“We Spaniards suffer from a heart disease that only gold can cure.” This is how Hernan Cortés, the prototype conquistador of the early colonial era, explained the unbridled greed for wealth to the Aztec ruler Montezuma II. Montezuma was perplexed – for the great and opulent civilisations of Central and South America, gold was mainly used as ornaments and for religious and ceremonial purposes. But Europeans were completely stunned by the splendour of some of these newly discovered lands. In their search for Eldorado, the mythical land whose ruler was said to have a skin covered in gold dust, the daze quickly turned to envy, which in turn turned to a mania for plunder and murder.
The sixteenth century marked the beginning of a new age – a renaissance in Europe and, on a global scale, the unbridled flowering of colonialism and imperialism. While Europeans faced overpopulation leading to famine, poor sanitation and the spread of deadly diseases such as the plague, Portuguese and Spanish seafarers began to bring home news of fabulously rich and sparsely populated fertile landscapes. The world’s first explorers of the era were soon followed by conquistadors or conquistadors – turning new lands into colonies, killing the natives in a sea of blood.
The systematic killing and destruction started in the Caribbean and spread like wildfire throughout the Americas. The unsuspecting natives, who often welcomed the newcomers with open arms, were easy prey. In the wake of the so-called Reconquista, during which the Iberians successfully expelled the last of the Moors from their lands in 1492 after centuries of Muslim presence, they were also driven by religious zeal and, in the name of the Catholic Church, made massive attempts to convert all the peoples they encountered. In this, they were conveniently assisted by the motto “serve the Lord and grow rich”.
The year 1519 was crucial for a new world order and understanding of the New Age, when two seemingly unrelated events changed the course of history. Cortés launched his campaign against the Aztec empire and Magellan’s expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe.
The first around the world under Magellan’s iron hand
When Christopher Columbus rediscovered America for Europeans in 1492 and Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India five years later, a fierce competition began between Spain and Portugal for dominance of the world’s sea trade routes and territories rich in exotic riches that an insatiable Europe had dreamed of.
In 1494, the Iberian neighbours had already concluded the so-called Treaty of Tordesillas, mediated by the Pope, which divided the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence along an apparent meridian in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This avoided open conflict and kept them busy for a while exploring and conquering “their” half of the hemisphere. Roughly speaking, Spain was given the territories in the west, that is to say most of the Americas, and Portugal the territories in the west, from Cape Verde to Africa and on to India. Spain was given the territories of the Americas and Portugal the territories of the Americas, from Cape Verde to the Americas and on to the Americas. But the no-merchant account did not work out in the long run, and other European countries soon joined in the hunt for their piece of the pie.
The Spaniards were soon no longer satisfied with the deal either, as they realised that Columbus had not discovered the rich Far East after all, but had unexpectedly stumbled upon an unknown continent which, at first sight, offered neither a glorified source of spices nor an unlimited treasure trove of gold, silk and precious stones. They could not hide their disappointment with the simple natives of the Caribbean and their way of life and soon began to look for alternatives to somehow make their way to the Orient and break the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade. The Portuguese, who controlled the route around Africa, had to be avoided.
Fernão de Magalhães, better known by the Spanish version of his name as Fernando Magellan, was convinced that he could complete Columbus’s mission and sail to the Windward Islands or the Moluccas by the western route – there had to be a passage somewhere past the continent that had been called America since 1507.
But why did this stern, deeply religious and disciplined navigator, who for years commanded important Portuguese expeditions, undertake one of the most epic voyages of all time under the Spanish crown? Like Columbus, an Italian by birth, he first sought support from the King of Portugal, who infamously dismissed him because of old grudges, even though Magellan had by then already established a reputation as one of the most successful seafarers and military commanders. Among other things, he was part of the expedition that in 1511 conquered Malacca for Portugal, a geostrategic port on the Malay Peninsula through which all the spice trade passed.
The new King of Spain, Charles I, who was also the Roman-German Emperor Charles V, was sufficiently enthusiastic about the plan to give the green light to the expedition. But for Magellan, the hard times were just beginning. Despite his motley crew, the Spanish were the most numerous aboard his ships and viewed him with suspicion from the start; they also constantly undermined his authority. Among other things, he was accused of being a spy for the King of Portugal.
