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I'm Tim Harford. And I'm Dan Snow. And this is a crossover episode of my podcast, Cautionary Tales. And my podcast, Dan Snow's History. And I am absolutely delighted to be sitting here in this little booth with you, Tim. Because Cautionary Tales is all about... It's very snug, isn't it? It's very snug. And we've both got long legs. And what I love is that I'm a big fan of Cautionary Tales because it's all about disaster.
which makes for great content, as we know, but also things you can learn a huge amount about. Human error, catastrophe, through time, through history. And I reached out to you, as our American cousins say, because I've got a story for you. I've just returned from a trip to Peru and there's an extraordinary tale about an Incan emperor...
a Spanish conquistador, and ruinous miscalculation. All about ruinous miscalculations on Cautionary Tales. And with absolutely gigantic consequences, which is the best kind of Cautionary Tale of the many I've listened to. But first, Tim.
The deal is, you've got a story for me. I need something from you, buddy. I have got a story for you. And it's a story we've told before on Cautionary Tales, but I wanted to get your perspective on it as a brilliant historian and explainer of history. We are going to go back to northern France in 1346, where a motley band of English invaders is about to go toe-to-toe with King Philip's unparalleled killing machine.
So string your bows and strap into your armour, folks. It's going to be a good one. We're in the 14th century and the Capetian miracle has petered out. Tim, do you know about the Capetian miracle? I feel I'm about to be told about the Capetian miracle, Dan. Brilliant! Yes, you are. The Capetian dynasty are the ruling family of France and they are kind of almost unique in European history because
by successfully going father to son, producing a faintly competent male heir in every generation. Which is obviously the only way you could possibly choose a new leader, right? Obviously, no one doubts that. Primogeniture, of course. Any other systems are madness. The House of Capet goes from strength to strength. From the very late 10th century, so the kind of 980s,
all the way down to the early 14th century, father to son. You know, you could contrast that, if you like, with Edward Confessor, 1066, dying without heirs. Henry I doesn't have any sons and there's a civil war that follows. There is a problem with sonlessness in these kind of medieval dynasties. And the competition miracle peters out as three...
hail and hearty sons of King Philip IV die, one after the other, bang, bang, bang, and one of their sons as well. So you just get this complete exterminating event in the royal house of France. And guess who, on paper, is the closest male heir to that last king?
King of England? Oh, shockingly, the King of England. It's Edward III. And it's this extraordinary thing that English and French, we like to say we're the greatest enemies. But our histories, our stories, our lineages are totally intertwined with each other. I think it's a great example. Edward III's
Mother, famous from the film Braveheart. Famous documentary. You wouldn't expect that. Listeners, Tim was not expecting that one. Anyway, she's a princess of France, married to Edward II. So Edward III inherits royal blood via his French mother. And he forms the opinion that he, in fact, is the rightful heir.
heir to the French throne. He argues that the French crown can pass through the female, very progressive. And it was the opinion of his cousins in France that it could not. And they had to get, they went back a bit further to trace their link to the throne. So you get the two houses of Plantagenet and Valois are both fighting now for the French crown. It becomes known as the Hundred Years' War. What do you think is going on here? These two families
about to thrust their respective nations into generations of warfare. There's uncertainty. It's unclear who is the leader. The moment you have uncertainty, you have something to fight over. As long as it's clear who is the boss, who is the king...
There's no reason to go to war. The whole thing is just caused by a lack of succession planning, as we might say in the 21st century. But because of that, Edward III brings his force over to France and starts rampaging around, causing trouble and basically trying to prove
prove that Philip of Valois is incapable of being the King of France because he can't protect his own subjects. It's like William the Conqueror landing in Britain and laying waste to parts of Sussex very deliberately. It's about delegitimising that the King... You're saying, A, he shouldn't be on the throne, he's not legitimate, and B, by the way, he's also useless. And it strikes me that that is a kind of twin-track approach, isn't it? It is. Now, one thing I was curious about is why it took...
