Dan Snow's History Hit - 4. Machu Picchu: The Fall of the Inca Empire

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Part 4/4. The Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru in 1526 in a bloody pursuit of gold and riches; it was the beginning of the end for the Inca. The Inca were unable to comprehend the Spanish weapons of war, foresee their underhanded tactics or resist the deadly diseases they brought with them.In the final episode, Dan and his expert guests trace the fall of the Inca and tell the story of the clash between these two mighty empires- so different from one another.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Next Episode in the Series:Episode 4: The Fall of the Inca EmpireEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

In 1530, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro set sail for the New World in search of fame, fortune and adventure. He led a relatively modest band of men. He arrived in Panama and by January the following year, he set his sights on Peru with one thing on his mind. Gold. with one thing on his mind. Gold. Pizarro was searching for a treasure city when he arrived in the Inca capital of Cusco in 1533. It glittered in gold,

from temples and shrines to statues and other adornments. The Inca made use of the abundant precious metals present in the region. But for the Inca, gold had no monetary value. No concept of money exists before Europeans arrive. And so gold, as part of that, is a symbolic sort of representation of spiritual value. No amount of gifted gold could save the Inca from the Spanish sword. Within two years, the Spanish had ransacked virtually every sacred temple and shrine for gold,

murdered the Sapa Inca, subjugated his dignitaries and people, colonised the land and reduced this once thriving empire into a small settlement in the remote jungle. Two mighty empires, so different from one another. Inca were unable to comprehend the Spanish way of war, unable to foresee their underhand tactics or resist the deadly diseases they brought with them. They could never survive. You're listening to the final episode of my Machu Picchu series, The Fall of the Inca Empire.

For the Inca, gold was the sun and silver was the moon. But for the Spanish, they were money and power. On the European continent, stories of this brave new world across the ocean arrived back at the Spanish court from expeditions led initially by Christopher Columbus. Tales of mysterious peoples and cities laden with gold and treasure captured the imagination of men like Pizarro. He was born in March 1478, illegitimately, to a young woman of humble birth. Some accounts say he worked as a swineherd before venturing to the Americas. He accompanied Vasco Núñez de Balboa in his crossing of the Isthmus of Panama, where they became the first Europeans to see the Pacific Ocean. He then

briefly took up position of mayor in the newly established Panama City, and he made a small fortune. But Pizarro wanted to make his own discoveries and lead his own conquests. In 1524, he put together a little band of soldiers and a priest, and the group set out on a series of voyages of discovery down the west coast of South America. The first was pretty disastrous, but on the second they made it to the land that they later named Peru. Upon arrival, they heard stories of a great ruler with vast wealth in the mountains. They returned to get permission from the king to claim the land for Spain, which of course was granted. With his half-brothers, Gonzalo, Hernando and Juan, among the 180 or so others, Pizarro's

band of conquistadors set off from Panama in 1531. Their sights set on Peru. To tell me the next part of the story, I went to find Jago Cooper, the executive director of the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, where they house wonderful artefacts and collections from cultures and artists across the world. He spent years as curator of the Americas at the British Museum and knows the Inca's story like the back of his hand. The Europeans, was it logistically they couldn't take bigger groups of people? Or was there a sense in this period of the kind of the arrogance, the underestimating ones, or perhaps correctly estimating one's opponents, where you thought you could achieve great things

with relatively small numbers of people? It's because Pizarro wasn't representing the crown with an army. You know, he wasn't like a general going to be a conquistador of an entire territory with the Spanish crown. He was basically almost like a freelance privateer, almost. He had the validation of the crown, but he was turning up in order to see what he could come up with and build a thing and be the bridgehead of it. Therefore, he gathered together the group of people he could persuade would be worth their while because they'd become rich by coming with him. They often had to fund the expedition themselves. Those people had to put money in to buy the ships and get the supplies

based on the idea that they were all going to become wealthy through exploiting these new lands. I mean, it's gigantically ambitious, isn't it? But I guess you're not assuming they're going to conquer great swathes of the continent. It could just be a raid. It could be a smash and grab. Absolutely. The plan wasn't very well thought through in my mind. It could have gone any way. They would have taken any of the opportunities. And that opportunism led to what happened in many ways, because they took advantages of situations in a very interesting way. There are obviously lots of innate advantages they had. Some of them they didn't even know about the advantages they had with them. But the particular advantage was that the

