Pod Insights The Rest Is History 649. The Fall of the Incas: The Last Emperor (Part 6) About this episode With the Incan emperor on the run, and the Spanish divided, what atrocities would unfold in the final phase of this brutal conquest? Who would triumph, Francisco Pizarro or his brutal former partner Diego de Almagro? And how would the once mighty Incas, finally fall…?
Join Dominic and Tom for the epic conclusion of one of the most epic stories in all of world history: a hunt for gold and glory, drenched in blood and tragedy, in which the collision of two worlds would reverberate across time.
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Transcript 13,379 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.
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0:42 Tom Holland? So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.
0:49 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.
1:10 Tom Holland? For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.
1:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.
1:50 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working. And in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to... Hire that clone for me.
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3:03 Tom Holland? So fell Peru. We gave her greed, hunger and the cross. Three gifts for the civilized life. The family groups that sang on the terraces are gone. In their place, slaves shuffled underground and they don't sing there. Peru is a silent country, frozen in avarice. And so fell Spain, gorged with gold, distended, now dying. And so fell you, general, my master, whom men called the son of his own deeds. I'm the only one left now of that company, landowner, slave owner, and forty years from any time of hope. There's no joy in that, or in anything now.
3:48 Tom Holland? But then there's no joy in the world could match for me what I had when I first went with you across the water to find the gold country. And no pain like losing it.
4:03 Tom Holland? So that was Old Martin, the narrator in Peter Schaffer's play The Royal Hand of the Sun, who was banished, Dominic, in our last episode. It's so great to have him back on the show and his customary cheery self. Everything's awful.
4:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he's had a brilliant time.
4:17 Tom Holland? He's like the wonsler at the end of the Lorax for Dr Seuss fans.
4:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
4:21 Tom Holland? He's responsible for ruining everything.
4:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes. I mean, that's what he basically says himself, isn't it? Doesn't he? In that quotation, "We've ruined everything. We arrived, we had a brilliant time, we ruined everything for everybody and then we all died."
4:32 Tom Holland? And is that a fair summary?
4:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. So this play, which was, we've used it a lot. I was actually in a production, I was at school. It was the first play I was ever in, the first proper play I was ever in.
4:44 Tom Holland? Who did you play? Please tell me, Atahualpa.
4:46 Dominic Sandbrook? No, no, no, this is gonna really, you're gonna really enjoy this. I played Vicente de Valverde.
4:52 Tom Holland? Did you, Dr Valverde?
4:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the deranged priest.
4:57 Tom Holland? Yeah, I do enjoy that.
4:58 Dominic Sandbrook? So just on the play. The play is from in the 60s and it's very kind of anti-imperial in its, in its themes. But its message, which is basically, you know, the whole thing has been a complete nightmare. It's charged with ambivalence and regret and horror of what's happened to Peru. Its message would have been very familiar to the people who wrote the first accounts of the conquest in the 16th century.
5:21 Tom Holland? Well, it ultimately comes from Batolame de Las Casas, who we may be hearing from.
5:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, not just Las Casas though. So it's not just churchmen and stuff who are writing this. People who had gone on the very, very first, you know, missions with Pizarro, when they write accounts of it, they, then it's not all jubilation and glory at all.
5:43 Tom Holland? No, but this is the, I mean, this is an English play by an English writer.
5:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, The Black Legend of Spain. Yeah.
5:48 Tom Holland? It's kind of enters the bloodstream of Protestant countries, doesn't it?
5:51 Dominic Sandbrook? It definitely does, but they don't get it from nowhere. They get it from the Spanish themselves. So.
5:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Where are we now? We are in the middle of 1537. Atuwalpa is dead, the civil war is over, and his successor Manco has fled Cuzco for the jungle of the Vilcabamba Valley. And among the Spanish themselves, they're now up to about 4,000 in total, so still a really tiny number, but increasing all the time. Any pretense of unity has completely collapsed. So the conquistadors are effectively divided between Francisco Pizarro in Lima and Diego de Almagro, his business partner, in Cuzco. The divide that has been there since the very first episode of this series. And we ended last time by setting the scene for the showdown between these three characters: Manco in the jungle, Almagro in the Andean highlands,
6:40 Dominic Sandbrook? and Pizarro on the coast. And let's start with a man who you might anticipate at this point is the favourite, and I think that's Almagro. Because Almagro is in charge in Cuzco in the capital. So to remind people just about his personality, we described him in the first episode. Almagro is a short man, he's ugly, he's very hardy and resilient, his body covered in scars. He is a conceited, boastful man who dresses very flamboyantly. He's always been bitter because he feels like Pizarro has shut him out. He's gone off to Chile and absolutely disgraced himself by walking around with chain gangs full of people half-dead, half-alive. He has taken Gonzalo and Hernando Pizarro prisoner now in Cuzco,
7:23 Dominic Sandbrook? and he is ready to win the whole game. What he wants to do is to march on the coast and deal with Pizarro. But he dared leave Cuzco undefended, with Manco just over the mountains in the jungle. So first, he thinks, well, I'll deal with Manco first. He sends troops to go and hunt Manco down. And he gets his lieutenant to do this. His lieutenant is a very dashing young conquistador, who we haven't met before in this story, who is called Rodrigo Orgones. He's leading 300 horsemen and foot soldiers. So Manco has gone over the mountains, and his men have tried to block the roads behind them with trees, and they've left some troops at rearguard to slow the pursuit. But Orgones makes light work of the enemy,
8:08 Dominic Sandbrook? and he crosses the Urabamba River, and he chases Manco towards the town of Vitcos in the jungle, where Manco has taken refuge.
8:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And when Orgonias's men get to Viccos, what they find actually saves Manco's life, I would say. So Manco has already moved on from the town, but in the town, the Spanish find two things they love finding. One is a temple with a giant golden image of the sun, which they immediately get to busy looting, and the other is a load of terrified kind of Vestal Virgin style princesses. The Spanish, as so often, let themselves down. They can't, you know, they can't restrain themselves. Instead of pressing on, they spend hours hanging around Viccos behaving badly. And meanwhile, Manco, with his high priest Vilak Umu, who's his brother, and his most, the most devoted of his wives, and a handful
9:02 Dominic Sandbrook? of followers, he heads on into the forest. Orgonias pursues him with his fastest horsemen, but night's falling now, and they can't find any trace of Manco in the jungle. And Orgonias goes back to Viccos for the night, and there he finds orders from Almagro already saying, come back to Cusco, I need you back here at once. Now, why does Almagro want him to come back? Because envoys have just arrived from Francisco Pizarro in Lima to try to settle the feud between them. And Almagro thinks, okay, well, if this is the moment of decision, I want my best guy back at hand. So that's great news for Manco. Manco's now got away, and he can kind of compose himself and prepare to fight back.
9:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Meanwhile, while he's doing that, the feud between Almagro and Pizarro is reaching the moment of decision. So mid-September 1537, Almagro leads his troops out of Cusco, heading for the coast.
10:00 Tom Holland? And Dominic, the coast is a huge advantage that Pizarro has had over Almagro, isn't it? Because from the coast, he can receive reinforcements, but also he can write letters to the king in Spain, giving his side of the argument. And poor old Almagro stuck up in Cusco, hasn't been able to do either of those things.
10:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Almagro, you could argue, in a weird way, although I think he started as the favourite. Yeah, the longer this goes on, the more it benefits Pizarro precisely because of Pizarro's links with the outside world, because Pizarro is controlling those links, you know, and as you say, people arriving all the time, supplies from Spain, guns, crossbows, general stuff, but also you're in charge of communications back to the court. And of course, all through this story, the mad legalism of the Spanish, you know, judges are always pronouncing verdicts, indictments are being handed down. They're very American in that sort of respect.
10:55 Tom Holland? And I mean, Pizarro's possession of Lima, therefore, is actually an enormous advantage for him. And so Almagro, he's got plans to set up his own town, hasn't he? And call it Almagro.
11:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, of course.
11:06 Tom Holland? Which is kind of sweet, I guess.
