conduct the discovery and conquest and settlement of the province of Peru. They say to him, You will be the first governor, you will be its first captain general. If you find it, we will give you a massive salary for life, actually double the salary that's given to Cortés in Mexico. So he's got a really good deal out of it.

It's a franchising.

Yeah, it's a franchise. He's got the franchise.

Pizarro has to put up the capital and take the risk, but he has the brand name.

Exactly. There is one catch. When he got the franchise, he accidentally forgot to get a good deal for his business partners.

Oh, no. The Welsh guy.

Yeah, this is how it works. So the guy with only one eye, Diego Del Magro, he's going to be his reward. Well, Pizarro has a massive salary and is Governor and Captain General. Al Magro has been rewarded with the title of Commandant of the Town of Tombez, which is marketing Totally inferior. So he's not going to be happy at all when Pizarro gets back, as we will discover. Anyway, Pizarro goes back from Seville to the New World, January 1530. He's picked up about 200 recruits from his native extra madura, by and large, including six Dominican friers.

And Dominic, would one of those friars be called Valverde?

He is called Valverde, yeah. The Valverde clan will play an important part in this story.

Maybe a doctor of theology.

It's a long time since we had a Valverde on the show. And long Outstanding listeners will record that when a Valverde appears on the rest of his history, all kinds of things will follow.

Good times follow.

Good times follow, exactly. There's this guy, Valverde, who will be playing an important part, and there's the three Pizarro brothers. Of these three brothers, they will return in later episodes. So remember that they're there. There's the youngest who is called... I mean, actually, there's so much disagreements about what order they're in, how old they are and whatnot, but this is what I've decided. Juan is the youngest. He's maybe 19 or so. Everyone said he's very impetuous, he's gallant, he's young, he's dashing, all of this. Then there is Gonzalo. Gonzalo is the middle one. Maybe he's about 20. He's very friendly and easygoing. He was full of nobility and virtue and was beloved and respected by everyone, says the chronicler, Garth Ilazo.

He's the noble one. Juan is the young scamp.

What's he like?

And then the third one, what's he like?

He's the oldest and Hernando. Now, Hernando, big figure in this story. He's the only one who's legitimate. The others are all legitimate. One Spanish chronicle describes him thus, A tall, heavy man with thick lips and a thick tongue, and the tip of his nose was fleshy and inflamed. A great and boastful talker.

So Martin Clunes?

Yeah, he doesn't sound like a massive looker, but everyone said he was charismatic, charming, impressive. Yeah, big bloke. He's got military experience because he definitely has served in Italy against the French. He will end up being Francisco's closest confident, his chief advisor, Enando.

Is there a sense that Italy is where you earn your spurs? That's the cutting edge of military technology. Exactly.

Where the Spanish troops are regarded as some of the best in the world, by the way. By 15: 30, they're all back in Panama, and Pizarro is planning a new expedition. He does have one problem. His business partner, Diego de Almagro, is absolutely really outraged that Pizarro has returned and got in this terrible deal. Pizarro says, Look, listen, when we've got Peru, there must be something underneath it to the south, and you can have that, and that's what's going to become Chile. So Al Magro, he will go off later on to Chile.

But that isn't legally stamped, is it? So he doesn't have letters, patent from the king or anything.

No, no, no. Actually, their relationship now is a bit broken and it'll never be the same again. This will right through this story. I can see why. Yeah, of course. He's really sold him out. He's completely sold him out. It's worse because Hernando, Pizarro's brother, absolutely despises Al Magro. Anyway, spoiler alert. This is the beginning of a feud that will destroy all these people. Anyway, 27th of September, 1530, Pizarro set sail from Panama and is bound for biru. He's got three ships and 180 men and a load of horses, 37 horses. Now, a crucial point Al Magro makes the same mistake again. He says, I'll raise more men in Panama and I will follow later. I'll join you later. This is maybe because he's a bit cautious and he wants to find out how things are going to turn out before he risks his life.

I assume that he doesn't feel quite the blood brother with Pizarro now, and so doesn't feel that they're in it together to the same degree, I suppose.

I would guess so. But as we will discover, this is going to have massive consequences. I mean, a lot of people will die because of this. Pizarro and Coast sail off down the Pacific Coast. The weather's against them this time, so they have to make landfall much earlier than they planned in what's now the far north of Ecuador. If you look at a map, top left corner of South America. From there, they start to march down the Coast. It's very miserable. There's loads of mosquitoes. They're hungry. Pizarro, everyone says, does really well. He's brave, he's big. When they're crossing a river, he will help to carry the sick across on his back, all of this thing. He leads from the front. I mean, whatever else you say about him, he's genuinely brave and he's got tremendous stamina and all this stuff.