The French so long to respond. Edward and his fairly small armies just laying waste to French cities, raping and pillaging, and the French don't respond for a while. In this medieval period, you can't really afford to keep men in the field. But most importantly, Edward III had won a crushing naval victory at the start of the Hundred Years' War. And so you've got a flexibility conferred by having naval superiority. So you can land in Normandy, you can land in the Pas-de-Calais, you can land in Brittany. It
It doesn't make sense to try and sort of gather up a huge army and keep them all in one place. A, they're going to get sick, they're going to eat up supplies. That's just not how armies work. You have to get aristocrats from around the country to bring levies with them. It's kind of a slow process. Not one that lends itself to, all right, mate, you sit there on the beach for the next two years and wait for Edward Plantagenet. What they're doing is a bit like Xerxes against Alexander the Great. You wait until you build up an almost overwhelming force. Yes, it certainly vastly outnumbers the English. Eventually, Tim...
What happens? Because the Battle of Crecy, it seems like the French are sort of at the end of a long day's march. They didn't need to fight a battle at all. It's quite extraordinary. So the English are outnumbered and they're far from home. The English do have this one advantage, which is they choose the battlefield. It is a gently sloping hill with a windmill at the top and Edward III takes up position in the windmill so he can look over the battlefield.
They have thousands and thousands of longbowmen as well as knights. The English longbowmen have plenty of time to dig in. They reinforce their position and they just sit there, I don't know, eating their pork pie or whatever it is and waiting for the French to show up. And the French army, which is probably three times bigger, many more knights, shows up as the sun is setting behind the windmill. And one of King Philip's advisers says, let's not attack now. There's no hurry.
We will be charging into the setting sun. We haven't prepared. Let's all pray and feast. And with God's blessing, we will attack in the morning, which would have been very good advice to take. And Philip tries to take it. He orders his army to stop, and they don't stop. And that was the first...
that I wanted to explore in Cautionary Tales because why didn't they stop? It wasn't so much that they directly disobeyed him. It was an emergent phenomenon. Basically what was happening is that the men at the back didn't want to stop until they had reached the front. They didn't want to be accused of cowardice. And the men at the front didn't want the men at the back to catch up with them. They didn't want to be accused of dawdling themselves. There's this sort of pressure where nobody wants to disobey Philip, but at the same time they're not stopping until they're in the front rank.
And if the whole army isn't stopping until everyone's in the front rank, the whole army isn't stopping. And what happens is, as the sun is setting, the advanced ranks of the French forces arrive at the bottom of this hill, milling around in full view of the slightly bemused English archers who are standing there going, ''What are they doing?'' At which point, King Philip decides, ''Look, we're kind of committed now, we're here.''
We have to attack, and that's really where the French troubles begin. They're a bunch of lusty, praise-hungry, wealth-hungry, egotistical, insecure young men. They know the easiest thing to do is charge at the enemy because then no-one can doubt their manliness and their courage and everything like that, and they want to win glory.
And actually what great commanders are able to do, great systems, great cultures, are able to get them to subordinate that urge and do exactly what they're told. And you see time and again, whether it's Sparta, whether it's Oliver Cromwell's roundheads, whether it's Genghis Khan's Mongols, it's the troops who subordinate. It might not make sense to them on the ground. The enemy's right ahead of me and they're running away. Come on, what's going on? But you have to assume the general's got a better intelligence picture of the battlefield or even the theatre of war. And this is the problem with medieval armies is...
There just isn't that culture. I mean, there's an economic side to this, which is that your shock troops, the most important weapon in a medieval battle is your fully armoured knights. And they're also the richest people on the battlefield. They're the richest people in your country. So how do you get the richest people in your country to put themselves absolutely on the front line? It's a bit of a
You need them because no one else can afford the armour. And critically, you can't afford it. So you can't have a big central state like the Roman Empire or the British Empire going, right, everyone, you're all going to be armed with the same kit, do the same job and do what you're told. Yeah. So they have autonomy and you need to give them an incentive to...
take risks and that incentive comes from culture, which is a culture where these men, they would rather die than be accused of cowardice. Which is great if you want people to fight bravely, but not necessarily great if you want people to just hang back and wait till tomorrow. Your primary objective probably is not that of the King of France. Your objective is, I want to win honour and fame and be the subject of praise poetry.
That's not a great way to organise an army. I mean, we should be fair and say that it's worked fine up until this point. And this battle is the moment where the English find the weak point of the French military tactics and the French military equipment. So speaking of tactics and equipment economics, you are the man to talk about...
