The Plaza de Armas in Cusco is the spot where tourists are thickest. The cathedral and the colonial-era mansions stand on every side, a fountain at the center of the plaza, and around it, on café terraces, travelers drink coffee. The Andean sun is bright, and vendors approach with alpaca scarves and knit caps. A busy, ordinary tourist square.
I am sitting there.
And yet there was a time when this plaza went by other names. Huacaypata, "the plaza of weeping"; Cusipata, "the plaza of joy." The heart of Inca-era Cusco. Coronations and royal funerals took place here. Seasonal festivals were held here. People believed it was the center of the world. Where the Son of the Sun made offerings to the Sun. The roads of the four great regions (suyu) of the Inca all set out from this plaza.
And on November 15, 1533, 168 ragged Europeans entered this plaza on horseback. Francisco Pizarro and his army.¹
I am sitting on those stones now. Right where they first sounded their horseshoes five hundred years ago. The cathedral and mansions surrounding the plaza, I now know, were built with the stones of Sacsayhuamán. The Inca dismantled their own temple, then the Spanish dismantled what they had built and used the stones to put up buildings for their own god. One civilization placed itself atop the corpse of another.
And yet the story today does not begin on November 15, 1533. It begins exactly one year earlier, in the small highland town of Cajamarca to the north.
That afternoon, two worldviews stood face to face for the first time, physically. And within a few hours, the direction in which the next five hundred years of the world would be made was decided.
How could 168 men topple an empire of eight million.
This is one of the oldest puzzles in scholarship. In Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Jared Diamond summarized the answer in three: technology, disease, writing.² This bestseller explained the fall of the Inca to many readers as a "fated asymmetry." But this explanation misses something important.
In this chapter I will offer three other asymmetries. And the third is the most decisive. But first we must look at what actually happened in Cajamarca that afternoon.
History is often built on a narrow window of timing.
In November 1532, Francisco Pizarro arrived at Cajamarca with 168 men. Sixty-two horses, 106 infantry. The number is so small that, by today's lights, it looks almost like a suicide mission. At that moment, the Inca Empire's population was about 12 million. Atahualpa's army stationed at the Cajamarca hot springs alone numbered about 80,000.³
That Pizarro could penetrate at this moment was due to two coinciding accidents.
First, the disease that came before him. Around 1524, smallpox, having crossed from Panama, spread into the northern Andes. The disease swept through the Inca Empire before the main Spanish force ever arrived. Emperor Huayna Cápac (Pachacútec's great-grandson) died of it around 1525. His successor Ninan Cuyochi died soon after. Thousands of high nobles died.⁴
Second, civil war. Huayna Cápac's death left two sons fighting for the throne. Huáscar represented the orthodox faction in Cusco; Atahualpa, the northern faction in Quito. A civil war that lasted five years had only just ended in 1532, with Atahualpa's victory. Right at the moment Pizarro landed.
That is to say: the Inca Pizarro met was the Inca at its most historically vulnerable moment, with a great share of its population already lost to disease and the empire split by civil war. Without these accidents it is hard to imagine what 168 men could have done.
Atahualpa knew Pizarro's party was there. They had landed on the coast some months earlier, and his scouts had reported on their movement inland. The reason he did not stop them was — he did not regard them as a threat. What could 168 bearded foreigners do? And Atahualpa was curious. Where had these strange people come from, what did they want?
So he accepted Pizarro's request for an audience. On the afternoon of November 16, he came to the central square of Cajamarca with thousands of attendants. The exact number varies by source, but is generally estimated at 5,000 to 6,000.⁵ Most were unarmed ceremonial attendants — feathered headdresses, gold-thread garments, ceremonial staffs.
The plaza was bordered by three large buildings. Pizarro had hidden cavalry behind those buildings. Gunners too. He knew this was not an audience but an ambush.
Atahualpa entered the plaza. His litter was carried by dozens, decorated with pure gold. Surrounded by his attendants, the emperor advanced to the center of the square.