And concerned for his men.

And concerned for his men. They reach their first settlement, a town called Kauake, in February 1531. They find a load of huts, they find a load of very baffled villages, and they find a load of emeralds and gold and silver. So Pizarro shares a lot of it out. Then, weirdly, he hangs around in this place, which doesn't sound that thrilling, for about six months. They all come down with a disease. This may be actually... I mean, they come in with a disease because they've hung around, but it may explain why they're hanging around afterwards. They come out with a horrible disease called Karrian's disease, where you get these massive warts that then bleed, separating warts.

Do they stay with you or do they heal?

No, I think they eventually... I mean, if you Google it, you won't forget it. So don't Google it, is all I say. Now everyone will Google it, of course. Tom's googling it as we speak. He can't wait to see all those photographs of people's bleeding warts. Oh, my God. You've finally seen the Carian's disease.

Guys, whatever you do, do not Google Carian's disease warts.

Yeah, it's not good. Horrible. Now, word is spreading about these bearded men who came in floating houses. A classic thing like we had with the conquest of Mexico. More reinforcements eventually arrive from Central America, from Panama. Al Magro is still not among them. He's still waiting to find out what's going to happen. Eventually, Pizarro sets off again. He crosses the equator. He's now going through fields of cultivated maize, what our American listeners would call corn. This implies a high level of social organization. There's farming going on here. People need to be... You need some form of social order for that to happen. The interpreters are reporting to the Spanish that people are talking about an empire further south, and also they're talking about a war, but no one really Nobody knows what that is. Intriguing. South of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, big city today, they reach a large island called Puna. Here, the locals are not so friendly. They stage a massive dance to trick the Spanish and then turn on them. But of course, the Spanish, a theme of this series, they have their steel swords against which there can be no resistance, and they're able to overcome the locals.

Do they have horses?

They do have horses. They've got about 38, 37 horses. Again, which absolutely terrify the people of South America, as we will see again and again. You can turn up with two or three horses and you can defeat hundreds of people, thousands of people, because they're so frightened of the horses.

Because all these rumors start to spread, don't they? That they eat people.

My favorite of all the rumors is that it was widely believed that the Spanish were incapable of walking uphill. That that was what the horses were for.

That's why they had the horses for.

Exactly. Some more people, more reinforcements arrive among a character who will play a part in the story, a night from Spain, from extra Majura called Hernando de Sotto.

Big news in Florida in due course.

Yes, he will come to a very sticky end in Florida. De Sotto is 32 years old. He's another very short man. There's a lot of short people in the story, but he has won a reputation in Central America as a very dashing and brave horseman. That's his great skill. He's like the person who would be very good at dressage or some such.

Nice. He'd win gold with Princess Anne.

He would. He'd be great pals of Princess That's what he's doing now, actually.

Is he posh?

He's a night. He's an Ilvalgo.

Okay, so he is. Exactly. He's one of those menacing posh people. I wouldn't get on that horse if I were you.

Yeah, he's a young Charles Dance. That's exactly what he is. Pizarro says to Soto, You can be one of my chief lieutenants. Actually, when we get to Peru, the capital, you can be the lieutenant governor of the capital city. Soto says, Brilliant. I can't wait. We should see how this promise works out.

I say.

They're now inching closer to this mysterious empire. There's about 400 of them now. They get some rafts. They cross from this island that they've been on back to the mainland and to the town of Thumbes that they had visited before. Now, they'd seen the temples if you recall. They'd seen the people's nice clothes. They'd seen all this. But when they get to the town, they can't believe it because the buildings are ruined, the streets are deserted, the temples have been looted.

What's happened?

Yes, It's something apocalyptic. Lesotho goes ahead to find out what's going on. He finds the local chief across the river. He brings them back to Pizarro, and the chief says, he doesn't really fill them in on what's happened, but he says, There's a much greater chief who lives far away, and this greater chief lives in a town with gold and silver jugs and houses and temples walled and roofed with gold.

I say.

Pizarro thinks, Wow, this is looking good. They continue on. The next place they get to is town called Poechos. Here, the local chief is friendly. He gives them food, and he adds a little bit more detail about what's been happening. He says, I, too, answer to this greater chief, the Emperor. The Emperor's rule extends for thousands of miles north to south. But, he says, the old Emperor has died, and his two sons have been fighting for control of this empire, of a civilization that up till now, has been totally unknown to the outside world. The local people call this civilization Tawantin Soya, the land of the Four Quarters. But Tom, we know it as the Empire of the Incas.

