Clash of Empires The Inca: Masters of the Clouds

Deep in the heart of the Peruvian Andes, there is a shrine.

It is known as Yurak Rumi - the White Stone.

Five centuries ago, priests

and royalty from one of the greatest empires in the world would

gather here to pray to the sun, to the earth, and to the stars.

But the empire they ruled had shrunk. Once it spanned a continent.

Now it covered barely this isolated piece of forest.

This is the story of what happened to the Inca -

the greatest pre-Columbian empire in the Americas.

A land of desert temples, of palaces in the clouds

and cities hidden deep in the forest.

The Inca created a system of governance that was ideally

suited to these landscapes.

A religion that chimed with pre-existing Andean belief systems,

but that was designed to emphasise their own special

position in the cosmic order.

Not only had they developed ingenious agricultural technologies,

but an effective way of distributing them, binding people to the state.

And their built environment, their architecture criss-crossed

the entire territories, projecting their power to the people.

But the Inca would meet another empire from across the ocean,

one which played by a completely different set of rules.

And this clash of two very different empires is still the defining

moment in South America's history.

I am fascinated by how the Inca succumbed to the Spanish.

How such a powerful state was conquered by just a few

hundred conquistadors.

How an empire of mountains, desert, sky and forest

was reduced to this lonely and forgotten shrine.

The Inca were one of many societies who

lived in the Andes during the early part of the second millennium.

From their capital city, Cuzco, they then built an empire which

stretched 4,000 kilometres along the western coast of South America.

It included parts of the modern-day

nations of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile.

This was an empire of solutions - the Inca revolutionised agriculture.

They had transformed food distribution.

They bound their huge realm together with thousands of kilometres

of roads, many of which are still in use today.

And at their zenith, their power even reached places like this -

Mount Ampato, high in the Andes, where rock and cloud meet sky.

So this is the base of Mount Ampato on the left.

That's Sabancaya - another volcano - on the right.

At over 6,000 metres, Ampato is one of the highest mountains in Peru.

Like many high peaks in the Andes,

it was summited by the Inca hundreds of years ago.

Which tells me that mountains like this played a significant

role in the culture of the Inca Empire.

When we talk about high-altitude archaeology,

we're talking about 5,200 metres. The only people who did

that before European sport climbing in the 1800s were the Incas.

So, like, 400 years before Europeans were even reaching 22,000 feet,

the Incas were not only reaching, consistently reaching,

they were building structures of stone at 22,000 feet.

For 99.9% of our lives, we live in the same

parts of the landscape - home, work, in the pub.

And so our behaviour in those locations is pretty

normal for society.

But what about that other fraction of the landscape,

extreme locations, deep inside caves,

under water and at the top of extremely high mountains?

I think that the behaviour of past societies at these extreme

locations can give us a unique insight into those cultures.

In the minds of the Inca, inanimate objects like rocks, rivers

or streams were often considered sacred.

Mountains were no exception.

They represented the origin of people's ancestors,

or their place they went to when they died.

Many of these mountains are active volcanoes and they still inspire

an almost religious reverence from the people who live here today.

When they look at the mountains,

they kind of see a living presence, and that was brought home many

times to me. They'd say, "You Westerners just don't understand.

"For us, the mountains are alive."

I'm currently at 5,500 metres, or just over 18,000 feet, above sea level.

When you hike up to these extreme altitudes, it becomes very

hard to breathe and there's a lack of oxygen to the brain.

And that's really interesting,

because it starts to play tricks on your mind.

Your thoughts internalise very, very quickly.

To describe it, it's almost like you're on the edge of dreaming

but you're still awake.

So you can see why the Inca would find it a very spiritual

experience as they came up to these extreme places,

why they might feel they were entering the realm of the gods.

That's why we need to look at these mountains not simply as rock

and ice,

but as places which were vital to sustaining

and explaining the Inca worldview.

And what happened on these mountains can explain

much about the strength and nature of Inca power.

Around the year 1450,

a spectacular Inca procession made its way up this mountain.

As part of the group was a 13-year-old girl,

dressed in elaborate Inca textiles.

But the group had a grisly purpose, because when they reached the

summit, they smashed in the girl's skull, sacrificing her to the gods.

For over 500 years, knowledge of this expedition,

and the fate of the girl who was sacrificed, lay hidden in the snow.

It wasn't till 1995, when American anthropologist Johan Reinhard

and his climbing partner Miguel Zarate reached the summit,

that Ampato gave up its secret.

