644. The Fall of the Incas: Empire of Gold (Part 1)

0:10My name is Martin. I'm a soldier of Spain and that's it. Most of my life I've spent fighting for land, treasure, and the cross. I'm worth millions soon I'll be dead and they'll bury me out here in Peru the land I helped ruin as a boy this story is about ruin ruin and gold more gold than any of you will ever see even if you work in a counting house I'm going to tell you how 167 men conquered an empire of 24 million. And then things that no one has ever told, things to make you groan and cry out I'm lying. And perhaps I am. The air of Peru is cold and sour like in a vault, and wits turn easier here even than in Europe.

1:09But grant me this, I saw him closer than anyone and had cause only to love him. He was my altar, my bright image of salvation. Francisco Pizarro. And the only wish of my life is that I'd never seen him. So that is the beginning of Peter Schaffer's play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. It was written for the National Theatre in 1964. So an English play, which is why that Spanish soldier has an English accent, just for people who are wondering. And The Royal Hunt of the Sun was then made into a Hollywood film. And it starred Robert Shaw as Francisco Pizarro, or Dominic as Hispanophiles would call him Francisco.

1:58Very good film. Very nice. But we're going to call him Francisco Pizarro in this. And also very improbably, coming off The Sound of Music, Christopher Plummer as Atahualpa. the great Inca and it has to be said that he has a much deeper tan and a much smoother chest than he had in The Sound of Music and it is actually quite shocking to think that from that film which came out in 1969 he would go on to play the Duke of Wellington in Waterloo which came out the following year so slightly mind boggling but listen we're not talking about films because this series is going to be one of the most epic, one of the most astonishing we've ever done and it tells the story of one of the most extraordinary episodes in the whole of world history isn't it yes so the exoticism and the drama of the story captured by that play which is a brilliant play by the way so this is the story of the conquest of the empire of the incas an empire that stretched from north to south some 2 500 miles it was the longest empire in history and it ruled millions of people probably not 24 million as they claim in the play but still a lot and it's conquered by a few hundred Spanish conquistadors, so fewer than 200 really.

3:11It's an adventure story with an amazing range of characters, so two of them you've mentioned, the doomed emperor Atahualpa, played by Christopher Plummer, and the man in that reading, the illiterate Spanish buccaneer, Francisco Pizarro. But it's one of these hinge moments in world history. It's a landmark in the story of colonialism. And actually, I sort of thought of this is the third part of a trilogy. So in February 2023, we did a series about Columbus's voyages to the Caribbean. So that was episode 306 onwards. They love us to give the numbers, Tom. Then in the autumn of 2023, we did an epic series, at that time our longest, about the fall of the Aztecs, the conquest of Mexico.

3:50That was number 385 onwards. We've said that the conquest of Peru is one of the most extraordinary stories ever told. But I mean, the mad thing is, is that the conquest of Mexico is as well. Yeah. And this is the sequel, really. I mean, it really is the sequel because everybody who's taking part in this adventure has that model in their minds. So what would you call it? Alien Contact 2. Yes, I guess so. It's the return of the king to the two towers of the fall of the Aztecs. And the amazing thing about this is it's one of those sequels that is just as good as the prequel. Definitely it is. Definitely.

4:25So we're a few years after the fall of the Aztecs. We'll be telling the story of Pizarro's first expeditions in the 1520s. his arrival in Peru in 1532, the capture and murder of the Inca emperor Atahualpa, the battle for the Inca capital of Cuzco, the flight of the Incas into the jungle, and the story of the legendary city of Vilcabamba, which was the last refuge, the lost refuge, actually, of the last Incas. So it's a very, very melodramatic story, and we shouldn't waste any more time before plunging right in. And maybe, Tom, we should start with our protagonist. so that's the man that martin who you voiced so splendidly is uh talking about in that introduction and this is the conquistador who changed the lives of millions of people francisco pizarro francisco yeah and we will as in the aztec series we will be trying to reflect the linguistic diversity of the newly united spain by doing a huge range of spanish accents from different regions and pronunciations there will be no internal consistency but a word of warning for our American listeners, we will not be pronouncing them in the strange way that you do.