11:08 Dominic Sandbrook? So Almagro brings with him, remember, he's got the two brothers hostage, Hernando and Gonzalo. He brings Hernando with him, but he leaves Gonzalo behind and Cusco as a prisoner. This is the first of three terrible mistakes by Almagro, because as soon as he's gone, Gonzalo breaks out of the tower and escapes. So that's mistake number one.
11:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Almagro arrives at the coast. Here, a mendicant friar called Francisco de Bobadilla has been appointed to arbitrate between him and Pizarro. And basically, the issue that the feud has boiled down to is who controls the city of Cusco? Does it fall in New Castile, Peru, which is Pizarro's? Or does it fall in New Toledo, China, Chile, which would mean it's Almagro's?
11:58 Tom Holland? And these negotiations don't go well, do they? Because there are Spaniards who say that the friar had been possessed by a demon who wished to show dissent among the Spaniards.
12:09 Dominic Sandbrook? That's possibly true.
12:10 Tom Holland? I'm guessing that they don't really patch things up.
12:12 Dominic Sandbrook? No, they don't. And I think another way of describing this demon-inspired negotiation is that Almag, basically, by this point, Pizarro and Almagro cannot stand each other. They absolutely despise each other. And Almagro, as soon as they start negotiating, massively loses the plot, has a colossal tantrum and a meltdown, and storms out. This is a great mistake, because basically that leaves the friar surrounded by Pizarro and Pizarro's armed men. And the friar at this point says, okay, well, maybe I guess you should have Cusco? Yeah, actually, on reflection, I think Cusco does belong to you. Pizarro is very shrewd throughout. I don't think he's at sort of Cortez levels of cold,
12:52 Dominic Sandbrook? slippery cunning. But Pizarro is a very good poker player. And Pizarro sends a message to Almagro and he says, look, you know, we've had our differences. I think it would only be fair to get his second opinion. You know, I don't want to claim the city straight away. I'd like to get a second opinion from a royal official. And I'm prepared to do that if you'll let my brother Hernando go. And if you let Hernando go, I promise I will send Hernando straight back to Spain. And Almagro, who must be the most, I mean, given that he's a conquistador and that he's steeped in blood, he must be the most gullible person on the planet. Because he says, oh, yeah, okay, well, that sounds like a good deal. And he immediately releases Hernando,
13:35 Dominic Sandbrook? which means he's lost his leverage because now he doesn't have either of the Pizarro brothers hostage. And Hernando, does he head for the coast and go to Spain? Of course he doesn't. He immediately musters 700 Spaniards and thousands of native auxiliaries. Because remember, Hernando, Hernando was always, although he was the defender of Cusco, he was always the Spaniard who got on best with the locals. Remember, he'd gone well with Ata Walper, he tried hard with Manco. He's clearly, he's the most sort of sympathetic.
14:09 Tom Holland? And the most diplomatic.
14:10 Dominic Sandbrook? The most diplomatic. Anyway, Hernando marches on Cusco, and Almagro's army is waiting for him. Almagro is not leading them, however. He's fallen ill, possibly, I think, with syphilis, which I think reflects poorly on his general conduct. And his dashing deputy, Rodrigo Orgones, is in command. And now Orgones makes a mistake of his own. Almagro's army is very strong in cavalry and horses. And he basically is in charge of choosing the site for this battle to face Hernando's army. And he chooses the site of some old Inca salt mines. But the terrain is very broken and kind of jagged and rugged. Not good for horses, but it is good for Hernando's
14:53 Dominic Sandbrook? army, which is mainly infantry and imperial gunmen, arcabusiers.
14:57 Tom Holland? And also, the other thing it's very good for, because it's like a kind of an amphitheatre, a natural amphitheatre, is for spectators. And loads of natives turn up, don't they, and kind of cheer on. Both sides, because they want, they want all Spaniards to wipe each other out. If only both sides could lose.
15:15 Dominic Sandbrook? So basically, all, everything that follows, you have to mention everything that follows in this episode, there's generally about 10,000 people watching from the hillsides and cheering, eating snacks and kind of, it's the most tremendous spectator sport. So what follows, it's the 6th of April, 1538, it's called the Battle of Las Salinas, and it takes just two hours. And I've restrained myself throughout this series from quoting from this guy, but I'm going to finally give in and do it. There's a 19th century American historian called William H Prescott, who Americans think is absolutely amazing. And he wrote the most tremendously florid account of the conquest of the Incas. And I'm gonna, well, actually, Tom, you do this sort of 19th century voice very well. So why don't you read it? This is his account of the battle.
15:56 Tom Holland? The struggle was desperate. For it was not that of the white man against the defenceless Indian, but of Spaniard against Spaniard. Both parties cheering on their comrades with their battle cries of El Rey y Almagro, or El Rey y Pizarro. While they fought with a hate, to which national antipathy was as nothing. A hate strong in proportion to the strength of the ties that had been rent asunder.
16:31 Dominic Sandbrook? That's brilliant. There's people in 19th century America wiping away tears of manly emotion at that prose, aren't there? So anyway, this guy, Ogonyes, he fights, in the words of William H Prescott, like a paladin of romance. But then he's hit, he's hit in the face by a shot from an arcabus. And he's knocked off his horse. And he gets up, and by the time he gets up, he's surrounded by Hernando Pizarro's men. And Ogonyes, who clearly is just in the wrong century.
16:59 Tom Holland? He's Don Quixote, basically, isn't he?
17:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, he's been reading too many Chevalier romances. And he says, is there a knight to whom I can surrender? And a bloke called Fuentes steps forward and he says, puts his hand, he says, you know, I'm a knight. He isn't. And Ogonyes ceremoniously hands him his sword.
17:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Fuentes takes his sword, then he draws his knife and stabs Orugnes through the heart. And then they cut off his head and stick it on a pike and parade around the battlefield with his head on a pike.
17:28 Tom Holland? Heart of darkness.
17:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Very heart of darkness. So at this point, Almagro's forces, they're sort of the flower of chivalry who was leading them, has basically been stabbed and had his head cut off. They all flee for Cusco, including Almagro himself, who's been watching in horror and in syphilitic agony from his litter. The Pizarro troops catch up with him and they lock him in the same tower in which he had imprisoned Hernando.
17:51 Tom Holland? So poetic justice.
17:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Poetic justice. Just a side point on this battle, actually, the Battle of Las Salinas. Apparently it's regarded as one of the last medieval battles, decided with lances and cavalry charges.
18:04 Tom Holland? Well, isn't that good news for the watching fans?
18:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
18:07 Tom Holland? You turn up to watch a battle and it's the last medieval battle.
18:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, because future battles will all be, there'll be loads of artillery and pikes and stuff. So much more early modern, but this is an old school battle. So they put on an old school treat for the watching crowds, which is nice.
18:21 Tom Holland? That's great.
18:22 Dominic Sandbrook? So for 10 weeks, Diego de Almagro, who thought he had it all, is rotting in prison. And then he's dragged out for trial. And I described him earlier as very naive and gullible. And I think he is because he thinks, you know, we're going to have more negotiations, you know, this will all be fine. And he is absolutely dumbfounded when Hernando Pizarro says to him, "You're a rebel, you know, you're a traitor against the king. I proclaim the death sentence upon you. This is the end of you." And Almagro breaks down in tears. He begs for his life. He says to Hernando, "Suspend the sentence so that I can appeal to Charles V for pardon."
18:57 Tom Holland? So that legalism again.
18:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the legalism. You let the wheels of justice take their, take time. And Hernando says to him, "Come on, this is very demeaning and unbecoming from you." Hernando said to him at one point, "What do you think this is? What, you know, what game do you think you're playing?" And he says, "God gave you the grace to be a Christian, so please employ your remaining moments in settling your accounts with heaven, because you're for the job." And the appointed day is the 8th of July 1538. Onando sends the executioner to Almagro's cell. The executioner goes in. He garrottes Almagro and then they drag his body outside. They strip him naked and then they cut off his head. So you might think this is the end of the Pizarro-Almagro feud.
19:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Exciting news, it isn't. This is a proper vendetta and we'll go through the generations. We'll come back to this point. So now Cusco belongs to the Pizarros and to their new puppet. Now, you may remember that the end of the last episode, Almagro had a puppet called Paulu, a collaborator. Paulu's men had fought for Almagro at Las Salinas. But as soon as they saw that the Pizarros had won, Paulu immediately switched sides. And he said to Onando Pizarro, "Look, I was pals with Almagro. I served him very loyally. I'll serve you loyally now, if you like." And Onando, who's a smart man, said, "Great. Yeah, why not? Let's do it." So in return for collaborating, Paulu, the sort of fake emperor, they built him his
20:28 Dominic Sandbrook? own Spanish-style townhouse. He got his own Spanish-style landed estate and they gave him a Spanish coat of arms. And I quote, "A black eagle rampant, a gold puma, two red snakes, a red imperial fringe, the inscription Ave Maria and eight golden Jerusalem crosses." That's too much action. I think that's great. No, I think less is more. Do you? Yeah, with a heraldic coat of arms. So you wouldn't fit in in Peru. They'd think more is more. So Paulu ends up wearing Spanish clothes. He converts to Christianity. And actually, he disgraces himself in one way. He hands over to the Spaniards the mummified remains of his father, Huena Capac. God, he is a snake, isn't he? The last unchallenged Inca emperor.
21:10 Dominic Sandbrook? He hands them over and apparently, we're told, that his mother and his other relatives sobbed and said, "Please don't hand this over. The Spanish will just burn it and destroy it," which they did. And Paulo said, I don't care. I'm all about winning. And I have, I've won. So that's the end of that. And he did.
21:26 Tom Holland? And Cusco itself is in a terrible way by this point because it's been kind of demolished. Everything's been stripped off. It's been burnt by red hot slingshot. So an absolute, I mean, wasted.
21:36 Dominic Sandbrook? But if you go to Cusco today, Cusco is a very attractive city, but it's a Spanish colonial city.
21:40 Tom Holland? There's nothing of the Incan city.
21:42 Dominic Sandbrook? There are bits. So there are bits of wall and stuff. There are bits of temple wall and things, a little bit like in Mexico City. But by and large, what you're seeing is, you know, you're not seeing thatched houses that were built by the Incas. So what's happened to Manco, Paulo's predecessor, half brother and now rival? Manco has been off in the jungle after his close shave with Vicos. And he now launches a series of attacks across the Andes. Tom, you'll enjoy this. He's particularly keen to punish tribes who have sided with the Spaniards, your old friends, the Huancas. This is not good for the Huancas. They are brought back. He captures lots of them and brings them back into the jungle of Vicos
22:24 Dominic Sandbrook? for punishment. And we're told his men tortured them in the presence of their women. So after the next couple of years, this degenerates into this colossal guerrilla campaign fought over a vast canvas. So the Pizarro brothers, basically battling Manco's forces and other kind of native forces, everywhere from the Andes down to Lake Titicaca, the great sort of plateau of Bolivia and so on, these huge landscapes.
22:50 Tom Holland? But also fast distances.
22:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Massive distance. I mean, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of miles.
22:55 Tom Holland? Over incredibly inhospitable terrain.
22:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Bonkers. One of the decisive battles, just to give you an example, one example of how this works is a place in central Bolivia called Cochabamba. And there Gonzalo finds himself trapped in a valley by thousands of sort of Bolivian indigenous warriors. And he, it looks really dicey for him, but he's got with him Paulo and 5,000 indigenous warriors from Cusco. And he ends up winning. And it's a really good example of how much indigenous support mattered to the Spanish conquest. Because one Spanish writer, Alonso de Toro, said, if Paulo had not been there, the Spaniards would have suffered heavily. And if he had chosen to be treacherous, few or none of them would have escaped. But Paulo has already
23:40 Dominic Sandbrook? decided, you know, the Spanish are going to win. So I'm going to stick with them. And he does. And they hold out and they basically end up wiping the floor with the people attacking them. So by the middle of 1539, I mean, we're only seven years after Pizarro marched into Caimán to meet Atahualpa. The Pizarros are actually pretty close to finishing the job. They pacified Ecuador, you know, they beat the bloke with his drum and whatnot. They've subdued most of Peru and Bolivia. They've got from Charles V the seal of approval because Francisco Pizarro has been made a marquess and he's got a very- A mad coat of arms. Yeah, a mad coat of arms. A coat of arms that shows Atahualpa with a metal collar with his hands plunged into
24:25 Dominic Sandbrook? two great chests of gold. So very on the nose, like Pizarro's not-
24:32 Dominic Sandbrook? But he's out and proud. Yeah, basically a coat of arms that combines gold and garrotting. Yeah. Which is what he's all about. That sums it up really, doesn't it? Yeah. What they haven't done there, the Pizarros, is find Manco. So Manco has retreated even deeper into the jungle and we have a tremendous source. His son, Tito Cusi, we'll come back to his son in the second half, his son is a great character. His son said of him, "He returned to the town of Vicos and from there he went to Vilcabamba", so that's below Vicos in the jungle, where he remained for some days and he built houses and palaces to make it his principal residence, for it has a warm climate because it's deep in the rainforest. And Vilcabamba, which is sort of further down from Vicos, was chosen for its remoteness
25:17 Dominic Sandbrook? and its safety, they thought there was basically no way the Spanish could find them in the heart of the jungle. And it's Vilcabamba that becomes the ultimate lost city of the Incas. So the site today is called Espiritu Pampa, but it's totally cut off, like you can't drive there. And actually, if anyone was interested, our friend Michael Wood, who's been on the rest of history, did a TV series in the 1990s called Conquistadores and he did an episode about Peru. And he literally hacks his way through the jungle in the sort of second half of that episode to get to this site and kind of does pieces to camera from the ruins. It's really good telly and very sort of powerful. Anyway, so that's where Manco is.
25:59 Dominic Sandbrook? In April 1539, the Pizarros decided they'd make another attempt to try and find him. And Gonzalo and Paolo set off from Cuzco with 300 men to track him down. And they were pretty confident they could get him. They thought he was hemmed in, there's no chance of escape, all this. They hack their way through the jungle. They survive an ambush by some Incas who roll boulders down the hill at them. That old boulder trick that the Incas are now very addicted to. And they think they've got him cornered in a jungle fort called Chuculhusca. But once again, Manco slips away. It's very, I mean, this is very Hollywood. He ends up swimming across a river to escape them. And then he gets out of the river, he stands on the other bank and he taunts them across the river and he shouts at them, "I am Manco Inca, I am Manco Inca.
26:44 Dominic Sandbrook? I have already killed 2,000 Spaniards. One day, I will kill the rest of you and I will take back the lands of my forefathers."
26:51 Tom Holland? So he's got away, but his sister, stroke, wife, Kura Oclo, who we heard about in the previous episode, seized, raped, horrible. Even worse things now happen. And again, you know, if you've got your children with you, watch out.
27:11 Dominic Sandbrook? So basically, yes, you're right. Gonzalo Pizarro had taken a fancy to her in Cuzco and had behaved poorly. She's had a terrible time. Now they catch her again and they drag her back to the sacred valley. And basically, all the way, they keep trying to rape her again. And her nephew Titucuzzi said, "She defended herself fiercely throughout and she covered her body with filth", I think we know what he means, "so that the men who were trying to rape her would be nauseated. She defended herself like this many times during the journey." So they get back and Francisco Pizarro wants to use her as a hostage to get Manco to surrender. And he sends messengers to Manco with gifts of a pony that he's imported over the sea
27:56 Dominic Sandbrook? and some silks, some nice silk. And he says to Manco, "Come on, you know, give yourself up and I'll let your wife go." Manco kills all the people bringing the messages. He says, "I'm not, you know, we don't, we don't do deals with terrorists." And Pizarro is furious and he decides to take his revenge on Kura Oclo, Manco's wife.
