Dominic Sandbrook

And the other is the Sun Temple of Coricancha in Cusco.

I think both of these you mentioned, Tom, in your excellent Christopher Plummer reading.

Mm-hmm.

And the reason Atahualpa wants to surrender these two places in particular goes back to the point about the Civil War.

So Cusco, the Sun Temple there, the most famous temple and religious site in the Andean world.

Why does he want to surrender that?

Because he's probably never even been to Cusco.

Cusco is his brother's city, his brother's heartland.

Well, he was planning to wipe Cusco out, wasn't he?

Yeah, exactly.

So get the Spanish to do it for him.

Yeah.

He represents the north of this empire, not the south.

And he just thinks, well, this is a brilliant way of punishing Cusco for backing my brother.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like someone in Manchester saying, destroy London.

Exactly.

And then the other one, Pachacamac.

Amusingly, the priests at this oracle had made some disastrous predictions.

They basically had the crystal ball that I used to use in my Associated Newspapers days.