The longbow. Bows made of yew, not peculiar to England and Wales, but really adopted by the English and Welsh in this period. Is that also a reflection of culture and the economy, do you think? Or was it just luck? Definitely not luck. The French don't take the missile weapon seriously. They have Genoese mercenaries with very powerful crossbows who they don't really understand and they don't respect the archer. The funny thing is the English felt the same way. So the English used to sing songs about how the archer was a coward who dare not come close to his foe.
And Edward III deliberately set out to change the culture. He decided he was going to build his army around this longbow, potentially a very powerful weapon, but you need to be very skilled. So how do you get so many skilled longbowmen? He made it compulsory to practice archery for two hours after church on Sunday. - Banned football for that period? - Yes, if you're really saying, no, archery is more important than football, you are making a very, very strong statement to the English and the Welsh.
And so over the course of years, it becomes clear that the longbow is very important, that the longbowman is to be respected, even though he is not a noble, not a knight, but is a very important part of the army. And so you have a large, respected and very skilled force of longbowmen who are deployed at Crecy.
And these can shoot 15 arrows every minute. I have not been able to achieve that rate of shooting, but they... Have you practised for two hours after church every Sunday? I have not. So this is the set-up. The English longbowmen are uphill, so they've got an extra range advantage. They're dug in. Philip sends the Genoese crossbowmen
out to fight. Just take out those English longbowmen and then we'll charge. The crossbowmen were supposed to be equipped with this huge shield with a spike in the bottom. They would carry the shield out onto the battlefield and ram the spike into the soft earth.
and crouch behind the shield while loading the crossbow, because the crossbow is a very powerful weapon, very sophisticated weapon, much feared, but slow to reload, and ideally you reload it with your foot, because that gives you the force. And you're quite vulnerable, aren't you? You're quite vulnerable, but not if you're behind your big shield. Well, remember, the French army arrived on the battlefield in some disarray, with a bit of a pile-up,
And the shields are back in the baggage train. These mercenaries, they must have been furious. They've been marching all day next to these French knights who were in the saddle. They're tired, they're hungry. Now they're sent into battle and they don't even have their shields.
So they march uphill to try to take out the English longbowmen and then there's a bit of luck for the English. It's a sudden rain shower. The English longbow is very easy to un-string, so they quickly un-string it. They keep the strings under their hats. Keep it under your hat. Keep it under your hat. The more sophisticated, more complex crossbow, you can't do that. So the Genoese crossbowmen, their strings get wet, which makes them looser and reduces the range.
They're marching uphill. The hill is now a bit soft because of all that sudden downpour. And maybe they're a little shy to get too close to the archers who have that height advantage. They stop, they fire their first volley and fall slightly short. And there is not a second volley.
No, because the English start shooting their longbows and at quite a long range as well. Yeah. If they just rain down these arrows, they're able to fire with tremendous rapidity. And the crossbowmen who don't have their shields, they just break and run. They've never seen anything like this. They're running back down the hills.
And then some reports claim that King Philip was so contemptuous of the crossbowmen, powerful force, who he misused completely. He was so contemptuous of them that he ordered his knights to just charge straight through them, hack them down if they got in the way, and attack the English. - Just engage the enemy. - Yeah. Did not go well.
It's interesting, isn't it, through history, the sort of lack of respect the existing hierarchies have for kind of new technology, new ways of doing things. I'm reminded of that British admiral who went to an early demonstration of submarines and he sputtered that it was underhand, unfair and damn done English. It's strange how...
blind we can be to engaging with and using this new technology. But they're also not very interested in the English longbowmen, who are mostly on their flanks. They want to make contact with the English knights because...
There's no honour in cutting down a bunch of peasants. Charge for the English knights. So they just ignore the longbowmen who are raining down these arrows from a defended position from either side and in front. And remember, the ground is soft. It's uphill. You've got several thousand Genoese crossbowmen trying to get off the battlefield.
And the horses are dying under this rain of arrows. So the charge just breaks down in disorder. It's not that thousands of French knights are killed, but just that they cannot sustain the momentum. And the few that reach the English lines are thrown back and they have to withdraw in disorder and put themselves together and then decide what to do next. It's so interesting you say that and how people, especially the officers, especially the members of the elite, how they want to go to war.
