The event at Cajamarca that Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs, and Steel was the first meeting between the Inca emperor Atahuallpa and Francisco Pizarro and his invading army of Spaniards. This meeting took place on November 16, 1532 and is discussed beginning on p. 68 of Diamond’s book.
Diamond says that Pizarro had 168 Spaniards with him at Cajamarca while Atahuallpa had 80,000 of his own warriors. Even so, Diamond says on p. 68, Pizarro captured the Inca “within a few minutes” of the time when the two leaders met. Diamond then uses Spanish sources to give many more details. The details of what happened at the actual encounter/battle begin on p. 70. Essentially, Pizarro planned to capture Atahuallpa. He divided his forces and hid most of them at various places around the square in the town of Cajamarca. According to the Spaniards (p. 72), Atahuallpa looked at the Bible and then threw it away, at which point the Spanish attacked. The Spanish slaughtered the Native Americans, killing (according to the writer that Diamond quotes) something like 7,000 of them before night fell. Diamond’s long quotation from the Spanish records ends on p. 74.
So, the best way to describe the event at Cajamarca is to say that it was a fight between 168 Spaniards and tens of thousands of Incas. The Spanish apparently planned all along to kill the Native Americans (or were at least very ready to do so). They seem to have used the religious “insult” as a pretext for the fight. The Spanish routed the Incas decisively, killing thousands of them. Diamond recounts this incident because he wants to think about why it was that the Spanish were able to defeat a force that was so much larger than their own. He goes on to discuss this issue in the rest of Chapter 3 of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Thursday, January 18, 2018
What happens during the event at Cajamarca that is discussed in Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
No comments:
Post a Comment