But no one had anything against the young Italian aristocrat Pigafetta, unskilled in navigation but eager for adventure. Antonio Pigafetta paid big bucks to take part, while convincing Magellan that he would be useful – and it is thanks to him that Magellan’s voyage is one of the most detailed expeditions of all time! In his precious diary, he describes the wonders of nature, the many rebellions that plagued the expedition and all the other dramatic events of this incredibly long round-the-world journey of three years. At the same time, the chronicler was fortunately one of the few survivors of the journey.
Such an expedition was a huge expense and took two years to prepare. Nevertheless, conditions on the five ships that finally sailed from Seville in August 1519 were substandard, hygiene was already at rock bottom after only a few weeks of sailing, and rats soon multiplied to such an extent that they, along with the ship’s worms, began to eat away at the ships and all their stores. Many a sailor preferred to use his meagre rations in the dark so as not to see the worms munching on them.
Unexpectedly, we saw a giant
The atmosphere between the men was tense from the start and the long months of hard sailing, combined with a distrustful, hungry and tired crew, were the perfect recipe for a resurrection.
The first was organised by the Spanish captains of three of the five ships, but they did not count on Magellan’s tough, experienced and above all cold-blooded personality. With the help of loyal Portuguese sailors, he put down the mutiny and the leading traitors felt the consequences keenly. Juan de Cartagena and his priest were left on uninhabited land, and Luis de Mendoza lost his head in front of the whole crew – cut off by his servant, who had to choose between his own death and the murder of his master. From then on, Magellan had unquestionable authority.
He drove the fleet stubbornly onwards towards the South American cape in the increasingly hostile Antarctic weather. It was then that Europeans first encountered animals such as penguins and sea lions. “They were a strange kind of geese, covered all over with black feathers, but they could not fly and fed on fish,” Pigafetta wrote. “And one day, quite unexpectedly, we saw a giant, on the shore, quite naked, dancing and singing, and as he sang he was sprinkling dust and sand on his head. /…/ He was so tall that the tallest of us barely reached his waist, but he was well built. He had a large face, painted entirely red, with yellow around his eyes, two hearts on his cheeks and a little hair painted white.” These giants were called Patagonians (Big Feet) because of their large feet, and the landscape that is still called Patagonia today.
How much credence can really be given to Pigafetta’s writings is questionable, since, like similar travel literature of the time, they contained many fantasy elements; at the same time, they glorified the superiority, strength and goodness of Europeans, and presented the natives in a primitive light as half-animal and cannibal. This, of course, justified their shameful treatment of them and, above all, their violent conversion to the Christian faith.
Magellan’s crew soon found the famous passage we know today as the Strait of Magellan or the Strait of Magellan. It is a thousand-kilometre-long maze of channels and bays surrounded by an uninhabited and inhospitable landscape, dubbed the Land of Fire because of its unusual terrestrial phenomena. After 38 days of extremely arduous navigation through the Strait, the sailors finally saw the vast calm sea and even the Commander-in-Chief himself wept with happiness. The ocean was named the Pacific Ocean because it was much calmer and easier to navigate than before.
But the worst part of the journey has only just begun. Soon, food supplies began to dwindle and there was no end in sight to the harrowing voyage. The crew only escaped cannibalism attempts because Magellan demanded that all corpses be thrown overboard immediately. The menu thus consisted of ship’s rats, boot soles, mast wood, leather, mouldy rusks, dirty water, etc. The scurvy continued, but after three months the crew finally saw land – the first Europeans to disembark in the Philippines in March 1521, more than a year and a half after their departure. Shortly afterwards, they got into a fight with one of the tribes who refused to convert to Christianity, and Magellan was killed by the natives.
They reached their original destination, the Moluccas or Fragrant Islands, on 6 November 1521, with a crew of only 115 men. They bought valuable spices and sailed west to Spain.
This literally epic voyage ended in September 1522, when a single ship, the Victoria, and just 18 sailors returned to Spain. 265 of them had set sail. The man credited with bringing them home was the last captain of the crew, Juán Sebastián Elcano. History had sidelined him. But history has not forgotten this dramatic story of rebellions, exotic faraway lands, disease, death, cruelty, missionary zeal, political and economic power grabs and the incredible discoveries that the Earth is indeed round, America is not part of the Far East and the planet is mostly covered by oceans.