5:31So you just have to suck that up. Right. So Pizarro, hero, villain, it's for the listeners to decide. He's born in 1478 or so in a place called Trujillo in Extremadura, which is the kind of wild west of Spain. Has a lot of stalks. Yes, exactly. A lot of castles. It's sun bleached. It's a very poor country, very violent, bandits. Spaghetti Western, isn't it? Spaghetti Western territory yes it's kind of place that basically you leave if you want to be successful which is why so many of the conquistadors enan cortez and francisco pizarro most famously came from extramadura and you can leave because it is a land that breeds tough men so francisco is the illegitimate son of an infantry officer who belonged to the minor nobility and his mother was a servant girl with whom this infantry officer had had a liaison she brought him up he never learns so he's very unlike Hernan Cortes he never learns to read and write later on people would say to mock him that he was a former pig herder he'd herded pigs in the fields which is perfectly plausible because there's lots of pigs in extremity famous for its ham but he seems to have been welcome at the Pizarro family mansion in the town square and there very probably he first met a distant cousin a much younger boy called Hernan Cortez whose mother was a Pizarro and was from the Pizarro clan.

6:55In the late 1490s when he was in his teens he may have gone with his father to fight in the wars in Italy can't be sure but if he did he didn't stay there for long because if you're from Extremadura if you're keen to seek your fortune in the 1490s a much more exciting and lucrative place has just opened up when pizarro was 14 years old in 1492 columbus first sailed to the new world and when he is 17 years old so in 1495 the spanish monarchs ferdinand and isabella basically scrap uh columbus's monopoly and open up the indies to any spaniard who will pay them a share of the profits so this is now now the kind of gold rush as it were is on and by the end of the 15th century, hundreds of Spaniards, people from Pizarro's kind of background, are seeking their fortune on Hispaniola and Cuba and on the other Caribbean islands.

7:51And Pizarro is one of them. He actually went before Cortes did. He landed on Hispaniola in 1502 and he became a soldier and he made a name for himself as a man who will do what needs to be done. And basically doing what needs to be done is massacring the local people, the Tainos. I mean, just to add a kind of interesting detail on that, that there's going to be a lot of massacring coming. But a person who sailed with him on that expedition to Hispaniola was Bartolome de las Casas. Oh yeah. The man who, in due course, will become the great spokesman of the rights of the native peoples in America.

8:24And that is going to be an enduring tension throughout the course of Spanish history in the New World in the 16th century, which we should not forget about. I think as with the Aztec series, if you just think of the Spanish as blood-soaked greedy. That's not quite right. They were always arguing about what to do, but also a huge theme of this series, as it was in the previous one, they're very legalistic. They're always arguing about the sort of legal ramifications of what they're doing, and they're always traveling with notaries and stuff. And this whole kind of mad thing where they have to read out a statement, inviting the Native Americans to become Christians and submit to the Spanish king, which obviously is gibberish to the people who are listening to it, but that is going to be an ongoing theme isn't it now a big theme of the conquistadors experience was that so many of them this is the age of printed books so many of them arrive in the new world with their heads full of chivalric fantasies they're expecting to fight monsters and rescue maidens and they're very excited at the thought of adventure pizarro of course is different he may know of such things but he has never read one and he never will because he still can't read and write and actually some historians and indeed some Spanish chroniclers who later very harsh about him treat him as an illiterate thug I think that's a little bit harsh I think he's a much more straightforward man than Cortes was very feline wasn't he was vulpine yeah he was very Machiavelli yeah Pizarro is not a Machiavelli he's a he's a strong man he's a big bloke he's very tough everyone says he's daring he's more conservative than cortez so he wears black and austere kind of black and white costume which he wears all his life like philip the second yeah his pleasures are simple playing bowls kind of ball games do you think the um the kind of sense of him as an illiterate thug is reflecting class bias then on the part of chroniclers who despise him for his illiteracy yes a little bit a little bit and there's so much feuding that once um people are falling out with Pizarro they say oh you're a former pig herder you can't even read you're just a bruiser all of this but actually at the time his men generally saw him as quite an easygoing I mean definitely the Tainas didn't but his men saw him as an easygoing kind of chap so one of the things about the conquest of the Incas a lot of the conquistadors wrote memoirs about their time in Peru and of course those memoirs may be fictionalized or may be distorted but they're really interesting kind of insights into what went on and I mean you have a kind of critical massive accounts, you guess, I mean, they can't all just be made up, right?

