Dominic Sandbrook

Pizarro can't believe this.

And he calls in one of his secretaries, a guy called Francisco de Jerez, and says, I want you to write this down, make a record.

And then he says to Atahualpa, great.

If you do this, we will let you go.

We will guarantee your life.

And you can go back off to your northern heartland of Quito in Ecuador, and you can be king in the north there.

And the Spanish are thinking, well, this is an amazing result.

Basically, if Atahualpa can honor this, we'll get the gold.

Because he's our prisoner and because people are bringing the gold, he'll be acquiescing in our overlordship.

We'll turn him into our collaborator.

We won't be attacked by his armies.

And in the meantime, we can get reinforcements from Panama or even from Spain.

Now, this is important because Atahualpa, I think, has no sense of the Spanish army.

are the first of many.

He thinks they are brigands, raiders, pirates.

I don't think it ever occurs to him or indeed to any of the Incas that more of these bearded men will come in their floating castles or whatever they call them.

Yeah, exactly.

right he's still i think a really important point actually that you made there is i think he is trapped by the context of the civil war intellectually he sees everything through the prism of his struggle with huasca of finishing off the civil war and then cementing his control over the empire yeah and the spanish are not exactly an irritation they're more they're obviously more than that but they're a factor aren't they yes they're a factor the wider story is he sees it

is the Civil War, which he thinks the Spanish don't really understand.

I think the Spanish think the Civil War is an incidental detail in their big story.