Another thrilling adventure story, full of shocking twists and turns, but with far more bloodthirsty consequences, set in the same year that Magellan’s fleet left Spain. It was written by Hernan Cortés, who, like Magellan, was in the right place at the right time.
Hernan Cortés, profession – conquistador
From an early age, Cortés wandered the ports of Spain, listening to the stories of sailors returning from distant lands with ships loaded with gold, jewellery, gems and many other valuables. Then, in 1504, aged just nineteen, he set sail on board a relative’s ship for the new Spanish colonies and, in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he quickly climbed the social ladder and became rich, owning a large amount of land and Indian slaves. But all this was not enough for the young, quickly bored Cortés.
At that time, the Spanish were sending more and more exploratory expeditions from the Caribbean islands to the mainland, as word spread of an exotic, fairy-tale-rich kingdom supposedly located somewhere in the heart of Central America. Cortés, sensing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to realise his golden dream, pledged all his wealth and offered to part-finance the new expedition himself – buying firearms, cannons, navigational equipment and horses. He was the most heavily armed European to set foot on the continent and the first to use gunpowder. In addition to all the harm he inflicted on the natives, he also ‘gave’ them the European way of warfare and mass killing.
With 11 ships, 10 cannons, 16 horses and 550 men, the expedition set sail for the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula in February 1519. A Spaniard, who had lived with the local Mayan tribes for eight years after the shipwreck and had learned their language, soon joined the expedition. He became Cortés’ first interpreter. And when Cortés’ men were victorious in their first battles with the coastal natives, they were joined by a second interpreter, the legendary La Malinche. In addition to gold and food, the defeated Maya gave the Spaniards twenty slaves, including La Malinche, known as Doña Marina after her conversion to the Catholic faith. La Malinche was a noblewoman and, as a well-educated woman, she spoke the Aztec dialect, Nahuatl, as well as the Mayan language. Thus, Cortés was able to communicate with both the Maya and the Aztecs with the help of the two interpreters.
La Malinche is still a controversial historical figure today, as she probably played a key role in Cortés’s success as an intermediary. For the locals, she was a traitor who even bore the conquistador a son – Martin Cortés was one of the first townsmen and one of Cortés’ favourite children. There were many of them, because Cortés was not only a conqueror of new lands, but also of many women’s hearts on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hundreds of kilometres of poisonous snakes and spiders swarmed along the deadly route to the heart of Mexico, accompanied by jaguars, wild beasts and hostile natives, and ghostly piles of human skulls. The Aztecs had been waiting for them like a grim foreboding.
Aztec civilisation before the arrival of the Spaniards
Down the steep steps of a mighty pyramid in the middle of an immaculately landscaped public square rolled another corpse of a sacrificed prisoner, whose heart was first ripped out before being beheaded alive. This is one of the most powerful surviving images of the memory of Aztec civilisation, which reached its peak in the mid-15th century and came to an inglorious end just 70 years later with the death of the Aztec ruler Montezuma II. In the three years between 1519 and 1521, a small number of Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernán Cortés, brought one of the most powerful empires of all time to its knees.
Today, many historians are convinced that the Aztecs were in many ways responsible for their own demise. They built their empire on a shaky foundation of fear-mongering and superstition.
The Aztecs settled in what is now Mexico around 1200 and evolved from a relatively modest tribe into one of the most militaristic conquering peoples of Central America, with a highly developed culture and a complex religious and social system. Their mighty kingdom was the last to emerge in this region in a rich 3,000-year Central American history, stretching from the shores of the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, from present-day Mexico in the north to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in the south. Before European conquests and deadly diseases, hitherto unknown in that part of the world, literally starved the population, there were around twenty-five million indigenous people in the whole of central Mexico. Spain, for example, had only about eight and a half million people at that time.
The Aztecs subjugated hundreds of tribes and at least ten million people, but some peoples managed to resist them and later helped to bring about their decline on the side of the Spaniards.
