Notes on Peru

Notes on Peru Standing in the Plaza de Armas at the very center of Lima, Peru's capital today, the presidential palace sits to the north by the river, while to the east stands the most magnificent and important Catholic cathedral in South America—the Lima Cathedral. On the wall of the first room to the right of the Lima Cathedral is a mural depicting Spanish knights in armor sending local natives onto boats. To the right of the mural is a coffin, in which sleeps the very knight depicted in the painting, and one of the most important figures in South American history—Francisco Pizarro. In 1532, Pizarro led 168 other Spaniards to land on the coast near the remote northern city of Tumbes, Peru. The conflict between these Spaniards and the Inca Empire, which spanned the South American continent at the time, brought Pizarro himself fleeting power and wealth, but its impact on the South American continent would echo for centuries. To this day, the vast majority of people on the continent, with the exception of Brazil, speak Spanish. Western conquerors' conquest of the "backward" New World and the East is one of the classic themes of Western historical narrative. Even the contemporary science fiction novel Dune is based on the famous Lawrence of Arabia. Among Western conquerors, the most famous are Cortés, who conquered the Aztec Empire (present-day Mexico), and Pizarro, who conquered the Inca Empire (present-day Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, etc.). When Lawrence was interviewed by an American journalist and asked "why come to the desert," Lawrence's answer was just two words: "It's clean." Compared to Lawrence's somewhat hypocritical idealistic answer with British overtones, Pizarro's reason for setting foot on the South American continent was straightforward. His purpose was to obtain, in the name of the Spanish king, the right to rule and tax the local laborers on this continent, using even the most heinous and terrible means if necessary. Pizarro was originally a penniless, illiterate illegitimate son with no social standing from the small town of Trujillo in Extremadura, western Spain. Forced by the fact that there was no hope or future for him in Spain, he boarded the island of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti), which Columbus had discovered nine years earlier. Then in 1513, Pizarro was promoted to Balboa's deputy and participated in that expedition across the Isthmus of Panama and the discovery of the Pacific Ocean mentioned in "Sternstunden der Menschheit" (The Tide of Fortune). Along the way, an Indian chief informed them that to the south was a golden land rich in gold—Peru (Viru). Leader Balboa never lived to embark on the expedition to Peru; his previous usurpation in the colony led to a trial from the Spanish king and he was sentenced to beheading, and the one who arrested him was his former deputy Pizarro. Pizarro naturally became the successor to the search for the golden land. Most Spanish exploration activities in the 16th century were conducted through the establishment of companies, where partners invested money or goods, and shared profits proportionally after discoveries or obtaining spoils. For the expedition, Pizarro and his partner Almagro established the Levant Company. As a company, the biggest fear is competition. After the first landing, Pizarro brought many local products to Spain to pitch to the Spanish King Charles V at the time. The pitching was very successful, and the Spanish royal family agreed to sign a royal authorization (capitulación), permitting Pizarro to be the only person authorized to explore Peru—equivalent to a franchise license, with the condition that the conquests would be proportionally handed over to the Spanish royal family. But the difference with this venture capital was that all of Pizarro's conquest activities needed to be self-funded. With royal authorization, Pizarro easily recruited the subsequent 168 employees who would receive equity. While the Spanish were making geographical discoveries in the New World, the young Inca Empire was also conducting its expansion. The Inca Empire in the early 15th century was just a very small state centered on the mountain valley city of Cuzco. Surrounded by powerful neighbors, like Rome and Germany, the Inca Empire also chose expansion as a means to ensure national security. When the Chancas, the Inca Empire's arch-enemy, besieged the city, the old king fled, but his son Cusi Yupanqui stayed in Cuzco to fight with his back to the wall and defeated the Chancas. Afterwards, Cusi Yupanqui deposed his father and became the ninth Inca king and one of the most important kings in Inca history. He changed his name to Pachacuti, meaning "upheaval." Because Peru is located on the Pacific volcanic earthquake belt and its climate is affected by El Niño, the surrounding environment is easily severely affected by sudden events, so the Incas believed that some epoch-making events would permanently change history. Pachacuti's dynasty was indeed epoch-making; during his lifetime, he expanded