I'm reminded of the Spanish Armada when the British ships developed this idea of cannons staying off Spanish ships and just blast them with cannon. Not very gentlemanly, really. I remember reading about one Spanish officer who would shout, he stood in the rigging, brandishing his sword and shouting at the English, calling them Lutheran hens. Because they didn't come alongside and fight as you should, hand to hand on each other's quarterdecks. Till he got a cannonball to the face, presumably. Exactly, presumably. So...
In the same way, early cavalrymen didn't want to go and fight in tanks. Like, no, it's not what I've signed up for. It's not what my dad did. It's not what my older brothers have done. So your point there is so fascinating. By the way, if people are interested, there is also a cautionary tales about how the British army invented blitzkrieg and then...
Tim, as with most of my content, it's stolen from stuff that you've done previously. I just go through your back catalogue. Hardly, hardly. Re-splicing it. So, Tim, the first charge gets thrown back and then begins this absolute killing field. Longbow arrows raining down, repeated French charges. It's a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,
Chaos? Because the French do it again and again and again and again and again and the same thing happens every time. It's just getting more and more difficult. The battlefield is getting muddier and muddier. There's stories of French knights drowning in their own helmets. Every time they try to do it, there's
There's more dead men and more dead horses on the battlefield. And they're not really reaching the English. I mean, occasionally there is a bit of a skirmish, but fundamentally they're thrown back every single time. And every single time, with tremendous skill, they wheel around at the bottom of the battlefield. It's getting darker and darker.
They think, well, what should we do? Let's do it again. But I bet that also that bit's important. I bet it's not the king going, right, everybody. I bet it's just sort of individual nobles going, on my honour, follow me. And then it's sort of that kind of chaotic, crumbling frontier idea. There's one famous example, which is the blind king, John. He's about 50. He's lost his sight about 10 years previously. And he's...
he asks to be led into battle, even though he can't see, which I think is a fantastic illustration of both the courage, the heroism, and just the stupid futility of it. Because, of course, Blind King John of Bohemia is immediately killed. And then, of course, everyone sings songs about what a great hero he was, but...
There we go. That's the French approach all summed up. And you can imagine him going forward with his little bodyguard. And then other people think, oh, there's something else going on. They join. And then everyone's like, oh, we're going up again. I mean, it seems so stupid to us. But this is where I got very interested in cautionary tales about, well, what is going on? This is the French military culture of the time. What does it even mean to have a culture? And of all places, I found an explanation in the Harvard Business Review, all about corporate culture and how it worked. And one of the things they said in this article, culture is a thing that
you have in common with other people. It's everywhere in a way that it means that you don't necessarily see it. And it's not articulated. It's implicit rather than explicit. It wasn't that the French knights came up with the wrong answers. It's that they didn't even ask the questions. Why are we doing this? Why don't we just wait till morning? The English are completely outnumbered. We're in France. We're surrounded by friendly territory.
let's wait till dawn and have another go, or maybe even just dismount and walk up there. We could walk up there and kill them. We've got such numerical superiority, but no, we have to ride, we have to charge. And because of their culture, which had served them very well up to that point, they weren't even able to ask those questions, let alone come up with the answers.
It's extraordinary. But the English are unable to turn this sort of battlefield advantage, so this tactical success, they're unable to win. Edward III never becomes king of England.
He strolls off to Calais, which the English then hold for many, many decades afterwards, but they don't hold much else. I mean, the battle is a catastrophe for France, even if it's not a particular triumph for the English, because so many French nobles die on this battlefield. It was a Hundred Years' War event,
Ultimately, the English do lose that war and the French do adapt. Their culture changes. They adopt gunpowder weapons a lot more. So perhaps crushing defeat is where culture starts to change. Culture can change and it often changes with learning from your mistakes, but it takes time.
Tim, a man who's never made any mistakes. Thank you very much. Well, Dan, this was such fun. I shall remind people that they can listen to The Battle of Crecy in the Cautionary Tales archives. And of course, the one or two listeners who have not yet encountered Dan Snow's history hit, well, now they know that they must subscribe and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. But we're not finished. We will be back in just a moment after the break. And when we return...