10:56No. So one Spanish chronicler in one memoir said he was a good companion without any vanity or pomposity. A later chronicler who was actually half Inca called Garthelazo said he was kindly and gentle by nature and never said a hard word of anyone. I mean, how kindly and gentle Pizarro was, we shall discover he is a soldier's son from a very violent part of Spain. it is a very violent business and pizarro as we will find out will do whatever it takes and he will kill whomever he needs to kill in order to get out on top there is your shout line for the film he will kill whoever he must to come out on top okay wow that that's yeah i mean i can see it now um who is he played by robert shaw i mean i like robert shaw as an actor so for the next 20 years or so he's in the caribbean he's a pretty obscure figure so we talked in the columbus and Aztec series about the conquistadors and how they operated these chains of conquest they would basically have rival networks of entrepreneurial kind of freebooters and adventurers and whatnot who would be engaged in island hopping across the Caribbean getting closer and closer to the American mainland and obviously the most celebrated of all these networks of all these operations is Cortez's when Cortez went from Cuba to Mexico and then from there into Central America.

12:16Pizarro joins a different company from his cousins, a company operating much further south, and they're basically hacking their way through the jungles of Central America and Panama and stuff. Which is lacking in the kind of splendid civilizations that Cortez finds. So there is a slight sense that there's kind of a bit of luck, isn't there? Completely. It's like you're venture capitalists and you're investing in tech firms and some of them will pay off and some of them won't. And Pizarro's has not really paid off. That said, he's part of the group that become the first Europeans to lay eyes upon the Pacific.

12:45Yeah, so not Stout Cortez, as John Keats said. Got it wrong. No, it's Balboa. Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who leads that operation. And here's a very good example of how the conquistadors' lives work. Pizarro is standing with him when they look out on the waters of the Pacific. And six years later, it is Pizarro who arrests Balboa and brings him for execution in Panama because of the endemic feuding that is always tearing the conquistadors apart. So they're basically always worried. You know, you can team up with somebody and go on some amazing expedition and risk your life and whatnot. And three years later, that person will sink a knife into your back and steal all your money.

13:26Or you'll be involved in 20 years worth of lawsuits in Spain. Or you'll die of some hideous disease in the jungle. All of these things will happen in this series. So if we fast forward now to the beginning of the 1520s, pizarro who's now in his early 40s has settled in the boom town of panama city so panama city is booming but it's a kind of pretty rough it's a kind of place of pub brawls and stuff star wars bar the cantina in star wars exactly pizarro has done pretty well for himself he has his own estate which is called an encomienda which comes with a grant of indigenous laborers who basically you know as close to slave labor as you can get really but pizarro is restless and the puzzle for historians is working out why he's so restless because at this age in your early 40s most conquistadors say that's it now i'm not trudging through jungles with loads of leeches again i've had enough i've made a little bit of money is it his pothos yeah like alexander alexander the great style yearning i mean i suppose because he's illiterate he doesn't have that kind of massive alexander the great vibe i think actually the pothos i think you're underrating it Tom.

14:33Pizarro has quite modest personal tastes. You know, he's not a man given to luxury. He's not a man given to display. He looks quite conservative. He's not married. He doesn't have children. So it's not like he's interested in piling up gold for his descendants. He has a yearning. Yeah. A thirst to make a name for himself, a thirst for glory. Maybe that's the subtitle of the film. It is. And he will gamble in the next seven years. His health, his life, and most importantly for a conquistador all his money on a pursuit of, well, this is the mystery. What? What does he really think he's after? And the truth is, he doesn't know.

15:13In 1522, so this is just a couple of years after Cortes had arrived in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs. In 1522, further south, a Basque called Pasquale de Andergoia had sailed southwest from Panama. Tabby was very anxious that people understand the geography because we're not, the rest is geography, but we like to dabble in it from time to time. So Pascal de Andergoia had gone southwest from Panama. So that's basically down the Pacific side of the top of South America, what is now Colombia. And he'd gone along the coast of Colombia and he was gone for ages. People thought he'd vanished.

