The Inca Empire - Andean Apocalypse - Extra History - #4

>> 1532. Francisco Pizarro is shocked by what he sees.

On his first expedition four years ago,

he had landed in this very city.

It's where he learned about the so-called Inca Empire he'd come to conquer.

Then there had been 1,000 stone buildings,

large sea going rafts in the harbor with great white sails.

Crowds had come out to greet them, to offer gifts,

and touch the strange white and black skin of the foreigners.

Now, it was a ruin.

Most of the populists,

it seemed, had fled.

He directs his translator,

a native man he'd kidnapped during the last expedition,

to ask one question, what happened here?

The answer, plague, death, and civil war.

>> It came from the North,

>> everyone was sure of it.

It turned people's skin's black and made blood flow from their nose and mouths,

and it was almost always fatal.

Today, we assume this disease was hemorrhagic smallpox or measles,

likely swept down from Mexico,

where Cortes' men had brought it to the Aztec Empire.

But the inhabitants of the Inca Empire had no name for the illness that ravaged them.

There's no way to solidly estimate the impact of this plague upon the Inca population,

but in some areas, the population may have dropped

90 percent and no one was spared, no one.

When the sickness reached the empire,

Emperor Huayna Capac was up North in Quito,

the place he'd fashioned into the second city of his empire and where he

marshaled his forces to crush rebels in what is now Ecuador and Colombia.

He was no fool,

he isolated himself, but the strange marks found him anyway.

Within days, he was dying.

Fearing that the emperor was about to make his transition into the spirit world,

the royal court asked him to name a successor. He did.

The son he named though was already dead,

a victim of the same illness which had swept through the royal court.

Though the Spanish did not know it,

they didn't understand disease transmission well enough to use it intentionally,

they had effectively decapitated

the Inca political leadership before Pizarro's men had even arrived.

With both the Sapa Inca and his heir apparent dead,

the rest of the empire was left to decide who would rule.

Back in Cusco, the nobles appointed one of the emperor's sons,

Huascar, as the new ruler,

which may not have been the best choice as Huascar was

a drunken party boy who had the habit of stealing

other noble's wives and then executing them if they objected.

He also made moves to seize lands and

estates held by his mummified predecessors and their families,

or maybe not because the accounts that claim

that come from a Spanish chronicler who got the story from his Inca wife,

a woman who was previously married to Huascar's half-brother and rival for the throne,

a man named Atahualpa.

Though Atahualpa and Huascar were both sons of the emperor,

they had different mothers,

with Huascar's mother being Inca and

Atahualpa's mother coming from a non-Inca Northern royal line.

Temperamentally, they couldn't have been more different.

While Huascar grew up steeped in the court life of Cusco,

Atahualpa had traveled and fought with his father in the Inca's Northern campaigns.

Huascar had the loyalty of the Cusco elite and

Atahualpa had the hearts of the battle-hardened army.

When the nobles of Cusco declared Huascar to be

the Sapa Inca and Atahualpa to be the governor of Quito,

it was pretty clear what was about to happen; civil war.

Now, a little civil war was, to be honest,

not really a big deal, practically expected.

With no concept of primogeniture,

it was normal for the Incas to fight a few battles to figure out who would succeed.

Indeed if a claimant had the guile military skill and fortitude to defeat his rivals,

wouldn't that actually prove he was the best man for the job?

It was clear that Atahualpa wanted the royal tassel.

Therefore, when Atahualpa sent a delegation to present Huascar with coronation gifts,

the emperor refused the gifts, killed the ambassadors,

and sent the military captains back dressed in women's clothing,

a declaration of civil war.

It was not the greatest idea though.

After all, Atahualpa was up in Quito where their father had been fighting with all

of his battle-hardened troops and his best generals who were all loyal to Atahualpa,

who was also part Northern and had major support.

But Atahualpa was also far

North and already fighting against rebellions that predated the civil war,

not to mention now,

these new provincial rebellions that supported Huascar and Huascar had his own assets,

namely the royal tassel,

the capital, and the larger army.

He marched North,

in some accounts even capturing Atahualpa who then supposedly proceeded to

escape after a woman smuggled him in a jail break kit during a drunk and victory party.

But here's what's not in doubt.

This war was vicious and costly.

It ripped the empire apart,

and in concert with the ongoing smallpox pandemic,

may have dropped populations in some regions by 95 percent.