And so The Incas enter the chat, and we will find out what they have to say for themselves after the break. Hello, everyone. Massive excitement because we have an update on the Rest is History Festival. We can finally start revealing some of the massive A-list names that we have joining us at that festival at Hampton Court.

Yes. So in case you missed it, on the fourth and fifth of July this year, we will be hosting the inaugural Rest is History Festival at, of all places, Hampton Court Palace. And this is a festival exclusively for members of the Rest is History Club.

That's right, Dominic. As I mentioned, we have some huge names coming. I will be joined by Mary Beard to talk about what else Rome. I will also be joined by friend of the show, Ali Ansari, to talk about what else Persha.

Yes. I'll be talking to two other people who've been on the Rest is History great fan favorites. One of them is the brilliant Tracey Borman, who will be joining us to talk about the secrets of the Tudas. And the other, another massive fan favorite is Katya Hoya, who will be talking about her work on Weimar, Germany. So we will let you know who else is joining us in the next episode. But rest assured, it is shaping up to be a brilliant, brilliant weekend in the most magnificent and historic setting imaginable.

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Genuine, we cannot wait to see you there.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History. It is the autumn of 1532, and top conquistador, Francisco Pizarro and his men have finally crossed into the mainland of modern day Peru. Dominic, only now are they beginning to grasp the reality of what they have discovered, an immense land stretching between the Andes and the Pacific. And this is the empire of the Incas.

Yeah. So at last we get to the Incas themselves. So first of all, the Incas, I think, are a little bit less known than the Aztecs. They're shrouded in mystery.

They don't call themselves Incas, do they?

They don't. They don't call themselves the Incas at all. So the reason we call them the Incas is that they called their Emperor, the Sapa Inca. And the Spanish got the word Incas from that. But they called themselves, as far as we know, they called themselves probably Runa, which means just the people. They called their country not Peru. They called it Tawantin Soyo, the land of the four quarters, north, south, east, and west. Their history is a little bit obscure because they didn't write anything down. They had no writing.

You'd be telling me they didn't have wheels next. You're right.

You're not wrong. They don't have pigs, so they don't have the three important elements for any civilization. Basically, what is written about the Incas is all written by Spanish chroniclers. We are fortunate in some ways that the Spanish were fascinated by South America and that in the 1530s, 1540s, 1550s, Spanish conquistadors and memoirists and historians are writing a lot of stuff down. But what we can't know, of course, is how accurate it really is.

But I would guess, again, that if you have all these large numbers of people writing accounts, there must be a measure of truth. They can't just be making it up from nothing.

I think so. I think absolutely. So the Incas are not the first civilization in the Peruvian Andes. Archeologists will tell you there were loads of different cultures before.

The Nascar, as in the lines, the Nascar lines.

The Chavine, a very famous civilization called the Tiwanaku. Are they famous? They are famous. I talk about nothing else. The people I hang around with, they're always talking to me about the Tiwanaku. I go out in London and in the pubs of London.

I mean, I would say, Dominic, I would say they're well known, but I wouldn't say they're famous.

I There's a difference. I think famous is the word. Tom, Lake Titicaca, the Gate of the Sun. People are always chatting about that, aren't they? The Gate of the Sun.

See, that's famous.

Okay, so that's the Tiwanaku's most famous thing. They built this fantastic gate by a lake, and then they went into decline about AD 1,000. Then they were succeeded, the Timonaku, by this loads of competing city states and tribes and stuff. All of these people, so they're Andeans, they developed, as we said before the break, in isolation really, from the outside world. Because north of Peru, you have the forests, the highland forests of Colombia. West, you have the Pacific. East, you have Amazonia with its dense rainforest. And south, all the way south, you have the wilderness that is Patagonia.

So this is by miles the most isolated civilization on the face of the planet.

Yeah, I think so. I think so. So it's not like a Himalayan kingdom that has been penetrated by-No, or Japan. Yeah, by missionaries or traders or whatever. This place, these people have basically have really been cut off. Now, the Incas themselves, like the Spanish, they are newcomers to the top division, to the big league.

And like the Aztecs.