Inca Empire seemed to be quite divided at the time. It was wounded, wasn't it, internally? Yes. There's a fundamentally important thing, which I think is often underestimated, that it's by 1529 and the early 1530s, when he arrived and started his expeditions up through the new continent, disease had already arrived, right? So a disease had spread down from the ports of Cartagena in the north, where Spanish had been for decades already, and smallpox had started to ravage communities. Huayna Capac, the sort of Sapa Inca, the leader of the Incas, had already died of smallpox, a European disease, in 1527. So before any Europeans turned up, their diseases are already ripping through. They're already ripping through, they're already sowing discontent. And then when

Huayna Capac dies, then there's a huge civil war between Huascar and Atahualpa, his two sons. And that creates huge division. And then, yes, Pizarro is able to exploit these divisions and these huge upheavals amongst society when he arrives. We need to imagine he's entering a landscape already just beset with appalling pandemics and mortality. Yes, it's very, very difficult for us to get a decent handle on this.

We've got very good evidence of cemeteries where you get big epidemics and large amounts of people dying during this period of disease. But visualising it, it's very hard in our minds. And then when the Europeans arrive, the bizarre arrives, that epidemic's just upscale and get bigger. But we're looking at between maybe 60% and 90% of the population on the coast get wiped out by disease. And that's just enormous numbers of upheaval. By the time the Spanish arrived in the vicinity of Cayamaca, the town where the Inca emperor

Atahualpa resided, they were battle-weary and dishevelled. Atahualpa heard of their arrival and sent emissaries to reconnoitre. Returning with reports that the Spanish consisted of less than 200 tired men, Atahualpa invited them to meet with him. But it was a terrible mistake to underestimate the Spanish. Although they were few in numbers, far fewer than Atahualpa's army, they were skilled soldiers, carrying weapons and harbouring diseases the likes of which the Inca had never seen. They were cunning and deceptive.

For Atahualpa, this meeting was just that, an opportunity to find out more about the new arrivals. For the Spanish, driven by a lust for treasure, the meeting was an opportunity for ambush. lust for treasure, the meeting was an opportunity for ambush. At dusk on the 16th November 1532, Atahualpa arrived at the Cayamarca town square to meet Pizarro. The Inca leader arrived in a ceremonial parade on the litter carried by nobles. He was bedecked in emeralds and gold, a ceremonial form of intimidation, to show a potential enemy the might of the Inca, a deterrent not to cross them. It's fair to say this backfired a bit. As Atahualpa arrived in the square,

crowded by Inca followers, there were no Spanish to be seen. Pizarro had hidden his men on horseback in nearby barns, waiting for the right moment to burst forth and attack. Instead, a single priest approached Atahualpa. He began to lecture the divine Inca leader on Christianity, forehanding him a Bible. Atahualpa threw it down in disgust, himself a god.

Enraged at being harassed in a strange language, usually his own people wouldn't even look him in the eye. At that moment, Pizarro gave the order for his men to attack. Cavalry men in armour, wielding swords, on horses, galloped out from the barns, slashing swords while others fired muskets without distinction into the Inca crowd. Blood pooled in the square as the Spanish slashed their swords indiscriminately. The Inca had not anticipated this. They had not come to the square to fight the invaders. With their vast empire, they believed they had no reason to fear the Spanish interlopers. In the midst of the chaos, Pizarro pulled Atahualpa from his litter, dragging him away as a prisoner. Without their leader, the Inca army quickly fled.

At the end of the massacre, 7,000 Inca lay dead or dying. Not a single Spanish soldier was killed. Like buzzards, the conquistadors picked through the bloody scene, collecting whatever gold or silver they could find. Without the Sapa Inca, the empire faced an uncertain future. During his incarceration by the Spanish, Atahualpa noticed the Spanish lust for gold and silver and struck a deal. In exchange for his release, he promised to fill an entire room with treasure,

ordering officials to melt down the jewellery, idols, and anything they could lay their hands on to give the Spanish what they'd come for. In today's money, it's estimated the ransom he arranged was worth more than 250 million pounds. Virtually overnight, Pizarro and his men became unimaginably wealthy. But once again, they tricked Atahualpa. They knew if they released him, as was the bargain, he'd raise an army and fight back. They had to get rid of him. Kill the Inca

emperor, decapitate the empire. On the 26th of July 1533, Atshawapa was led from his cell, given a hasty show trial on the grounds of treason and condemned to be burned at the stake. But in Inca religion, bodies are mummified, so they have to be intact if they're to pass to the afterlife. The Spanish agreed to a method of execution that would leave Atahualpa's body undamaged on the proviso that he convert to Christianity. He reluctantly agreed. But even after his conversion in the shadows of the gallows, the Spanish reneged on their promise once again. After he was killed by strangulation, some of his skin and clothes were burnt in one final act of degradation. Atahualpa was succeeded by his brother Tupac Hualpa, but really it was in name only

because the Spanish began to consolidate their power in Peru, and the Inca couldn't stop them. Does the empire... Is there dysfunction there? Because it's quite pyramidal, it's quite hierarchical. If the Inca himself is out of action, does that screw the decision-making process of subordinates? Yes, I think like many different societies, yes, if you take out the top, it creates dysfunction. At the same time, you've got disease, you've got these sort of new animals arriving, these horses, these massive dogs. It's like, what on earth's going on? Like everything just gets sort of disrupted.