The Aztec culture and way of life was based on strong religious beliefs and rituals. They believed that they could only thank the gods for their prosperity by continuously sacrificing fresh human blood, and that if they stopped sacrificing, the sun would stop shining. The relentlessness of ritual sacrifice reached unimaginable proportions; many estimates suggest that at least 20,000 people a year were sacrificed, some as many as 80,000! They needed a regular flow of victims and were therefore constantly attacking unconquered peoples. If they still could not round up enough prisoners, the Aztecs themselves would voluntarily lay down on the altar of sacrifice. Often, the losers of the popular Aztec ball game, tlatchtli, would end up on the sacrificial stone.
The rituals were chilling. Most often, the victim’s heart was first removed, exposed to the sun and then beheaded or skinned. The priests would put it on and dance ritual dances while cooking the human organs to be eaten later. Different gods of the Aztec pantheon demanded different sacrifices, but the frequency and brutality was common to all.
Even the conquistadors, who excelled in the brutality of their killing techniques, were sickened by such cruelty and by the sight of 136,000 skulls stacked in rows in the capital’s main temple. But many of the descriptions of these ritual sacrifices were written by the conquistadors, who often tried to justify their own actions. As one of them said: “These and other things are testimonies with which we Spaniards accuse the Indians /…/ because we try to cover up our own weaknesses by what we say about them and to justify our mistreatment of them.”
When we look down on Aztec ritual sacrifice, we also quickly forget that at the same time, the Inquisition was flourishing in Europe, resulting in mass persecutions and killings, most often the burning of witches and wizards at the stake. It is difficult to say which killing practice is more primitive, but in the name of religion, blood has flowed in various parts of the world, as it has so many times before and so many times since.
But other aspects of Aztec culture and way of life were admirable. They had highly enlightened educational standards, a complex script and calendar, a sophisticated postal service and a sophisticated legal system. They were outstanding astronomers, architects and engineers and were noted for their beautiful roads, bridges and aqueducts that brought fresh drinking water from the nearby mountains to the cities. Most Europeans at the time drew their drinking water from dirty and often contaminated rivers.
They respected nature, and family and community were important values, as were generosity and hospitality. They took good care of the helpless and the elderly. They spent a lot of time improving the environment and employed civil servants to look after the many parks, gardens and tree plantations. They also collected taxes on a regular basis, and each subject province had to deliver annually to the imperial capital, among other things, 7000 tonnes of corn and 4000 tonnes of beans.
Their hygiene standards would be the envy of many places in the world today. Personal cleanliness was paramount, and the Spaniards were said to have overused soap and anti-odour products. The Aztec ruler Montezuma II, for example, bathed and perfumed himself twice a day.
Over time, they developed a hierarchically ordered society with a warrior elite, and all boys were subjected to rigorous military training, which further consolidated their dominance over neighbouring peoples. During battle expeditions, they did not kill their opponents, but gathered them for their sacrificial rites.
The Aztecs were also overly superstitious. The many apocalyptic omens they received just before the Spanish arrived – from floods, fires, comets, the eruption of the Popocatépetl volcano – predicted a dark future. According to the prophecy, their god Quetzalcoatl would return among them in 1519 in the form of a bearded and pale man. Cortés’s appearance was a perfect match for this much-anticipated god.
They destroyed a kingdom, one of the happiest in the world
Montezuma’s vanguards followed the small Spanish army from afar, and when it was almost at the gates of the capital, Tenochtitlan, they came to meet it officially and lavished it with lavish gifts. The superstitious Montezuma, because of the many prophetic signs, insisted on being received with full honours. The Aztecs, who outnumbered them a thousand to one, would easily have defeated them or at least driven them away, thus turning the tide of history in their favour. But the honourable military tradition of these places demanded that war should always be declared against the enemy and that the reasons for war should be clear. And since Cortés had falsely declared that he was coming in peace, the reasons for war did not (yet) exist.
When Cortés’ men saw the magnificent Tenochtitlan, the stunning centre of Aztec greatness on an island in the middle of a great lake, they thought they were dreaming. It was reached by many intricately laid-out waterways, where thousands of small boats passed daily on their errands, and it was also a magnificent floating garden, echoing with the songs of many beautiful exotic birds. At the time of the Spanish arrival, it had a population of at least 300,000, more than any other European city. London and Seville were then five times smaller.