We initially found food and textiles,

you know, torn, and wood pieces and stuff like that.

When we returned later, we found statues and other things -

boxes, little boxes, and so on, but, of course, the focus then

became on the mummy which was just laying right out.

Reinhard and Zarate named the mummy Juanita.

Her sacrifice was the culmination of a whole series of carefully

planned rituals which spread throughout the empire.

Human sacrifice was the last event in a whole

series of rituals that could take as long as a year before they

reached their culmination. People, in fact, were brought to Cuzco

and fed special foods and purified before being carried

or themselves walking

as far as 2,000 kilometres to get to their final sacrifice point.

Juanita's last journey would have taken her across the whole empire,

from desert, to coast, to forest,

before finally reaching Mount Ampato.

Her epic journey and carefully planned death played a critical role

in demonstrating and reinforcing Inca power to the people they ruled.

The Inca Empire is partly held together through

religion and ritual and activities, such as the human sacrifices on

mountain tops or on islands, which create an integration of the empire

through people coming from Cuzco and walking to make these sacrifices.

And this is why Juanita was led up this mountain five centuries ago.

Her journey to Ampato symbolised the political reach of the Inca.

Her sacrifice emphasised the Inca control over the sacred

landscape of the Andes.

Above all, Juanita's death suggests to me

an empire with an incredibly well-developed

sense of its own mission, its own rituals and its own power.

And yet, this huge empire of ten million souls

fell rapidly to a small force of conquistadors.

To find out why, I think we need to look at just how rapidly

the Inca were expanding by the late 15th century.

Because that rapid expansion undermined the foundations

upon which their empire was built.

This is the site of Quispiguanca, the great royal

estate of Huayna Capac, the Sapa Inca ruler.

In 1493, when construction of this site was in full swing,

it must have been such a impressive sight -

the estate sprawling down this beautiful Urubamba River.

This was when the Inca were at their zenith.

Today, Quispiguanca is in danger of being consumed by the modern

town of Urubamba.

But once, nearly 2,500 workers and their

families lived on this site, tending to Huayna Capac's every whim.

The emperor and his family lived in this massive enclosure,

as big as seven football pitches.

There was a forest stocked with game and deer, a lagoon,

an artificial pond, and storehouses for clothes, food and beer.

But all this splendour was hiding a serious problem.

The Inca empire was fed by a constant need for growth.

As the Inca Empire expanded and got larger,

it was much harder to control the diversity of populations that

were under the Inca rubric.

I think the Inca Empire was continuously unstable,

in as much as you were always having to persuade all

of these different ethnic groups to remain within it, and as it became

larger and larger, the potential of fragmentation was always there.

Pressure to expand is common to many empires, not just the Inca.

But expanding whilst maintaining stability, even for a powerful

and complex empire like the Incas', is a delicate balancing act.

I think all emperors take power with

the idea of expanding their empire.

It's rather a mandate when you take the crown.

So I think Huayna Capac was expanding out, but he inherits

the empire and it's already very large, it's already very complex.

Huayna Capac probably spent little time enjoying Quispiguanca.

His rule was dominated by attempts to project Inca power ever

further from Cuzco.

His greatest campaign would see him lead his armies north,

into modern-day Ecuador.

We shouldn't think of the Inca in the way we think of empires

like Rome or Britain, where power flowed directly from military might.

The Inca were different.

Their empire had largely grown through diplomacy

and peaceful incorporation, rather than bloody conquest.

It was a clever strategy, in which neighbouring societies

were enticed to accede to Inca rule in return for sharing in the fruits

of their rich, efficiently organised and well-fed empire.

If you look at the history of the Inca expansion, there's relatively few major pitched battles or

military campaigns.

But there were limits to this strategy,

as Huayna Capac and his armies were about to find out.

Quitoloma is one of a series of Inca forts which mark the northern

boundaries of the Inca empire.

These forts occupy the high points along the ridgeline,

nearly 4,000 metres above sea level in northern Ecuador.

My guide today is eminent archaeologist Antonio Fresco,

who has studied the remains of Inca forts and defences in these hills.

For 17 years, Huayna Capac and his Inca forces

fought against the Cayambe and Caranqui peoples who lived here.

The highland people of Ecuador had no need of the Inca

revolutions in agriculture and administration. Evidence shows

that they had long enjoyed plentiful harvests and a varied diet.

