FROM DISCOVERIES TO EMPIRE^107invisible carriers of death to a population never exposed to these dis
eases. They had already done terrible work in the Caribbean. Now
they laid hundreds of Aztec warriors low at the very moment of their
victory.
Cortés got his respite. Months passed. New fleets brought new
forces. His Indian allies helped build the components of ships and
move them across the sierra into the valley of Mexico, where they were
assembled and launched against the Aztec island capital. This time,
the war was over; the Aztec empire beaten; their temples destroyed;
their idols overthrown. They could hardly be surprised: the Aztec glyph
for a conquered city was a burning temple. Winner's god takes all.The conquest of the Inca empire was essentially similar: again, a far-
flung tributary empire, centralized and ingenious in its administrative
structures; but again, internal divisions and hatreds, setting Incas not
only against subject tribes but against one another; and again, Euro
pean disease as a silent partner of European conquest. When Francisco
Pizarro arrived with his small war party, the country was just coming
off seven years of civil war (the Inca had apparently died of smallpox)
and much the weaker for it.
Here, too, the first contacts were appetizing: the smallest coastal
villages seemed to abound in gold. Again, mistaken dispositions facil
itated the Spanish advance. The Incas did not mistake them for gods,
but they sorely underestimated the possibilities of so small a force and
they had an immemorial contempt for the people of the coast. How
could these possibly prevail against the harder warriors of the high
lands? Again, the Spanish knew to make the most of these divisions to
get help from locals. They went up to the highland town of Cajamarca,
there to meet the Inca, whom Pizarro, with sublime assurance,
promised to receive as friend and brother. Then most of them hid and
lay in wait. The Incas took this as a sign of fear, and indeed, many of
the Spaniards were literally peeing in their pants.
The Inca party of thousands marched in, brilliantly clad but un
armed. They filled the square, the greatest nobles in the kingdom bear
ing Inca Atahualpa on his royal litter. Now a Spanish priest advanced
to offer the Inca a holy bible. Atahualpa opened it, looked, and threw
it on the ground. That did it. The friar ran back to Pizarro: "Come out!
Come out, Christians! Come at these enemy dogs who reject the
things of God." The slaughter that followed left some seven thousand
Indians dead on the spot, plus numerous wounded. Spanish horsemen