And like the Aztecs. They're originally a pastoral tribe shape, shepherds and stuff or whatever, in the valley of the Urubamba River, which is outside the highland city of Cusco in the Andes. That's about 11,000 feet above sea level. They'd actually physically developed tremendous capacity or whatever to live so high up with the air so thin. They speak a language called Ketua, which is an Andean language which proceeds the Incas. They don't invent it or anything.

Can I ask, is there a sense among the Incas as there was among the Aztecs that they are living amid the ruins of previous civilisations and that their gods and their sense of the past is inherited from those civilisations.

Yes, definitely there is. Absolutely there is. Particularly this very famous people, the Tiwanaku.

The well-known people.

Yeah, really well-known. A lot of their gods, a lot of their customs, a lot of Andean social morees and whatnot, they are inherited by the Incas rather like the Aztecs were their successors to the people of Teotihuacan and so on and so forth.

The people in the Andes have this creator god, don't they? Viracocha.

Viracocha, yeah, exactly.

He's an ancient god, not just an Incan god. He's the top dog.

Well, as we shall see, some of the great temples that end up being looted by the Spanish the Incas. Maybe hundreds or even thousands of years old, these religious sites. So yes, absolutely. They're living amid the ruins of civilisations that preceded them. They begin to expand from being just this little tribe in probably the late 13th century. So for context, that's the time when Edward I is hammering the Scots. Then by the 1350s, that's the time of the Black Death, Hundred Years War, all that stuff, they are expanding into the neighboring valleys. Historians call this state the Kuzco Kuzco Confederation. Then about a century after that, there's this legendary moment in Inca history when their rivals, who were called the Chanka, attacked the Cusco Confederation, and the Chanka looked like they were going to have the upper hand. The King of Kuzco, who was called the Sapa Inca, he fled the city. But his son, who was called Kuzi Yopanqui, rallied the army and he won this tremendous victory. Then on the back of that, he displaced his father and he became Sapa Inca or Emperor. He took a new name to mark that, which is Pachacuti.

He is the person, Pachikuti, who reorganizes and expands the Kuzco Kingdom into an empire He's the Augustus of the Incas? He's absolutely the Augustus. When the Spanish came and wrote about him more than 100 years later, they said, He's the guy, he's the founding father. A Jesuit missionary called Bernabe Cobo said, he endowed the state with a code of He expanded the official religion. He embellished the temples of magnificent buildings. In short, he overlooked nothing and organized everything. Later, archeologists and writers said, Oh, Patrick Coote is absolutely the man. The Augustus, as you called him, Tom. There's a Victorian explorer called Sir Clements Markham, who said, Patrick Cooty, he said, was the best all-round genius ever produced by the native races of America. But actually, disappointingly, he may not have existed. What? Yeah, I know. Oh, no.

A real shocker. That is so classic.

So I think modern historians now think the Incas might have made him up as they needed a founding father figure.

It's like, if he didn't exist, you'd need to invent him.

Well, that's the thing. So I think we should act as though he did exist because somebody like him must have done.

Yeah, someone of the same name.

Yeah, somebody must have expanded the empire. And so if you believe the traditional accounts, Patrick Cootee, his son, who was called Tupac Inca, and his grandson, who was called Huerna Capac, they massively expand this empire. They go all the way west to the Coast of the Pacific. They go north into Ecuador and Colombia. They go south to Lake Titicaca and the highlands of the high plateau of Bolivia. They go southwest to the top of what is now Chile. So you can imagine them basically expanding throughout Western South America.

So it's just very, very long and thin.

So long, so long. 2,500 It's 200 miles long. There's an American writer called Charles C. Mann, who wrote an absolutely wonderful book. I never thought I would say this about a book that has a lot of science in it, but it's called 1491, and it's about the New World Before Columbus. And amazingly for a really good book, there's a lot of stuff about pollen and plants and agricultural terracing, but it's really interesting.

It is, isn't it? Yeah.

And in that book, he says, Imagine as though there was one power that ran an empire that went all the way from St. From Petersburg in the north to Cairo in the south, but a long, thin empire. That's the Inca Empire. Probably not as in the Royal Hunter of the Sun claimed 24 million people, probably about 12 million people.

Still impressive, though, isn't it?

I When they're living in massive regional diversity and all of this.

If you're a guy leading an invasion with about 190 horsemen, it doesn't really matter how many millions you're up against. It's still millions.

No, exactly. This is a gigantic country. The mad thing is they don't have Some of the things that Eurasian empires take for granted, namely the horse, the wheel, the arch, and the written word. They don't have any of those things. What do they have? What's Inca civilisation look like? Well, most people are peasants, and they live in these thatched huts along the river valleys of the Andes. They don't have any draft animals. There's no horses, there's no oxen in South America. So they don't have wheels because there's no point. I suppose you Could you have a wheelbarrow, couldn't you? You'd think you'd have a wheelbarrow? Yes. They don't have them.

