Tom Holland

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.

He knows what happened to Cortes in Mexico.

That Cortes ended up cornered in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, the future Mexico City, and basically had to fight his way out.

And he doesn't want that to happen to him.

So if we think about the map and think about the Inca Empire in thirds, because it's a long, it's not wide, it's just very long.

The Spaniards are in the central third.

So that's basically modern-day Peru.

And they control that, Pizarro and Manco.

Then you've got the southern third, so below that.

And that's modern-day Bolivia and northern Chile.

And that, so far, no Spaniard has been there.

They don't know what it's like.