the Inca Empire from a tiny state around Cuzco to a great empire that almost spanned the west coast of South America. However, the Incas' smooth expansion was disrupted by the arrival of the Spanish. When Pizarro landed on the Peruvian coast for the second time, Pachacuti's grandson Huayna Capac was in present-day Ecuador's Quito suppressing rebellions in the northern part of the empire, but the smallpox brought by the Spanish arrived before them, killing Huayna Capac and the designated heir to the throne. The vacancy of the throne triggered a struggle between the old king's two other sons, Huascar and Atahualpa. In 1532, Atahualpa had just won the struggle for the throne and was about to become another very important king in Inca history, because it was he who would face the Spaniards who descended on the Cajamarca valley like visitors from beyond. At that time, the Inca Empire practiced a primitive form of socialism. Land was state-owned, there was no private property or currency in society, and all activities were completed by planning. The state allocated land to subjects for cultivation, and in return, subjects did not pay a fixed amount of crops, but fulfilled their obligations to the state in the form of completing two to three months of labor per household per year. It was this labor system that built the temples of Cuzco, Machu Picchu, and the Inca Trail stretching thousands of kilometers. Inca cities, from the capital Cuzco and regional centers like Machu Picchu to small villages behind terraced fields on hillsides, were all carefully designed and laid out. These components of the empire were connected by the Inca Trail like capillaries, with foot messengers for communication, and grain was redistributed between regions in years of famine. This new empire also had weaknesses that had not yet been resolved: the Inca Empire, which had been expanding for less than a century, was a multi-ethnic country of 10 million people ruled by 100,000 Incas; although Quechua was already the common language of the empire, many regional ethnic groups had not yet had time to integrate, and the ethnic groups' alignments with the two royal heirs during the civil war also caused divisions within the empire; the Incas had no writing, only using knotted strings to aid memory, and knew little about the Spaniards, let alone the conquest activities that had taken place in Mexico and Panama a few years earlier. On the other side, behind Pizarro and the Spaniards was the empire on which the sun never set under Charles V of the Habsburg dynasty. He was not only the King of Spain, but also controlled present-day Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Naples and Sicily in Italy, and all of Spanish America through political marriages. Although Pizarro did not know how vast the empire he was about to conquer would be, he had already gained experience in nearly twenty years of fighting with Native Americans, and had Cortés's conquest in Mexico as a reference. The time was November 15, 1532. After crossing unknown mountains in Ecuador for six months, the Spaniards finally crossed the Andes, and the Cajamarca valley was spread out before their eyes. But what awaited them was not an easy opportunity to increase their wealth a hundredfold, but the endless camps of the Incas—Atahualpa's army of eighty thousand stationed in the valley. These 169 Spaniards would soon discover that not only would their dreams of conquest not be realized, but their own lives were in danger. After the first day's brief contact between the Spanish envoy and the Inca king, the Inca king proposed to meet Pizarro in the square of Cajamarca city the next day. In reality, the Inca king wanted to capture most of the Spaniards the next day and deprive them of their horses and equipment. On the Spanish side, a plan was also brewing—to capture the Inca king alive and use this to command the entire empire, which was perhaps the only way for the 169 of them to have hope of surviving among eighty thousand Indians. Thus, the first contact between the Spaniards and the Inca Empire turned into a kidnapping operation, and it would become the most successful and far-reaching kidnapping operation in history for the kidnappers. It must be stated that as mentioned earlier, Inca civilization had no written language at the time, so the following descriptions mostly come from the hands of Spanish accompanying notaries, and these notaries were not historians. The "probanzas" (testimonials) or "relaciones" (reports) they wrote were all for the purpose of reporting to the king for rewards. Although the following events took place less than 500 years ago, these descriptions as history are likely unreliable. As people often say, "history is written by the victors," and the losers, their bodies carry the blood of the victors, forgetting their original language, original culture, and even original history. The next day in the square, the accompanying friar Valverde read the Spanish king's "Requerimiento" (Requirement) to Atahualpa, briefly explaining the God-given ecclesiastical authority