And signs of their resistance to the Inca are still visible here today.

As the war dragged on, the Inca used their tremendous

organisational skills to attempt social engineering on a vast scale.

They expelled people under their control and replaced them

with loyal settlers from other parts of the empire.

You get several advantages in this type of colonisation.

You are able to disperse a power which is against you

and place them in different areas, and you're able to reward

some of your own people with new conquered lands.

To this day, the effects of this can be seen here. Many people in

this part of Ecuador can trace their ancestry to Argentina and Chile.

They are descendants of the settlers and soldiers the Inca brought here.

As the years passed,

the war stretched the resources of the empire to breaking point.

This is a pretty bleak, desolate, windswept place.

But I think it was here that the peoples of northern Ecuador

changed the game for the Inca.

Because what happened here at Quitoloma and the whole

series of Inca forts along this ridgeline fundamentally altered the

nature of Inca power, with terrible consequences for the Empire.

The war reached a climax here at Lake Yahuaracocha -

the ominously named "lake of blood".

Beneath the surface, and around the edge of this lake, archaeologist

Jose Echeverria has uncovered evidence of an immense battle.

Jose has pieced together what happened here when Inca forces

confronted their northern enemies by the shores of this lake.

Sometimes empires are like supernovas -

they expand out in tremendous speed, and often there's

an over-extension, and I think that's what we have with the Incas.

They are really at the end of their logistical

abilities by the time they get up into northern Ecuador.

And the Incas just have a hard time in controlling those different

ethnic groups.

Strategically, this Pyrrhic victory was a disaster for the Inca.

Their empire in the north was not based on the same peaceful

cooperation as it was further south.

It was based purely on military strength.

The Inca were now an occupying army.

What had made the Incas

so successful was offering solutions to people, and providing

a stable and attractive way of life in a tough environment.

The campaign completely undermined what had made Inca power

so seductive and successful.

In a sense, the Inca were following a dangerous path

taken by other empires around the world, with their soldiers holed

up in forts, harassed by guerrillas, and only able to maintain

control through the application of overwhelming force and bloodshed.

This was a profound moment in Inca history,

and it was immediately followed by an event that would

destabilise the Empire like never before.

Around 1528, Huayna Capac died.

And in the Inca system,

royal succession was not simply decided by who was next in line.

The Incas basically had two tracks to the throne.

One of them was the ruler would name a co-regent

while he was still ruler. The other one was that the most able

son of the ruler would ascend to the throne, which invited competition.

That's disastrous.

It could be ruinous for a society looking for a peaceful transition.

Previous Inca successions had been disruptive and often bloody affairs.

This one would be no different.

This is a world in which the descendants of the Sapa Inca

are almost as likely to be killed in a succession

crisis as they are of becoming the Sapa Inca themselves.

The problem is, without an iron rule of primogeniture,

and the emperor having lots of children by many wives,

there's a large pool of people to claim the throne.

It's a system that lends itself to plotting, intrigue, and bargaining,

with inherent uncertainty in it, right from the beginning.

So the moment of succession is a moment of upheaval,

of vulnerability, like a shock to the system for the entire empire.

Of course, many European kingdoms have endured this

kind of constitutional crisis.

But what made this one

so dangerous was the fragile balance of power in the empire.

The most powerful armies were in the north.

They were not concentrated in Cuzco, they were up there

as a potential rebellious source of power for a contender to the throne.

When Huayna Capac died, it thrust both

the political elite in Cuzco

and the military elite in Ecuador into direct conflict.

They no longer had a uniting figure everyone could get behind,

and that put the empire into chaos.

This was the unintended consequence of Huayna Capac's northward

expansion.

His two-decade-long campaign had fatally undermined the military

and political balance of the empire.

Combined with the uncertainty of the succession,

the result was a devastating civil war.

The protagonists in this Civil War were half-brothers Atahualpa

and Huascar - both sons of Huayna Capac, but by different mothers.

It was a rivalry that divided the empire.

Huascar had the support of the nobles in Cuzco

and was enthroned there.

But Atahualpa had the support of the northern armies.

It's unclear whether he was expecting a separate empire

in the north or simply to move the capital from Cuzco to Quito.

But it wasn't just a dispute between half-brothers -

it was a war between north and south that completely split the empire in two.

The war became a series of devastating

battles along the length of the Andes.

After three years of fighting,

Atahualpa's seasoned soldiers gained a decisive upper hand.