Then the Dominican friar Vicente de Valverde stepped forward holding a breviary. Through his interpreter Felipillo — a young coastal native boy who spoke broken Spanish and Quechua — he began to read aloud the "Requirement" (Requerimiento).⁶
The Requirement was a legal document drafted by the Spanish crown in 1513. A formal declaration with which a conquistador demanded the conversion to Christianity and submission to the king of Spain from any Indigenous people he encountered. Once the declaration had been read aloud, if the natives did not accept it, this provided the legal basis for a "just war." In effect, it was a single sheet of paper to legitimate conquest.
Felipillo translated the declaration into Quechua. How accurately, no one can say. He was a child, with little experience, who barely knew theological vocabulary. According to the chronicle of Juan de Betanzos, Felipillo's translation was nearly incomprehensible.⁷
When the declaration ended, Valverde held out the breviary to Atahualpa.
This was the climactic moment.
Atahualpa took the book. It was one of the first such objects he had seen in his life. The Inca had no writing. They had no such thing as a book. He turned it over in his hands. Some sources say he held it to his ear — since the Spaniards called it "the word of God," he tried to hear if it spoke. There was no voice. As if disappointed, he let it fall to the ground.
Valverde shouted: "The infidel has profaned the Scripture! In the name of the just gospel!"
And Pizarro gave the signal.
The hidden two cannons, 62 cavalry, and twelve arquebuses burst across the plaza. The first cannon fire dropped dozens through the smoke. The cavalry charged — the Inca had never seen horses. A creature where man and beast appeared as a single monster. As the men on horseback stabbed and slashed with lances and swords, the Inca attendants were mostly unarmed. Only ceremonial staffs and feathers.
The plaza was small. The escape routes were blocked. People shoved each other and a wall on one side collapsed. Cavalry charged over those trying to flee through the breach. Pizarro himself rode at Atahualpa's litter, cut down his attendants, and dragged the emperor out.
Within a few hours, about 7,000 were slaughtered.⁸
The Spanish suffered a single casualty. And that was Pizarro himself, who, in the act of dragging Atahualpa down, was nicked on the hand by his own subordinate's blade. Not by any Inca attack.
To put it in one sentence: Within a few hours, an empire's emperor was a prisoner, 7,000 of its people were dead, and the conquerors had no casualties.
Atahualpa was put under guard.
In the previous chapter I unfolded the contrast of two worldviews conceptually. Roman dominium and Andean ayni. Domination of nature and accompaniment of nature.
The afternoon at Cajamarca is the moment that contrast erupted into the actual scene of history. And in this short scene, four structural elements are already present that will repeat across continents over the next five hundred years.
① The trap dressed as mission. Valverde's Requirement had a religious form. The gesture of handing over the breviary appeared peaceable. But the form itself was already the trap. Whatever the answer, the outcome was set. Accept and submit; refuse and war. The form of mission was used as the instrument of war. This — as I will note at an important point later — was a problem strongly criticized by many Catholic clergy of the time themselves. Las Casas, in chapter ten, is the representative case.
② Religious justification. "Profaning the Scripture," on the basis of Atahualpa's dropping the book, was proclaimed. That proclamation justified the next several hours of slaughter in the name of the just gospel. Putting a good name on one's own act — this structure is not a problem of any particular religion. Every civilization, when it expands, does the same thing. So did Rome. So did Islamic conquest. So did the Mongols. So did several twentieth-century ideologies.
③ The use of overwhelming technological gap. Cannon, cavalry, iron weapons were overwhelming compared to Inca bronze and cloth shields. But this gap was used not in head-on confrontation but in ambush and surprise. Technology used not in just war but as an instrument of slaughter.
④ Betrayal before promise. Atahualpa had been invited to a "meeting." He had ordered his attendants to keep weapons to a minimum. He thought it was a peaceful encounter. That trust was used to slaughter him in the middle of a plaza. The promise itself becomes a weapon — this is one of the features that will repeat most deeply in the colonial relations of the centuries to come.