But they got llamas, haven't they?

They've got loads of llamas. If you like llamas, you're laughing because they've got more llamas than anyone. Don't they eat guinea pigs? So guinea pigs, so what they eat, do you want to hear what they eat? They eat sweet potatoes. They eat this maize, or as Americans would say, corn. They eat potatoes, which the great historian John Hemming calls Peru's greatest legacy to the world is the potato. They don't have any cows, they don't have any sheep, they don't have any pigs. They have a load of guinea pigs, and that's the national dish of Peru.

Quite young.

They drink a beer made from maize called chicha. They chew coca leaves. The Spanish commented that the Inca nobility seemed to be constantly chewing these coca leaves. They're very mild, very, very mild stimulant, basically green cocaine.

Does it make them rush around, going on about how brilliant they are?

No, I don't think so.

Because I'm reading some of the stuff that the Inca emperors say about themselves, you think there's a guy who's been on the coca.

No, I don't think so, actually, I think it's so mild, the coca leaf. I've never chewed a coca leaf myself. But anyway, they have a load of llamas, as you say, and alpacas. Now, interestingly, they all wear the same clothes. If you went to the Inca Empire for a straw, you would see All the blokes wearing brown cloaks and all the women wearing gray cloaks and so on. This is an important point. This is a standard uniform and no deviation whatsoever is permitted. This is an exceptionally ordered society. If you think about the Incas, they've got some massive things are going against them. They don't have any domestic animals, very few domestic animals. They don't have rich farmland. The highlands of Peru, the steep slopes of the Andes, is a terrible place to try to grow crops, which is why they have to carve out all these terraces and stuff. As Pizarro's men march into this empire, they see these stone terraces along the hillsides. They see there's loads of irrigation canals and ditches and an incredible road network. The largest road network in the America is 14,000 miles long. There's these paved stone roads, ropes, suspension bridges, and almost like primitive cable cars going across the valleys.

And they are crucial in any film, aren't they? You have to have a battle on a swaying suspension bridge with somebody threatening to cut the ropes.

Exactly. And all the way, there's a chain of warehouses and storehouses along the roads with clothes and with food and supplies and stuff. There's nothing like this in Mexico and the Aztec Empire. And in fact, some of the Spanish say, there's nothing like this in Europe. I mean, an incredible road network.

But you'd have to have it because otherwise you couldn't run an empire that's that long.

That's that long. But to have it at all, that tells you how this empire is working. The Incas, they don't get people to build these roads out of voluntary enthusiasm. They force them. They haven't built their empire by a shared enthusiasm for nice textiles and playing the panpipes. They have built it through force. In terms of weaponry, they're Bronze Age, aren't they? They've got slings and axes and clubs and how birds made of bronze. They have quilted armor. They have Greek-style crested helmets with feathers and stuff. They have nice little painted shields and whatnot Or not.

And they have this horrible thing, don't they? Where they come up against enemy peoples and they say to the leaders of the enemy peoples, join us. And if you do, then you'll become one of us and you can have a great time with guinea pigs and gold tweezers and things. And if you don't and you fight and then you get captured, they'll bring you back to the capital and they'll dig these huge pits and they'll put in snakes and hungry jaguars and things. And then if you survive it, then get pulled up and live as a servant. If you don't, you get killed by these snakes and things.

I'll just put my cards on the table here. I would not have liked to have lived in the Inca Empire. I think it sounds like a terrible place. I mean, this will shock our Peruvian listeners. Well, no.

I mean, you have to wear this monochrome clothing. You have to spend your whole time digging roads. If you rebel, you might end up in a pit with a snake. I mean, it's not fun.

They have absorbed all these surrounding peoples into their empire. And part of it is by persuading their elites to join the Inca nobility. And to be an Inca nobleman is quite a laugh. You get a palace, you get the best food and drink. You get to use... Some of these roads are just for the nobility. You get to travel in a litter on these roads, and you get to wear these golden plugs in your earlobes, ear plugs. They widen out your earlobe.

Would that be a selling point for you?

I think it'd be worth a try. And the Spanish call them, for that reason, the oriones, the big ears. That's the Spanish name for the Inca nobility, the big ears. However, To be a peasant is awful. So basically, the Aztecs, if the Aztecs conquer you, the Aztecs just want you to send them some lovely beans as a tribute every year or whatever, some chocolate or whatever. The Incas aren't really that bothered about the tribute. What they want is you. They want your labor.