Atahualpa's principle general

went into Cuzco and captured all of the royalty of Cuzco who had

sided with Huascar and massacred them.

Thousands and thousands of people were killed on the spot.

This resulted in the elimination of perhaps half of Cuzco's

royalty in the space of just a few months.

In terms of human life, the cost of Atahualpa's victory was high.

This bloodshed undoubtedly weakened the empire.

But, by 1532, Atahualpa was the undisputed successor,

and ruler of a vast realm.

Into this world stepped Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors.

They were small in number - less than 200 soldiers

and a dozen horses - but they were battle hardened after

years of fighting in Central America.

From their point of view, they could not have arrived at a better time.

Atahualpa sent emissaries down just

to have a look at these strangers. They reported back that

they're pretty hopeless, so he allowed them to come up

and meet him.

So they marched up into the mountains.

When people discuss the European conquest of the Inca,

they often ask a simple question - why didn't the Inca just

snuff out the Europeans as soon as they arrived on the coast?

They certainly enjoyed overwhelming force

and could have kidnapped or killed them at any time.

But I think this question slightly misses the point.

Because this isn't a war between equals, it's a

collision of two completely different worldviews.

From Atahualpa's perspective, he had just taken

control of an immense empire - the entire known world was his.

So from his perspective, why should he be scared of some bedraggled,

sunburned Spaniards, struggling inland?

Although few in number, Pizarro led a band of experienced

and skilled soldiers.

They were the fearsome spearhead of the Spanish Empire.

In their wake, they had brought European diseases which were

ravaging indigenous populations

and spreading, uncontrolled, across the Americas.

But, ultimately, theirs was a crusading mission.

Cloaked in the symbols of Christianity,

its aims were simple - to accumulate for each other,

and for the Spanish crown, as much wealth as humanly possible.

The expedition of Spaniards

led by Francisco Pizarro was made up of soldier entrepreneurs.

They had invested their money with the expectation of pay-offs

and the riches that they were going to find in the new land.

They purported to be spreading Christianity,

but they were just there for the money.

Atahualpa agreed to meet Pizarro in the town square of Cajamarca,

in northern Peru, at dusk on 16th November, 1532.

This was the first meeting of two very different empires.

Atahualpa had decided to turn his arrival into an elaborate

ceremonial parade.

He arrived being carried on a litter,

bedecked in his finest imperial regalia of emeralds and gold.

Perhaps to intimidate the Spanish,

or at the very least to show them who they were dealing with.

But when he arrived, there were no Spanish to be seen.

Pizarro had hidden his men in the barns that ringed the square.

They had mounted their horses, and were fully armed.

For the Inca, however, this meeting was purely ritual -

their chance to impress the Spaniards as well as to assess them.

The last thing Atahualpa and his men expected was a fight.

They weren't armed - it was a sort of ceremonial parade.

And he was on a litter being carried by 70 of his senior nobles.

He was expecting to meet this strange stranger,

instead of which a priest came out - Valverde.

Valverde began lecturing Atahualpa on Christianity,

saying that the King of Spain had sent him

to reveal the word of God to Atahualpa and his people.

This speech is known as "The Requirement"

because the Spanish government required it to be read

out before any bloodshed was resorted to by the troops.

Valverde then gave Atahualpa a Bible,

but Atahualpa quickly threw it down in disgust.

Atahualpa was a semi-divine figure.

His people believed he was descended from the sun god, Inti.

He was treated with such reverence that few dared look him in the eye,

and he expected similar respect from this bedraggled band of strangers.

Yet now he was being harangued in a language he did not understand.

Pizarro had anticipated Atahualpa's angry reaction and prepared for it.

To the astonishment of the Inca, he ordered his men to attack.

By then, the Inca's up on his litter

and all these hundreds of thousands, everybody was

squashed into this square, and then the Spaniards, by surprise, ran and

galloped out of the houses they'd been lodged in and started killing.

And they just slaughtered with their swords, just killing and killing.

Thousands of Inca died in the square that afternoon.

But not a single Spaniard was killed.

Pizarro made straight for Atahualpa and dragged him off his litter.

Seeing their revered emperor bundled into a barn,

the remaining Inca tried to flee.

What happened in Cajamarca could be explained in one way quite

simply - that Atahualpa had just underestimated the Spanish.

Certainly his scouts had reported back that they were

a disorganised rabble, weak and inferior to the Inca.