possessed by the Pope, stating that the Pope had in 1493 divided South America east of 46 degrees west longitude to Portugal and the western part to Spain, so the Spanish king had the right to begin ruling immediately, and violators would be "lawfully" punished by force. The speech mentioned that God's voice was contained in a book in the friar's hands. Since Inca civilization had no written language, the translator did not know how to translate it, and it was likely translated into the knotted string language. Atahualpa became interested in the Spaniards' "knotted strings" and proposed to examine them. After receiving the book, Atahualpa found nothing remarkable in it and contemptuously threw it to the ground in front of him. The friar, believing that God had been blasphemed, became furious, ran toward Pizarro behind him, and shouted for Pizarro to begin the attack. Pizarro, who held the lives of everyone present in his hands, hesitated only briefly before ordering the cannon to be fired, giving the signal to attack. The Spaniards who had been lying in ambush in the square finally rushed out shouting the attack signal "Santiago" (the armored knight, Spain's patron saint). These men had been waiting around the square for a long time, many of them had urinated in their pants without knowing it. Because when the Spaniards first arrived, the American horse on the continent had long been extinct, and the Incas only had llamas that could carry goods (llama, even this English word comes from Spanish). At the same time, Peru did not discover large iron mines until modern times, so the Incas had no steel either. Inca warriors mostly wielded clubs or axes with copper tips, accustomed to fighting with infantry, and had never even seen a horse. Among the 169 Spaniards, 60 were cavalry in full armor. The result was that the Incas were completely overwhelmed by the military superiority of the Spanish knights. Their clubs could not reach the Spanish knights on horseback at all, and even if they could, they could not penetrate the armor. And their cloth armor was useless against the Spanish steel swords. Spanish knights could charge and slash through the Inca crowd, and could quickly escape after being besieged. Many Incas directly chose to flee, and even the fleeing crowd trampled each other, causing countless deaths and injuries. The result was that on that day, except for a few injured, no Spaniards died, while the Incas suffered more than half casualties. The Spanish military superiority was like dropping bombs from an airplane onto medieval cavalry. Even later, the Incas only successfully eliminated cavalry by pulling knights off horses or throwing huge stones from mountaintops. The target of this operation—Atahualpa—was sitting in a litter exclusive to royalty and nobility when the Spaniards began their attack, carried by about 80 other high-ranking Inca lords. The Spaniards tried to kill all the Inca lords below, but an endless stream of people would come up to stabilize the litter. Finally, the Spaniards had cavalry charge the litter from one side to capture Atahualpa. As a hostage, Atahualpa promised the Spaniards to fill an entire hall with gold and silver as ransom in order to survive, and at the same time agreed to let the Spanish personnel sent to various parts of the empire go undisturbed, while the Incas still obeyed the captured king's orders. Most of the Incas' gold and silver were metals used to worship the sun and moon respectively, and Atahualpa even allowed the Spaniards to pry gold plates directly from the walls of the Qorikancha (Sun Temple) in Cuzco. At that time, sailors who risked their lives sailing on the ocean could receive half a pound of gold per year. And four pounds of gold could buy a small sailboat in Spain. But after capturing Atahualpa, the Spaniards in Cajamarca received three hundred to six hundred pounds of gold every day. Considering that many of them had invested perhaps only a horse or less when joining, the return was at least a hundredfold, no less than even the most successful venture capital today. The Spaniards' success even triggered the inflation in Europe later observed by Adam Smith. The title of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" provides the answer to why the Incas were defeated in the conflict with the Spaniards. But the above three still cannot explain why the Incas had no writing, why they did not invent the wheel, and why even their political organization and historical progress seemed to lag behind the Eurasian continent. The book adopts an economic factor perspective and finds that the calories produced per unit area of crops in South America are inherently low. The reason is that there are no suitable animals and plants for domestication locally, the north-south orientation has extremely different climates, and the dense jungle blocking the two American continents is not conducive to the spread of agricultural technology, unlike the Eurasian continent which has an entire 37th parallel north latitude that nurtured ancient civilizations. And low-yield land