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Civil war was probably unavoidable. Egged on by scheming courtiers and generals, relations between Atawallpa and Washkar spent several years swinging through the emotional valence from concealed suspicion to overt hostility. Washkar, in Qosqo, had the machinery of the state at his disposal; in addition, his claim to the fringe was generally accepted. Atawallpa, in Ecuador, had a war-tested army and the best generals but a weaker claim to the throne (his mother was merely his father’s cousin, not his sister). The war lasted for more than three years, seesawed across the Andes, and was spectacularly brutal. Washkar’s forces seized the initial advantage, invading Ecuador and actually capturing Atawallpa, almost tearing off one of his ears in the process. In a sequence reminiscent of Hollywood, one of Atawallpa’s wives supposedly smuggled a crowbar-like tool into his improvised battlefield prison (his intoxicated guards permitted a conjugal visit). Atawallpa dug his way out, escaped to Ecuador, reassembled his army, and drove his foes south. On a plateau near today’s Peru-Ecuador border the northern forces personally led by Atawallpa shattered Washkar’s army. A decade later Cieza de León saw the battleground and from the wreckage and unburied remains thought the dead could have numbered sixteen thousand. The victors captured and beheaded Washkar’s main general. Atawallpa mounted a bowl atop the skull, inserted a spout between the teeth, and used it as a cup for his
chicha.

With the momentum of war turning against him, Washkar left Qosqo to lead his own army. Atawallpa sent his forces ahead to meet it. After a horrific battle (Cieza de León estimated the dead at thirty-five thousand), Washkar was captured in an ambush in the summer of 1532. Atawallpa’s generals took the Inka as a captive to Qosqo and executed his wives, children, and relatives in front of him. Meanwhile, Atawallpa’s triumphant cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty thousand strong, slowly promenaded to Qosqo. In October or November 1532, the victors stopped outside the small city of Cajamarca, where they learned that pale, hairy people who sat on enormous animals had landed on the coast.

No matter how many times what happened next has been recounted, it has not lost its power to shock: how the curious Atawallpa decided to wait for the strangers’ party to arrive; how Pizarro, for it was he, persuaded Atawallpa to visit the Spaniards in the central square of Cajamarca, which was surrounded on three sides by long, empty buildings (the town apparently had been evacuated for the war); how on November 16, 1532, the emperor-to-be came to Cajamarca in his gilded and feather-decked litter, preceded by a squadron of liveried men who swept the ground and followed by five or six thousand troops, almost all of whom bore only ornamental, parade-type weapons; how Pizarro hid his horses and cannons just within the buildings lining the town square, where the 168 Spanish awaited the Inka with such fear, Pedro Pizarro noted, that many “made water without knowing it out of sheer terror”; how a Spanish priest presented Atawallpa with a travel-stained Christian breviary, which the Inka, to whom it literally meant nothing, impatiently threw aside, providing the Spanish with a legal fig leaf for an attack (desecrating Holy Writ); how the Spanish, firing cannons, wearing armor, and mounted on horses, none of which the Indians had ever seen, suddenly charged into the square; how the Indians were so panicked by the smoke and fire and steel and charging animals that in trying to flee hundreds trampled each other to death (“they formed mounds and suffocated one another,” one conquistador wrote); how the Spanish took advantage of the soldiers’ lack of weaponry to kill almost all the rest; how the native troops who recovered from their initial surprise desperately clustered around Atawallpa, supporting his litter with their shoulders even after Spanish broadswords sliced off their hands; how Pizarro personally dragged down the emperor-to-be and hustled him through the heaps of bodies on the square to what would become his prison.

