Dominic Sandbrook

This stream of porters with all the gold of Cuzco, 14,000 pounds of gold, 26,000 pounds of silver, combined 20 metric tons of treasure.

And at this point, Atahualpa's ransom is unquestionably the biggest ransom ever paid.

There's a rabbit hole of economic history where people have tried to quantify how much this is.

At the lowest, it's billions of dollars or pounds in today's money.

At the highest, it is tens and tens of billions.

It's almost impossible to put a figure on it.

I mean, it puts Francis I into very, very low rent.

It's as though somebody has basically said to him, how much ransom would you like?

And he said, I don't know, a hundred billion pounds.

Yeah.

And they've said, okay, we've got it.

You know, here it is.

The three Spaniards who turn up back in Cajamarca say, do you know the mad thing?

This is only a fraction of the gold in Cusco.

They said there was so much gold in all the temples of the city that it was marvelous.

They would have brought back much more of it, but it would have detained them longer.

And they said, we've already taken steps to start hoarding it.

We've got a big storehouse there.

We've got blokes guarding it.

Great.