The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession

by Peter L. Bernstein

  The Spaniards found the Inca seated in a spacious courtyard with attractive structures around it and a fountain in the center, surrounded by nobles and women of the royal household. He was about thirty years old, handsome, more robust than many of his countrymen, with a large head and bloodshot eyes that made him look fierce. Hernando Pizarro greeted Atahualpa and informed him that the Spanish commander and his men were "the subjects of a mighty prince across the waters ... come ... to offer their services, and to impart to him the doctrines of the true faith which they professed." De Soto then invited the Inca to visit the Spaniards in their quarters on the following day; the Inca bluntly accepted the invitation. As a defensive measure, the Spaniards never dismounted from their horses, but this still left them in a position to respond eagerly to invitations to drink the sparkling chicha from golden vases of extraordinary size handed up to them by the dark-eyed beauties of the harem.

  Hernando and his contingent returned to their comrades in a state of high anxiety over the evident strength and discipline of the military forces of the Inca. In addition, the level of civilization was much more impressive than anything they had observed in the lower regions of the country. Pizarro, however, was undaunted. He gave a rousing speech to his men, reminding them that "If numbers, however great, were on the side of their enemy, it mattered little when the arm of Heaven was on theirs."22

  Pizarro had concocted an audacious scheme that-if it workedwould give his side an overwhelming advantage despite the enormous differences in military strength: he would take the Inca prisoner in the face of his own army. This was a high-risk strategy, but he had no doubt that the huge disparity in manpower had put him in a situation so desperate that a more modest effort would have been doomed.

  The next morning, Pizarro hid his troops throughout the buildings on the plaza, with his artillery of two small cannon in the fortress. He made certain that all the arms were in good order, that the armor was shining, and that the horses were garnished with bells to make maximum noise at the crucial instant of attack. Then mass was said. "One might have considered them a company of martyrs," Prescott observed, "about to lay down their lives in defence of their faith, instead of a licentious band of adventurers, meditating one of the most atrocious acts of perfidy on the record of history!"23

  The Inca's royal procession appeared a few hours later but halted about half a mile from Caxamalca and began to pitch their tents. Pizarro sent a messenger to ask Atahualpa to join the Spaniards as soon as possible, as both dinner and entertainment had been provided for him.

  Atahualpa swallowed the bait-whole. He arrived with only a few warriors, and without arms. Was Atahualpa so absolute in his own empire that he had no fear of entrapment? Or did he simply figure that a small troop of only two hundred men would never even contemplate such a brazen deed? Whichever it was, his lighthearted decision would seal his doom.

  Atahualpa may not have brought his army with him, but he did not spare the numbers of the rest of his retinue; five thousand or six thousand people filled the square in Caxamalca. There were hundreds of menials, singing as they cleared the path the Inca would follow. Nobles came in costumes of checkered red and white squares, while the guards and the Inca's immediate attendants wore a rich blue livery and a profusion of bright ornaments. The Inca himself was carried high on an open litter of gold and seated on a massive throne, also of gold. He wore a collar of enormous, brilliant emeralds and his hair was decorated with a variety of golden ornaments.

  When he and all his people had gathered in the square, without a Spaniard in sight, Atahualpa wondered aloud where they had all gone. At that moment, the chaplain appeared, holding a Bible in one hand and a crucifix in the other. He was accompanied by Felipillo, the Indian interpreter. The chaplain announced that he had come to set forth to the Inca the articles of true faith, which he proceeded to do at great length. He finished by explaining the role of the pope, who had commissioned the Spanish emperor, "the most mighty monarch in the world, to conquer and convert the natives in this western hemisphere.... [His] general, Francisco Pizarro, had now come to execute this important mission."24

  Atahualpa exploded. "I will be no man's tributary," he announced. "I am greater than any prince on earth.... For my faith, I will not change it. Your God, as you say, was put to death by the very men whom he created." He halted to point to the sun, then just beginning to set behind the mountains, and added, "But my God still lives in the heavens and looks down on his children." He took the Bible from the shocked friar's hands, looked at it briefly, and then threw it on the ground, declaring, "I will not go from here until your comrades have made me full satisfaction for all the wrongs they have committed. 1121

  The priest ran to Pizarro and commanded him, "Set on at once; I absolve you."26 Pizarro waved a white scarf, a cannon boomed from the fortress, and his men, some mounted and some on foot, dashed into the plaza shouting their battle cry: "St. lago and at them!"2' The Indians panicked. Stunned by the thunder of the artillery and muskets and blinded by the sulfurous smoke, they made no resistance as the Spaniards trampled them down with the horses and slashed into their defenseless bodies. Meanwhile, the Inca, still up on his heaving litter, saw his faithful nobles falling in a desperate attempt to protect him. Indeed, Pizarro himself ran to protect the Inca from excessively eager Spaniards and received a wound on his hand for his efforts-the only wound the Spaniards suffered that day. The massacre of the Indians continued for a long time until thousands of them had fallen. The precise number of dead is a matter of dispute, while the crowd of prisoners was beyond counting.