Pizarro exulted less in victory than one might imagine. A self-made man, the illiterate, illegitimate, neglected son of an army captain, he ached with dreams of wealth and chivalric glory despite the fortune he had already acquired in the Spanish colonies. After landing in Peru he realized that his tiny force was walking into the maw of a powerful empire. Even after his stunning triumph in Cajamarca he remained torn between fear and ambition. For his part, Atawallpa observed the power of Inka gold and silver to cloud European minds.
^*9
Precious metals were not valuable in the same way in Tawantinsuyu, because there was no currency. To the Inka ruler, the foreigners’ fascination with gold apparently represented his best chance to manipulate the situation to his advantage. He offered to fill a room twenty-two feet by seventeen feet full of gold objects—and two equivalent rooms with silver—in exchange for his freedom. Pizarro quickly agreed to the plan.

Atawallpa, still in command of the empire, ordered his generals to strip Qosqo of its silver and gold. Not having lived in the city since childhood, he had little attachment to it. He also told his men to slay Washkar, whom they still held captive; all of Washkar’s main supporters; and, while they were at it, all of Atawallpa’s surviving brothers. After his humiliating captivity ended, Atawallpa seems to have believed, the ground would be clear for his rule.

Between December 1532 and May 1533, caravans of precious objects—jewelry, fine sculptures, architectural ornamentation—wended on llama-back to Cajamarca. As gold and silver slowly filled the rooms, all of Tawantinsuyu seemed frozen. It was as if someone had slipped into the Kremlin in 1950 and held Stalin at gunpoint, leaving the nation, accustomed to obeying a tyrant, utterly rudderless. Meanwhile, the waiting Spanish, despite their unprecedented success, grew increasingly fearful and suspicious. When Atawallpa fulfilled his half of the bargain and the ransom was complete Pizarro melted everything into ingots and shipped them to Spain. The conquistadors did not follow through on their part of the deal. Rather than releasing Atawallpa, they garroted him. Then they marched to Qosqo.

Almost at a stroke, just 168 men had dealt a devastating blow to the greatest empire on earth. To be sure, their victory was nowhere near complete: huge, bloody battles still lay ahead. Even after the conquistadors seized Qosqo, the empire regrouped in the hinterlands, where it fought off Spanish forces for another forty years. Yet the scale of Pizarro’s triumph at Cajamarca cannot be gainsaid. He had routed a force fifty times larger than his own, won the greatest ransom ever seen, and vanquished a cultural tradition that had lasted five millennia—all without suffering a single casualty.

VIRGIN SOIL

I have just pulled a fast one. The Inka history above is as contemporary scholars understand it. They disagree on which social factors to emphasize and on how much weight to assign individual Spanish chronicles, but the outline seems not in serious dispute. The same is not true of my rendering of Pizarro’s conquest. I presented what is more or less the account current when Dobyns arrived in Peru. But in his reading he discovered a hole in this version of events—a factor so critical that it drastically changed Dobyns’s view of native America.

Why did the Inka lose? The usual answer is that Pizarro had two advantages: steel (swords and armor, rifles and cannons) and horses. The Indians had no steel weapons and no animals to ride (llamas are too small to carry grown men). They also lacked the wheel and the arch. With such inferior technology, Tawantinsuyu had no chance. “What could [the Inka] offer against this armory?” asked John Hemming, the conquest historian. “They were still fighting in the bronze age.” The Inka kept fighting after Atawallpa’s death. But even though they outnumbered the Europeans by as much as a hundred to one, they always lost. “No amount of heroism or discipline by an Inka army,” Hemming wrote, “could match the military superiority of the Spaniards.”

But just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inka used metal for almost nothing useful. In the late 1960s, Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, suggested to “an eminent scholar of Andean prehistory that we take a serious and careful look at Andean metallurgy.” He responded, “But there wasn’t any.” Lechtman went and looked anyway. She discovered that Inka metallurgy was, in fact, as refined as European metallurgy, but that it had such different goals that academic experts had not even recognized it.

According to Lechtman, Europeans sought to optimize metals’ “hardness, strength, toughness, and sharpness.” The Inka, by contrast, valued “plasticity, malleability, and toughness.” Europeans used metal for tools. Andean societies primarily used it as a token of wealth, power, and community affiliation. European metalworkers tended to create metal objects by pouring molten alloys into shaped molds. Such foundries were not unknown to the Inka, but Andean societies vastly preferred to hammer metal into thin sheets, form the sheets around molds, and solder the results. The results were remarkable by any standard—one delicate bust that Lechtman analyzed was less than an inch tall but made of twenty-two separate gold plates painstakingly joined.