15:48And then he returned and he said, I've been in the jungle in Colombia and there are people there. There's not much there, but people say further south, there is this land called Biru. And Biru, they say, is a rich and powerful empire, maybe as rich as Mexico. And Dominic, just to ask, there have been no contacts between the Aztecs and the Incas, have there? And the geography is just too impenetrable and impossible. As we will discover when we get to the Incas, they've basically been living in a vacuum. Yeah, because they're geographically bound in by sea and mountains and jungle and all kinds of things yeah exactly so pizarro in panama city you know imagine him in his cantina surrounded by aliens he says oh i like the sound of this and this is the dream that he will chase so he in the summer of 1524 he forms a partnership with two friends from panama city one of them is a priest called hernando de luque who dabbles in business and has borrowed some money from a judge and the other a very important person in this story in all six episodes it's an old comrade of pizarro called Diego de Almagro.

16:55And he's from rural New Castile. He's a little bit older than Pizarro. He's also legitimate. He's also illiterate. They can't read. And he's another very hard man. People said his body was covered with scars from fighting. But he's literally more colorful than Pizarro. He wears very colorful clothes. And to read you, because it's important to get all these people in their heads. One chronicler said of Almagro, he was a man of short stature with ugly features, but with great courage and endurance. He was generous, but was conceited and was given to boasting, letting his tongue run on sometimes without stop.

17:30So he's short, he's ugly, he's very brave, and he's boastful, and he's always talking about himself. I mean, this is, the film is just writing itself, isn't it? There'd be so many actors he'd want to play that part. Well, not least because he and Pizarro at this point are great mates, and spoiler alert, it will not last. Not for long. no honor among thieves so so in november 1524 they set off in three small ships down the pacific coast of columbia so this is the top left of south america and this is not a success at all this voyage the weather's really bad they put ashore they get into a fight with some villagers who've got spears and bows and arrows al magro loses an eye so this is great now because we can picture him with an eye patch i don't think he did wear an eye patch but i think for the purposes of the film.

18:19What, so he just had a horrid kind of bleeding sore? I think so, yeah. Oh, great. I think for Hollywood purposes, the eye patch is important. Who would play him? Joe Pesky? I'm thinking the bloke who was Gimli. John Rhys-Davis. A Welshman? Yeah. More Welsh history and the rest is just too much. Okay, so he's either Gimli or Joe Pesky. I think Gimli. I think Genneman's Gimli. We still haven't cast Pizarro, but we can work on that during the course of the series. Anyway, they go back to Panama. Pizarro's undeterred. He raises more money. In March 1526, he and El Magro set up again with two small ships.

18:53And this voyage will become one of the most celebrated voyages in Spanish history. They go south down the coast of Colombia, the sort of western coast. And when they get to the San Juan River, Pizarro goes ashore and camps. El Magro goes back to Panama to get reinforcements. And their pilot, so the guy who's basically piloting the ships, who's a guy called Bartolome Ruiz, he says, well, I'll take the ships on a little bit. scout on south to see what's there while you guys do what you're doing ruiz crosses the equator and then once he's crossed the equator on the horizon he sees a ship and it's basically a raft it's an ocean going raft oh like the contiki with cotton sails and he captures the ship and a lot of its um people sort of jump overboard and stuff to escape him but not all of them and he can't believe what he finds on this raft because as he reports in a letter to charles v fifth of spain it's full of gold and silver ornaments crowns and diadems belts and bracelets tweezers and rattles and strings and clusters of beads and rubies mirrors and cups and other drinking vessels tweezers tweezers tweezers and mirrors yeah brilliant tweezers the king will be thrilled and have some tweezers golden like uh yeah nasal hair clippers dental floss thing dental floss yeah anyway they've got all this stuff on the boat and these blokes on the boat were taking this to trade all this gold to trade unbelievably for brightly colored fish shells which they would use as counters so this is effectively money yeah but what this tells me is is that you know to trade this for a load of shells means that the people with the gold must have an awful lot of it because they don't prize it that highly anyway for pizarro and co this is tremendous news this is so exciting because this means that clearly is an advanced civilization if they're making golden tweezers and they've got loads of loads of um golden rubies and stuff exactly ruiz keeps three of the blokes in the raft on afterwards to train as interpreters and actually throughout this whole story there are clearly going to be people interpreting the whole time and we know virtually nothing about them and the one thing we do know actually is the spanish unlike in the story of the aztecs the spanish spends a lot of time complaining that their interpreters are useless and they're mistranslating what is being said because there's no equivalent of malinche there's no malinche no cortez's girlfriend who for very complicated reasons can speak all these various languages but there isn't an equivalent of that in this story is there no there isn't There are just generic people who keep getting the Spanish themselves, get them mixed up, as we shall see.

