Tom Holland

But the lust for more and more just seems to seize them.

And the competitiveness and the fear that your gold will be taken away, I suppose, that's at the back of their mind the whole time.

There is Christopher a moralist.

There is Christopher a moralist.

So there's a young priest who wrote an account of this, Cristobal de Molina.

Their only concern was to collect gold and silver to make themselves all rich without thinking that what they were doing was wrong and that they were wrecking and destroying.

For what was being destroyed was more perfect than anything they possessed.

So it's like the lamentations over the beauties of Tenochtitlan, isn't it?

Yeah.

After that had been destroyed.

And there are people clearly at the time who think, you know, there are one or two people who think, God, hold on.

Are we losing our minds here?

Are we the baddies here?

Are we the baddies?

Exactly.

But Pizarro himself is in no mood to mess around.

So exactly one month after he entered the city, on the 15th of December, 1533, he says, let's start the melting down.

And for the next two months, as in Cajamarca, the forges are roaring day and night, and they're producing another colossal, colossal horde of gold and silver bars for shipment back to Spain.

Now, in the meantime, Pizarro is thinking about the issue of the wider Inca empire.

So Pizarro is not a fool.