If a piece of jewelry or a building ornament was to proclaim its owner’s status, as the Inka desired, it needed to shine. Luminous gold and silver were thus preferable to dull iron. Because pure gold and silver are too soft to hold their shape, Andean metalworkers mixed them with other metals, usually copper. This strengthened the metal but turned it an ugly pinkish-copper color. To create a lustrous gold surface, Inka smiths heated the copper-gold alloy, which increases the rate at which the copper atoms on the surface combine with oxygen atoms in the air—it makes the metal corrode faster. Then they pounded the hot metal with mallets, making the corrosion flake off the outside. By repeating this process many times, they removed the copper atoms from the surface of the metal, creating a veneer of almost pure gold. Ultimately the Inka ended up with strong sheets of metal that glittered in the sun.

Andean cultures did make tools, of course. But rather than making them out of steel, they preferred fiber. The choice is less odd than it may seem. Mechanical engineering depends on two main forces: compression and tension. Both are employed in European technology, but the former is more common—the arch is a classic example of compression. By contrast, tension was the Inka way. “Textiles are held together by tension,” William Conklin, a research associate at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., told me. “And they exploited that tension with amazing inventiveness and precision.”

In the technosphere of the Andes, Lechtman explained, “people solved basic engineering problems through the manipulation of fibers,” not by creating and joining hard wooden or metal objects. To make boats, Andean cultures wove together reeds rather than cutting up trees into planks and nailing them together. Although smaller than big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-muddlers; Europeans first encountered Tawantinsuyu in the form of an Inka ship sailing near the equator, three hundred miles from its home port, under a load of fine cotton sails. It had a crew of twenty and was easily the size of a Spanish caravelle. Famously, the Inka used foot-thick cables to make suspension bridges across mountain gorges. Because Europe had no bridges without supports below, they initially terrified Pizarro’s men. Later one conquistador reassured his countrymen that they could walk across these Inka inventions “without endangering themselves.”

Andean textiles were woven with great precision—elite garments could have a thread count of five hundred per inch—and structured in elaborate layers. Soldiers wore armor made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was almost as effective at shielding the body as European armor and much lighter. After trying it, the conquistadors ditched their steel breastplates and helmets wholesale and dressed like Inka infantry when they fought.

Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces, and clubs, their most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made of cloth. A sling is a woven pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch, picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment. Expert users could hurl a stone, the Spanish adventurer Alonso Enríquez de Guzmán wrote, “with such force that it will kill a horse…. I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a sling, break a swordin two pieces when it was held in a man’s hand at a distance of thirty paces.” (Experimenting with a five-foot-long, Andean-style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to my rough calculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was terrible, though.)

In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in campfires until they were red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in midair. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a counterattack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone. Rather than evacuate, the Spanish, as brave as they were greedy, fought to the end. In a desperate, last-ditch counterattack, the Europeans eked out victory.

More critical than steel to Pizarro’s success was the horse. The biggest animal in the Andes during Inka times was the llama, which typically weighs three hundred pounds. Horses, four times as massive, were profoundly, terribly novel. Add to this the shock of observing humans somehow astride their backs like half-bestial nightmare figures and it is possible to imagine the dismay provoked by Pizarro’s cavalry. Not only did Inka infantrymen have to overcome their initial stupefaction, their leaders had to reinvent their military tactics while in the midst of an invasion. Mounted troops were able to move at rates never encountered in Tawantinsuyu. “Even when the Indians had posted pickets,” Hemming observed, “the Spanish cavalry could ride past them faster than the sentries could run back to warn of danger.” In clash after clash, “the dreaded horses proved invincible.” But horses are not
inherently
unbeatable; the Inka simply did not discover quickly enough where they had an advantage: on their roads.