21:33And they, but the Spanish do say, and in fact, the Incas later say, God, your interpreters are absolutely useless. Well, I mean, I don't think you can blame them because they're having to learn a completely new language. And how can they be sure that the language is properly spoken? Yeah, true. I mean, I just think interpreters should do their job, but I have high expectations. anyway Ruiz the pilot goes back to the camp and he sees Pizarro and Almagro turns up with uh from Panama and they're all delighted by the news of the gold he's the Welsh guy Almagro is yeah the guy with the eye patch and Almagro says look I'll take some of this gold back to Panama I'll get more recruits why don't you guys keep going you know see if you can what you can find so they they go on and they decide their rendezvous on this deserted island called the Isla de Gallo which is on the border roughly between colombia and ecuador so we're now going down the west coast of south america so pizarro and co go to this island almagro goes back to panama to take the gold back and to get more recruits when almagro gets back to panama the governor of panama says this is mad i'm not giving you more people this is a fool's errand but what about the rubies and the gold yeah he sees that but he just thinks it's maybe a one-off it's a maybe a one-off but also you know the weather the weather the malaria you know we've got stuff going on in central america that we're busy doing i'm not throwing more men you know more men off good money after bad as it were now meanwhile pizarro and the men on this desert islands the isla di gaio they're having a dreadful time they run out of food they're living off like rotten shellfish mosquitoes are eating them alive they've all got dysentery all of this kind of thing eventually they see ships coming towards them and pizarro says oh brilliant these are the reinforcements these are the new recruits the ships arrive and actually the people on the ship say no no we've come to take you back home you're going back to panama pizarro is gutted he's furious and this incredibly famous scene in spanish history he draws his sword he gets all his men onto the beach the men who haven't died of dysentery and he draws a line in the sand of the beach and he has this fantastic speech comrades and friends on one side lies comfort on the other lies death hardship hunger nakedness rain and abandonment on that side you return to panama to be poor on the other you go to peru and become rich the choice is yours it's um very like when i phoned you to ask if you would like to do a podcast god it is yeah drew a line in the sand and said on that side is comfort and the other is golden tweezers nakedness rain and abandonment and so only 12 crossed don't they only 12 men crossed and one of them is a very cool guy who's a greek who's come from crete pedro de candia pedro de candia who's an expert in artillery and firearms and i just mentioned that artillery and firearms you know for no particular reason i mean it may not have an impact later on in the plot.

24:37Pedro de Candia is a giant. So the giant Greek and 11 other blokes cross to Pizarro's side of the line. The rest of them get back on the ship and go to Panama. And for the next few months, Pizarro and these men, who become immortalized in Spanish paintings and Spanish literature later on as the famous 13 or the immortal 13, they stay on this desert island. And they're almost doing it out of stubbornness because it's not like they're going to go anywhere are they becoming good mates as a result of this are they getting on each other's nerves are they a band of brothers what what effect do you think it has on them i think it probably does create a band of brothers thing because a lot of these people continue will carry on with pizarro because that's the striking thing isn't it that they they really do stick together yeah they're all in now they can't back out because they'd look like fools they'd look like absolute idiots they stay on this desert island pizarro becoming increasingly emaciated and then at last the pilot ruiz comes back with a ship and says the governor of panama said you know enough come home now you've made your point and basically no one's going to come and join you so very despondently they get on the ships and pizarro says before we go home could we just take one last look south can we just have a look and see what's around the headland or whatever so they they go um on and they go into the gulf of guayaquil which is where peru and ecuador meet So southern Ecuador, northern Peru.