And then there are incredibly good communication systems within the Inca Empire. These road networks go everywhere. And that information is traveling over the empire very, very quickly about what's going on. And it's like, you can just imagine sort of how that news is being received by people around the empire. Just the confusion must have been extraordinary. Why does Pizarro then make the decision to march on Cusco? Because he knew Cusco was the capital. I think at that time he had Huascar and a couple of Atahualpa's generals who sort of took him up towards Cusco. And then when he arrived there, he was super impressed by Cusco.

It's an absolutely incredible city. You know, it's a rival anything in Europe at the time. It's an amazing city. You've got a golden temple of the Coricancha. The stonework is absolutely majestically beautiful. The Sacawaman fortress up on the hill is just beautiful. Like it's an incredible city. And so he arrives in Cusco as the capital, seeing that that will be the seat of power. And in March he's almost straight in. There's hardly a fight, is there? There's hardly a fight at that stage because then it's sort of,

it becomes political. To a certain extent at that that stage pizarro's role is being slightly overstated because different generals are sort of allying themselves with pizarro as a mechanism of gaining power thinking that he will then sort of you know help them out or be a subordinate not quite understanding the nature of what is going on because you know allying with different communities and deciding who you pay tribute to is quite a common thing in the andes and so pizar, and yes, there isn't like a big battle where he's 200 people riding and kill people at that stage. Then Pizarro sort of installs a puppet Sapa Inca in a way called Manco Inca, who is directly appointed with Pizarro to a certain degree.

So this is really important. You see it again further north of the Aztecs. The traditional interpretation was just a bunch of Europeans come in with guns and horses, and that's just so overwhelming it's just completely rewrites but we should think a lot about these indigenous allies should we yeah well then Cortes Tlaxcala it's Tlaxcala in the Gulf of Mexico who totally helped Cortes take over with the Mexica in the city of Tenochtitlan and yes similar here like you've got a lot of northern communities in what

is modern day Peru, up in the northern areas, who are not big fans of the Inca, and therefore they ally themselves, they're quite willing to ally themselves. And so yeah, that political landscape is extremely important to understand. And a lot of it's happening. And I don't think the people who are behaving within that quite can foresee the consequences of what's actually going to happen, that these people are going to keep arriving over from Europe. The numbers are going to start increasing. They're going to set up some more bridgehead cities and towns on the coast and suddenly they're just going to keep coming and keep coming. And then things slowly, that power dynamic starts to get out of hand.

And that's why Manco Inca, after three years, decides, actually, wait a second, this really isn't a good idea to be allied with Pizarro. And he secretly amasses an army of 100,000 people from the Highland Andes and then marches on Cusco to retake the capital. This is Dan Snow's history. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm now exploring an astonishing Inca site, Sacsayhuaman. Now, I know I say this a lot on the podcast, but this is one of the most amazing places I've ever been in my entire life. I am standing in a gigantic, I guess you call it a fortress. It's certainly used as a fortress, as you'll hear. It's made out of enormous shaped stones that the Incas brought here.

There are 2,000 gigantic stones forming these enormous concentric defences here. Massive walls of these rocks carefully shaped and fitted together, stretching in long lines around the summit of this hill. Some of these stones are comfortably five metres tall and they've all been fitted together in that classic Inca way interlocking without mortar. When the Spanish first saw this place they thought it had been built by magic they could not believe that human beings particularly human beings with the tools that Inca had available were capable of building fortifications like this and it has blown me away and below me sitting in the valley is the city of Cusco and this is where the leader of the Inca at this point based himself during the siege of Cusco in 1536 he was gazing down at what

had once been the capital of the Inca empire now in the hands of the Spanish you'll be surprised to learn the structure of Dandina was built by Pachacutec. He was the man who oversaw a vast expansion of the Inca Empire. He did lots of road construction buildings. He built Machu Picchu. And this place is almost as impressive as Machu Picchu, I've got to say. Even though it's in ruins, you get a sense of the gigantic size and scale of his ambition. of the gigantic size and scale of his ambition. So Manco Inca had managed to gather about him an army of tens of thousands of men. The Spanish might have captured Cusco, but this was going to be the attempt by the Inca

