One day in November 1532,
the new world and old world collided.
168 spaniards attacked the imperial army of the incas
in the highlands of Peru.
Before the day was out, they had massacred 7,000 people
and taken control of the inca empire.
Not a single Spanish life was lost in the process.
Why was the balance of power so uneven
between old world and new?
And why, in the centuries that followed,
were Europeans the ones who conquered so much of the globe?
These are questions
that fascinate professor Jared diamond.
He is on a quest to understand the roots of power-
searching for clues in the most unlikely places.
He's developed a highly original theory-
that what separates the winners from the losers
is the land itself... Geography.
It was the shape of the continents,
their crops and animals
that allowed some cultures to flourish,
while others were left behind.
But can this way of seeing the world
shed light on the events of 1532?
How can geography explain the conquest of the world
by guns, germs and steel?
For two years,
a band of Spanish conquistadors has been traveling
in search of gold and glory.
They're not professional soldiers,
but mercenaries and adventurers,
led by a retired army captain- Francisco pizarro.
He's already made a fortune for himself
in the colonies of central America.
Now he's taking his men south into unknown territory.
They are the first Europeans to have climbed the andes-
and ventured this far into the continent of south America.
As they travel they find evidence
of a large native civilization.
They've reached the edge of the mighty inca empire.
For Indians and spaniards alike,
any encounter is a clash of cultures.
These Indians have never seen white men before-
and have no idea of the threat they represent.
They can't imagine that within a few days
these strangers will turn their world upside down.
By the 1530s the inca empire was enormous...
It stretched along the length of the andes
from modern day Ecuador to central Chile,
a distance of two and a half thousand miles.
But just 500 miles to the north began the colonies
of central America and the Caribbean-
prized possessions of the Spanish empire.
At the time,
the Spanish king controlled a third of mainland Europe.
But Spain itself
had only recently become a unified state,
having fought off 700 years of occupation
by islamic moors.
It was still a rural society.
Most of the conquistadors came from villages and small towns
in the heart of the country-
towns like trujillo, where pizarro grew up.
He spent much of his childhood here,
working as a swineherd in the fields nearby.
Today he's remembered as a great warrior...
His statue dominates the main square in trujillo.
And his family home has been turned into a museum.
Jared diamond has come here
to explore the world of the conquistadors...
And understand the secret of their success.
This is Francisco pizarro, a spaniard
who conquered the most powerful state in the new world,
the inca empire.
Why did pizarro and his men conquer the incas,
instead of the other way around?
It seems like a simple question.
The answer isn't immediately obvious.
After all, pizarro started out as a rather ordinary person,
and trujillo here is a rather ordinary town.
So what is it that gave pizarro and his men
this enormous power?
Why am I so interested in pizarro's conquistadors?
Because their story is such a grimly successful example
of European conquest...
and for 30 years I've been exploring patterns of conquest.
Jared diamond is a professor
at ucla in Los Angeles.
But most of his field work has been done in Papua New Guinea.
His time there inspired him to explore
the roots of inequality in the modern world...
to understand why some people
have been able to dominate and conquer others.
Looking back thousands of years,
he argues that farming gave some cultures
an enormous head start,
and those who were lucky enough
to have the most productive crops and animals
became the most productive farmers.
Agriculture first developed
in a part of the middle east known as the fertile Crescent.
Over time, crops and animals from the fertile Crescent
spread into north Africa and Europe,
where they triggered an explosion of civilization.
By the 16th century, European farms were dominated
by livestock animals that had come from the fertile Crescent.
None were native to Europe.
They provided more than just meat.
They were a source of milk and wool,
leather and manure.
And crucially, they provided muscle power.
Harnessed to a plow, a horse or an ox
could transform the productivity of farmland.
European farmers were able to grow more food
to feed more people,
who could then build bigger and more complex societies.
In the new world,
there were no horses or cattle for farming.
All the work had to be done by hand.
The only large domestic animal was the llama,
but these docile creatures have never been harnessed to a plow.
The incas were very skilled at growing potatoes and corn,
but because of their geography,
they could never be as productive as European farmers.
Horses gave Europeans another massive advantage...
They could be ridden.