25:58And there they see a town on the coast, which they end up calling Tombez. And they go near the town. Two of Pizarro's men go ashore with presents. The ship clearly has brought them some food. They've got pigs and chickens. They go ashore with the presents of the pigs and the chickens. And the locals are delighted. So they're not frightened by these pigs. I think if you've never seen a pig before, it'd be unsettling. They don't seem unsettled. They seem delighted. that they probably make a nice ham sandwich out of it or something. Anyway, the two blokes come back onto the boat, and they say, oh, my God, this is what we wanted.

26:33This is a proper civilization. These blokes have pots, they have nice clothes, they have chiefs, and they talk about a king far away. And, best of all, they have very fancy temples decorated with silver and gold. Ka-ching. Yeah, that's what Pizarro's thinking. Brilliant. So Pizarro has what he needs. He's got the ship, the evidence of the ship with the tweezers. He's got the evidence of the town where they welcome the arrival of a pig, and they've got temples with gold. And he says, great. And what's more, they pick up from this town. They're either given or they capture two local boys who they call Martinio and Felipio, like little Philip or little Martin.

27:14And these boys, they're going to train as interpreters to add to the ones they've got already. And these boys will play a big part in this story. Because they've grown up actually pretty good, right? Yeah, well, better than the rest. The Spanish keep mixing them up. So in the chronicles, the chroniclers always disagree whether it's Martini or Filippio who's translating. But anyway, they've got translators. And the language, and of course, the Spanish don't know what the language is. But the language that they are translating to and from is a language called Quechua, which is a very big Andean language.

27:45So Pizarro goes back to Panama, and he meets his business partners, and he says, look, we've obviously got a lot of potential here for another expedition, but we need to get royal approval, because we don't want to go down, find stuff, and then have competitors come down with royal approval to sort of take all the treasure. So it's that legalistic side again. Exactly. So in 1529, in the spring, Pizarro goes back to Spain, and he goes to see the king of Spain, the emperor, Charles V. who's in Toledo in the center of Spain. Now, Charles V is a very, very busy man. He's the king of Spain. He's the head of the House of Habsburg.

28:24He's the Holy Roman Emperor. He is currently fighting two very expensive wars. One is against the French in Italy, and the other is against the Ottomans in Eastern Europe. So what he wants more than anything is gold and silver from the New World. And Pizarro says to him, Your Majesty, you know, I've heard that this place, Biru, is brilliant. I've not been there, but I've heard very good things. They have golden tweezers. They have lovely pots. They have nice clothes. All of this. Give you, your majesty, a pot. But Charles loves a pot. If he can melt it down into money for his wars. Now, as luck would have it, also in Toledo at the court, visiting with loads of gifts for the royal family is Hernan Cortes.

29:09He's making one of his periodic returns from Mexico. Is this where he turns up with loads of Aztec mime artists for the Pope? Their bodies are their tools. Is he not always travelling with indigenous people? Well, anyway, Cortes has gone down an absolute storm. And because of that, people are very well inclined to the idea of, oh, there's another Mexico further south. Well, brilliant. So, in July 1529, the Council of the Indies, which is based in Seville, authorises Pizarro to conduct the discovery and conquest and settlement of the province of Peru. And they say to him, you will be the first governor.

29:44You will be his first captain general. If you find it, we will give you a massive salary for life. Actually double the salary that's given to Cortez in Mexico. So he's got a really good deal out of it. It's kind of a franchising. Yeah, it's a franchise. He's got the franchise. Pizarro has to put up the capital and take the risk. But he has the brand name. Exactly. There is one catch. When he got the franchise, he accidentally forgot to get a good deal for his business partners. Oh, no. The Welsh guy. yeah this is how it works so the guy with only one eye diego del magro he's going to be the his reward well pizarro has a massive salary and his governor and captain general al magro has been rewarded with the title of commandant of the town of tombez which is which is markedly inferior so he's not going to be happy at all when pizarro gets back as we will discover anyway pizarro goes back from Seville to the New World, January 1530.