But there is another explanation that is perhaps more

pertinent to Inca power.

When Atahualpa was kidnapped, the Inca army fell into disarray.

By the morning, thousands of Inca soldiers had surrendered

meekly without a shot being fired.

Without their all-powerful demi-god leader,

the Inca military were paralysed.

Pizarro wasted no time in getting down to business with his new

prisoner.

And then they sent to the camp

and came back with anything that was gold or silver.

So, Atahualpa very rapidly realised that the one thing

they were obsessed with was gold and silver.

Attitudes towards these precious metals crystallise

the different world views of the Inca and Spanish empires.

For the Spanish, gold was the Holy Grail,

the principle reason they had travelled so far from home.

But for the Inca, it had no monetary value whatsoever.

To them, its value was purely ceremonial and spiritual.

Atahualpa then made a famous offer to Pizarro -

that he would fill a room with gold,

and twice with silver in return for his release.

He ordered his officials to melt down jewellery, idols -

anything they could lay their hands on.

It's estimated that this ransom was

worth about £200 million in today's money.

It was the largest ransom in history.

Every man under Pizarro's command instantly became fabulously wealthy.

But they now had a problem - what to do with Atahualpa.

It's hard to look into the mind of Pizarro

and his men, but I would anticipate that they saw the power

that one being, that living being represented for the unity

of the Inca Empire and that once they had received that ransom,

I bet that they did anticipate

that killing him was the only way to save their own skins.

Atahualpa hoped that by acceding to Pizarro's request,

providing so much precious metal,

he would be freed and his empire left in peace.

But it seems that some Spanish were anxious that,

if he was released, their small army would soon be crushed by the Inca.

And so on the evening of 26th July, 1533,

Atahualpa was led from his cell, into the main square of Cajamarca,

and, after a hasty trial, he was condemned to be burned at the stake.

In the Inca religion, bodies were

mummified to go into the next world, but the body had to be intact.

And so they got him to do a deathbed conversion to

Christianity. And that was in return for not damaging his body.

And then they even reneged on that.

Killed him, they then set fire to his body.

When they captured Atahualpa, the Spanish decapitated his army.

When they killed him, they decapitated an empire.

Well, the Sapa Inca is

the representation of the unity of the empire. If given time to

work out a succession system among the elite groups in Cuzco

and in Ecuador, the Inca very well could have come up with

a succession that would have yielded a new Sapa Inca, a new leader

who would have unified the empire, but the Spanish short-changed that.

They cut the legs off from under that process.

That was probably the most strategic decision they unwittingly made.

With the empire leaderless, the Spanish seized the initiative.

They made alliances with the northern peoples the Incas

had fought so long to conquer.

And they set about destroying the remaining Inca armies

on their way to Cuzco.

And they brought with them a secret weapon, which the Inca were simply

unable to deal with.

But this wasn't the latest European technology.

It was the horse.

Horses had dominated European warfare for centuries,

but they were completely alien to the Inca.

They'd never seen anything like them before,

and had no idea that they could be used as an offensive weapon.

In fact, the first Inca who saw horses,

as Pizarro moved inland, thought they could be no threat,

because they ate grass, rather than humans.

The only large domesticated

mammals in the Andes are llamas and alpacas.

Nobody ever rode them -

they were beasts of burden who would take small packs.

No-one had ever seen, or conceived of, that a warrior that would

ride a large beast. And the warfare tactics that were developed were

developed for fighting hand-to-hand with men, or projectiles with men.

Not for fighting cavalry.

Not for fighting men on horseback, and so it was a very, very,

different system of warfare that they had never

encountered before and were not prepared for, frankly.

Horses gave the Spanish mobility and speed,

allowing them to outflank whole armies of Inca foot-soldiers.

And when you are up here, it's much easier to kill a man.

You have height, you can thrust straight down into the crowd.

The horses were almost always revered by the Inca soldiers

because they gave the mounted Spaniards so much advantage.

Police today, to this day, quelling a demonstration, will use horses.

Horses were the tanks of the conquest.

Throughout the empire, they were used to

charge into ranks of terrified soldiers.

To the Incan mind, it reinforced the sense that the conquistadors

were invincible.

A charge of horses was like modern-day "shock and awe" warfare,

combining physical strength with psychological

domination of the enemy, confronting them

with something they had never seen before and struggled to comprehend.

Barely a year after capturing Atahualpa, Pizarro had

reached Cuzco.