We'll be shifting continents, we will be shifting centuries, and Dan Snow will be telling me another cautionary tale about another mighty power that failed to comprehend its opponent. Back soon.
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We're back. I am sitting here with Dan Snow, the historian, the host of Dan Snow's history hit. Now, Dan, when Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru in 1526, it was the beginning of the end for the Inca, as you well know. Their bloody pursuit of gold, fame and fortune was rife with treachery and deceit. And within a few short years, the once thriving Incan empire had been decimated.
Now, Dan, you've recently returned from a research trip to Machu Picchu in Peru. Where should we start? Should we start with the man at the helm of this brutal invasion, Francisco Pizarro? Well, just a remarkable figure. In fact, we could go back even further because...
Actually, the conquistadors might have arrived in Peru, but their diseases had arrived earlier. And I think that forms the absolute foundation for everything we're talking about here. It's now thought that something like nine out of ten indigenous Americans, so that's people North and South America and the Caribbean...
They succumbed to European diseases, smallpox, typhus, in the century or a couple of centuries after Christopher Columbus arrived. Yeah. So Columbus arrived in 1492. We're now talking about 1526. So they've...
It's only been 30-odd years. But the diseases have travelled faster than the Spanish, as you can imagine, from person to person. We've had an illustration of how quickly that can happen. We certainly have. And the Spanish, obviously, the first is a little toehold in the Caribbean, and then it's islands, several islands, and then famously...
You get Cortes, who goes to Mexico and topples the Aztec Empire at the beginning of the 16th century. And so the Spanish tentacles are now extending out into the so-called New World. And Peru is a little bit later than that. So tell me, Francisco Pizarro, who was he? Pizarro, well, he's the kind of man that you'd expect to rise at a time of upheaval, that change quickly.
represents huge opportunity to people like him who are ambitious. He was born in 1478. We think he was a legitimate. He was born to a woman of very humble birth. He's described as a swineherd. And he's a man who therefore has got very little to lose. He seeks opportunity.
If you're a settled Aris, if you're the Duke of Medina Sedonia, you don't tend to take your life in your hands, cross the Atlantic and try and hack out a life in the New World. And so he goes with a bunch of other adventurers, really. Yeah. Hard men, ambitious, nothing to lose, nothing to go back for. And he's not an official representative of the Spanish crown, but he sort of has permission to go and have a crack, doesn't he? Yes. Spanish...
colonialism, even the Spanish state can't often afford. It's not like we're going to raise an army of 10,000 men and a fleet of ships and send them all under our chosen officers and everything will be done according to Spanish law. So you send out these ruffians and if they're successful, the state will kind of backfill it and move in afterwards. And if they disappear into the wilderness, the jungles of Central America, you go, well, no great loss. And so
He and his brothers put together, he goes on one of the first expeditions across the Isthmus of Panama in 1502. And by the 1520s, he's wealthy enough, he's got enough of a reputation to gather a little band of followers. I mean, it's not unlike the Vikings, you could say. He's got fewer than 200, hasn't he? Yeah, yeah. These are war bands. They're setting out from secure bases on islands in Central America and other places, and they're just seeing what they see. But he has his sights set on it.
treasure city. So what was the idea? There's rumours of a city of gold in what we now call Peru. Peru, we should say for people who don't have the Atlas to mind, is on the Pacific coast. It's on the west side of South America. You've got it. The Spanish have established themselves as places like Colombia in the Gulf of Mexico. You go across the isthmus and
And then you start looking down that west coast of South America at the spine of the Andes. And there were rumours, there were rumours, because there was a huge amount of trade and exchange in this period before the Europeans arrived. And there were rumours of a glittering civilisation with lots of gold and lots of silver. And the Incan civilisation is indeed enormously impressive. And it was enormously impressive, enormously sophisticated.
But critically, not only are they in the process of undergoing this extraordinary mortality event, the Inca emperor, for example, dies and his two sons are then thrown into civil war against each other. It's another succession crisis. It's a big succession crisis. And so these two sons are fighting and suddenly these Europeans appear on the northern edge of the empire. A tiny little band of soldiers. They can't do that much harm. But the empire is wrestling with disease. Millions of people, I think.