These four elements will reappear repeatedly through the chapters of this book. The silver of Potosí, the Caribbean slave trade, Canadian residential schools, Imperial Japan's "protection" and "annexation." The form differs, but the structure is identical. The afternoon at Cajamarca is the archetype of that structure.
And a phrase a Canadian Indigenous friend once told me comes back to me. "The conqueror's history book was written by the conqueror." Every Spanish chronicle after Cajamarca was written by the men who led the slaughter and their associates. They drew themselves as heroes. They drew Atahualpa as a traitor. They drew the slaughter as justice. The history we read today was made on top of that frame.
Once captured, Atahualpa took stock quickly. The Spaniards wanted one thing — gold.
He proposed a deal. The room he was held in — about seven meters by five meters, about two and a half meters high — he would fill to the height of his arm (about 2.7 meters) with gold, and twice that with silver.⁹ In return, they would release him.
Pizarro agreed.
Over the following months, gold and silver flowed to Cajamarca from across the Inca Empire. Wall ornaments of temples, palace fittings, jewelry of the nobility, offerings on the mummies of ancestors, golden corn and silver llamas from the gardens. Inca civilization's artworks, accumulated across centuries, gathered to be melted.
The amount that came in over about eight months is estimated at about 6,000 kilograms of gold and 12,000 kilograms of silver.¹⁰ At today's prices, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of metal. But more important is the artistic value. Most of these metals had been worked by Inca artisans into ritual objects and works of art. Even the Spanish chroniclers who saw them before the melting marveled, "such craftsmanship is found nowhere in the world."¹¹
And yet Spain melted them.
Everything was recast as gold and silver bars. To divide the king's fifth (the quinto real) from the soldiers' share. The works of art vanished, leaving only the mass of metal.
The Roman archetype I traced in chapter five repeats here, dramatically. The reduction of form to mass. "Is this golden ear of corn an artwork or a lump of gold?" The Spanish answer was the latter. Always the latter. This is the essence of modernity.
When the promise was fulfilled, the Spanish put Atahualpa on trial. The charges were four.
Whether a Spanish royal court could even legitimately recognize these charges was itself in doubt. The Inca emperor was not a subject of Spain. He owed the Spanish king no loyalty. Most of his acts were matters internal to his own empire. Nonetheless the trial proceeded and found him guilty.
On July 26, 1533, Atahualpa was executed in the plaza of Cajamarca. At first he was sentenced to be burned. But Atahualpa accepted an offer that, if he received baptism, the burning would be replaced with garroting. In Inca belief, fire was the worst death, since it would prevent the soul from passing to the next world. He was baptized as Juan and strangled to death.¹²
The promise was not kept. The gold and silver Atahualpa paid as ransom went to Spain, and his life went to them as well. This was Pizarro's first major betrayal. Many of his Spanish associates protested the execution. But Pizarro decided, and acted.
The same grammar appears here again. Promises are means, not principles. When useful, you make them; when their use is over, you break them. This logic, beginning at Cajamarca, will be repeated thousands of times over the next five hundred years.
After Atahualpa's execution, Pizarro marched south toward Cusco. On November 15, 1533, he entered the city. In this very plaza, where I am sitting now, Spanish horses sounded their hooves for the first time.
But Pizarro was clever. He did not immediately dismantle the Inca state. Instead he used a puppet-emperor strategy. Install a successor from the Inca royal house as the new emperor, and borrow legitimacy through him.
The first puppet was Túpac Huallpa. A brother of Atahualpa. But he died under suspicious circumstances within months of his coronation. Probably poisoned by the Huáscar faction. The wounds of the civil war had not yet healed.
The second was Manco Inca Yupanqui. A son of Huayna Cápac and a half-brother of Huáscar. A figure backed by the Huáscar faction. Pizarro formally crowned him Inca emperor in January 1534. With Spanish ceremony. The Inca crown was placed on his head. At that moment the Inca nobles of Cusco cheered.
They misunderstood what this meant.