The rapid success of the Spanish traumatised the empire,

throwing its delicate systems of government into chaos.

And thanks to a fantastic discovery, we have a snapshot of life,

and death, at this time.

In 1999, Guillermo Cock and his colleagues found an Inca

burial ground dating from the exact moment of the Spanish conquest.

One of the people found there was a young woman,

now known as La Senorita.

She was born just before the conquest.

We believe that she was born

somewhere between 1526, 1528.

She was not buried in a flexed position, as you notice immediately.

She was buried extended and she was buried, no,

with the hands on top of the chest, as a Christian.

That means that she was baptized.

La Senorita was born into a world of sun worship

and of elaborate Inca religious ritual.

But she died worshipping another god.

And her health may have been poor. In an empire which could

feed its people, Guillermo believes she probably died hungry.

She was poorly fed.

She died because of malnutrition.

If she would have lived a week more, she would have lost all of her teeth

at the same time because of the infection that she had in her mouth.

Guillermo hasn't been able to tell for sure whether La Senorita

suffered from a European disease like smallpox or measles,

because identifiable traces of these diseases can be hard to find.

But he believes new diseases would have been present

in the community at the time of La Senorita's death, arriving with,

or maybe even before, Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors.

Chances are that, before Pizarro,

the diseases were already here.

With a more limited spread, but since the natives used to sail and

trade to the north, they may have brought some of the diseases.

These diseases spread rapidly along the Incas' extensive road network.

These 40,000km of road, which had once held the vast

empire together, were now aiding the spread of deadly epidemics.

The communication networks in the Incan Empire were

excellent, and the Inca used to move people around. And so this migration

of population around the place would have helped to have transmitted

disease between different, really quite remote communities.

There were communicable diseases that

would run riot through a population that is not prepared for it,

that has no in-built natural resistance to it,

so I think it's entirely possible that these diseases really

did some of the groundwork for the invading Europeans.

And when we start to

think about percentages of population decrease,

what percentage of the population was affected by European disease?

On the coast it was terrible.

By 1575, at least 70%, 75% of the coastal

population was gone. And by 1610, there was another major

counting of people - between 87 and 93% were gone.

This represents a staggering loss of life,

which continued for generations after the conquest.

A whirlwind of death which would have devastated any empire,

even one as big and well-developed as the Inca.

La Senorita is an incredible mummy.

She provides this wonderful window of opportunity on the European

impact on Inca society, both culturally and physically.

But for me, it's this question of disease which is crucial,

because I think the Inca society would have

continued for centuries if it wasn't for European arrival.

But no society can survive the 50-90% of population

decline that we think that European disease

effected on the indigenous population.

As individuals, we are all strong and weak

at different times in our lives - physically, emotionally,

politically - and it is where we are on that spectrum

when chance meetings or key events occur that defines the decisions

we'll make, and therefore the pathway that our lives will take.

Societies and empires are no different. Power structures

waxing and waning as they morph and change through time.

Therefore, if we are weak when these key events occur,

our vulnerability can increase exponentially.

This is what happened to the Inca.

Terrible new diseases had infected the people.

In the north, their inability to build a peaceful empire had

undermined the strategy which gave the empire its strength.

Their failure to arrange an orderly succession had led to political

chaos and civil war, weakening them just as the Spanish arrived.

And as the infrastructure of empire crumbled,

the bargain the Inca had made with the people

they governed, that their rule would bring benefits in reliable

food supplies and efficient social organisation, fell apart as well.

Soon, Pizarro's small band were joined by hundreds, then thousands

more Europeans, attracted by the promise of gold, silver and land.

In little more than a year,

one empire in the Andes began to replace another.

And one of the first buildings the Spanish built in celebration

was this beautiful church in Quito.

Today, all that remains of the last independent Inca

ruler are the bodies of his descendants,

hidden away in the catacombs beneath the Church.

So we're right underneath the Covenento Maximo de

San Francisco de Quito.

It's one of the earliest churches built in South America, in AD 1534.

And why it's important is that it's a church

built on the foundations of the palace of Atahualpa.

So it really represents this turning point for the Inca elite as we

see this transition from Atahualpa's palace into a Christian space.

And what's different about the Inca noble elite living

here at the time is that, unlike in Cuzco, where many of them

are killed, people here live on and they adopt a Christian way of life.

In some ways, these skulls are symbols of the final

defeat of the Inca.

They show an elite capitulating to the Spanish,

converting to Christianity.