Millions of people. Literally millions of people. Largest empire in the history of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. So stretching from, I think, parts of Columbia, southern Columbia down to Argentina and Chile.
and a remarkable empire, extraordinary road network, no written language, but you must have done something on this, Tim. No written language, no. Well, actually, I studied it at a primary school. Fascinating. But also no horses. So it's an enormous civilisation. It's a very sophisticated civilisation.
But they're in crisis. They're losing tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people to smallpox. They are in the middle of a civil war. Civil war. And Pizarro shows up. Pizarro shows up. They've got other problems, which is they're enormously sophisticated, but they lack gunpowder weapons. They lack horses. They lack beasts of burden. The biggest domesticatable animal in South America is a llama.
And a llama cannot carry nearly as much weight as a horse. They have no wheeled transport. That's what's so fascinating and mind-blowing about this place. They're capable of building fortresses, enormous rocks, enormous stones, which made the Spanish believe when they first set eyes upon them, they were the work of angels. But pertinent to what you like talking about, they also have a cultural problem. Their way of making war appears to be very different to the European way of making war. And that is essential for the story that comes next. Yeah, so Atohulpa, the ruler of the Inca Empire...
He decides he's going to meet Pizarro. And I love the way that you told the story in your podcast of Atahulpa showing up with his bodyguards and with his vast army and with his enormous display of wealth. Well, as I said, with the French knights, it wasn't that he came up with the wrong answer. It's that there were certain questions that he didn't even ask about what Pizarro might do. So what did Pizarro do? It didn't occur to him.
His own subjects were not allowed to look him in the eye. He was the ruler of a vast empire. He was a divine figure, really. It didn't occur to him that this ragged, sunburnt joker with a couple of hundred men behind him would do something as audacious as what, in fact, Pizarro does. You're meant to have a parley. There's meant to be a sort of discussion, a meeting, a sort of a diplomatic moment.
And Pizarro just breaks all the rules. And as Atahualpa and as Pizarro are sort of about to meet in this town square, Pizarro has secreted away all his horses and men, and they all jump out, ambush, terrify. If you've never seen horses before, it's Fort Gates horses, gunpowder weapons. They're terrifying anyway, even if you do know what they look like. My kids love riding them, and they scare me to death. So, yeah, terrifying war horses charging through these narrow streets. And there's this moment of extraordinary chaos...
And in that, there is opportunity. And Pizarro physically grabs the Sapa Inca, grabs Atualpa, slaughters his men. He's decapitated this mighty empire. It's like the northern barbarians seizing the Emperor Augustus upon landing in Rome and holding him to ransom. Although I feel that if that happened to the Romans, if the emperor was taken prisoner, somebody else would be in charge. And the problem, perhaps because of the civil war or perhaps because...
such an occurrence had never struck them as possible, there's no chain of command. It's not clear who's now in charge or what they should do. Yeah, perhaps a little bit like Stalin's approach to government. The power is concentrated remarkably in this one person. And this one person is now a hostage of Bizarro. This one person is now a hostage of Bizarro. And it fragments the empire. So some of these northern groups...
take the opportunity to establish a bit more autonomy, a bit more independence, and they kind of join Pizarro and say, yeah, we didn't like the Inca anyway. And some notables within the empire kind of go over to Pizarro thinking, oh, I can use these Spanish. Classic, my enemies, enemies, my friend. They don't understand the existential threat that Pizarro represents. Because they think it's just 180 guys and a few horses. We can get rid of them eventually. We can pay them off. They don't realize that there are just
cities bursting with Europeans. The demographics is all wrong for this. And they're able to transport across the Atlantic. They're able to arrive in greater and greater numbers. You know, they're able to supply gunpowder, weapons, horses at a level required to kind of topple the empire. The Inca and the peoples of the Inca Empire can't get their heads around the nature of this challenge. Yes. We should talk about what happens to Atahualpa himself, which is rather sad. Well, it's very sad. And he realizes that
that the Spanish are obsessed with gold and gold doesn't really have a monetary value in the Inca Empire. Gold is a sort of sacred material. It's a symbolic representation of the sun and
of divinity and Coricancha in Cusco the Inca capital it's the temple of gold the walls were so coated with gold and there was lots of golden ornamentation in it and he offers it all to the Spanish and he says if I fill this room full of gold will you let me go and it's estimated to be sort of 300 million dollars or something in today's money but it's it's a vast amount of gold and silver from around the empire
He says, yeah, deal. He says, deal. Of course he says, yeah, deal, mate. Yeah, brilliant. He knows full well he can't release the Inca emperor. Overnight, you know, Pizarro becomes one of the richest men in the world. And again, they misunderstand. In the Inca world, lots of warfare and lots of conflict is about...