to strike back, to drive the hated Spaniards out. His army was surrounding Cusco on all sides. Some sources say more than 100,000 troops. And a Spaniard described it as a black carpet by day and a clear sky with stars at night as the Inca army on the top of these hills lit all their campfires and illuminated the night so in contrast down below me now there were just about 200 Spaniards they had some indigenous allies of course but they were massively outnumbered they were surrounded they sent to Lima for reinforcements,

but those were very slow to arrive. So in the meantime, they would have to deal with the Inca themselves. In early May, 1536, the Inca launched their main assault on the town below. They swept into Cusco. They set fire to the thatch on the roofs. There was savage hand-to-hand fighting.

The Spanish and their indigenous allies were pinned back in just two buildings on the main square. was savage hand-to-hand fighting. The Spanish and their indigenous allies were pinned back in just two buildings on the main square. They barricaded themselves in, kept the Inca at bay with their gunpowder weapons and occasional sallies with their horses, terrifying the Inca, just allowing the Spanish to maintain their toehold in the city. The Spanish came up with a very bold, very daring strategy, in fact.

They used their cavalry, they rode them out. Pizarro, the famous conquistador, one of his brothers was in charge at this point of the garrison. He rode his cavalry out. The Inca thought they were retreating and chased them. The Spanish cavalry rounded on them, defeated them and then struck directly at Sacsayhuaman itself. A very, very bold counter-attack at the heart of Inca power. What followed was a terrible battle where I'm standing now. The Spanish and their indigenous allies assaulted these walls with scaling ladders. They used their gunpowder weapons to try and pick the Inca defenders off this wall and allow infantry to climb up and over first one wall then another. There was vicious fighting. The Spanish

in Cusco at this point were led by Pizarro's brother Juan Pizarro. He was struck in the head with a ball shot by a slinger and was mortally wounded died shortly afterwards but the Spanish were successful they hacked their way into this fortress over these mighty walls and captured it. When Sacsayhuaman fell Manco Inca and his forces didn't continue the siege for that much longer and retreated into the mountainous interior. This fortress was dismantled little by little. The stones here were used to build the colonial era churches and residences that I can see in Cusco below me. The only ones that were left were the ones that were just simply too gigantic to move, even with the technological advantage that the Spaniards had. And eventually this site was abandoned. It was covered in dust and grown over until Peruvian archaeologists

rediscovered it in 1934. In a way, that's the great battle, isn't it, for Cusco and for the Empire. It's an extraordinary moment. That hilltop fortress, I mean, it's incredibly closely fought as well. Yes, Mangalinga should have won. It's because of the rules of engagement. They've vastly outnumbered the European force, but they arrive and they encircle it. You know, the Spanish chronicles record this sort of starry night because all the campfires surround the entire city of Cusco. But they hold, you know, three or four days of sort of rituals and ceremonies and playing music and walking around and sort of psyching themselves up

and talking about it and sort of, and like, you know, if they just marched in and sort of psyching themselves up and talking about it and sort of, and like, you know, if they just marched in and sort of killed everyone, then they'd have won. But that wasn't the rules of engagement for them. They were sort of, you know, providing a starting point of negotiation. The principal rules of warfare were often about capturing people and subjugating them. And then you enforced a sense of obligation that these people who were the losers would then have to offer you things in the future. And the losers would know how to respond in that situation as well. Whereas, yeah, even Pizarro, when he's on the, it looks like he's kind of losing.

He obviously responds a completely different way. Like he counterattacks. He does, you know. Yeah. I think the thing is that the Inca hugely valued human life, right? This is a massive misconception among South American cultures. The value of human life was enormously important. And therefore, the idea that you just kill people with blunt edges of steel and hack them to death is just like totally incoherent, right? Why would

you kill people in this brutal, savage manner? That was against the rules. And this is often misunderstood because of human sacrifices that happen amongst Inca culture. But often human sacrifice is an indication of how much human life is valued, as opposed to how much it's not. And the idea of European warfare, it would have just been abhorrent to Inca culture. You know, horses riding in and hacking each other to death by their thousands in Europe. It's just horrible. So after the failure of that big attempt to retake Cusco, what happens to Inca resistance after that? So Manguangu takes a small band and they start to push out of the Cusco Valley

and they move down towards Vilcabamba, the town of Vitcos, and they sort of hole up in a smaller fortress, which is a site called Vitcos, which is an absolutely beautiful site. I think it rivals Machu Picchu in terms of its beauty and its loveliness. And they hole up there and sort of, you know, survive essentially

beyond the realm trying to hold on to the Inca power structures that exist You mentioned Vitkos rivals Machu Picchu Why so? Is it the same incredible setting? Geographically it's beautiful It's very similar, it's like on a big promontory surrounded by mountains with these beautiful raging rivers that flow around it The architecture is impressive It has beautiful stone masonry protected on that promontory surrounded by mountains with these beautiful raging rivers that flow around it. The architecture is impressive. It has beautiful stone masonry protected on that promontory.