Even their final resting place emphasises their defeat,

underneath a Catholic Church built right on top of Atahualpa's palace.

But despite the catastrophes which had befallen them, there was

a resilience to the Inca.

And it would be a mistake to think that all of them

meekly accepted their fate

Back in Guillermo Cock's lab in Lima,

there are some more interesting skulls.

The remains of 70 people found in a mass grave,

dating from three years after the Spanish arrived.

At first, we thought they were poor people

but then we realised that many of the individuals have injuries,

and pretty bad injuries.

This person, and those dumped in the grave with them,

died a violent death.

We have a powerful hit on the head,

on the left side, that has been produced by something

sharp in a 45-degree angle.

We have clear evidence there.

We have also a smash on the side of the head with something very,

very powerful. The right arm, the left arm,

the bones in the chest, shows the evidence of combat.

You don't have to be a genius!

HE LAUGHS

-No, it's pretty clear evidence.

-It's very clear.

These deaths occurred after the Spanish arrived.

In other words, these men and women were rebelling against Spanish

rule, resisting them in the new colonial capital, Lima.

We are 100% sure

they are all indigenous, they are all also from the same area.

And many of them joined the Inca troops

and went in to the siege of Lima, and they were killed there.

The leader of the rebellion was Manco Inca,

another son of Huayna Capac.

In 1533, the Spanish had installed him as Sapa Inca in Cuzco,

with all the pomp and ceremony of his predecessors.

Manco Inca hoped that, by cooperating with the Spanish,

he could maintain his empire.

But he soon realised he had been tricked.

As he sat in his palace, here in Cuzco,

he received reports of his empire falling apart, its administration

in disarray, and the ruthless plundering by the conquistadores.

There had been personal slights, too -

Spanish officials pestering him for jewellery and gold.

Pizarro's brother had even stolen his wife.

Only two years after being installed by Pizarro, Manco Inca

decided to rebel.

Under the noses of the Spanish, he assembled a huge army

and prepared to re-take Cuzco.

The Incan army surrounded the city, covering the hills and plains.

It must have been a magnificent sight,

but a horrifying one for the Spanish holed up in the city centre.

One Spaniard described the Incan army as a "black carpet"

by day, and "a clear sky filled with stars" at night,

as their campfires lit up the landscape.

There were fewer than 200 Spaniards in Cuzco

when Manco Inca arrived at the gates.

They desperately sent messages to Lima for help.

Messages which didn't arrive.

The Incas had developed one tactic that did seem

to be able to kill Spaniards.

Peru is very mountainous, so they trapped them in...

where they knew a road was going through - a narrow gorge.

They trapped them at either end

and then rolled huge stones down on them.

And they managed to kill most of those relief expeditions in that way.

It looked like the Spanish empire in Peru was about to come to

an abrupt end.

But despite the Incas' overwhelming numerical advantage,

the attack stalled.

Manco Inca's rebellion illustrates some of the strengths

and weakness of the Inca empire.

On the one hand, he was able to assemble a vast

army of over 100,000 loyal warriors, right under the nose

of the Spanish whilst essentially under military occupation.

But on the other, he was unable to take the swift and decisive

military action necessary, against an army far inferior in number.

And that's because when they arrived at the battlefield, they spent

days feasting, doing ceremonies, and consulting the oracles.

Anything, that is, except actually attacking.

Inca battle tactics had consisted of a vast show of force designed

to persuade their enemies not to resist.

This had worked for previous Sapa Incas,

allowing them to build an empire with minimal bloodshed.

But these tactics didn't impress the Spanish,

who used the delay to dig in and wait for help.

It seems to me that what underpins Inca power is fundamentally

a shared understanding of the way the world should work.

And when an empire arrives who play by a completely different

set of rules, they become powerless.

I think the failures of Manco Inca

and Atahualpa can be explained by this.

From a military perspective, Manco Inca wastes days before he

attacks the Spanish, following his customs and elaborate ceremonies.

And Atahualpa - for him

it's completely inconceivable that during an imperial delegation

to meet Pizarro he might be attacked and kidnapped.

After months of bloody skirmishes around the city,

Spanish reinforcements finally arrived.

Manco Inca realised his rebellion had failed.

He had no choice but to retreat -

as far away from the Spanish as he could.

His destination was the remote, mountainous region of Vilcabamba.

Although only a few days' march from Cuzco, this area

was difficult for the Spanish to penetrate.