It's a bit like Maoist China. You have to wear the same clothes and just spend your whole time being bossed around by apparatchiks making deep roads. It completely is.

Well, it's actually more like Stalin's Soviet Union, actually. You will be called up regularly under a system called the Meta, the Turn. You'll be called up to work on huge state farms and state construction projects. All these people who built all these roads and bridges and stuff are conscripts working in basically slave gangs, chain gangs. They belong to the Emperor. There is no private property in the Inca Empire. There is no free market. In fact, there is no market of any kind. There are no markets, which is mind boggling. There is no money. There is no private ownership of land. Land is held in common. In other words, it's... Well, Latin American Marxists in the '60s and '70s used to talk about Inca communism, and they said, This is brilliant. No private property. There's no hunger because the food is distributed by the state, all of this. But more right wing historians write of this with horror. So Hugh Thomas, who ended up being a very fatter adjacent peer in the 1980s. Incredibly boring historian.

Cannot write an interesting sentence.

His books are simultaneously incredibly long, but incredibly unsatisfying, no? Yeah. Just lists of the genealogy of conquistadors. So and so who was from Trujillo, his brother actually was the Bishop of whatever, and he just goes on and on and on. Actually, the guy is fighting a battle on the rope bridge at this moment. But Hugh Thomas is more interested in telling you that his uncle once went to Caceres and I don't know. Anyway, whatever. Hugh Thomas says of the Inca system, Personal was practically nonexistent. Blind obedience and questioning self-abnegation had forever to be accorded. Never was there a more pervasive government than that of the Incas. I think there is something a bit chilling about it. Basically, if they conquered you or if you did a deal with them. They would take thousands of people and deliberately move them, like Stalin and the Caucasus, to the other end of the empire to work on a huge farm and force them to speak Ketua, which wasn't their language. There's something very, not Not totalitarian, but something very top-down and joyless and cold about it, I would say.

Here's a question. If you're an Andean peasant, just suppose, would you rather be conquered by the Incas or the Spanish?

I don't think it's a bundle of laughs either way, to be honest with you, because the Spanish, as we will see, behave quite poorly at times.

Do they behave as poorly as the Incas, though?

It's a tough one.

I mean, surely you get fiestas with the Spanish.

Mariachi bands, you're thinking Mexico. You're in Mexico, Tom.

I think you have fiestas in Peru, don't you?

Yeah, a bit more pan-pipe-based, no?

That's fine. That's the fusion of cultures.

Yeah. I don't know. I think, possibly, I'm going to go with the Spanish just because I'm Eurocentric person. So for that reason. The Incas do all this, of course, with no writing. And do you know what they use instead of writing? They have these things called kipus, which are long rows of knotted, looped strings.

I did know that.

No one really knows how they work because a lot of them were destroyed in the Spanish conquest. Historians have puzzled some of them out. But basically, you get a load of string with a lot of knots, and that could be the census.

Yeah, it's like an abacus, isn't it? I mean, it's that thing. Exactly.

It could be anything. However, all the suffocating uniformity of the Inca Empire, maybe it's a little bit, I think, might be a little bit overstated. Because if you take the example of religion, we know that the Incas tried to enforce their gods on the people whom they conquered. Particularly, it seems like Patrick Coothe and his success has tried to enforce an official cult the Sun God linked to their own dynasty. The Sun God was called Inti. The Inca priests said, he gave the gift of civilisation to Pachikuti's ancestor, who was called Manko Capack, supposedly. Our Emperor is therefore the Son of the Sun. You should venerate him and all this thing.

So like Japan.

Yeah. However, we know the Spanish discovered that all the different local people still had their own cults and their own shrines and their own gods.

I mean, that's not surprising. I guess that that would also work actually in the dimension of what you want to wear and whether you have to go and build roads or whatever. I imagine that off those main roads, there is actually a degree of autonomy, I would suspect. I don't see that you can impose that degree of uniformity over people who live 10 miles away up a mountain.