The Cusco nobility seem to have received the Spanish arrival as a kind of dynastic change. There had been previous instances in Inca history of kings being changed with outside help. New dynasties had largely preserved existing institutions and culture. They thought this would be the same.
But the Spanish wanted something different. They wanted to absorb the legitimacy of the Inca state into their own rule. Manco Inca wore the crown, but had no real power. He could make no decision without Pizarro's permission. He was insulted, threatened, sometimes abducted. One of his wives was raped by Spanish soldiers.¹³
And the Spanish strategically exploited the internal divisions of the Inca. They approached the Cañari, Huanca, Chachapoya peoples, who had long been forcibly incorporated into the Inca. Many of them cooperated with the Spanish. They saw it as an opportunity to be liberated from Inca rule.
This was decisive. The narrative of "168 versus 8 million" misleads. The actual situation was 168 plus tens of thousands of Indigenous allies versus a divided empire. Pizarro's real strength was not the size of his force but his ability to convert internal grievance into war.
Here I want to recommend, to a Korean reader, a juxtaposition.
Imperial Japan, in 1910, recorded that it had "merged (合倂)" with Joseon. The word "merger" suggests two states becoming one voluntarily. In reality it was military occupation and diplomatic coercion. But the language wrapped the substance in words like "union (合邦)" and "annexation (倂合)". And to legitimate the "merger," Japan put forward Korean officials such as Yi Wan-yong as legal signatories.
The installation of Manco Inca at Cajamarca has the same structure. Place the Inca crown to borrow legitimacy, and in that name conceal the substance of the dismantling of the empire. The dissociation of form from substance — this is the typical technique of colonial rule.
The word "conquest" is also a device of concealment. The word evokes a military decision. Two armies meet, one wins. But what actually happened was decades of slaughter and colonization. Not a single event but a structural process. The Spanish conquista, the English conquest, the Korean jeongbok (정복) — all tidily wrap the structural process.
This is why I have called this chapter "The Slaughter Called Conquest." To bring forward what the language conceals.
Two years passed. Manco Inca came to recognize, more and more clearly, that he was a puppet. So did his Inca nobles. The illusion of receiving the Spanish as "a new dynasty" broke. The Spanish were not a dynasty but something else.
In April 1536, Manco Inca acted.
He obtained leave for a religious procession and left Cusco. Once outside, he sent messengers across the empire. Time for revolt. Chaski runners ran along the Qhapaq Ñan. Within a month, an army of about 200,000 had assembled.¹⁴
In May 1536, this great force besieged Cusco. Inside the city were about 190 Spanish troops and several thousand Indigenous allies. The siege lasted more than ten months.
The most dramatic moment of the siege came at Ollantaytambo.
A Spanish relief column, sent to save Cusco under Hernando Pizarro (Francisco's brother), advanced on Ollantaytambo in January 1537. There Manco Inca commanded in person.
The terrain at Ollantaytambo was a steeply terraced fortress. Manco used the terrain. And he used the canals as a weapon. Inca engineers diverted the Urubamba River to turn the entire valley to mud. The Spanish cavalry horses sank into the mud. From above, the Inca army poured down stones and arrows. Hernando Pizarro's force was routed. They returned to Cusco only narrowly avoiding total annihilation.
In chapter three I wrote of the hydraulic engineering of Tipón. The philosophy of treating water as a living being became, in this moment, a weapon. The canal technology of the Inca disabled European cavalry.
The great stone structures I had seen in Ollantaytambo a few days earlier, and the canal flowing beside them — the canal where I had dipped my hand — to know that this was the decisive weapon of that battle five hundred years ago felt fresh again. History is inscribed in stone and water.
At the same time, there is another story.
Manco Inca sent armies to several fronts. The siege of Cusco, the defense of Ollantaytambo, and an attack on Lima. The general who went to attack Lima was Quizo Yupanqui.¹⁵
Quizo was a brilliant general. In the Andean highlands he defeated several Spanish relief columns in succession. He ambushed in canyons, exploited the weakness of cavalry on narrow mountain trails. A master of mountain tactics. But at the end he made a fatal mistake.