To the incas, the sight of pizarro's conquistadors
passing through their land is extraordinary.
They've never seen people carried by their animals before.
Some think they are gods... These strange-looking men...
Part human, part beast.
The horses that seemed so exotic to the incas
had already been used in Spain for 4,000 years.
In an age before motorized transport,
they allowed people to be mobile and control their land.
When Javier Martin is not herding cattle,
he gives displays of traditional Spanish horsemanship.
This style of riding is known as jineta-
the emphasis is on control and maneuverability,
using bent knees to grip the sides of the horse
and only one hand on the reins.
Very different
from the more formal style of medieval knights.
By the 16th century, the jineta way of riding
had become the dominant style of the Spanish cavalry.
This is how the conquistadors would have ridden their horses.
It's an amazing display
of a big animal being controlled by a person, precise control,
stopping and starting and turning.
Javier told me that he has been riding
since he was five years old,
and when I watch this I have a better understanding
of where the conquistadors were coming from.
They were masters of these techniques
and they learned these techniques
for working with bulls,
but the techniques were also good
in a military context as well.
I can see that this control
would let you ride down people in the open.
People who had never seen horses before
would have been absolutely terrified watching this.
It would be strange and frightening,
and that's even before one of these animals
is rushing towards you, riding you down,
about to Lance you and kill you.
News of the god-like strangers on their four-legged animals
is taken by royal messenger to the emperor of the incas...
who's camped in the valley of cajamarca in northern Peru,
guarded by an army of 80,000 men.
Atahualpa is revered as a living god-
a son of the sun itself.
He's in cajamarca on a religious retreat-
giving thanks for a series of recent military triumphs.
When he hears about the progress of the spaniards,
he chooses not to have them killed.
Instead he sends back a message.
He invites them to join him in cajamarca
as quickly as possible.
Trelles: atahualpa wanted the spaniards to come to cajamarca
and enter into a trap,
and to be sure that they would do so,
he played like a psychological game with them,
sending presents, asking them to come.
Atahualpa knew that the spaniards were not gods.
The intelligence reports speak of people
wearing wool on their faces,
like a llama, like an alpaca, like an animal.
Then, they went from one place to the other
wearing, on top of their heads, a little pot
that has never been used for cooking.
You need to be crazy to walk with a pot.
But you must be beyond salvation
if you arrive to a camp and you don't use that pot to cook!
Atahualpa had an idea that these were subhumans.
What could a few horsemen and a hundred or so spaniards do
to the powerful inca?
Virtually nothing!
But atahualpa's spies don't realize
that the Spanish are armed
with some of the best weapons in the world.
At the time of the conquistadors,
Spain had the biggest army in Europe,
orchestrated from the imperial capital... Toledo.
For more than 700 years the spaniards had been at war,
fighting against the moors and other European armies.
There was an arms race in Europe.
To survive, the spaniards needed to keep up
with the latest in weapons technology.
By the 1530s, the harquebus
was an important part of the Spanish arsenal.
Gunpowder had originally come from China,
but its use as a weapon was pioneered by the arabs.
In European hands, guns became lighter and more portable...
And were used for the first time
by foot soldiers on the battlefield.
The harquebus was still a crude weapon,
but would go on to change the face of warfare.
To us moderns,
this gun doesn't seem useful for anything,
it's like a joke...
Its aim is terrible, it takes a long time to reload,
and while the shooter's reloading,
a swordsman would come in and kill him.
But the incas hadn't even gotten this far, and even this gun,
with its sound and with the smell and with the smoke
and with every now and then
a person that it manages to kill,
would have been terrifying
to someone who had never seen this before.
This would have been shock and awe, 1532 style.
Aah!
Whuh! whuh!
For all its bluster,
the technology of gunpowder was still in its infancy.
The real power of the conquistadors lay elsewhere...
With the production of steel.
Toledo had some of the best swordsmiths in the world-
but why were people here able to craft deadly steel weapons,
while the incas were still making simple bronze tools?
There was nothing innately brilliant
about Europeans themselves
that allowed them to be the ones to make high-quality swords.
Just as with guns, swords were the result
of a long process of trial and error
that began outside Europe.