In one of his letters to King Charles V of Spain, Cortés wrote, among other things: “This is the most beautiful, the richest place that has ever existed. /…/ All these houses have very large and comfortable rooms and also very pleasant gardens and all kinds of flowers. /…/ They even had servants in charge of the sweeping.” He described the splendour, the folk rites, the order, the wealth, the surroundings, the gold mines, and added: “I cannot describe to you even a hundredth part of all the things I could mention, but I will describe /…/ some of the things I have seen, which are /…/ so astonishing that it is impossible to believe, because even we who have seen them with our own eyes have not been able to comprehend them.”
In addition to the two huge, beautiful pyramids – mainly for ceremonial purposes – that stood with dignity in the middle of the city, the Spaniards were impressed by the large marketplaces, the centre of Aztec commerce, where all kinds of goods, food, ornaments and tools made of gold, silver, lead, copper, tin, shells, bones, feathers and much more were exchanged daily. They could no longer contain their lust for all this luxury.
Montezuma also housed them in luxurious palaces and gave them everything they wanted, without suspecting that on the road to Tenochtitlan, the Spanish had made numerous alliances with peoples hostile to the Aztecs, who were only waiting for revenge. When Cortés tricked Montezuma into taking him hostage and imprisoning him and his entire court in his own palace, the Aztecs lost their leader and the stage was set for a Spanish coup.
After many complications, the Spaniards surrounded one of the public celebrations and “the Indians, who still did not understand the purpose of the conquistadors, thought that they were merely admiring their style of dancing, playing and singing, and therefore continued to celebrate and sing.”
Then the attack began: ‘The first Spaniards to rush into the fray attacked the musicians who were playing for the singers and dancers. They cut off their hands and heads, so that they fell dead on the ground. Then other Spaniards also began to chop off the heads, arms and legs of the Indians and to paralyse their stomachs. Some were beheaded, others were cut in two, others had their stomachs ripped open and died instantly. Others dragged their intestines behind them until they staggered. /…/ There was so much bloody slime and intestines in the courtyard, and the stench was so overpowering that the scene was horrifying and heart-rending. When almost all the natives had fainted and gasped for breath, the Spaniards went hunting for those who had climbed the temple and those who had hidden among the dead, and killed all those they found alive.”
When the Aztecs finally realised what was happening and prepared to retaliate, the Spanish sent Montezuma, chained, to beg for peace. This act of betrayal, as the Aztecs perceived it, cost Montezuma his life – no one knows whether he was killed by the Spaniards, who were no longer of any use to him, or by the frustrated Aztecs themselves. Cortés’ army soon realised that it was not doing well and, after two weeks of fighting, retreated to safety.
But in addition to the devastation, they left the Aztecs another killer gift – smallpox. While Cortés was gaining strength, the Aztecs were succumbing in their thousands to this disease, which first appeared in the New World in Hispaniola in 1518 and spread throughout the Americas within a few years.
The unprecedented plague continues
At a time when the Aztec empire was completely weakened by the smallpox epidemic, Cortés also had to defend himself against the siblings sent by Spain to cut the conquistador’s wings and take over the reins of New Spain, as Mexico was then called. But once again he had the last word and most of them joined his army. He returned to Tenochtitlan with some 150,000 warriors of the Aztec-loathing peoples to raze it to the ground.
They first besieged the city to rally the inhabitants, which was the exact opposite of the Aztec way of fighting – they sent food to their opponents along with a declaration of war, so that they would not dishonour the weak. The Europeans’ backwards way of warfare was alien to them.
Cortés continued the tradition of writing letters to the King of Spain, even though he knew that he was no longer (any longer) on the best of terms with him. This is how he described the second, this time openly belligerent, attack on Tenochtitlan:
“We have just learned from two wretched creatures who escaped from the city and came to our camp during the night that they are starving to death /…/ I decided to invade the city the next morning just before dawn and do as much damage as possible /…/ and we encountered a huge number of people. As they were the greatest wretches and were looking for food, they were almost all unarmed, mainly women and children. /…/ That day we just burned and razed houses to the ground /…/, which was a really sad sight, but we had to do it because there was no other way to achieve our goal. /…/ The crying of the women and children was so loud that there was not a man among us whose heart did not bleed at the sound. /…/”
Soon Tenochtitlan and its 300,000 inhabitants were no more. The conquistadors now embarked on an unrestrained grab. Unfortunately, they did not realise the value of the gold and silver artworks and melted most of them down. By agreement with the King, Cortéz was given as much as one-fifth of all the booty, including slaves for his personal use, but he treated them so badly that only one-tenth of them remained when he died in 1547.