and about the obligations of the captor and the captured and giving your word. And then the Inca would often expand their empire. They would capture notables. The notables would swear allegiance and there would be an exchange of kind of divine gifts and things. And then the Inca would be happy for that arrangement to exist. I mean, there was no sense in which you needed to...
exterminate your enemy which is what the Europeans are so good at. And so Atahualpa despite having given Pizarro all this gold he is tried he's put on trial for treason you know for Spanish king which is remarkable. He's sentenced to being burnt. He asks Pizarro for mercy he says please don't burn me. In the afterlife of the Inca require mummification take place. Pizarro relents says fine he garrots him then he burns the corpse anyway. Yeah.
Just in case there was any doubt that Pizarro was not a nice man. No, he's a horrible person in many ways. Very effective, unfortunately, in this example. But in 1533, there's this moment... Actually, a lot of people think that was the great moment and it was all Spanish conquered after that. But in 1533, there's a really interesting moment where Pizarro moves south with these indigenous allies at this point, people who see an advantage at the end of the Inca. And they capture Cusco, the Inca capital. And then, fascinatingly...
There is a battle. The Inca do seem to get their heads around what's happening here. And despite succession crisis, disease, fragmenting of their empire, they do assemble a huge force. Let's pause this conversation with Dan Snow for a moment. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.
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People focus traditionally on Pizarro, Suiza and Atahualpa, but I think this is really the most exciting and interesting moment. And it's this battle for Cusco. And it's still a very small number of Europeans. They've got indigenous allies. They've got horses and guns. But importantly, again, for your listeners, they've got a culture of warfare that is just fundamentally different. And I'm minded also of the Comanche in North America. Or you think about moments in North America where indigenous Americans, they enjoy spectacular success over British, Spanish colonial forces.
They kind of enjoy their success, own the battlefield, take home some slaves and go and celebrate and all disperse their communities. What they don't do is what modern proto-industrial European armies are capable of doing, which is immediately march where the center of gravity of your enemy is and slaughter everybody. And so their fields with salt. You know, we've won a big battle.
We've won this battle on the Molongahela River. We've won this battle here. Let's celebrate. It's great. And yet Europeans, they come back again and again and again and again. And unless you kind of march on Albany, murder everyone there, and then march on New York, you cannot drive the English out of New England, for example, and New York. So in the same way here, the Inca do get to the point, they build up this big army, but then to our eyes, they're just very, very poor in their use of it. What they need to do is just get into Cusco and...
and attack Pizarro and his band of ruffians until they are all dead. Because it's thousands and thousands. We think it's 100,000. 100,000 against a few hundred. A few hundred. We have got indigenous allies and they are important. But in terms of the Europeans, we think it's just a few hundred still. But again, there's no sense of the magnitude of what is about to happen to them if Europeans gain a toehold in this part of the Americas. There are...
ships of reinforcements and priests and engineers and soldiers and settlers who are about to arrive. So rather than do that... So rather than do that... You're charging into Cusco and going house to house. Yeah. Well, I'm sounding rather bloodthirsty here. That's what the Europeans would have done if the tables were turned. They don't do that. They don't do that. They spend a lot of time in religious observances. They know a hopeless situation when they see one. They think they do and expect Pizarro to come out and say, all right, you're right, lads.