28:16 Dominic Sandbrook? They strip her naked and they tie her to a stake and there we're told she is beaten and abused by Canyari Indians, so native allies. And her last words are quoted as, hurry up and put an end to me so that your appetites can be fully satisfied. They shoot her with arrows, they put her body in a basket and they float it along the river into the jungle to Manco. Titucuzzi says Manco wept and made great mourning for her, for he loved her very much. But Manco never does give himself up and we'll find out what happens to him after the break. But before that, let's move on two years to the summer of 1541 and to the Pizarros. So they're now for, what, nine years since they met Atahualpa?
29:01 Dominic Sandbrook? And they look like they've won. Francisco is the governor in Lima, Gonzalo is his lieutenant governor in Quito in Ecuador, and Hernando has gone back to Spain to represent them at court. Francisco, the man we began this whole series with, the man from nowhere, you know, the wild west of Spain in Trujillo, he's 63 years old. He's one of the richest men in the world. He has achieved his dreams more completely even than his cousin Hernán Cortés. As one chronicler, López de Gomara, says, "He had found and acquired more gold and silver than any of the many Spaniards who had crossed to the Indies, and more than any commander in the history of the world." I think that possibly is true. I mean, colossal quantities.
29:44 Dominic Sandbrook? The amazing thing about Pizarro, Pizarro, remember, illegitimate, illiterate, you know, as a young man, as a boy, herded pigs. He has achieved all this by, of course, ambition and violence, but also by cunning and kind of cool, shrewd calculation. He's not a lovable man, that's for sure, but he's not as slippery as Cortés is, and he's not as bloodthirsty as Pedro de Alvarado. And the weird thing about Pizarro, as historians so often say, is he lacks the sort of driving motivations of a lot of conquistadors.
30:18 Tom Holland? Which is the lust for gold, the desire to convert to Christianity.
30:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, all through this series, right? There's been very little about Christian conversion. You know, we haven't had accounts of the Spanish destroying temples out of zeal, or insisting that their collaborators become Christians.
30:37 Tom Holland? You've had kind of, you've had priests watching with interest as people bow towards the sun.
30:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And Pizarro sets the tone for this. He appears to be generally pretty uninterested in this kind of thing. The amazing thing is, he's, for a man who's been driven by the pursuit of gold, he's very uninterested in spending it. So we're told, he didn't like fine food, he didn't like fine wine, he doesn't like hunting particularly, he wears the same old clothes he's always worn, he spends his spare time just hanging around in his orange orchard that he's had built, and basically playing coits for pennies with ordinary Spanish soldiers. So what has driven him all this time? What has made him tick? What has made him risk everything? Adventure? Glory? I mean, obviously, he likes having the gold, but he doesn't particularly
31:26 Dominic Sandbrook? want to spend it. He doesn't want to live a luxurious life. We just do not know.
31:30 Tom Holland? I mean, whether it's the fault of the sources, or whether it's a reflection of his personality, but he's a much less vivid character than Cortés, isn't he?
31:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, absolutely. And I think, but I think that's exactly what he was like. I think there's something opaque, possibly even a bit dull. There's nothing especially likeable. Although, actually, the other conquistadors generally did find him likeable. They said he doesn't have, you know, he's not as untrustworthy as Cortés is. I mean, obviously, if you're Diego de Almagro, you might disagree. But by and large, he's neither lovable, nor but especially loathsome by conquistador standards. He is, as you say, just dull.
32:08 Tom Holland? A bit vanilla.
32:09 Dominic Sandbrook? So, but in the summer of 1541, he hears some slightly worrying news. In Spain, his brother Hernando has been indicted for the execution of Almagro. This is always the way with the Spaniards. And he's being held in the Alcata, their castle in Madrid. And it's a reminder to Pizarro, you know, you can be very successful as a conquistador, but you're never entirely secure. And at the same time, he starts to hear rumours of unrests from the streets of Lima. Remember that Almagro had been the standard bearer for people who felt they'd arrived too late, and they'd been left out, and they hadn't shared in all the booty of the Pizarros. And they feel resentful and frustrated and bitter. And people like that, who of course are arriving all the time, now have a new
32:51 Dominic Sandbrook? champion. And this is a young man who was born to a native woman in Panama. And has arrived in Peru and he's nicknamed El Modo, El Modo, the boy. But his real name is Diego de Almagro. He is the son of Pizarro's old rival.
33:14 Dominic Sandbrook? And in June 1541, the mayor of Lima says to Pizarro, this young man, you know, his father's son. You know, he's out for revenge. He's planning a coup to assassinate you at mass. And Pizarro says, what in Lima, Lima is my city. I'm the big man. Nothing will happen. I don't, I don't have anything to fear from this boy. Then on Sunday, the 26th of June, that morning, he hears reports of trouble. People tell him that there are men outside Almagro Younger's house and they're shouting down with the traitor, down with the tyrant, i.e. Pizarro. And he thinks, okay, well, to be on the safe side, I'll say that I'm ill and I won't go to mass. And this afternoon I'll go and get my cavalry. We'll ride into the city and we'll capture this little brat and we will punish him.
33:58 Dominic Sandbrook? So the hour of mass comes and Almagro and his friends wait for Pizarro outside the cathedral. But obviously Pizarro doesn't come. They get one of their number who's a Basque priest. And they say, go to Pizarro's house, find out what's going on. The priest goes to Pizarro's house and Pizarro, very naively actually, says to the priest, oh, come on in. You know, actually you can celebrate mass here if you like. So they start celebrating mass. Meanwhile, the other conspirators all pile down to Pizarro's house, about 40 of them. They start making a great racket outside the house, banging on the door and shouting and stuff. Pizarro sends one of his friends to find out what's going on. And about this point, Pizarro's servants, who are indigenous people, like scrambling out of the windows and stuff. This is absolutely insane.
34:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Why is he so blithely oblivious to all this? Clearly these men mean us nothing but ill. And at this point, doors of Pizarro's mansion crash open and Almagro the Younger's men burst in. And Pizarro grabs a sword and a dagger and he stands there in the doorway. Remember, this is in the 60s. But the attackers are on him right away. He cuts the first one down, but the men behind him are too strong. They slash at Pizarro's body and one of them stabs him in the throat and he falls to the ground. And then one of the attackers, Juan Borregán, wrote this account: "When the marquis had fallen wounded to the ground, he made the sign of the cross over his mouth with his fingers and begged confession for his sins. But I took an urn
35:25 Dominic Sandbrook? that was full of water and smashed it down onto his crossed fingers, and I said to him, 'In hell, you will have to confess in hell.' It was a big jar and it broke his face. And with that great blow, the marquis breathed his last." So that night, Pizarro's mangled body is buried behind the cathedral, and that is the end of the man who masterminded the conquest of the Incas. So with that, everything changes again. So now you have in Lima, Almagro, the younger. He's parading through the streets and he's shouting, "I am the new master of Peru." But you still have one Pizarro brother
36:07 Dominic Sandbrook? left in South America, that is Gonzalo, who is in Quito. He's going to want revenge. And of course, in his jungle there, you have Manco Inca, who is planning one last comeback.
36:22 Tom Holland? So Dominic, would you say still all to play for?
36:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Absolutely all to play for, Tom. Yeah. I mean, mad to stop listening now.
36:29 Tom Holland? Yeah, you'd be completely mad. So come back after the break for the thrilling final chapter of this epic and blood-soaked saga.
36:43 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by Vanguard. Now, Dominic, history is full of examples of people who are promised the world and then got very badly let down. Can you think of a particular example?
36:56 Dominic Sandbrook? I can. I can think of a couple of examples, Tom. So we've just been recording a series about the fall of the Incas, and Francisco Pizarro, who was the Spanish conquistor in charge, first of all, he betrayed his business partner, Diego de Almagro, and Then, shockingly, he betrayed the Inca Emperor Atahualpa.
37:13 Tom Holland? Well, Dominic, can I ask you a question? Had Atahualpa been in the hands of Vanguard? Do you think that Vanguard would have let him down?