I think you're right. I think the Incas are trying to impose a uniformity as part of the Empire building project. But I think, as we will discover, a lot of local groups bitterly resist that and actually hate the Incas, rather like with the Aztecs when the Spanish arrived in Mexico. There are a load of people who actually said, Well, I mean, sure, I'm not a massive fan of the Spanish, but I'll tell you who I really hate. It's the people who've been lording it over us for the last 150 years. And this is the case, I think, with the Incas. So in the Inca Empire, for example, the official language is Quechua. But millions of Incas don't speak Quechua. Millions of Inca subjects, I should say. They would speak Aymara or Pukina or Mochica, all these other languages, many of which are now lost. They chaf, I think, under the jackpot of the Ketua speakers from Kuzco. When the Spanish arrive, I think there are probably a lot of people who think the Spanish are not a bundle of laughs. They will behave very badly. But if they will guarantee us a little bit more autonomy.

I mean, I imagine if you're an Andean peasant, you assume that anyone with power is going to behave badly. Yeah, I think- It's just relative. Who's going to be worse?

Now, with the Aztecs, we talked before about how diversity was not their strength, how the Spanish were brilliant at using this against them. And this will be the case here as well. But here it's slightly different because the Incas are even more vulnerable than the Aztecs. This takes us back to the scene that had confronted Pizarro and Co when they landed on the Coast, and they found the devastation and the deserted streets and the looted temples. At the beginning of the 16th century, so the time when Pizarro was arriving in the Caribbean, 1,500 or so. The Emperor of the Incas, the 11th Sapa Inca, as he was called, was this bloke called Xhuena Capac, who was Pachacuti's grandson. Juan Acapac is clearly a very impressive guy. He built loads of temples, he built loads of roads, he annexed a lot of what's now Ecuador and Bolivia, he pushed as far north as Colombia. It's quite possible that he was the first Emperor to hear reports of the Spanish arrival in the Americas. He probably would have got garbled news from Panama because he's gone up into Colombia in the next country, up is Panama. He's probably heard garbled news, the some blokes with beards who've turned up who are laying waste and behaving poorly.

He may have known that the Spanish are coming, but the threat to him and his empire, it's not the Spanish themselves, it's what they bring from Europe, which is smallpox. Smallpox had arrived in the new world in the 1510s. It had ripped through the Caribbean, killing the vast majority of the indigenous population. Then it had killed colossal numbers of people in Mexico and Central America. It gets to Central America in the 1520s or so. Then it goes down Central America, down the Isthmus of Panama, into Colombia, into the very place where Juan Acapac is campaigning with his army. It hits the army first, probably in about 1525. Then it spreads to the court. It kills Juanacapac's eldest son. Then round about between 15: 25 and 15: 27 or so, he gets it, too, and within days, he is dead. This disease to which nobody in the Americas has any immunity. For the Incas, the death of the Emperor from this unknown disease is an absolutely shattering, pivotal moment. They have no system of primogeniture, so the next son in line does not have an automatic right to rule. Basically, the system works on constant succession crises.

There's a crown, which is a, it might sound slightly peculiar to listeners who are used to crowns. It's a circlet of red cords with a tassel that hangs down. If you have the tassel, that shows that you're the king, the Emperor. This circlet will go not to the eldest, but to the strongest. There are two obvious contenders for the crown, as we should call it. One of them is Hwena Capack's son, Huascar, probably son by his first wife. Huascar's power base is in the traditional Inca heartland of Cusco.

But he's an absolute lush, isn't he?

Do you think so? He's a lush? I think this is harsh.

He spends his whole time Having drunken parties.

That's what people say, but I think this is propaganda, actually. I think this is Atahuelp and propaganda, because the other son is called Atahuelpa. Atahuelpa is younger. He's from a different wife. Atahuelpa is probably about Probably his mother came from Quito, which is the capital city today of Ecuador. That tension between what's now Ecuador and what's now Peru is a huge, huge part of this story. North versus south, basically.

So Atahuelpa doesn't have any particular loyalty to Cusco?

No, not at all. Way down in the south. His loyalty is to Quito in the north. What ends up happening is Huascar becomes the Emperor, and he says to his younger brother Atahuelpa, Well, you can be my viceroy in the You can rule in Quito, I'll rule in Cusco. There's 2,000 miles between these places. I mean, that gives you a sense of how huge this empire is. But it's a very trite comparison, but I'm just going to go there because that's what we do. It is Every Game of Thrones, the potential for who's going to get the ultimate prize. By about 1529, relations between the two brothers have broken down. There's a civil war. Now, we're dependent on later Spanish accounts for the civil war, so it's a bit murky. Clearly, this is a regional as well as a factual thing. Quito in the north versus Cusco in the south, that's really important. It's extremely vicious. Basically, if you side with one brother and the other brother's troops turn up, They will take hideous reprisals on you. The longer the civil war goes on, the more damage it does to the Empire's infrastructure and unity.

It goes on for a long time. It takes three years before Atahualpa, the younger brother, the bloke from the north from Quito, before he gets an advantage. In April 1532, his generals win a big victory over his brother's forces outside Cusco. They capture Huascar, the older brother, and Atahualpa's army can now lay siege to Cusco itself. Now, this has come, victory is at hand, but it's come at a great cost to him and his empire. He personally has established a reputation for incredible cruelty. So if Spanish writers had to be believed, he would order enemy chiefs' hearts to be torn out and he would make their supporters eat them.

Doesn't he behave very badly to poor old Huascas, nearest and dearest? Yeah, very much. He rounds up all his wives, all his children, tortures them to death, then sticks their bodies on massive great spikes along the road. I suppose effectively, by doing that, he is destroying not just Huasca's status as a king, but any prospect of him establishing his dynasty.

His bloodline, exactly. His bloodline. Huasca, I suppose, was forced to watch while his wives and children were being tortured. Atahalpa's armies and Huasca's armies have done tremendous damage to towns and cities the length of the empire, from Quito to Cusco. And they've divided that the ruling Inca elite itself has been completely splintered. So to quote the Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes, The Inca nobility on which the system had largely relied was now irreperably torn. The scars of the war were too fresh, too painful, and only too obvious.

Isn't there a Romans destroying Carthage scenario where Atahuelpa basically tells everyone in Cusco, you've got to leave. You've got to come to Quito. I'm going to wipe out Cusco. Abandon your temples, all of that.

Yeah. So at this point, Cusco has not yet fallen. But Atahalpa is clearly a very vengeful person, and he is determined. He associates Cusco with his brothers' faction and with the rebellion. All his commanders tend to be from the north. His family are from the north. And his investment in, as it were, the traditional Inca heartland is not great. Actually, I think there's a case that a lot of people in the central and South Inca Empire view Attawalpa and his troops as outsiders. As foreigners, almost. As foreigners from the north, exactly. Now, this doesn't have to be fatal for Attawalpa. He's one. He can, with time. He can rebuild the Inca nobility. He can establish himself. He can stitch up the wounds of war. He can kill everybody he doesn't like. He could be the Emperor for another 30 years or something. But of course, he doesn't know that time is the one thing that he does not have. Because this takes us back to the Spaniards who are knackered, hungry, sodden with sweat, but are now learning the reality about this empire.

But just to remind people, a hundred 68 Spaniards.

So these Spaniards, they don't know everything we know about the Incas, but what they do know now, thanks to their informance, is that to the south, there is this vast empire with extraordinary wealth, but it's divided, it is battle-scarred, it is ripe for the taking. Francisco Pizarro, this illegitimate, illiterate bruiser from Western Spain, he doesn't hesitate, he knows exactly what to do. And so now the Spaniard's road lies south to a showdown with Atahuelpa in the town of Kiamaka, to the temples and treasure houses of the Incas capital, Cusco, and finally to a quest into the jungle to find the last lost city of the Incas.

Showdowns, Lost Cities. This really is a series that has it all. We have five episodes to come. And the tremendous Tremendous news for members of the Restes History Club, our very own band of bedraggled but ruthless conquistadors, is that you can hear all five episodes right away. If you would like to sign up to join us on our murderous assault on the Incan Empire, then you can head to theresteshistory. Com and do it there. But for now, hasta luego.

Bye-bye. Sagen wir, hast du bei der Steuer auch diesen Schulflashback? Einfach irgendwas raten und dann hoffen, dass es stimmt? Boah, nein, gar nicht. Wieso Steuer ist so mein safe space? Du meinst, damit ist alles sicher? Ja, genau. Wieso Steuer ist so die Steuer-App, die dich einfach versteht. Egal ob Studium, Job oder Umzug. Stimmt, krass. Fühlt sich gar nicht wie Steuern an. Steuern erledigt? Safe. Mit WISO Steuher. 11: 58. Mittagspause. Dein Magen knurrt lauter als der Bürohund. Und dann ploppt der Chat auf. Kantine? Wie immer? Wenig später blickst du auf die „Wie immer mickrige Portion und denkst dir nur: „Wir hätten zu Mac es gehen sollen. Für den Big McDonalds-Hunger, probier den neuen Big Gouda und den Big Tasty Red Steakhouse mit 100% Rindfleisch aus Deutschland. Ange der Vorrat reicht, nicht zu unseren Frühstückszeiten.