Its approach is lovely that you sort of walk over, very similar. You walk over and you have like a little tongue of land that you walk along and then go up to the site of Vitkos and there's no people. As the Inca continued to engage in their cultural practices and isolated Vitkos in the Peruvian jungle, the Spanish continued their conquest of the rest of the country. They designated Lima as the new colonial capital, where in 1541 Pizarro was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy among his Spanish rivals. He'd made enemies during his conquest and rule in South America, and many felt cheated out of their share of wealth and land. Meanwhile, more and more Europeans arrived in Peru looking to settle. They spread across the country, inland and further into the

Sacred Valley. But the Spanish never made it as far as Machu Picchu. It was a difficult place to get to by road or river, and had already begun to disappear under the jungle vegetation, having been abandoned by the Inca not long after the Spanish arrived in Peru, though it's difficult to say exactly when. Melby Viena, a specialist tour guide at Machu Picchu, who we've heard from throughout this series, recounts the last days of the city in the clouds. During that time of resistance, people in Machu Picchu knew what was going on, because the messengers used to run and tell them messages, news about the situation, telling, you know, the Spanish are killing people, the Spanish are creating a terrible battle, and the people in Machu Picchu had to make

a decision. It wasn't probably so easy because Machu Picchu is a city that had only two generations of Incas living in the city. They had to leave not only because they had fear, it's because the situation in Machu Picchu got worse because no supplies arrived to the city and they said we have to take with us whatever is important and we can leave the rest. So they probably took and organized everything and they ran away because they knew that the Spanish were getting too close and the only way it was into the jungle. How long does this sort of postscript last in Vitkos?

Decades in terms of sort of Vitkos and then it goes through a couple of generations and then you get to Tupac Amaru and Tupac Amaru is like the iconic leader of resistance who was the last iconic Inca linked to the Inca lineage in that way. And you still see Tupac Amaru's image regularly around in the Highland Andes today. Once they retreated to Vilcabamba, it was only a matter of time before the Spanish caught up with them. And in the end, they did indeed arrive

at this last outpost of Inca rule. The last independent Inca leader was dragged to Cusco and executed in the main square. But it's very important that listeners realise that the Inca Empire isn't sort of conquered in terms of like, the majority of people in the Highland Andes are still indigenous, right? Indigenous language is everywhere, indigenous customs, food, everything still exists in the High Andes. Andes. I've come to a house in a small village just outside Cusco and I'm meeting two women, a mother and a daughter, who are going to give me a traditional Andean meal. What's on the menu? Freeze dried potato soup. And this is very traditional, this food? Is this the same recipe that's been going

for hundreds of years up here? This is the. Incas? This is what the Incas ate? . Ah, these are the freeze dried potatoes. . And they last for years, last a long time?

. One or two years? Great. We'll see what they taste like after that. I'm just sitting here now by the fire with Elena and her family. We've cooked a meal that harks back to Inca times using the ingredients the Inca used. We're drinking chicha, the drink that the Inca used to drink. We've toasted Mother Earth like they would have done. They're still speaking Quechua-Ramayu, the language the Inca used to drink, we've toasted Mother Earth like they would have done.

They're still speaking Quechua-Ramay, the language the Inca spoke. So it's clear that although the Inca empire, the way of life, the language, the people, the customs, endured. And 500 years later, elements of the Inca are still very much with us. still very much with us. It's my first time in Peru, and I certainly wasn't expecting to discover such a powerful, tangible link with that past 500 years ago. It's a really important reminder that too often we look at history just through the lens of the leaders

and the magnificent elite art that's produced the monumental architecture. But this Andean way of life was here before the Incas. It thrived during the Inca period but it outlasted the Incas you've enjoyed our series on Machu Picchu, why don't you follow us so you never miss out on future episodes? And if you want more series like this one, we've got a bunch. Like our award-winning series on the greatest discovery in Egypt, the intact tomb of Tutankhamun.

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and edited by Dougal Patmore. Bye! Thank you.