I submit to you. We're going to go through a kind of formal process of submission and that's going to confer obligations on me. This is how they would traditionally do things. They don't realise that Pizarro is going to fight the last man and the last bullet and then he's going to counterattack them and then when they knock him down, he's going to get up and fight again. That's just not what they're expecting. But by this stage, in fact, so when February 1536 happened,
And Pizarro, Francisco Pizarro, he's left it to his brothers, Hernando, Gonzalo and Juan. So they're in charge of...
the defence of Cusco. There is an attack into Cusco and there is some house-to-house fighting. And their army's massive European observer said it was like a carpet of black on the hills around Cusco during the day and at night it was like a starry sky from all the campfires. They enjoy enormous advantages. But then critically, the Inca, they've wasted time and it means that Pizarro's brother Juan is able to use that time. He's able to launch this extraordinary counter-attack. You never do this. If you're
wildly outnumbered in a terrible position. The Inca would never expect this. He launches his cavalry. They break out. So the Inca go, well, the cavalry have all treated. They've disappeared. But he circles them around and they attack the Spanish citadel on the hilltop above Cusco. This beautiful, stunning hilltop, giant walls, hugely powerful position. And the Spanish...
to the absolute consternation of the Inca, like launch an attack on this strong point. Not unlike Blitzkrieg that you've mentioned earlier, the Spanish are very good at identifying the center of gravity, the kind of cerebral cortex of the enemy and just trying to kill it repeatedly. And the Inca have just got no way of comprehending this and no way of dealing with it. And the Spanish have these technological advantages as well. And so there's this huge battle that takes place in the hills above Cusco.
And Juan Pizarro at this point is mortally wounded. He gets smashed in the head with a stone from a slinger. But the Spanish achieve enough of a victory for the Inca to kind of withdraw and think again. Sometimes you don't know you're in an existential fight. And if you knew you were in one, you would act a bit differently. So the Inca instead, they kind of withdraw and think about how they're going to do it. But by withdrawing, it helped further fragment their coalition. It further encourages the Spanish and their indigenous allies. You're ceding the battlefield to the Spanish.
And of course, what they should do is throw every last man, every last stone, every last weapon club at the Spanish, but they don't do that. Culture, I think, is fascinating. We don't know what we don't know. We don't discuss what it never occurred to us to discuss. In the cautionary tale about the Battle of Crecy, I reflected on my own profession, journalism, and I saw a wonderful talk, at least I thought it was wonderful at the time, by the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, Marty Barron, who's this great journalist
great figure in journalism. This is a few years ago and he was reflecting on the fact that Trump was portraying the media as the enemies of the people, that the newspaper's business model was in absolute crisis because of social media and Craigslist, so they were losing money. Many of the American people just thought that newspapers such as the Washington Post were fake news, so nobody believes them, they're the enemies of the government and they're losing a massive amount of money. Brilliant diagnosis. It is a brilliant diagnosis.
what do we do? And Marty Baron said, we need to do our job. Back to basics, he cited the Washington Post principles from the 1930s. And at the time, I thought, yes, stand up for traditional journalism. It was only afterwards, I thought, this is like the Inca. This is like the French Knights. You are about to be wiped out.
And what is your response? Do exactly what we've been doing up till now that has brought us to this moment of crisis. Do it again. And so I think the important message is it's not just about some medieval knights in armour. It's not just about this amazing culture from South America from centuries ago. It's about the way that we all have our blind spots to do with the culture in which we're raised. Yes, I'm just really struck by...
And particularly as I get older, I realise that the conservatism that can creep up on you, small c, in middle and older age, and sometimes in the face of a changing world, if you're a World War I general, if you are a German senior officer in the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, if you're a Japanese admiral, you have lived your whole life living and breathing an institution, its value, absorbing its culture, propagating its culture, that the idea of dismissing that...
feels, well, feels literally revolutionary. And the extent to which people would almost rather be defeated. They would almost rather die on the battlefield than change. And it's easy to laugh at that when you're a young history student. But the older I get, the more I think, well, maybe that's me as well.
I've been speaking to Dan Snow. Dan is the host, the creator of Dan Snow's History Hit. That is an amazing show available wherever you get your podcasts. Dan's recently made a fantastic four-part series on the Inca, which you can find by searching Dan Snow's History Hit Machu Picchu. We'll be back again with another Cautionary Tales on our regular schedule at really all...
that it falls to me to say is, Dan, thank you so much for joining us on Cautionary Tales. As a long-time fan, it's been a huge honour. Thank you very much. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Vital Moulad, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. MUSIC PLAYS
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