Tom Holland

He's installed in the great capital of the Incas, the very center of this massive empire.

He's got temples.

He's got palaces all around him.

They've got this compliant young puppet in the form of Manco.

He must just be thinking, this is great.

Everything's going superbly.

What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And now he can really get stuck into what he's come here for, which is the gold.

So some of the gold of Cusco has been moved north to Cayamarca, but not all of it.

There is a lot more gold in the temples of Cusco, and there is four times as much silver as the Spanish have already shared out.

So for the Spanish, this is basically the best thing ever.

So all their accounts, they say wherever you went, you basically found gold.

pictures of gold, golden effigies.

Pedro Pizarro has a section where he says, you know, we went and found this cave and it was full of women's shoes made of gold.

I mean, you can see why it drives the Spaniards mad because this is exactly what in their wildest fantasies they had been imagining.

And now those fantasies have come true and it will implant a kind of gold lust that will continue to rage for decades and centuries afterwards.

Yeah, it will.

And actually, the mad thing about them all falling out, which they do, spoiler alert, they all end up killing each other, is they were all really rich men.

They've got enough money now to buy a country estates back in Spain, to make their family's reputation, all of this kind of thing.