The Aztec Empire fell in 30 months and Cortés built Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, on its ruins. They banned ritual sacrifice and introduced Christianity, encouraging marriages between Spanish and native women to bring a modicum of peace to the land. Cortés also married La Malinche.
Meanwhile, his contemporaries and successors continued the conquest. There are many accounts of reporters, often priests, who went with the conquistadors to convert people. On these journeys they were accompanied by packs of dogs specially trained to hunt human victims. “To many of the conquistadors, the Indians were just another wild animal among many, and the dogs were trained to track down human prey and tear it apart with the same zeal they felt when hunting wild beasts.” Murdered babies were left along the roads as markers to help them find their way from one place to another.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican priest who became increasingly vocal in his warnings about the cruel and sadistic treatment of the locals, wrote: “They have destroyed a kingdom that is one of the happiest in the world in terms of birth rate and population. /…/ From 1525 to 1540, they killed more than four or five million people.”
The cruellest of the conquistadors, who managed an even bigger gold throw than Cortés, was his distant relative, Francisco Pizarro. After the destruction of the greatest Central American civilisation, it was the turn of the greatest South American civilisation – the Incas.
Prologue to the end of the Inca Empire
Unlike the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire was based on integration and cooperation with neighbouring and subordinate peoples. For example, the Incas integrated defeated peoples into their armies, facilitating a more peaceful cohabitation. But just like the Aztecs, it was a small group of bloodthirsty Spanish conquistadors, ready to do anything, that brought about their destruction. It is hard to imagine that the Inca destroyers were even more cruel than the contemporaries who destroyed the Aztecs.
There are many parallels between the two empires. Both peoples are humble in origin, built on the achievements of millennia of civilisations, and rose rapidly to imperial status, peaking between the 14th and 15th centuries. Both were remarkable scientists and engineers, most admirably the Inca road links, which stretched for more than 40,000 kilometres between mountains and coasts. In this, the Incas surpassed even the Roman Empire. Some Inca roads are still in use today! The same is true of the magnificent stone temples that still stand today, built without cement, each stone carved to fit perfectly into the stone beneath it. – Such construction has survived many an earthquake.
They were also impressive agronomists who perfected terraced agriculture, which, despite the harsh mountain weather conditions – often above 3000 metres above sea level – allowed them to grow a wide variety of crops, such as maize, potatoes, squash, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts and even coca, which until then had only thrived in the Amazon jungle, as it needs warmth and moisture. Coca leaves are still eaten in these places today to help them cope with the thin air at such high altitudes.
The Inca Empire was huge – it included Peru, parts of Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Colombia – and its excellent organisation earned it a reputation as the Roman Empire of South America. Peru alone is the size of about five Great Britain, and the Inca rulers could not have controlled such a large area without a well-organised centralised state apparatus. Like the Aztecs, they reorganised the traditional tribal structure to create a skilled military and noble elite. Their postal system was fascinating, based as it was on human runners who carried messages daily between towns hundreds of kilometres away, high in the mountains.
Religion was also at the centre of Inca life, and although they were not so obsessed with sacrifice, they often sacrificed women and children, first by getting them drunk and then by strangling or burying them alive. According to Spanish records, in 1524, on the death of one of the rulers, 4 000 servants, officials and concubines were killed in his honour. The sacrifices were also highly valued among the Incas.
Perhaps the most admirable aspect of the Inca surgical skills and knowledge of anatomy was their knowledge of skull surgery, which was most often performed on adult males. These operations were most likely performed after severe head trauma from combat, whereby parts of the skull were cut out to relieve the pressure caused by internal bleeding. This procedure, which was carried out with incredible frequency, is called trepanation and still exists today in a very similar form. By the 15th century, it had been perfected to such an extent that 90 % of people who underwent such surgery survived. The anaesthetic used was herbs, which they knew very well, coca and intoxicating drinks.