People started working with metal
in the fertile Crescent 7,000 years ago.
And because Europe was geographically close
to the fertile Crescent,
Europeans inherited this metal technology.
But they took this technology on to a new level.
European soldiers demanded
stronger, longer, sharper swords.
This is what a Toledo sword looks like when it's finished.
This particular one
is modeled on the sword that pizarro carried.
It's a fearsome weapon.
It's used for stabbing, and it's also used for slashing,
and I can easily understand how the person wielding this sword
could kill dozens of people within a short time.
Loades: swords like this, rapiers,
represented a high point
in a very sophisticated
metalworking technology.
If you think about what the qualities are
that are needed in a sword-
first of all it has to be hard enough,
the metal has to be hard enough to take a sharp edge.
And that requires steel-
that is, iron infused with carbon,
and the more carbon you put into the iron,
then the harder the metal is.
But if you make it too hard, then it's brittle,
and that's no good, because as you hit somebody,
your sword would break.
And so you also need your sword to have a certain pliability,
an ability to bend and spring back into shape.
And it's got by heating it to certain temperatures,
plunging it into cold water,
immense amount of experimentation.
It took centuries to get to the level of sophistication
where you could get something
so long and elegant and fine and deadly as the rapier.
The rapier, with its extra long blade,
was developed as a dueling weapon,
but became so fashionable in renaissance Europe
it was the sword of choice for any aspiring gentleman.
Loades: the word rapier
derives from the Spanish term espara ropere.
And that means, "dress sword."
and for the first time in Spain,
we start to see people wearing the sword
with their everyday clothing, their civilian dress,
going about their everyday business...
They didn't do that in the middle ages.
This is something new in the 16th century.
And it's saying, "I have arrived,
I am a gentleman, I am upwardly mobile,
and I claim ancestry from the knights of the middle ages."
it was very much a symbol
of the conquistadors' aspiring greed.
The thing that drove them through all their hardships,
the thing that made them go to the americas,
was their lust for gold, their lust for self-advancement,
and the rapier absolutely symbolized
that overbearing avarice.
On November 15, 1532,
pizarro's band of adventurers enters the valley of cajamarca.
They've been told that atahualpa is waiting for them here,
but they're not prepared for the sight that greets them.
In the hills beyond the town of cajamarca
is the imperial inca army- 80,000 men in full battle order.
The conquistadors' own journals
bear witness to their first impressions.
Conquistador: "their camp looked like a very beautiful city.
We'd seen nothing like it in the indies until then...
And it scared us,
because we were so few and so deep in this land."
pizarro sends a party of his best horsemen
into the heart of the inca camp.
They are led by captain de soto.
They are gambling that atahualpa will allow them
to pass through the camp unharmed
and agree to meet them.
Trelles: soto's visit
had a very important psychological purpose...
To intimidate the inca in front of his people,
challenging him with the horse.
Atahualpa at first didn't react to soto's presence,
as if nobody had entered the room.
Once the horse comes eye to eye with the inca,
the inca is still calm,
showing that the horse has no impact on him,
calling soto's bluff.
Conquistador: "the captain advanced so close
that the horse's nostrils
disturbed the fringe on the inca's forehead.
But the inca never moved."
and then, after a brief silence, comes atahualpa's explosion.
He was telling them, "the time has come for you to pay."
I understand this as, "the time has come
for you to pay with your lives."
Soto, I understand, was nervous enough
to come back with fear to the camp,
and as we know,
the spaniards spent the night before in extreme fear.
The conquistadors have made their camp
in the town of cajamarca.
Many of them are now convinced they are facing oblivion.
168 soldiers, a thousand miles from any other spaniard,
facing an army of 80,000 incas.
Conquistador: "few of us slept that night.
We kept watch in the square,
from where we could see the campfires of the Indian army.
It was a fearful sight...
Like a brilliantly star-studded night."
pizarro and his most trusted officers
debate their options for how to deal with atahualpa.
Some advise caution, but pizarro insists their best chance
is to launch a surprise attack the next day-
it's a tactic that's worked successfully in the past.
