Post
by MLE (Emily Cotton) » Tue December 21st, 2010, 3:03 am
According to the chronicler who married Atahualpa's widow (who was there for the massacre) the Inca was completely drunk at the time. When the messenger arrived to tell him that his pet 'gods' were misbehaving, he had the man beheaded on the spot. Twenty minutes later, he was too sotted to give the orders to fight when two small hand-carried cannons and seventy-five cavalry charged the packed masses in the square of Cajamarca. The native soldiers didn't dare fight without orders, they were packed like sardines until the press broke down the six-foot walls around the square, and by then the Spaniards had Atahualpa as a captive, and they didn't dare do anything.
The Inca nobles knew very well that the Spaniards weren't gods, but they couldn't abandon Atahualpa's cause--most of the Empire was still behind his brother Huascar, the rightful Inca, who had just been defeated in a bloody battle of the civil war started when smallpox killed their father Inca Huayna Capac AND Ninian, his first choice of heir. By the time Pizarro arrived, over half the population had died from smallpox and civil war.
And as for Pizarro, he had his partner Diego Almagro to deal with. Within a few years, the spanish would be fighting each other; Pizarro would kill Almagro, and later Almagro's supporters would assassinate Pizarro.