determined a sparser population, and without population concentration, it was impossible to produce more complex civilizations. The sparser population was not even prone to infectious diseases, which also laid the groundwork for the apocalyptic plague brought by the Spaniards. Conquerors like Pizarro, who started from the bottom of society and achieved great success through their own courage and became masters of a country, inspired many European adventurers and made them figures comparable to Columbus, forming a classic Western heroic narrative. But the work "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" by the New German Cinema director deconstructed such a heroic narrative. The story tells of Spaniards who, after completing the conquest of Cuzco, took rafts from the Andes down the river to the Amazon basin to search for the golden land and continue conquest activities. But their luck was not as good as Francisco Pizarro's in 1532. On both banks of the river, there was not only no money to plunder, nor any empire to conquer, but only occasional showers of arrows from cannibal tribes pouring down. Midway, a minor member Aguirre seized power in the expedition through force, killed all who wanted to resist, and insisted on continuing the expedition. When approaching the mouth of the Amazon River on the Brazilian side, Aguirre boasted of sailing to Mexico to seize power and breeding descendants with his daughter to create an empire of pure bloodline, but in reality, there were only a few corpses on the boat and a group of monkeys from the jungle. The film directly depicts Spanish contact with Indians. Amazon tribal natives mistook the Spaniards for descended gods, reminiscent of Montezuma who regarded the Spaniards as gods and led them into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Unsurprisingly, the Spaniards were most interested in the gold pendants worn around the natives' necks, urgently asking about the source of the gold. And the second thing was to have the natives accept baptism and accept God's teachings. The natives, like Atahualpa, put the Bible to their ears, but did not hear the so-called "voice of God," angrily placing the book under their feet. The ending was also like countless Indians in history, stabbed to death for blasphemy. Interestingly, although the film crew came from all over the world, and the language used for communication and performance on site was English, Herzog deliberately dubbed the film in German as the official version. In addition to having the iron-fisted Aguirre called Führer (leader), having the Spaniards speak German also indicated that the events in the film, beyond the history of Spanish conquest, also pointed to Germany's own history, and even more broadly, the path of destruction of the entire Western civilization. People died batch after batch, all for the personal ambitions of a very few madmen, and the absurd occupation of land in other parts of the world "according to law," just as the accompanying nobleman in the film did—with a stroke of the pen announcing that the land on both sides of the boat belonged to the Spanish royal family and calculating that the occupied territory was already several times the Iberian Peninsula. The entire death journey on the raft perhaps has a philosophical meaning: the Spaniards never faced the enemy directly, the natives' arrow showers seemed to come from deep in the jungle, more like a divine punishment; the rational people in the team quickly either died or escaped; desperate people even doubted the reality of the arrows stuck in their bodies, and finally the drifting raft seemed to no longer move forward, the camera began to rotate around the raft, indicating that downward history had fallen into a cycle at the bottom of the valley. In real history, Pizarro and his family did not have much time to enjoy their wealth and glory, and soon began to face their own path of destruction. Compared to the British who worked out "equal利益均沾" in China, the Spanish conquest methods were obviously much more clumsy. After completing the conquest procedure, the early Spaniards with Pizarro lived an extremely luxurious life in the newly built City of Kings Lima on the Pacific desert that only the highest Inca royalty and nobility could have enjoyed, and this aroused the strong jealousy of Spaniards who came to the American continent with dreams of sudden wealth and found that opportunities were all taken and they had nothing. Many of them were minor nobles and merchants with some wealth and reputation in Spain, but they let Pizarro, who crawled up from the dregs of Spanish society, stand at the top of the pyramid. The result was predictable. On June 26, 1541, in the governor's palace, seven assassins with long swords shouted "kill the tyrant" and killed the Spaniard who had conquered the largest empire in South America. After the fall of the Inca Empire, the brief new order brought by the Spaniards ended in this dishonorable and undignified way, which also seemed to foreshadow the ugly and dirty modern political history of Peru that followed.