At the time Pizarro began to prepare his conquest, in 1527, the empire was in the throes of a civil war sparked by a dispute between two brothers over the succession. The victor, Atahualpa, did not enjoy victory for long. Another parallel between the Incas and the Aztecs was the belief in the return of the pale bearded god, and Pizarro, like Cortés, fit this prophecy perfectly.
An epilogue that lasted for decades
Illiterate and self-important, Pizarro, who was ‘just’ a pig herder in his native Spain, crossed the Atlantic with the same idea as the other conquistadors, namely that there was an inexhaustible source of gold waiting for him. He settled for a time in Panama and was a crony of the notorious Núñez de Balboa, better known for being the first European to see the Pacific from the continent. He honed his treacherous tactics and manoeuvres – one of which saw de Balboa lose his head as a traitor. Pizarro was also one of the most bloodthirsty, burning out the eyes of Indian chiefs for gold, chopping off arms, legs, heads and ears.
When he was convinced enough, after many tales, that there was a fairy kingdom somewhere in the south even richer than the Aztec one, and when he watched Cortés’ successes with envy, he returned first to his native Spain to seek the royal blessing to penetrate southwards and, above all, to find loyal companions. These were his four half-brothers and his closest friends. The Inca invasion was a mafia and family enterprise that lasted for many decades.
Many of Pizarro’s commanders were also important researchers. Francisco de Orellana, for example, was the first to sail the entire Amazon, while Diego de Almagro crossed the Atacama Desert and “discovered” Chile.
In 1532, Pizarro set out for the heart of the Inca Kingdom with some 200 well-armed soldiers. When the conquistadors reached the top of the Andes, 5000 metres high, one of them said: “Breathing this thin air causes severe pain in the lungs and our procession moves like a wounded animal, this is all we want, to end these torments as soon as possible.”
The Incas watched them every step of the way and carried news of their progress to the capital, Cuzco, home of Atahualpa. The latter saw this small group of people as a curiosity rather than a threat and half-believed, however, that they might be the Inca god Viracocha. But that hope was dashed when the Pizarros attacked a group of unarmed Incas for the first time.
Nevertheless, Atahualpa received Pizzar with honours on his arrival in Cuzco, but when Pizzar tried to convert him to the Catholic faith, the proud Inca ruler refused. The Spaniards had the perfect excuse to take him hostage. Atahualpa promised them a huge room filled to the top with gold and gold objects in return for his freedom, but when he fulfilled his agreement, Pizarro nevertheless had him treacherously murdered. They cut off his head and burned him, which was the worst insult to the Incas, who believed that this way of dying meant that the deceased could not go beyond the grave.
This was the start of a protracted battle for complete domination of the vast Inca territory, and the last Inca stronghold fell in 1572 after years of courageous guerrilla warfare against the invaders. At this time, there was also rivalry between the Spanish clans themselves, on the one hand the Pizarro and, on the other, above all the de Almagro. Pizarro himself died a violent death before founding Peru’s new capital, Lima. Peru soon became the richest Spanish colony of all time, with no end in sight to the gold and silver of the Andean mountains. Even today, art dealers still rub their hands in it, for example in 1987, huge tombs from Inca times were found in northern Peru, hitherto overlooked, filled with gold and beautiful masks.
Glorification of colonialism
Both seafarers like Magellan and their grim counterparts, the conquistadors, were the forerunners of a new, Eurocentric, world order. It is true that the conquistadors, the conquerors, differed from the first explorers of the new age in their cruelty and brutality, but their aim was the same – to subjugate the world, politically, economically, culturally and religiously. In the process, they caused the collapse of great civilisations and wiped out hundreds of indigenous peoples; by some estimates, 90 % of indigenous peoples died out between the 15th and 16th centuries.
The first vocal opponents of such brutality were priests, such as the famous de las Casas, who accompanied the expeditions to help convert people to Christianity. They did get the Spanish monarchs to try to clip the wings of the conquistadors, but, intoxicated by luxury themselves, they never intended to stop colonialism. The glorification of the personality of the conquistadors and the idealised perception of the colonial era are still present in many ways today – Cortés, for example, was still adorning the Spanish currency, the peso, in 1992!
