The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming

We have here, to be sure, the most factually accurate account of the Peruvian conquest in print, and in this respect the author’s achievement is dazzling. For Peru, we now have John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas, but the book is a disappointment. For Mexico, there are only the magisterial pyrotechnics of Robert Padden’s The Hummingbird and the Hawk to further enlighten us about the world views of those who contested the sovereignty of Mexico in the sixteenth century. As a result, though specialized monographs of great merit abound, subsequent attempts to come to grips with the totality of the Spanish conquests have been rare. Prescott’s moral certitude makes us wince today, but his factual knowledge and overwhelming eloquence served to intimidate generations of historians. Therefore, in his writings he felt free to pass moral judgements on the European and Amerindian cultures locked in these deadly combats, and, though he condemned acts and actors on both sides, the outcome was to his satisfaction. Prescott lived in the age of Manifest Destiny, before the dawn of anthropological relativity. The second, and equally potent, factor in this neglect is William Hickling Prescott, the nineteenth-century scholar from New England whose diligent efforts to record the Spanish victories, including the examination of a significant amount of the original documentation, resulted in classic accounts of the circumstances and consequences of these momentous encounters. Northern Europeans became the most prominent chroniclers of Europe’s global dominance, and these men, when they bothered to write about Spanish deeds, were usually at pains to stress the great cruelty with which Spain had imposed her backward civilization on the Amerindian peoples of over half a hemisphere. Charles V and his successors were pleased to claim posthumous overlordship of Atahualpa and Montezuma II, but ultimately the treasures of American victories were insufficient to make Spanish Catholicism prevail in Europe, and a weakened Spain barely held her own in the colonial world against the onslaughts of her European enemies. In part, a natural human aversion to lost causes explains this neglect, and in this case the victors and vanquished fared alike. The Spanish conquests of Peru and Mexico were among the most spectacular triumphs of a renascent Europe during the great age of colonial expansion, but relatively few historians have studied or celebrated the exploits of Pizarro and Cortés.

The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming