Due to being an insufferable swot I always like to read a book from a country I am in when I am in it. Thus THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim MacQuarrie while I was in Peru. This was some hair-raising non-fiction. I knew very little about South American colonialism, and now I know a little more all I can say is YIKES. These sixteenth century Spanish were intense. However so also were the Incas.
Basically the tiny amount of contact the Incas had had with Europeans had spread smallpox, which the Inca Emporer (Sapa Inca) died of. This triggered a civil war between two of his sons, and when I say a civil war, I mean the winner (Atahulpa) aimed to exterminate his brothers whole blood line down to hanging the unborn babies BY THEIR UMBILICAL CORDS. Then the Spanish turn up. There were only 163 of them, and Atahulpa had a victorious army in the tens of thousands. So you can see where he was not worried. He went to meet them the day after he found out his brother was dead, so he was really finally the Sapa. He was mostly just interested in seeing the horses, as they did not exist in his Empire and he saw how valuable they could be. They immediately kidnap him. Poor guy: one day as the Sapa. So unconcerned was he about the capacity of the Spanish (who he thought were strange savages, which is of course exactly what they thought of him) that from his prison he ordered the continued execution of senior figures in the Inca opposition, instead of – for example – asking them to rise up and save him. You can see where he is coming from: there are only 163 of them! But what he did not bargain on was that they had iron. I guess I did not appreciate the importance of iron, but it meant that their armour made them basically invincible, especially with the horses.
It just gets worse and sadder from there on all sides. These Spanish were not representatives of the Crown but really just independent entrepreneurs, who risked their lives on the chance there was gold somewhere out there in places they did not even know existed yet. Pizarro, the main one, grew up really poor, as did most of the others. I guess you need to be really desperate to get on one of those ships. I got the impression that these were some seriously traumatized people before they even left Spain, and it went downhill from there.
There are about a million more things I learnt, like how the Incas kept everything the Sapa touched (eg., left over food) and burnt it once a year, or how the Sapa executed a whole batallion once for flinching the first time they saw a horse, or how this poor 19 year old the Spanish put in place as a puppet emperor grew into a guerilla leader, or how his wife was tortured to death in public but shamed the Spanish by not saying a word, but anyway I guess you will just have to read it.
It was strange to read so much history while in a country. I had a coffee in a central square about which my only context was that 3000 Incas died defending it.