Tom Holland

So the lowlands being conquered.

The coastline always.

The Spanish are always coming.

But maybe, you know, so the Incas don't have a couple of things really.

Something that might have been a massive game changer for them is a bow and arrow.

Because they don't have that many trees in the Andes, they have remarkably few kind of pikes and bows and arrows, which might have helped bring down the horses.

I mean, it's amazing, as we'll come to in this episode.

you know, a handful of horses can see off hundreds and hundreds of men who are terrified and they don't know how to bring them down because they don't have many bows and arrows.

But they might have learned, you know, if they'd had a sufficient breathing space, they might have.

Yeah.

The counter argument to that is nowhere else on the continent do people hold out.

And the weight of Spanish technology, of numbers, and also disease.

I mean, one thing we haven't really talked about much, we talked about in the first episode,

smallpox has made its entrance and has, before the Spaniards even arrived, and disease will continue to decimate the populations of South America.

Okay, so it's bad news for the Incas, basically.

So back in Cajamarca, Pizarro and Almagro are preparing to set off south.

And this really, I mean,

Even by their own standards, this is an absolutely insane journey to be doing.

They're going 800 miles almost south across the central Andes.

They're basically going up and down the whole time, down into these valleys, crossing rivers, climbing these peaks.