Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [32]
Seated in the golden litter that carried him everywhere, Atahualpa arrived in the town square at Cajamarca for a meeting with Pizarro. Atahualpa’s thousands of attendants were unarmed. The Spaniards fired four cannons and launched a surprise attack. In the violence that followed, Pizarro pulled Atahualpa from his gilded chair and took him hostage. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Incas were slaughtered like sheep, Atahualpa’s nephew later said. The Spaniards suffered no losses.
Atahualpa quickly figured out what the Spaniards wanted and made Pizarro one of the most extraordinary offers in history. In return for his freedom, the Inca told his captor, he would fill a twenty-two-byseventeen-foot room with treasure three times to a height of more than eight feet—once with gold and twice again with silver. When word of Atahualpa’s deal with Pizarro went out to his subjects, precious metals poured in from all over the kingdom. The capital of Cusco and the sacred Koricancha were stripped of their gold ornamentation. More than six tons of twenty-two-and-a-half-carat gold were melted down over the following months. Double that amount of silver was shipped out of Peru during that time.
To show his thanks, Pizarro reneged on his promise and ordered Atahualpa garroted in the Cajamarca town square. When the new ruler of Peru rode his horse into the royal city of Cusco for the first time, he took for himself the finest palace. It’s now a restaurant loathed by John Leivers because it sells five-dollar bowls of chicken soup.
Bingham wasn’t especially interested in the story of Pizarro and Atahualpa, which had been told many times before, most famously in William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru. Much more interesting to the explorer was the puppet ruler whom Pizarro installed to help keep peace with the natives.
When Pizarro arrived in Peru, Manco Inca Yupanqui was just shy of twenty years old, the kid brother of Atahualpa and Huascar. (One of the many job benefits of being Sapa Inca was the right to take as many wives, and father as many children, as one wished.) Today, perhaps because Machu Picchu is so popular among the spiritually inclined, the Incas are sometimes portrayed as a peaceful race who graciously invited neighboring tribes to join their thriving territorial conglomerate. In reality, they could be as brutal as the conquistadors. Atahualpa in particular was not someone who’d make a good long-term houseguest. He often drank from a ceremonial cup crafted from the skull of a former enemy, and he ordered his army to find and slaughter the male members of his family who had opposed him in the civil war. Atahualpa’s men had been searching for Manco. Had he been found, he surely would have been killed in some unpleasant fashion.
Francisco Pizarro named Manco the new Sapa Inca in 1533. The traditional boozy monthlong coronation ceremony in Cusco followed, at which the mummies of previous emperors were paraded around the square. Deceased Sapa Incas were not only treated as immortals; their mummies continued to live in their palaces with all of their worldly goods and a large staff of servants and advisors, who channeled the wishes of the former emperors when their advice was sought. So much chicha was guzzled during Manco’s investiture, one witness recorded, that the drains of the city “ran with urine throughout the day . . . as abundantly as if they were flowing springs.” Imagine a presidential inauguration held during Mardi Gras, at which the taxidermied remains of Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower were incorporated into float themes, and you’ll get some idea of the horrified reaction the Spaniards had to this