By Manco Inca's order, he advanced on Lima, on the flat coast. The flat coast is the cavalry's ground. Mountain tactics do not work there. Quizo knew this. But he could not refuse the order.
In September 1536, on the flat ground near Lima, Quizo's army met the main force of Francisco Pizarro. Disadvantaged by terrain and devastated by cavalry, the Inca army collapsed. Quizo fell. With him, the last possibility of recovering Lima vanished.
This tragedy contains a lesson. The rigidity of a chain of command can defeat tactical judgment. Quizo, as field commander, knew the danger of advancing on the plain. But he obeyed the emperor's command. In chapter fourteen we will compare this with the case of Admiral Yi Sun-sin (이순신). Yi refused King Seonjo's foolish orders. The Inca general could not. This difference in cultural flexibility becomes one factor that shapes the fates of civilizations.
In the end the siege of Cusco failed. In 1537 the Spanish main force returned from Chile, and another reinforcement column came from northern Peru. The Inca army could not sustain the siege any longer. Food ran out, and some allied peoples broke off from the front.
Manco Inca withdrew. But he did not surrender.
He retreated northwest from Cusco, into the Amazon-side mountains. In that deep mountain country he founded a new capital, Vilcabamba. The Neo-Inca State was born. In 1537.¹⁶
Vilcabamba lasted thirty-six years.
These thirty-six years we must remember. The Inca did not collapse at Cajamarca. Nor with the execution of Atahualpa. Nor with the occupation of Cusco. They resisted across two generations. Setting up a new city deep in the mountains, sustaining a new line of kings, harassing the Spanish through guerrilla warfare.
The Vilcabamba Neo-Inca State saw four kings in succession.
Manco Inca (r. 1537–1544): leader of the great rebellion. In 1544 he was assassinated in his own palace by seven Spaniards who had taken refuge with him. The result of an internal power struggle.
Sayri Túpac (r. 1544–1560): Manco's son, who took the throne while still young. In 1560 he negotiated with the Spanish, accepted an estate near Cusco, and left Vilcabamba. But within about a year he met a suspicious death. Suspected poisoning.
Titu Cusi Yupanqui (r. 1563–1571): another son of Manco. He attempted a diplomatic approach. He tried to make a treaty with the Spanish, leaving open the possibility of conversion to Christianity. He died suspiciously in 1571.
Túpac Amaru I (r. 1571–1572): youngest son of Manco. He took the throne after his brother's death, and the Spanish launched their full offensive. In 1572 the viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, ordered the seizure of Vilcabamba, and the Neo-Inca State at last fell.
Túpac Amaru was taken prisoner. On September 24, 1572, in the Plaza de Armas of Cusco — in this plaza where I am sitting now — he was publicly executed. Beheading. His head was displayed at the center of the plaza. The last official heir to the Inca royal line died on this very ground.¹⁷
Forty years of resistance ended officially in that moment. From the day of Atahualpa's capture in November 1532 to the execution of Túpac Amaru in September 1572.
The Inca did not collapse easily. What had been built across ninety-five years was defended across forty.
Despite forty years of resistance, the Inca did fall. Why?
Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, offered three factors. Guns (military technology gap), germs (disease), steel (the systemic advantage of metal and writing). This explanation persuaded many readers. It offered a kind of "fatalistic vision." The consolation that the fall of the Inca was not a moral problem but a geographic and biological inevitability.
But this account has a decisive weakness.
If technology and disease were the principal factors, why did it take forty years? How does it explain the resistance at Vilcabamba? Quizo Yupanqui's military feats? The victory at Ollantaytambo? In Diamond's model, all of these become anomalies. His model can explain the speed of the Inca fall but not the persistence of resistance.
I propose three other asymmetries. Each is decisive, and the last is the most fundamental.
The first overlaps with Diamond's point — only more precisely.