12 years before pizarro went to Peru,
another famous conquistador, hernan cortes,
had gone to Mexico
and encountered another formidable civilization -
the aztecs.
He conquered the country by kidnapping the aztec leader
and exploiting the ensuing chaos.
Cortes' story was later published
and became a best seller-
a handbook for any would-be conquistador.
It can still be found
in the great library of salamanca university
in northern Spain.
Diamond: this wonderful library here
can be thought of, among other things,
as a repository of dirty tricks,
because in these books are the accounts
of what generals had been doing to other generals
for thousands of years in the past
and across much of eurasia.
And here from this library
we have a famous account of the conquest of Mexico
with all the details of what cortes did to the aztecs
and what worked.
That was a model for pizarro
to give him ideas what exactly to try out on the incas.
Whereas the incas, without writing,
had only local knowledge transmitted by oral memory,
and they were unsophisticated and naive
compared to the spaniards, because of writing.
But if books were so useful,
why couldn't the incas read or write?
To develop a new system of writing independently
is an extremely complex process
and has happened very rarely in human history.
It was first achieved
by the sumerian people of the fertile Crescent
at least 5,000 years ago.
They pioneered an elaborate system of symbols
called cuneiform,
possibly as a way of recording farming transactions.
Ever since, almost every other written language
of Europe and Asia
has copied, adapted, or simply been inspired
by the basics of cuneiform.
The spread of writing was helped enormously
by the invention of paper, ink and moveable type...
innovations that all came from outside Europe,
but were seized upon by Europeans in the middle ages
to produce the ultimate transmitter of knowledge...
the printing press.
The written word could now spread quickly and accurately
across Europe and Asia.
The modern world would be impossible
without the development of writing.
But there's another part of the world
where a new system of writing was invented independently.
In Southern Mexico, at least two and half thousand years ago,
native people developed a way of working with symbols
that evolved into the Mayan script.
But if the Maya had writing,
why didn't it spread south to the andes
and help the incas become literate?
For diamond, the answer lies in the shape of the continents.
Here are Europe and Asia
forming the continent of eurasia, a giant continent.
But it's stretched out from east to west
and narrow from north to south.
The American continent is long from north to south,
narrow from east to west, very narrow at Panama
where it narrows down to less than 100 miles.
The two continents are of the same lengths.
They're about 8,000 miles in maximum dimensions.
But eurasia is 8,000 miles from east to west,
and the americas are 8,000 miles from north to south.
It's as if these continents
were rotated 90 degrees of each other.
Diamond has already shown
that crops and animals
could spread easily east and west across eurasia,
because places at the same latitude
automatically share the same day length
and a similar climate and vegetation.
But the American continents were the opposite of eurasia.
A journey from one end of the americas to the other
is a journey from north to south-
a journey through different day lengths,
different climate zones
and dramatically different vegetation.
These basic differences hindered the spread of crops and animals,
as well as people, ideas and technologies.
The people of the andes were chronically isolated,
without access to writing or almost any other innovation
from elsewhere in the americas.
By contrast, pizarro and his men were geographically blessed.
As spaniards they enjoyed the benefit
of technologies and ideas
that had spread easily across eurasia.
The events of 1532
were clearly influenced by deep causes...
Over which no individual spaniard or inca
had any control.
The shape of the continents,
the distribution of plants and animals,
the spread of eurasian technology...
These were facts of geography-
and at almost every turn of the drama
geography was tilted in favor of Europeans.
It's the morning of November 16, 1532.
Atahualpa has agreed to meet the spaniards
in the town of cajamarca-
and sends his entourage ahead of him.
But he makes a fateful decision...
That his soldiers should not carry weapons.
Trelles: the Indians were musicians and dancers.
They were soldiers, but unarmed.
Why would atahualpa unarm his own soldiers?
Why?
Because he was in a festivity, he was celebrating,
he wasn't going to war, he was going for a celebration
so that the whole people could see
how the alleged gods would run away in fear.
The fact that some people
believed that the spaniards were gods
would play better in the hands of atahualpa's purpose.
If I know they are not gods, and I defeat the gods,
then of course everybody will be with me.
But what if I defeat the gods with no show of force at all?
Then I am beyond the gods!