37:19 Dominic Sandbrook? No, the thing about Vanguard, Vanguard was founded on one core principle, and that principle is putting investors first. Tom, for more than 50 years, Vanguard have been delivering on that promise for millions of clients worldwide.
37:32 Tom Holland? And do you know what's brilliant? You too can open an ISA or a self-invested personal pension, and you can choose investments yourself, or you can let Vanguard choose and manage them for you. So search Vanguard Investor to find out more. When investing, your capital is at risk and tax rules apply.
37:55 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
38:05 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee? You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more, except.
38:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
38:31 Tom Holland? And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.
38:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.
38:58 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
39:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who Found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
39:41 Tom Holland? So they asked over a hundred thousand people and what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
39:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking.
40:05 Tom Holland? Hello and welcome back to The Rest Is History. So the two principal characters in our story, Pizarro and Almagro, the business partners who, whose relationship stretched right the way back to episode one, whose bloody vendetta has laid waste to Peru. They are both now dead. Their vendetta has cost both of them their lives. And I guess, Dominic, the, the big question is where does that leave the struggle for supremacy in Peru? Which is by now war ravaged, smallpox scarred, ransacked of gold and silver in a very, very poor way.
40:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly. So we've still got our two rival Inca emperors. We still have Paulo and Cosco with his lovely coat of arms that you think is a bit too garish.
40:57 Tom Holland? It's busy.
40:58 Dominic Sandbrook? So he doesn't die horribly. He lives peacefully till about fifteen fifty. And then he dies of old age or illness in his bed.
41:07 Tom Holland? In his bed. I mean, unheard of.
41:09 Dominic Sandbrook? He has no legitimate children and the Spanish don't bother, you know, proclaiming a successor. By this point, the Inca Empire has been consigned to history, really. So they think, well, we don't even need a puppet. Yeah, who cares? Now, there's also Manco in Vilcabamba, in the jungle. He's kept out of the civil wars. He's just watching, hoping they all lose, which they kind of are. So he's waiting. But people who enjoy confusing Spanish vendettas will be pleased to hear that this particular one is actually not quite over, because it simply moves to the next generation. So the Pizarro's champion is Gonzalo. Gonzalo, we described him in episode one, the Spanish critic was saying handsome, popular,
41:50 Dominic Sandbrook? virtuous, easygoing, but he's behaved disgracefully throughout this series.
41:55 Tom Holland? That wasn't his vibe in the previous episode.
41:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Not at all. Now, he has been doing something very fun. He has been searching for the mythical land of cinnamon in the Amazon. And he went there with a guy called Francisco de Oriana. And if you've ever seen one of our stage shows, particularly in Australia, you may remember that Oriana went all the way down the Amazon, didn't he? He met people who'd invented Wellington boots or something? I can't remember all the details.
42:19 Tom Holland? And this is the first kind of real great quest for El Dorado, isn't it?
42:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Gonzalo went back to Quito, to the lilt of the Spanish guitar. And there he heard the news of his brother's death and he took over leadership of the Pizarro clan. So he's there in Ecuador. The Almagristas, as they are called, are delighted with life now. They're in control of Lima under Almagro the Younger. And Almagro the Younger, who's just 22, says, well, I'm now the governor of New Castile. Brilliant, I've won. This does not go down well with Charles V. People aren't watching this in Spain and saying, well, this is actually tremendous behaviour. Our conquistadors behaved incredibly well. Charles V, who is a very, he's quite a boring man himself, isn't he? For one of the most powerful men who ever lived.
43:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Charles V gets these reports at his desk and says, they're just all murdering each other and proclaiming that they're the governor. I'm, I'm in charge of choosing the governor. And he's already sent a special investigator called Vaca de Castro to South America.
43:21 Tom Holland? I mean, that's a tough gig, isn't it?
43:22 Dominic Sandbrook? I think it's a terrible gig. I think it's actually a terrible gig. I mean, if you're a judge in Spain and you're.
43:27 Tom Holland? You've got to sort out between these two thuggish clans.
43:31 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. You definitely don't want to do that. Vaca de Castro gets to Peru and there he's told that Pizarro has been murdered. And Charles V had said to him, if something like that happens, you become the governor yourself and sort it out. So Vaca de Castro does precisely that. He lands in Peru and he says, this is absolutely intolerable. He raises the royal standard and he says, I'm out for blood against Almagro Junior. And they have a showdown outside what is now the city of Ayacucho in central Peru, the Battle of Chupas in September 1542. Now, this is a much more modern battle than the one we had in the first half. So there's all kinds of arcobuses, there's light artillery, it's sort of proper early modern stuff.
44:13 Tom Holland? And crucially, pikes and these pikes disembowel the horses. And I kind of, I guess, illustrate to the Incas what they've been missing out on.
44:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the Incas didn't have pikes and they thought if they had pikes, it would be a very different story. Now, one of the guys who dies at this battle is a familiar name to people who listen to the first part of the series. He's the Greek bloke Pedro de Candia from Crete.
44:34 Tom Holland? Yeah.
44:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Remember him?
44:34 Tom Holland? Yeah.
44:35 Dominic Sandbrook? So he had fired the artillery signal that marked the kidnapping of Atahualpa.
44:40 Tom Holland? And then he'd gone off on a kind of proto El Dorado quest, which had gone horribly wrong.
44:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And he's fighting in this battle for Almagro the Younger. And do you know who kills him? I mean, given the way the Spanish behave, people can probably anticipate. The guy who kills him is Almagro the Younger. He kills him for, and I quote, "treachery in not firing his cannon sufficiently vigorously."
45:06 Dominic Sandbrook? You basically, you don't want to be involved in this business at all, I think.
45:09 Tom Holland? You don't want to be involved with the Almagro guys. I mean.
45:13 Dominic Sandbrook? They're terrible. The royal army under Vaca de Castro wins a huge victory. And Vaca de Castro, he says, I'm going to lay down the law now, no prisoners. And we're told the ditch under the scaffold was full of dead bodies. And then brilliantly, this gave considerable pleasure to the native onlookers.
45:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Although they were amazed to think that many of the victims had been captains holding posts of honour. So again, huge spectator sport. Yeah, you've got to get your pleasures where you can. Exactly. So Almagro Junior gets away. He flees to Cusco with a friend of his called Diego Mendez. And their plan is actually they'll head on from Cusco to take refuge with Manco, right? Another twist. Because Diego Mendez is clearly a bit of a dog because he dallies in Cusco for a final visit to his mistress. And that slows them down. They're overtaken in the valley by a posse from Cusco and they're dragged back to Cusco. Mendez is imprisoned. Almagro Junior is taken to the central square. He's tried for rebellion. He is unsurprisingly grotted and then he's beheaded.
46:15 Dominic Sandbrook? So that is the definitive end of Almagro. Now this bloke Mendez, who'd been his pal, he ends up escaping. He teams up with six other fugitives from the Almagro faction. And they do manage to get over the mountains to Vilcabamba and to Manco.
46:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, some of Manco's captains, when these blokes turned up, they said, oh, really? The Almagristas, you know, just kill them. Just get rid. These people are always trouble. And Manco, I think it's weird how everybody in this entire story at some point is guilty of crass naivety. Yeah. After 10 years of this mad backstabbing, they say, ah, what could go wrong? I trust him. They seem nice. Yeah. Manco says, well, they can teach us to ride horses and to fire their Spanish weapons. So he puts them up in his so-called palace in Viccos. This is the sort of courtyards on a promontory overlooking the valley. And Titucusi, Manco's son, says, my father ordered they should have houses in which to live.
47:19 Dominic Sandbrook? He ordered his own women to prepare their food and drink. He took his meals with them. He treated them as if they were his own brothers. So with that, I think our listeners can guess what's coming. So two years later, these Almagrista refugees get a secret message from Cusco. Basically, the new authorities in Peru will forgive you if you can murder Manco. And they discuss this and one of their female servants hears them discussing it. And the servant tells Manko's commanders and they tell Manko. And Manko again, he says, no, I don't believe they would do this. He says, I think you've made this up. I think you've actually made this up because you want me to get rid of these Spaniards and so that you can have their weapons for yourself. I'm not gonna fall for that one.