Disease arrived before the Spanish army did. Smallpox set out from Panama and spread through the Andes before the expedition arrived. Around 1524–1526 the disease swept through the northern Inca Empire and killed 30 to 50 percent of the population. Some scholars give higher figures.¹⁸
The disease collapsed the leadership. Emperor Huayna Cápac, his successor Ninan Cuyochi, and a great share of the principal nobility died. This produced a succession dispute. The civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa was the result. By the time Pizarro landed in 1532, the Inca were already deeply wounded internally.
The time lag of disease, then, produced political division, and division opened the window for outside intrusion. Not the disease itself but the political vulnerability disease produced was decisive.
The second requires more careful analysis.
The Inca Empire was an empire that expanded rapidly in a short time. As we saw in chapter one, after Pachacútec's accession it took control of two million square kilometers in ninety-five years. This expansion was through conquest. Many peoples were forcibly incorporated in the process. Cañari, Huanca, Chachapoya, Chimú. Some of them carried deep grievances against the Inca.
The Cañari especially had a bloody history. In the early sixteenth century the Inca, in suppressing Cañari resistance, had reportedly massacred tens of thousands. The wound was vivid in Cañari collective memory.¹⁹
Pizarro weaponized that wound. He promised the Cañari, "I will free you from the Inca yoke." Thousands of Cañari warriors fought on the Spanish side. So did the Huanca. Much of the force that defeated Quizo Yupanqui's march on Lima was not Spanish but Indigenous allies.
That is to say, what brought down the Inca Empire was 168 Spaniards plus tens of thousands of Indigenous allies. To call it "the Spanish conquest" is inaccurate. More precisely, "a multi-ethnic coalition led by the Spanish, in revolt against Inca rule."
This analysis does not justify the Spanish. What it reveals is rather the general working of conquest systems. The invader always exploits internal grievance. The way the British in Canada divided and used the Iroquois and Huron confederacies. The way European colonizers in Africa fomented ethnic conflicts. Without division, outside penetration cannot go deep. And in almost every society there are seeds of division.
And the third asymmetry. The most decisive and least acknowledged.
The Spanish conquerors did not see the Inca as "fully human." Atahualpa was not a true emperor (he was not Christian). The Inca nobles were not true nobles (they were not of European blood). Inca commoners were something between human and beast (held to be deficient in reason).
This perception was decisive.
Because only with this perception does the obligation to keep promises disappear. To a fully human being you must promise. To a half-human you need not believe you have promised. The same logic by which we do not "promise" to animals.
That Atahualpa was killed even after his ransom was paid. That Manco Inca was raised as a puppet then humiliated and looted. That Sayri Túpac was promised peace and poisoned. All of this was possible from the Spanish legal premise that "ordinary law does not fully apply to relations with natives."
Where did this premise come from? It was formalized in the courts of Valladolid. We will treat it in detail in chapter ten. In 1550 Spain officially debated the question — "Are natives fully human?" The debate produced no conclusion. The very absence of conclusion made the conquest continue.
Technological gap only made the outcome arrive faster. It did not determine the outcome. Even if the Inca had had European-equivalent technology, with this asymmetry of humanity in place, a similar fate would have been hard to escape. Because that asymmetry supplies a logic that justifies anything. Plunder, slaughter, betrayal, enslavement — all become "all right when done to half-humans."
This is — what this book will name more precisely later — the deepest mode of operation. To not see the other as a complete being. Once you do not see, you can do anything.
The sun is tilting.
The shadows in the plaza grow long. Tourists go into cafés or back to their lodgings. Vendors fold their tents. The Plaza de Armas sinks into the quiet of late afternoon.
I am still sitting. On this stone floor.
On September 24, 1572, in this plaza, Túpac Amaru was beheaded. A crowd was gathered. Among that crowd were Inca nobles who had betrayed the resistance. There were Quechua peasants weeping. There were Spanish officials taking down the record coolly. Viceroy Toledo would have stood at the front. Watching his order be carried out.
That day Túpac Amaru is said to have left last words. In Quechua.²⁰
"Collasuyu, Chinchasuyu, Antisuyu, Cuntisuyu — my brothers, hear me. This is not the end."
