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Posted: 24 Jun 2022

Taken: 24 Jun 2022

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1491 •
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Charles Mann •
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Guns, Germs & Steel •
Jared Diamond •
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . Washkar www.britannica.com/biography/Huascar-Inca-chieftain was captured in an ambush in the summer of 1532. Atawallpa’s generals took the Inca as a captive to Qosqo and executed his wives, children, and relatives in front of him. Meanwhile, Atawallp’s triumphant cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty thousand strong, slowly promenaded to Qosco. 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); now on November 16, 1532, the emperor-to-be came to Cajamerca 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 building lining the town square, where the 168 Spanish waited the Inca 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 Inca, 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 changing 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. ~ Page 92
23 months ago. Edited 23 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
1491
23 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
……. Atahuallpa was in the middle of his own empire of millions of subjects and immediately surrounded by his army of 80,000 soldiers, recently victorious in a war with other Indians. Nevertheless, Pizarro captured Atahuallpa within a few minutes after the two leader first set eye on each other. Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history’s largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom – enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet – was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa. ~ Page 68

Thus, Atahuallpa’s capture interests us specifically as marking the decisive moment in the greatest collision of modern history. But it is also of more general interest, because the factors that resulted in Pazarro’s seizing Atahuallps were essentially the same ones that determined the outcome of many similar collisions between colonizers and native peoples elsewhere in the modern world. Hence Atahuallpa’s capture offers us a broad window onto world history. ~ Page 68

……. Pizarro’s military advantages lay in the Spaniards’ steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horse. To those weapons, Atahuallpa’s troops, without animals on which to ride into battle, could oppose only stone, bronze, or wooden clubs, maces, and hand axes, plus slingshots and quilted armor. Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. ~ Page 74

The transformation of warfare by horses began with their domestication around 4000 B.C., in the steppes north of the Black Sea. ….. Their role at Cajamarca thus exemplifies a military weapon that remained potent for 6,000 years, until the early 20th century, and that was eventually applied on all the continents. Not until the First World War did the military dominance of cavalry finally end. When we consider the advantages that Spaniards derived from horses, steel weapons, and armor against foot soldiers without metal, it should no longer surprise us that Spaniards consistently won battles against enormous odds. ~ Page 77
23 months ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
23 months ago.

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