48:03 Dominic Sandbrook? My guests would never betray me in this way. And then what happens next? Insane. And this is an account by a guy called Juan de Betanzos. He says, they decided to have a game of coits. They hoped the Inca would wish to play with them at this game, as he usually did. This has my single favourite detail, by the way, from the whole series. Then, while playing, they would concoct a quarrel with him and gang up to kill him. They hit daggers in their boots. They hid many bread rolls up their sleeves to eat in the jungle when they escaped. I think that's a massive giveaway, frankly. If a bloke turns up in his sleeves stuffed with bread rolls, you know you're in trouble. They start playing this game. They part playing coits. It's basically throwing horseshoes.
48:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Manko says, I don't want to play. I'm not in the mood. And also, what have you got? Why have you got all those bread rolls up your sleeves? What's going on here? I mean, why someone like the Coen brothers haven't made a film of this? I do not know. Anyway, they start playing the coits. They feign having an argument about a foul throw. Manko moves in to referee. And then one of them, Gómez Pérez, took out his dagger and plunged it into the Inca's chest. And the terrible thing is that one of the people watching this is Manko's son, Tito Cusi, who was nine years old and who wrote this, or dictated this very evocative account to what followed. My father, feeling himself wounded, tried to defend himself, but he was alone and unarmed, and there were seven of them with knives.
49:33 Dominic Sandbrook? He fell to the ground, covered with wounds, and they left him for dead. I was only a small boy, but seeing my father hurt, I wanted to go and help him. But they turned furiously upon me and hurled a spear which only just missed me. I was terrified and hid among some bushes. They searched for me, but failed to find me. And maybe you'll know this better than me, but I can't think of many accounts from the 16th century or earlier. Of something like this that are quite as personal, you know, by somebody's son telling the story firsthand about the terror and the horror of that kind of moment.
50:08 Tom Holland? Is he writing this in Spanish?
50:10 Dominic Sandbrook? He's dictating it to a missionary, to a Spanish missionary who wrote it all down. So basically, we have Tito Cusi's account of the entire conquest, um, given dictated by him to Spaniards who came to visit him later on.
50:23 Tom Holland? It gives you a sense of if that is the kind of standard for Incan narrative.
50:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
50:29 Tom Holland? How badly we've missed out on not having other such eyewitnesses.
50:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Just a very straightforward kind of account. I mean, what he doesn't mention is whether they had bread rolls falling out of their sleeves as this happened, but.
50:38 Tom Holland? Well, he was very young, wasn't he?
50:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Maybe he thought that was standard for a Spaniard.
50:41 Tom Holland? Yeah, well, they could have been doing it for weeks before to lull him into a false obscurity, of course.
50:48 Dominic Sandbrook? That's proper planning, isn't it?
50:49 Tom Holland? Yeah.
50:51 Dominic Sandbrook? There's sort of secreting tapas around their.
50:54 Tom Holland? Bocadillos.
50:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. So anyway, these guys, they run into the jungle. I mean, this is a stupid plan, the coites and all that, how they thought they could get away with this, I do not know. They're chased into the jungle by Manco's bodyguards. They end up being cornered in a thatched hut, um, rather like John Wilkes Booth. So loads of Incas appear outside, Boston Corbett style. They pile up wood, they set it on fire. Any of the Spaniards that come out shot with arrows and the rest are all burned alive. And that's the end of the assassins and sadly the end of poor Manco. So he was embalmed, he was taken down the hill to Vilcabamba and he was housed in the Temple of the Sun there. And actually, most Spanish sources were very damning about his murder. They didn't see his assassins as heroes, they saw them as cold blooded traitors.
51:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And actually, most of the Spanish sources saw Manco as pretty admirable, you know, a noble adversary. And historians have been very kind to him by and large. Clearly, he was a, you know, he was a resilient and courageous man who inspired people to stick with him and not to collaborate. John Heming calls him an indomitable patriot, the only native prince whose royal lineage and stubborn courage enjoyed the respect of Spaniards and Indians alike. And I have to say, he's probably one of the very few admirable characters from this entire series. With Manco's death, any chance of a serious native fightback pretty much disappears. So we're now 1544, 12 years after Bizarra's arrival, and the Spanish supremacy is largely
52:24 Dominic Sandbrook? unchallenged. So most of the land now of the former Inca Empire is divided between about 500 Spanish landowners. They build these large stone mansions in Spanish colonial settlements, places like Lima or Trujillo, which is also on the coast, full of hangers-on. They import European horses, they import African slaves and Spanish women to be their wives. Gold is by now pretty much all gone, it's gone back to Europe. So these guys live on proceeds from their massive estates there in Comiendas. Now, there are people arriving all the time from Spain at this point, you know, hundreds of people, who don't have gold and who don't get estates. And they are very impatient and resentful, and they take it out on the locals.
53:08 Dominic Sandbrook? And there are reports back to Spain that the rablars, they are called, are behaving very badly, they're taking local people as slaves and all of this kind of thing. And this is the context, in company with the protests of clergymen like Las Casas, who you mentioned before.
53:22 Tom Holland? Who is now on the Royal Council by this point.
53:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So this is the context for what are called the new laws of the early 1540s. So this is Charles V responding to these complaints, and he says, "No more abuses. Stop giving out indigenous peoples' land and giving out indigenous people themselves as workforce. Our colonial officials, it should be a priority for them to look after, in inverted commas, 'Indian welfare. We should treat them as equal subjects of the Spanish crown'." You know, basically be a bit kinder.
53:53 Tom Holland? And specifically, no slavery. So neither because of war, even under the category of rebellion, nor by barter, nor for any other cause in any other way, may any Indian be made a slave.
54:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. At the time, lots of sort of churchmen said, "Great, this is exactly what we want." Historians, of course, think very highly of the new laws, because they were a step in a more liberal direction. But at the time, Spanish settlers in the Americas hated them. They were outraged. The things were heard by the people over here with great indignation. There was a wild tumult with the news flying from one part to another.
54:27 Tom Holland? So go woke and go broke.
54:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, well, this is what happens because Charles sends a viceroy to enforce the new laws in Peru in 1544. The settlers go ballistic and their champion is a very familiar name. It is none other than Gonzalo Pizarro. He's now in his mid 30s and he thinks, finally, this is the chance to make myself the unchallenged strongman of Peru. He raises an army and he says, I'm going to use this against Vilcabamba, against the Inca, the little Inca kingdom. But actually, once he's raised it, he uses it to march on Lima. And this is such an interesting moment.
55:06 Dominic Sandbrook? In his book, John Hemming points out that this is basically a preview of so many rebellions in the Americas over the next few centuries.
55:15 Tom Holland? Except that I guess that particularly in South America, the rhetoric will be that this is a campaign launched in aid of liberty from servitude.
55:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Liberty from the oppression of the crown.
55:26 Tom Holland? But Pizarro is essentially doing this because he wants to restore servitude.
55:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, for other people.
55:31 Tom Holland? Which is also, of course, I guess, what the founding fathers also.
55:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Wait, we're about to get on to this. John Hemming, "A home government had legislated too liberally on behalf of colonial natives. The colonists loudly protested their loyalty to crown and mother country, but demanded a free hand to exploit the territory that they had won and settled." So in other words, Tom, this is a dry run for the tax revolt of the 1770s. And there is only one major difference between Gonzalo Pizarro and George Washington. And you know what that difference is? Gonzalo Pizarro had.
56:06 Tom Holland? He had his own teeth. He had all his own teeth.
56:09 Dominic Sandbrook? He did not walk around with somebody with slave's teeth in his mouth. Also, Gonzalo Pizarro wasn't a massive hypocrite. So that's another big difference.
56:16 Tom Holland? And you know someone else who had that perspective on the revolution in America?
56:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Is it Dr. Johnson?
56:23 Tom Holland? It's Dr. Johnson, who will be appearing in our next series.
56:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Brilliant.
56:26 Tom Holland? So it all links up.
56:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Because people at this point are thinking, well, enough of this. I want to hear about this Dr. Johnson guy. He sounds very sound.
56:34 Dominic Sandbrook? And as luck would have it, he will be joining us on Monday. So Gonzalo Pizarro, the George Washington of Peru, he kills the viceroy and he marches into Lima as the master of Peru. We're told he was wearing a sumptuous outfit. It's always good to hear about the clothes. A sumptuous outfit of black velvet, gold, plumes and jewels.
56:50 Tom Holland? I mean, to be fair, George Washington, that's not his style.
56:52 Dominic Sandbrook? That's not his vibe at all. However, Gonzalo, by doing this, is basically is an open rebellion against the King of Spain. As we know from the American business, you know, once you've done that, you either have to go the whole way or not. You've got, there's no real halfway house. Charles V sends a new viceroy called Pedro de la Gasca. And this says to this new viceroy, right, okay, scrap the woke laws. That hasn't worked at all. You know, as you said, Tom, we've been too liberal. Forget all that. However, we have to punish Gonzalo. You cannot, you know, rebel against the crown and kill the viceroy. So Gonzalo confronts the viceroy outside Cusco at a place called Chacahua. But Gonzalo's
57:33 Dominic Sandbrook? men completely let him down. They all desert and he is taken prisoner. And he has one last final confrontation. This guy who's behaved consistently badly, I think, from episode one through episode six. Gasca says to him, you've been very ungrateful to His Majesty. You Pizarros were nothing until he raised you from the dust and made you rich men. And Gonzalo, perhaps not entirely unfairly, says, what we did, we did at our own expense. His Majesty did not lift us from the dust. The Pizarros have been gentlemen since the Goths came to Spain. That's a good line. If we were poor, well, that explains why we went out to win this empire. And we gave it to His Majesty, though we might have kept it for ourselves. Do you know what reminds me of a little bit there? Lope de Aguirre.
58:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Do you not think there's a sort of the resentment of giving everything away to the crown and all that kind of thing?
58:23 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, you can definitely see where the wrath of God comes from. I mean, and not least with all the garottings.
58:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. It's the same thing. So between Lope de Aguirre, the madman, Gonzalo de Pizarro and George Washington, I mean, they've got a lot in common, those three men. That's a dinner party I don't want to go to. Because George Washington would actually bore you to death before the others got a chance to garrot you.
58:44 Tom Holland? He'd tear you his garden, wouldn't he?
58:46 Dominic Sandbrook? So Gonzalo ends up being executed in the main square of Cusco, textbook execution, confesses his sins, apologises to the king, all of this. And that's the end of him. And that basically is the end of all of them. They've all died violently. After all that, the only exception is Hernando Pizarro. He was in prison, if you remember, in Madrid. He ended up being moved to another prison and he stayed there for 20 years. He was released in 1561 and then he died 17 years later, aged about 74.
59:18 Tom Holland? Was he able to enjoy his wealth?
59:20 Dominic Sandbrook? I don't think so, really. I think a lot of it was probably confiscated and stuff, so.
59:24 Tom Holland? So it was all for nothing?
59:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, let's talk about what it was, what it all meant for the people that have been slightly absent for this series, which is basically the people of the Andean region. So a guy we've quoted a lot, John Heming, brilliant, brilliant book on the conquest of the Incas, really, I can't recommend it too highly. He's very frank about what all this meant for the people of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. A total and utter demographic disaster. There are all kinds of accounts, including from that bloke I played on stage, Bithente de Valverde, writing to Charles V in 1539. "I moved across a good portion of this land and saw terrible destruction in it. Having seen the land before, I could not help feeling great sadness. The sight of such desolation would move anyone to great pity." I mean, we don't need to go into all the sort of evidence and the quotations, but
1:00:10 Dominic Sandbrook? other Spanish writers describe how towns and villages are deserted, populations, valleys where there were 40,000 people, there are now 4,000 people.
1:00:19 Tom Holland? I mean, the key writer on this, again, is Las Casas, isn't it? Who, in 1552, he writes this book, The Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in which Peru features very prominently.
1:00:33 Tom Holland? And he casts it as a kind of genocidal destruction of a paradise. And he casts the Incas as childlike, as peaceable, as never having committed any crime at all. And that is the narrative that then passes into Protestant countries and which Peter Schaffer, for instance, ends up inheriting and which I think is still very, very much part of the narrative in, say, English-speaking countries.
1:01:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Completely. And it's part of that world, that sort of vibe of the pant pipes are playing, native spirituality, in touch with nature, peaceful people, lovely textiles, all of that kind of thing. There's not the degree of truth in that, but as we established in episode one, to be ruled by the Incas was definitely not a barrel of laughs. I mean, they are pretty brutal. You know, they will deport you, they will deny you private property, they believe in forced labour, you know, massive chain gangs, all of this kind of thing. I'm not saying they're complete monsters, but they're not saints either.
1:01:36 Tom Holland? But also just really important to emphasise that we know about the monstrous crimes of the conquistadors, thanks to Spanish writers and Spanish moralists. And so that tension in attitudes to what the Europeans are doing in the Americas is there right from the beginning. It is not a kind of something specific to the 21st century to worry about this.
1:02:00 Dominic Sandbrook? No, I mean, just by the way, you used the word, or you mentioned genocide, and that's something that historians talk about a lot. I think it's not right to call this a genocide for this reason.
1:02:09 Tom Holland? No, but that's Las Casas's rhetoric. I mean, Las Casas is providing these terms and these frames of reference.
1:02:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course. And lots of people today, if you Google it online, there are lots of people who will bandy around terms like these, which I think are wrong because most people probably died not because of Spanish violence, but because of disease, by smallpox and measles. We've already described the effect that they had in the Caribbean and in Mesoamerica, Central America and Mexico. The conquest, of course, follows the civil war.
1:02:35 Tom Holland? Yes, the civil war was just as bad, right?
1:02:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Between them, the two of them destroyed Inca infrastructure. So the irrigation canals, the terraces, the roads on which the economy depended. As early as 1539, some Spanish writers are saying, you know, because basically armies are crisscrossing the land, taking people's food, people have nothing to eat. And as in the Caribbean, I think you have a massive sense of trauma and therefore a collapse in the birth rate. Of all people, Philip the Second of Spain wrote years later to the Archbishop of Lima, "We have been informed that many people hang themselves, others allow themselves to die by not eating, others take poisoned herbs, and mothers kill their babies at birth, saying they do it to free them from the hardships they suffer themselves."
1:03:21 Dominic Sandbrook? And that really reminds me of what people were saying about the Taínó people in the Caribbean in the 1510s, that there's this kind of cultural collapse which comes from the effect of colonisation. And if you survive, your life is not much fun. So the survivors, because of the encomienda system, are subject to punishing work requirements. So about four out of five men in Spanish ruled Peru in the 16th century are subject to forced labour. And as you said, Tom, and I think you're dead right to make this point, the criticism does not come from without, it comes from within, from Spanish people, you know, senior Spanish officials. So this is a guy called Fernando de Santillán, who is a royal official in Peru and Ecuador in the 1560s. I think it's a really telling quotation.
1:04:04 Dominic Sandbrook? He says, "When people are healthy, they work only for tribute. Even when they're sick, they're forced to pay their tribute in full. They have nothing left over for themselves. They're deeply depressed by their misery and servitude, and they believe they must continue to work for the Spaniards for as long as they live." This is a Spaniard talking. "Because of this, they despair. They ask only for their daily bread, and they cannot even have that. There are no people on earth so hardworking, humble, or well behaved, but they live the most wretched and miserable lives of any people on earth." And actually, do you know what? The people he's talking about, the people in the fields, they don't even have the worst of it. The worst of it are the people who end up working in the mines, particularly the mine we mentioned before, the giant mine at Potosí in Bolivia.
1:04:48 Dominic Sandbrook? That opened in 1545. Tens of thousands of people were drafted there, year after year, to work as forced labourers, digging out silver. It ended up being called "The Mountain That Eats Men", and if you, you know... Demographers, historians argue about exactly how many people died in that mine at Cerro Rico in Potocay. I mean, the highest estimate is eight million people. The lower estimates are still hundreds of thousands of people died in these mines. I mean, just unbelievable.