The empire, already under strain during

Huayna Capac's reign, teetered on the brink of collapse.

The turning point came when the two armies met in central Ecuador.

Huascar's force was much larger,

led by a veteran general known as the fox,

but it was also made up of militia conscripts unused to war,

where Atahualpa's force, on the other hand,

was a battle-hardened army made up from the best troops in the empire.

Men drafted from warrior societies who the Inca from birth prepared for war,

experienced slingers from the Andes,

hard Ecuadorian infantry men,

and archers from the Amazon who dipped their arrows in serpent venom and frog toxins.

The battle did not last long,

for if history teaches us one thing,

it's the age old adage,

don't bring conscripts to a hardened veteran fight.

Seriously, that's all over historical texts. You can look that up.

When it was all over though,

Atahualpa had the fox's skull made into a gold accented drinking cup.

He'd killed the captured general by filling them with arrows and darts

an omen for what was to come.

At first, Atahualpa tried to lore soldiers

away from Huascar's retreating army with offers of clemency.

However, when those offers to defect went unanswered,

he turned to another tactic; terror.

When he captured the enemy,

he had them slaughtered and their bodies desecrated.

Settling in the northern city of Cajamarca,

he sent his army ahead with orders to take Cusco and it did not take long.

Atahualpa's bloody tactics had destroyed

>> the enemy morale and Huascar had lost his nerve.

>> Even when Huascar's army occupied forts

where they had an advantage of terrain and defensive barriers,

they often failed to hold.

When Atahualpa's army reached Cusco,

Huascar evacuated rather than fight.

Soon he was a captive and his legacy destroyed,

and when we say destroyed, we mean destroyed.

One of Atahualpa's generals entered Huascar's family compound where

his wives and children lived and spared no one regardless of age or gender.

Then they rounded up the historians who kept the records of Huascar's reign,

those who knew what each knot represented on

the quipu that kept royal history and they killed them.

Afterwards, they burned the quipu even

though the people trained to interpret them were dead,

and then they destroyed the mummies of his most powerful ancestors,

all of this in front of the deposed emperor's own eyes.

His victory complete, Atahualpa prepared to march south and enter Cusco.

There were things to attend to,

not the least of them,

weeks of victory feast to celebrate his coronation,

but there was another matter that kept him.

A force was marshaling behind him heading South toward Cajamarca.

They were not allies of his half-brother, that was certain.

Reports from survivors said these strangers had

pale skin and wore clothing made of metal,

they rode enormous beasts larger than llamas

and evil long fanged creatures trotted at their heels,

and they used bizarre weapons that made a noise like thunder and expelled smoke.

Most importantly though, report said that they killed as they marched.

Everywhere they went, they killed without reason,

captured anyone they could,

and questioned them under torture,

they wanted to know the way to the emperor and his gold.

Such in pertinence, Atahualpa thought.

Such belligerents from a force of only 168 men.

They were, of course,

conquistadors, Pizzaro's third expedition.

Though they carried documents from the Spanish crown,

making it their duty to claim Peru for Spain and Christianize the population,

they were actually here for the money.

This venture was an entrepreneurial one and each man on it was a shareholder.

If he enlisted with infantry weapons,

he gained a small slice of whatever treasure they captured,

but if the men who'd brought horses,

plate armor, and contributed ships and provisions,

men like their leader Pizarro and one of his captains,

Hernando de Soto,

they could get very rich indeed,

but Pizarro was already very rich indeed.

In fact, he was a veteran of several conquistador rates,

but he was also aging and wanted to make his mark on

the world the same way Cortes had done when he overthrew the Aztec Empire.

He carried documents in his pocket that, once the Incas were overthrown,

would make him the Spanish governor of Peru.

So he was surprised when a group of

Incan ambassadors met them on the road bearing gifts,

it seemed they would be received.

The Sapa Inca, his translator said,

wanted to meet them.

Pizarro didn't realize that the gifts were a threat,

the Inca's usual modus operandi of displaying their generosity,

that if spurned would lead to annihilation,

each item carefully selected to send a message.

Pizarro and his men walked deeper into Atahualpa's territory,

drawn into a position where the Incas army of 40,000 could envelop their little party.

Pizarro and Atahualpa were about to come

face-to-face in a meeting that would shatter an empire,

not to mention cost both men their lives.

>> Special thanks to educational tier patrons

>> Ahmad Ziad Turk, Joseph Blaim, and Gerald Spencer Dinan.