Protected by steep mountainsides and encircled by rivers, the Vilcabamba

region offered protection to Manco Inca and his shattered people.

The Inca arrived here in 1537.

Five years earlier, the empire had stretched across a continent.

Now it was reduced to a small patch of mountainous forest.

Its centre, the new Cuzco, was the town of Vitcos.

I really love this site of Vitcos.

It's on this beautiful promontory with

valleys on either side, surrounded by high mountains covered in mist.

There are some real parallels with Machu Picchu.

But whereas that site is visited thousands of times every

single day, hardly anyone ever comes here.

And this site really tells the important

story about the end of the Inca empire.

THEY SPEAK IN SPANISH

Miriam Dayde Araoz Silva is one of the few archaeologists who

has excavated this remote site.

Vitcos had been built during the first flush of empire,

as the Inca expanded from Cuzco.

But now this isolated region would be the base for the resistance,

the location from which Manco Inca hoped to rebuild Inca power.

When Manco Inca first pulls into Vilcabamba,

there's armed conflict back and forth.

Manco Inca saw the Inca empire at its height,

and he knew what he was losing and he was wanting to fight back.

But in 1545, Manco Inca died.

His was the last serious rebellion against Spanish rule.

And after his death, his small Inca dominion was increasingly

encroached upon by Spanish officials and missionaries.

One part of their diminished empire that the Inca wanted to keep

safe from the Spanish was this - Yurak Rumi, the White Stone.

It had been a shrine at the height of empire.

But now it had become one of the last places on Earth

where the Inca could worship openly.

Today, it is a place of extraordinary serenity.

These elaborately carved rocks are an iconic

feature of the religious landscape of the Inca.

And this one shows how the ideology is persisting,

even here at Vitcos, right at the end of the empire.

In front of this rock would have been carried out elaborate

ceremonies, and over there you can see structures remaining that might

have housed the priests who controlled access to the site.

And that, ultimately, was too much for the Spanish.

In 1570, missionaries and their converts held

an exorcism of this shrine, before setting fire to it.

It proved to be the prelude to a larger attack on the entire

Vilcabamba region.

The Spaniards send a diplomatic

mission into Vilcabamba and that mission is killed by the Incas.

When the Spanish learn the ambassador has been killed,

they launch a massive raid into Vilcabamba.

The Inca had preserved an independent state

here for nearly 40 years.

But the destruction of Yurak Rumi signalled

the end of the Inca as an independent people.

The empire's cities and shrines were left to fall into ruin.

In many ways,

the story of this shrine reflects that of the Inca empire.

It was founded in the mid-1400s during one of the early Inca

expansions and its fateful end came when it was razed to the ground

in 1570 by Christians who saw it as symbolic of the Inca resistance.

But there's a story that I really like,

and that's an archaeologist who was working here only a few years

ago, who saw people coming here to make offerings of maize and coca.

So I think the symbolic power of this place is still alive

amongst the population today.

And you can still sense the power of the Inca as you travel

through the lands that made up their empire.

Modern highways follow Inca roads.

Incan agricultural terraces are being restored and reused.

And respect for the earth, for this incredible landscape,

is strong among the people who live here today.

Indigenous groups within the Andes have been

battered by colonial

and republican forces for all the period since the Inca empire.

But today I think the ideals of the Inca empire are used by some

of those indigenous groups to fight and say that, "We deserve the voice

to be able to run our communities as we wish, and that we have had

the force to construct a society that is as sophisticated as anything

else in the world and we can do that again within our own society today.

The ingenuity of the Inca lay ultimately in their incredible

achievements in agriculture, architecture, diplomacy

and nation-building.

Achievements which combined to give their empire a very distinct

and unusual source of power.

The source of power in many of the Andean

nations still harkens back to the memory of the Inca

and the great unity that they were able to provide over very

diverse environments and very diverse populations.

And so Andean leaders, I think, still look at the Inca

as a source of unification and a means of emulating what they did.

The Inca empire may have flourished comparatively fleetingly,

but I think it's one of the most intriguing empires the world

has ever seen.

Not just because of the astonishing way in which the Inca

developed an empire of such magnitude and complexity,

nor because of their ingenious innovations in agriculture,

architecture and engineering.

But for me, it's because they offer a completely different

perspective on how to live our lives, and at a time when Peru,

South America, and the world faces some pretty major challenges to

our way of life, I think we have a huge amount to learn from the Inca.