1:05:21 Tom Holland? And the amount of silver produced from that
1:05:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:05:24 Tom Holland? will massively destabilise not just the economy of Spain, not just the economy of Europe, but the entire global economy. And you can start to, you can start talking about the global economy.
1:05:34 Dominic Sandbrook? You can, thanks to this, thanks to this. The silver has been shipped across to Spain. And as you say, the effects are rippling all through the world economy. There's a brilliant book on this by Charles C. Mann called 1493, about the world after the discovery of the Americas. So we'll just finish off by telling you what happened to the jungle kingdom of Vilcabamba. Manco was succeeded by his son, who was called Sari Tupac, who was five years old. And he ruled in Vilcabamba for the next few years. They just kept themselves to themselves. They were very quiet. We're talking about maybe a couple of thousand people in the jungle. In 1552, Sari Tupac, who was then late teens, got a letter from, again, of all people, Philip
1:06:17 Dominic Sandbrook? the Second of Spain. He wasn't quite Philip the Second then, he was a prince. But Philip said to him, listen, I know that your father Manco was provoked into his uprising. Isn't it amazing, by the way, that Philip, of all people, is saying this? If you come out of your lair, I promise you a full pardon and will leave your little kingdom alone. But basically, I'd like you to come out. And this guy Sari Tupac decided to accept. And he travelled down by litter to the coast. He was greeted in Lima by the viceroy with great honour. He was lodged in the viceroy's palace. He was given, they said, you know, thanks for coming out, we'll give you a big estate in the sacred valley outside Cuzco. And amazingly, I love this, Pope Julius III gave him special dispensation to marry his sister.
1:06:59 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, he'll do it for the Inca, but not for Henry VIII.
1:07:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, what's all that about?
1:07:03 Tom Holland? That's poor from the papacy, yes, again.
1:07:05 Dominic Sandbrook? So the kingdom, the little, what they call the Neo-Inca kingdom. Survived under his older half-brother who succeeded, who is Tito Cusi. The guy we've been hearing from. This amazing source, because he narrated this stuff to a Spanish missionary. Tito Cusi, he actually is, without any question, the only, basically, really, really good person in this whole story. So he ruled for basically a decade, the 1560s. And he said to his captains and whatnot, basically, we should do nothing to provoke the Spanish, we'll just completely leave them alone, we'll stay here in the jungle and they'll leave us alone. And not only did he do that, he was very friendly to the Spanish. They would send missionaries and envoys and he enjoyed chatting to them, he allowed them to put up a cross, all of this kind of thing.
1:07:50 Dominic Sandbrook? He allowed them to preach, he was baptised, although he continued to practise his own religion as well. And the Spanish reported that Tito Cusi was this sort of large, very jolly man, he was a joker, he liked to kind of a lot of feathers and nice cloaks and stuff like this. And John Hemings says, basically, if he had lived longer, Vilcabamba, and I quote, might have become an independent state under the direct protection of the Spanish crown. It might have related to Spanish Peru as Les Soto, Swaziland and Botswana related to South Africa, and Vilcabamba would now have a seat in the United Nations. That's a nice thought, isn't it? It is, isn't it? But he doesn't live. He goes to visit his father's shrine, where his father had been murdered, in Vitcos.
1:08:33 Dominic Sandbrook? He catches a chill, he then makes a terrible mistake, he decides to go on a massive drinking bout and gets absolutely wasted on Chicha, and then he gets a fever and he dies. And he's succeeded by his brother, who has probably a better known name, Tupac Amaru. Tupac Amaru was in his mid twenties and he was a disaster for the neo-Incas state, because he was much less skillful than Tito Cusi. He said, Tito Cusi's death was all the Christians' fault, should never have allowed all those missionaries in and done all this. He kills a friar, he outlaws Christianity, and he says, let's seal off Vilcabamba from the outside world. So the viceroy at the time was Gaiaco Francisco de Toledo, and he sent an envoy to protest
1:09:15 Dominic Sandbrook? with letters protesting from the Pope and the King of Spain, Philip II. Tupac Amaru did not welcome the envoy with open arms, he had him murdered on the border. The inevitable consequence, the viceroy proclaimed Tupac Amaru an apostate, a homicide, a rebel and a tyrant, and he called for a liberal interventionist war of fire and blood.
1:09:36 Tom Holland? I mean, a war of fire and blood, never good news.
1:09:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Never good news. The Spanish marched into the jungle in 1572 in June. This time, they find it all pretty easy. The Incas have fled into the jungle, but they track them down, they capture Tupac Amaru, and they bring him back to Cuzco, together with the mummified remains of Manco and Titucusi. And Tupac Amaru is tried for rebellion. It's a show trial, very like Atahualpa's. And like Atahualpa, he converts to Christianity, kind of in extremis. But just like Pizarro and Almagro with the death of Atahualpa, the viceroy wants to get rid of him, and he wants it done quickly.
1:10:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And so, on the 24th of September 1572, the last king of the Incas is led out into the square in Cuzco. We're told that he was riding a mule with trappings of black velvet, and he himself was completely dressed in mourning. And as so often on these occasions, there are colossal crowds. The Indians climbed the walls and roofs of the houses, and even the many large hills that are visible from the city were full of Indians. And he goes up onto the scaffold, Tupac Amaru. As the multitude of Indians saw that their lord and Inca was to die, they deafened the skies, making them reverberate with their cries and wailing. And then he turns to the crowd, and he says his last words in Quechua.
1:10:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Pacha Camac, so the old creator god, see how my enemies spill my blood. And then, with one blow, the executioner severed his head and held it high for all to see. And as the blow fell, the bells of the cathedral began to toll, and they were followed by those of all the monasteries and churches in the city. The execution caused the greatest sorrow and brought tears to the eyes of all. And that was the end of the last of the Incas.
1:11:28 Tom Holland? Thank you, Dominic. What an incredible epic sweep. Thanks so much. A dark, but I mean, such a compelling story. And next week, a complete change of tone. We are in 18th century London, the story of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, one of the great friendships in history. And nobody, I think, is killed in the course of that series at all. So a real, a change of flavour, I think it's fair to say. And members of the Restless History Club will get all four episodes of that on Monday. And if you're not a member, you know what to do. Sign up at therestishistory.com. But for now, thank you, Dominic, for an epic
1:12:12 Tom Holland? tale, epically told. Bye bye.
1:12:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Muchas gracias. Adios, muchachos.
1:12:27 Tom Holland? Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Book Club, a new podcast from Goalhanger, hosted by me, Dominic Sandbrook.
1:12:33 Speaker 02 And me, Tabitha Sirens. As some of you may know, I've been Dominic's producer on The Restless History, and we even did a mini-series last year about all things books.
1:12:43 Tom Holland? And since we enjoyed that so much, we have decided to roll it out as its own show. So it'll be coming out every Tuesday. We'll be doing a different book each time and digging into all the stories behind them.
1:12:55 Speaker 02 And we are going to be talking about the historical contexts behind some of the greatest and most famous books of all time. We're going to be digging into the remarkable people behind them, the unexpected stories behind the stories, and also unravelling the plot of each book a bit and delving into the depths of the story.
1:13:13 Tom Holland? Now, you don't have to have read the books to listen to the show, but we hope that by the end of each episode, you will be able to pretend to people that you've read them. That is the key thing. And either way, whether you read them or not, we hope that you'll learn lots of fascinating facts, you'll read lots of great stories, and maybe, Tabby, the odd laugh.
1:13:29 Speaker 02 We will be looking at thrilling Gothic bodice rippers like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, as well as iconic stories like The Great Gatsby or Little Women. And then also some more modern stuff, so Game of Thrones, Normal People, The Hunger Games, Hamlet, all manner of exciting stories.
1:13:48 Dominic Sandbrook? So please join us on our journey into all things books wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for the book club every Tuesday and hopefully we will see you there.
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