Inca Gold - The Kidnap of Atahualpa
Catholic Spain funded her religious wars in Europe with gold from the Americas. By 1532, Spain had entered America’s greatest Empire. Tawantinsuyu - the 3,000-mile long land of the Incas.
Saturday, November 16th, 1532. The central square of Cajamarca, in what is now Peru. Francisco Pizarro and 168 Spanish soldiers were hiding in buildings around the square. They’d set a desperate trap to capture the Inca emperor, Atahualpa. The Inca Emperor was curious about these foreigners who had asked to see him. Atahualpa’s scouts had been tracking Pizarro’s progress, and reporting back on these poor, incompetent creatures encased in metal shells and riding large llamas.
Clearly no kind of threat, but Atahualpa thought they might be worth a look.
80,000 of Atahualpa’s crack troops were camped around the town. The Spanish were outnumbered by more than 400 to 1. Behind their walls, crouching down, many of the Spanish, as they confessed afterwards, were wetting themselves in sheer terror.
Their only chance was an ambush. Pizarro gambled on having weapons unknown in the Inca world - steel swords, guns, horses and Canon. And luckily for the Spanish, none of Atahualpa’s entourage was armed.
The Incas felt no threat, no need for weapons on a purely ceremonial occasion. At four o’clock, Friar Vicente de Valverde came out of hiding.
Through an interpreter, the Friar told Atahualpa that his book contained the holy words of God. It meant nothing to the Inca. There was no such thing as a book in his world, so he discarded it. The Pope had decreed that the people of the New World were human and were worthy of respect… unless they rejected Christianity. Pizarro used Atahualpa’s rejection of the Bible as his excuse to launch the attack.
In two hours of carnage and confusion, at least 2,000 Incas died. Most were trampled to death in their attempts to escape. Not a single Spaniard died. And Pizarro took Atahualpa hostage.
Atahualpa was outraged to find himself imprisoned. In his eyes, he was the ruler of the world. But he soon realised what Pizarro wanted. Atahualpa raised his hand, as high as he could, in the room where he was being held. It’s thought to be this room. And he said he would fill the room to that height with gold. And then he would fill it to that height in silver twice over. Now, we don’t know what Pizarro said in response. I suspect he was simply grinning.
It took eight months to collect the ransom. 13,000 pounds of gold and 26,000 pounds of silver. Once the Spanish had the gold, they’d no more use for Atahualpa. They brought the Emperor to the square in Cajamarca. He was given a choice - convert to Christianity and be garrotted, or refuse and be burned alive. Atahualpa converted.
His last words were to Pizarro. He asked him to take care of his children. Pizarro agreed.
Atahualpa’s empire crumbled. Civil War and European diseases now cleared the way for the Spanish to take over the Inca Empire. In the century that followed, more than $100 million of silver and gold were shipped to Spain. In today’s money Spain’s plunder would be worth $10 trillion.
Only 40 years after Columbus first set sail, Spain was rich beyond imagination. But what did Spain do with its plunder? It gilded its churches and palaces and spent the rest of the fortune on religious war, which Spain lost. Within 60 years, Spain was glittering… but bankrupt.
This is a story in which nobody sees what’s right in front of them. Atahualpa was blind to the threat the Spanish offered to him. Pizarro thought that, by conquering the Incas, he would become rich and happy. In fact, the gold mania so infected his own soldiers, they ended up murdering Pizarro. And the Spanish never even saw the real wealth of Peru all around them… the humble potato.
Further Reading
Long Live Atahualpa: Indigenous Politics, Justice, and Democracy in the Northern Andes
Atahualpa: The Last of the Incas