While atahualpa and his men enter cajamarca,
the spaniards are waiting, hidden from view.
Conquistador: "there were 5 or 6,000 men
and behind them the figure of atahualpa
seated on a very fine litter lined with feathers
and embellished with gold and silver.
Many of us pissed ourselves out of sheer terror."
trelles: the square is filled with atahualpa's people,
but there's not one spaniard in sight.
Atahualpa asks, "where are these dogs?"
one of his right hands answers, "they have run away
because they are afraid of the magnificent inca!"
of course, the whole crowd listened to this,
and believed that this was the case.
Pizarro sends out his priest to confront atahualpa.
The conquistadors are obliged to try and convert native people
before any resort to violence.
Atahualpa has never seen a book before.
He doesn't know what to do with it.
Trelles: at that moment,
with the crowd absolutely unprepared,
the horses come, there was massive panic.
Loades: just imagine the scene in cajamarca...
The incas hadn't seen horses before,
and these aren't ordinary horses,
these are Spanish horses, fierce, big, fighting horses.
They could get in amongst men, they would trample men,
and they made the most excellent platform.
From the horse you could stab down to the left,
stab down to the right, you could cut,
you could scythe, hacking all about you.
If only the incas had known
that what you had to do against cavalry was stand firm,
then they'd have been all right, they had superior numbers.
But they didn't know that, they fled, they broke ranks,
and then the horsemen could get in amongst them,
and they cut them down.
There was an inca god called viracocha,
and he was a white man, and he was the god of thunder,
and they thought these men with their harquebuses
were the very incarnation of viracocha.
Trelles: the inca of course was in his litter,
helped by his carriers.
As soon as they were able to do it,
the spaniards went after the litter,
and they started killing the carriers.
One carrier would fall, and another one would replace him.
Only at the very, very, very end of the tragedy,
the litter started to move
because there were no more carriers left.
As the litter falls,
pizarro himself captures atahualpa.
His plan has worked to perfection.
Atahualpa is taken to a makeshift prison
in the royal quarters at cajamarca.
Conquistador: "he thought we were going to kill him.
But we told him no...
Christians only kill in the heat of the battle."
outside thousands of incas are dead.
The rest of the army has retreated to the hills.
In spite of a massive imbalance in numbers,
Spanish horses, swords and strategy have proved decisive.
But the spaniards possessed another weapon
they didn't even know they had...
A weapon of mass destruction
that had marched invisibly ahead of them.
Today the war against infectious disease
is waged at biological research centers
like porton down in Southern england.
They produce vaccines here
against the world's deadliest viruses.
In the 16th century there were no vaccines...
And there was no protection
from the rampant spread of infectious disease.
12 years before pizarro arrived at cajamarca,
a Spanish ship sailed to Mexico.
On board, one of the slaves was suffering
from the first signs of a fever.
He was the first person to bring a deadly disease
to the American mainland.
The disease was smallpox.
Within weeks, the smallpox virus
would spread from a single source
to infect thousands of native Americans.
Brooks: smallpox gets into the body when you breathe in the particles.
And they attach themselves
to the back of your throat and the inside of your lungs.
About two to three days into the illness,
then the classic rash appears.
And in its worse forms,
this takes over the whole of the body
with initially pimples and then enormous blisters,
until the whole of the skin,
starting with the hands and the face
and then spreading down to cover the rest of the body,
is taken over by the smallpox blisters.
From that time on the patient is highly infectious,
because each of those blisters
is packed full of smallpox particles.
Then if you burst a blister, the fluid will come out,
and large numbers of viruses
will be spilled onto whatever it touches.
10 to 12 days later,
his friends would begin to be taken ill,
and then 10 to 12 days after that, their friends.
That kind of rate
means the disease spreads exponentially.
Its rate of increase gets bigger and bigger and bigger
the more people are infected,
until eventually it will cause
tremendous devastation in the population.
The first smallpox epidemic of the new world
swept through central America and reached the inca empire.
Wherever it went, the virus decimated native populations,
making them easier prey for Spanish conquest.
But why were the germs so one-sided?
Why did the spaniards pass their diseases on to the incas,
and not the other way around?