He named the four regions of the Inca Empire and said it was not the end. And his head was struck off.
Four hundred and fifty years have passed. This plaza is now an ordinary tourist site. A place where photos are taken, coffee is drunk, souvenirs are bought. The tourists do not know that someone was beheaded on this stone floor. The signage does not say it in detail. Cusco's tourist enterprise advertises this plaza as a "beautiful colonial-era square." The fact that it was an Inca plaza is forgotten, as is the fact that it was the plaza of beheading.
And yet the stone remembers.
This is no literary device. The stone does not speak, but it is still here. The stone Túpac Amaru stepped on, the stone his blood fell on, is somewhere in this plaza. Through earthquakes and through several waves of colonial-era redevelopment, much of the Inca foundation still remains. Beneath the chair where I sit, the stone Túpac Amaru last set foot upon may lie.
I want to dedicate this chapter to that stone. To the countless Inca who died nameless. To their silent testimony.
Forty years of slaughter ended. Túpac Amaru's head was set on a pike. But Spain's work was not done.
They did not kill only people. They tore down temples, pried away the stones, burned the records. They erased, systematically, the material and spiritual trace of Inca civilization. This is cultural conquest — more precisely, memoricide.
In the next chapter we will look at the site of that second conquest. A few minutes' walk from this plaza. A place that was once the heart of the Inca Empire, and now is the place where a colonial church sits on top of it. The Coricancha.
The story of those who lay stone on top of stone.
¹ Pizarro's entry into Cusco is dated November 15, 1533. John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), p. 144.
² Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), especially chapter 3, "Collision at Cajamarca."
³ On the composition of Pizarro's force and the size of Atahualpa's army at Cajamarca see Hemming (1970), pp. 32-39. Estimates of the Inca army vary by source; this book uses a median figure.
⁴ On the time of smallpox's spread to the Andes and the death of Huayna Cápac see Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
⁵ On the number of attendants Atahualpa took to the plaza of Cajamarca see Hemming (1970), pp. 40-42.
⁶ On the history and content of the Requerimiento see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 3.
⁷ A contemporaneous statement on the quality of Felipillo's translation appears in Juan de Betanzos, Suma y narración de los incas (1551). English translation: Narrative of the Incas, trans. Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
⁸ On the death toll at the Cajamarca slaughter see Hemming (1970), p. 45. That the Spanish in effect suffered no casualties is confirmed in all major sources.
⁹ On the dimensions of Atahualpa's ransom room and the amounts of gold and silver promised see Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 94-98.
¹⁰ On the actual amount of gold and silver collected see Hemming (1970), pp. 73-75.
¹¹ The Spanish chroniclers' admiration for Inca craftsmanship is recorded in many sources. A representative example is Pedro Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú (1553), Segunda Parte.
¹² On the date and method of Atahualpa's execution see Hemming (1970), pp. 79-80.
¹³ On the humiliations Manco Inca suffered under Spanish rule see Titu Cusi Yupanqui, An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru (1570), trans. Ralph Bauer (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005).
¹⁴ On the size of the army assembled in the great rebellion of 1536 see Hemming (1970), p. 189. The estimate varies by source.
¹⁵ On the life of Quizo Yupanqui and the Lima campaign see MacQuarrie (2007), pp. 221-240.
¹⁶ On the history of the Vilcabamba Neo-Inca State see Vincent R. Lee, Forgotten Vilcabamba: Final Stronghold of the Incas (Jackson, WY: Sixpac Manco Publications, 2000).
¹⁷ On the execution of Túpac Amaru see Hemming (1970), pp. 448-454.
¹⁸ On the scale of Andean disease losses in the early sixteenth century see Cook (1998), passim. Estimates range from 30 to 70 percent depending on the researcher.
¹⁹ On the Inca suppression of the Cañari see Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
²⁰ Records of Túpac Amaru's last words appear fragmentarily in several chronicles. The quotation in the text is a synthesis of Titu Cusi Yupanqui (see footnote 13) and later oral tradition.