30:39He's picked up about 200 recruits from his native Extremadura, by and large, including six Dominican friars. And Dominic, would one of those friars be called Valverde? He is called Valverde, yeah. The Valverde clan will play an important part in this story. Maybe a doctor of theology. It's a long time since we had a Valverde on the show. And long-standing listeners will record that when a Valverde appears and the rest is history, all kinds of things will follow good times follow good times follow exactly so there's this guy Valverde who will be playing an important part and there's the three Pizarro brothers so of these three brothers they will you know return in later episodes so get them remember that they're there there's the youngest who is called I mean actually there's so much disagreement about what order they're in how old they are and whatnot but this is what I've decided Juan is the youngest he's maybe 19 or so and everyone said he's very uh impetuous he's gallant he's young he's dashing all of this then there is gonzalo gonzalo is the middle one maybe he's about 20 he's very friendly and easygoing he was full of nobility and virtue and was beloved and respected by everyone says the chronicler garthi laso he's the kind of noble one juan is the the kind of the young scamp yeah what's he like yeah and then and then the third one what's he like He's the oldest and he's Hernando.

32:00Now Hernando, big figure in this story. He's the only one who's legitimate. The others are all legitimate. One Spanish chronicle describes him thus, a tall, heavy man with thick lips and a thick tongue, and the tip of his nose was fleshy and inflamed. A great and boastful talker. So Martin Clunes? Yeah, he doesn't sound like a massive looker, but everyone said he was kind of charismatic, charming impressive yeah big bloke um he's got military experience because he definitely has served in italy against the french and he will end up being francisco's closest confidant his chief advisor ernando and is there a sense that um italy is is where you earn your spurs that's the kind of cutting edge of military technology exactly where the spanish troops are regarded as some of the best in the world by the way so by 1530 they're all back in panama and pizarro is planning a new expedition he does have one problem his business partner Diego de Almagro is absolutely outraged that Pizarro has returned and got him this terrible deal and Pizarro says look listen when we've got Peru there must be something underneath it to the south and you can have that and that's what's going to become Chile so Almagro will you know he will go off later on to Chile but that isn't legally stamped is it so he doesn't have kind of letters patent from the king or anything no no no and actually their relationship now is a bit broken and it'll never be the same again and this will run right through this story i can see why yeah of course he's really sold him out he's completely sold him out and it's worse because hernando pizarro's brother absolutely despises almagro anyway spoiler alert this is the beginning of a feud that will destroy all these people anyway 27th of september 1530 pizarro sets sail from panama and is bound for biru he's got three ships and 180 men and a load of horses 37 horses now a crucial point al magro makes the same mistake again he says i'll raise more men in panama and i will follow later i'll join you later this is maybe because he's a bit cautious and he wants to find out how things are going to turn out before he you know risks his life i assume that i I mean, he doesn't feel quite the blood brother with Pizarro now, and so doesn't feel that they're in it together to the same degree, I suppose.

34:27I would guess so. But as we will discover, this is going to have massive consequences. I mean, a lot of people will die because of this. Pizarro and Coast sail off down the Pacific coast. The weather's against them this time, so they have to make landfall much earlier than they planned in what's now the far north of Ecuador. So if you look at a map, top left corner of South America, From there, they start to march down the coast. It's very miserable. There's loads of mosquitoes. You know, they're hungry. Pizarro, everyone says, does really well. Like, he's brave. He's big. When they're crossing a river, he will help to carry the sick across on his back, all of this kind of thing.

35:02He leads from the front. I mean, whatever else you say about him, he's, you know, he's genuinely brave. And he's got tremendous stamina and all this stuff. And concerned for his men. And concerned for his men. they reach their first settlement a town called koake in february 1531 they find a load of huts they find a load of very baffled villagers and they find a load of emeralds and gold and silver so pizarro shares a lot of it out and then weirdly he hangs around in this place which doesn't sound that thrilling for about six months they all come down with the disease this may be actually i mean they come down disease because they've hung around but it may explain why they hung around afterwards they come out of the horrible disease called carrion's disease where you get these massive warts that then bleed separating warts do they stay with you or do they heal no i think they eventually if i mean if you google it you won't forget it so don't google it is all i say now everyone will google it of course tom's googling as we speak you can't wait to see all those photographs of people's bleeding warts oh my god oh you've finally seen those the carrion's disease yeah guys whatever you do do not google carrion's disease warts yeah it's not good horrible so now word is spreading about these bearded men who came in floating houses you know classic thing like we had with the conquest of mexico more reinforcements eventually arrived from central america from panama almagro is still not among them he's still waiting to find out what's going to happen so eventually pizarro sets off again he crosses the equator he's now going through fields of cultivated maize, what our American listeners would call corn.