This is pizarro's secret weapon...
Pigs and cows, sheep and goats, domestic animals.
Remember that pizarro was a swineherd.
He grew up in huts like this,
in intimate contact with domestic animals,
breathing in their germs,
drinking the germs in their milk.
And it was from the germs of domestic animals
that the killer diseases of humans evolved.
For example, our flu evolved from a disease of pigs
transmitted by chickens and ducks.
We acquired measles from cattle,
we acquired smallpox from domestic animals,
so that these worst killers of human people
were a legacy of 10,000 years of contact
with our beloved domestic animals.
During the middle ages,
infectious diseases swept through Europe
and claimed millions of lives.
But paradoxically, repeated epidemics
made Europeans more resilient.
In each outbreak there were always some people
who were genetically better able to fight off the virus.
These people were more likely to survive and have children.
In the process, they'd pass on their genetic resistance.
Over centuries, whole populations
acquired some degree of protection
against the spread of diseases like smallpox-
a protection the incas never had.
Brooks: once smallpox was taken to the new world,
nobody knew or had ever seen a disease like this before,
so the number of people who were susceptible was much greater.
There was no natural immunity,
and so therefore the number of people
who could both contract the disease and then spread it
and the number of people to receive it
once it had been spread
was much higher.
More people would die, and more people would be susceptible
to catch it in the first place.
It would spread rapidly throughout the population,
and the death toll would be enormous.
Diamond: why hadn't native Americans encountered smallpox before?
And why didn't they have any deadly diseases of their own
to pass on to the spaniards?
It's simply because they didn't have
the same history of contact with farm animals.
The incas had llamas,
but llamas aren't like European cows and sheep.
They're not milked, they're not kept in large herds
and they don't live in barns and huts alongside humans.
There was no significant exchange of germs
between llamas and people.
The key to diamond's argument
is the distribution of farm animals around the world.
Aside from the llama, all the large farm animals
were native to eurasia and north Africa.
None was ever domesticated in north America,
sub-saharan Africa, or Australia.
As a result, the worst epidemic diseases
were also native to eurasia and north Africa
and were then spread around the world
with deadly effect.
There's been a long debate
about the number of indigenous people who died
in the Spanish conquest of the new world.
Some scholars think there may have been
a population of 20 million native Americans-
and the vast majority, perhaps 95%,
were killed by old-world diseases.
A continent virtually emptied of its people.
After the initial shock of his capture,
atahualpa became a cooperative prisoner.
He learned to speak Spanish and play chess with his captors.
The spaniards realized
he was more useful to them alive than dead.
He was allowed to re-establish his court in prison,
as long as he ordered his people to accept Spanish rule.
He also ordered them
to melt down a vast amount of treasure...
Pizarro had promised atahualpa his freedom
in return for the gold.
It proved to be an empty promise.
Having handed over 20 tons of gold and silver,
atahualpa was no longer useful to his captors.
He was garroted to death...
In the same square
where so many of his followers had been slaughtered
eight months earlier.
With atahualpa dead,
the conquistadors went on to colonize the rest of Peru...
relying on the power of their guns, germs and steel.
Gold from the Spanish colonies
was brought back to Seville in Southern Spain.
There's little activity on the guadalquivir river today,
but in the 16th century this was
among the most important, busiest ports in the world.
A steady flow of ships carrying treasure from the americas
helped Spain become one of the richest nations on earth.
The conquistadors had changed forever
the relationship between old world and new.
I came to Spain to answer a question...
Why did pizarro and his men conquer the incas
instead of other way around?
There's a whole mythology that that conquest
and the European expansion in general
resulted from Europeans themselves
being especially brave or bold or inventive or smart.
But the answers turn out to have nothing to do
with any personal qualities of Europeans.
Yeah, pizarro and his men were brave,
but there were plenty of brave incas.
Instead Europeans were accidental conquerors...
By virtue of their geographic location and history,
they were the first people to acquire guns, germs and steel.
By the end of the 19th century,
European powers had ventured beyond the americas
and colonized Africa, Australia and much of Asia.
The process that began at cajamarca
had reached its logical conclusion.
European guns, germs and steel were re-shaping the world.