(^108) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
pursued the rest, spearing them at will, targeting those with fancy
clothes, presumably leaders. "If night had not come on, few out of the
more than 40,000 Indian troops would have been left alive."
Atahualpa was taken prisoner, naked but unharmed. The Spanish de
manded and obtained a ransom greater than any European monarch
could have paid—enough gold to fill a good-sized room to the ceiling.
So the Indians paid, and now the Spanish had to free their hostage; a
deal is a deal. But they immediately rearrested him on a charge of trea
son to the Spanish crown (sic!); and after bestowing the last rites (sal
vation first), figuratively and literally decapitated the kingdom.*
It is a bloody story, full of cruelty and bad faith, condescension and
sanctimony; but one must not judge these events in terms of the good,
the bad, and the ugly. They all deserved one another. Before Pizarro
arrived on the scene, Huayna Capac, emperor and father of Atahualpa,
set the terms for defeat when he decapitated the members of a rebel
tribe and threw their bodies into a lake: "Now you're just a bunch of
litde boys!"^8 We are told that the victims numbered twenty thousand,
that this "was probably the bloodiest encounter in the history of the
pre-Hispanic New World."^9 The place is known to this day as the Lake
of Blood.^10
In a penetrating analysis, the biologist-historian Jared Diamond asks
why the Incas behaved so naively—by our standards, stupidly. His ex
planation: the difference in cunning and experience between a literate
people and an illiterate. The Spanish were "heirs to a huge body of
knowledge about human behavior and history"; the Incas had "no
personal experience of any other invaders from overseas... had not
even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else,
anytime previously in history."^11
But the Incas should have known themselves.
The peoples of Peru resisted longer and better than the Mexicans; in
deed, some would say that this insurgency is not yet ended. Pizarro
seized Atahualpa in 1532, but not until 1539, when the Inca army of
Charcas surrendered and Manco Inca took refuge at Vilcabamba, was
Spanish control reasonably secure. Even then, the Inca government-in-
exile promoted rebellion from the mountains, and not until 1572
could Viceroy Francisco de Toledo put an end to this resistance. Inca
- They persuaded the Inca Atahualpa to embrace Christianity by telling him that if he
died a Christian, his body would not be burned; which meant, by Inca belief, that he
might yet return to lead his people.