36:41And this implies a high level of social organization. You know, there's farming going on here. People need to be, you need some form of social order for that to happen. And the interpreters are reporting to the Spanish that people are talking about an empire further south. And also they're talking about a war. But no one really knows what that is. Intriguing. South of Guayaquil in Ecuador, big city today, they reach a large island called Puna. And here, the locals are not so friendly. They stage a massive dance to trick the Spanish and then turn on them. But of course, the Spanish, a theme of this series, they have their steel swords against which, you know, there can be no resistance.

37:22And they're able to overcome the locals. Do they have horses? They do have horses. They've got about 38, 37 horses. Again, which absolutely terrify the people of South America, as we will see again and again. you can turn up with two or three horses and hundreds and you can defeat hundreds of people thousands of people because they're so frightened of the horses because all these rumors start to spread don't they that they um they eat people my favorite of all the rumors is that it was widely believed that spanish were incapable of walking uphill that that was what the horses that's why they had the horses for exactly yeah so some more people more reinforcements arrive among a character who will play a part in the story, a knight from Spain, from Extremadura, called Hernando de Soto.

38:05Oh. Big news in Florida in due course. Yes, he will come to rest again in Florida. De Soto is 32 years old. He's another very short man. There's a lot of short people in the story. But he has won a reputation in Central America as a very dashing and brave horseman. That's his great skill. He's like a sort of the person who would be very good at dressage or some such. Nice. He'd win gold with Princess Anne. He would. He'd be great pals to Princess Anne, actually. Is he posh? He's a knight. He's an Il Valgo. Okay, so he is. Exactly. He's one of those kind of menacing posh people. I wouldn't get on that horse if I were you.

38:42Yeah, he's a young Charles Dance. That's exactly what he is. So Pizarro says to Soto, right, you can be one of my chief lieutenants. Actually, when we get to Peru, the capital, you can be the lieutenant governor of the capital city. And Soto says, brilliant, I can't wait. which you'll see how this promise works out i say they're now inching closer to this mysterious empire there's there's about 400 of them now so they get some rafts they cross from this island that they've been on back to the mainland and to the town of tumbes they visited before now they'd seen the temples if you recall they'd seen that people's nice clothes they'd seen all this but when they get to the town they can't believe it because the buildings are ruined the streets are deserted oh my god temples have been looted what's happened yeah something apocalyptic the soto goes ahead um to find out what's going on he finds the local chief across the river he brings them back to pizarro and the chief says you know he doesn't really fill them in on what's happened but he says there's a much greater chief who lives far away and this greater chief lives in a town with gold and silver jugs and houses and temples walled and roofed with gold i say and Pizarro thinks wow this is looking good they continue on the next place they get to is a little town called Poechos and here the local chief is friendly he gives them food and he adds a little bit more detail about what's been happening he says I too answer to this greater chief the emperor and the emperor's rule extends for thousands of miles north to south but he says the old emperor has died and his two sons have been fighting for control of this empire of a civilization that up till now has been totally unknown to the outside world and the local people call this civilization Tawantinsuyu the land of the four quarters but Tom we know it as the empire of the Incas and so the Incas enter the chat and we will find out what they have to say for themselves after the break.

41:19Let's test it.

41:49inaugural Rest is History Festival at, of all places, Hampton Court Palace. And this is a festival exclusively for members of the Rest is History Club. That's right, Dominic. And as I mentioned, we have some huge names coming. So I will be joined by Mary Beard to talk about what else Rome. And I will also be joined by friend of the show, Ali Ansari, to talk about what else Persia. Yes. And I'll be talking to two other people who've been on the Rest is History, great fan favourites. One of them is the brilliant Tracy Borman, who will be joining us to talk about the secrets of the Tudors. And the other, another massive fan favourite is Katja Hoyer, who will be talking about her new work on Weimar Germany.