  Some of Pizarro's troops wanted to put the prisoners to death, or at least to disable them by cutting off their hands. Pizarro refused and liberated all the prisoners except for a sufficient number to tend to the needs of the Spaniards. "In this respect," Prescott comments, "the most common soldier was attended by a retinue of menials that would have better suited the establishment of a noble."28 Shades of the fourteenthcentury Florentine chronicler in the previous chapter, who had complained "at the spectacle of the popolo minuto who ... dressed themselves in a manner unbefitting their station and insisted on the finest delicacies at their table."29

  As the Spaniards settled down to await reinforcements from the Spanish base on the coast, Pizarro used the time to become better acquainted with his captive. Atahualpa, on his side, closely observed the Spaniards. He soon discovered that they had an appetite even more potent than their repeated efforts to convert him to Christianity: the love of gold.

  One day Atahualpa proposed a deal. If Pizarro would set him free, the Inca would arrange to have the room he occupied filled with gold as high as he could reach, all within two months; the gold would come from the royal palaces, temples, and public buildings. The area of the room was about 17 feet by 22 feet, with a height of nine feet. Pizarro eagerly accepted the proposition. As Atahualpa stood on tiptoe, a red line was drawn at the height he indicated, a notary recorded the details of the agreement, and Atahualpa dispatched couriers to execute the task.

  Pizarro also sent emissaries to the capital city of Cuzco, a difficult journey of over six hundred miles across the mountains, where they found the great temple of the Sun covered with plates of gold and royal mummies within, each seated on a gold throne. The Spaniards ripped seven hundred plates from the temple walls, each about the size of the lid of a chest and weighing around 4%z pounds. Before the Spaniards were through, they had packed two hundred loads of gold to be carried back to Caxamalca on the backs of the humbled Indians. This was just a preliminary foray: a larger and more rapacious trip to Cuzco would take place later on.

  Meanwhile, gold was arriving from all over Peru, from the Inca's temples, palaces, and other public edifices, to satisfy his contract with Pizarro. The gold came in many forms-goblets, ewers, salvers, vases in great variety, ornaments and utensils, tiles and plates, curious imitations of different plants and animals, and a fountain that sent up a sparkling jet of gold. Pizarro selected a small sampl
e of these objects to ship back to the emperor, Isabella's grandson Charles V, who was known as Charles Quint. He inherited the throne of Spain via his mother, Joanna the Mad, and had also been elected emperor of the Holy Roman Empire-a position his father's father had occupied. Only Napoleon and Hitler at their zenith have ruled over a larger area of Europe. We shall encounter Charles again in a later chapter.

  Except for the tiny lot that Pizarro sent to Spain, not a single piece of that heap of gold in Atahualpa's room has survived in its original form, but the small quantity of Peruvian gold work that escaped the clutch of the Spaniards and has come down to us is breathtaking.* Gold was so easily obtained at high purity from the river deposits in Peru that the art of working gold began there at an early time. By 500 BC, golden diadems, earrings, bracelets, and plaques were being created. There are even earlier objects with clear Chinese and Vietnamese influences, which suggests that Asian sailors were finding their way across the Pacific at a time when Europeans were barely managing to paddle themselves around the Mediterranean.3° Admittedly, we do not know whether the Asian sailors ever found their way back.

  The Peruvians at the time of the conquest were beating out thin gold into vessels and masks of great variety, complexity, and opulence. Among the more spectacular achievements were enormous beakers in the form of a human effigy, a difficult technical task with startling impact on the viewer. Some of these beakers show the head in an inverted position; one thereby drank out of the neck, indicating that these beakers probably represented the head of a defeated enemy with the user symbolically drinking from the enemy's skull-just like the Lombards. A woolen tunic has been found that contained thirty thousand miniscule plaques of sheet gold. At the other end of the scale, the goldsmiths created sheets of gold with repousse relief designs to cover walls, such as those that the Spaniards ripped from the temple walls in Cuzco."

  Except for the small exhibit reserved for Charles V, all the accumulated treasure was transformed from adornment to money, as one article after another disappeared into the melting pots to be recast into gold bars of a uniform standard. Pizarro assigned this task to the Indian goldsmiths, the same men who had created many of these beautiful objects. The work consumed a full month, but it produced 1,326,539 pesos d'oro, which Prescott calculated as the equivalent of $15 million when he was writing his book in the 1840s.32 That would set the value in today's money as $270 million, a handsome return for one's efforts under any circumstances, but that sum cannot convey the importance of this treasure in the far smaller economies of the sixteenth century. This calculation does not include the throne on which the Inca had made his tumultuous arrival190 pounds of 16-carat gold, or the equivalent of one year's output of the Peruvian gold mines .i3 That prize Pizarro reserved for himself. If we convert the pesos d'oro into weight and express the result in tons, the Indians must have filled Atahualpa's chamber with nearly five tons of gold, which is more than the total annual output of gold within Europe at that time, or, even more impressive, the equivalent of twenty years of production by the Peruvian gold mines.34 In contrast, it is worth recalling that Justinian poured twice as much gold into Saint Sophia and that jean II's ransom, at three million crowns, was more than double the mass of gold in Atahualpa's chamber. No wonder Justinian believed that he had surpassed Solomon and the French people rose up in revolt at the burdens imposed on them!

  The account of the Inca has a hideous ending. Newly arrived Spanish troops saw little point in continuing to shelter Atahualpa and were strongly opposed to liberating him. Pizarro resisted the pressure at first but ultimately yielded. He put the Inca up for trial under charges of having usurped the throne, squandering public revenues, practicing adultery and idolatry, and attempting to instigate an insurrection against the Spaniards. The kangaroo court lost little time in finding Atahualpa guilty. After the sentence was pronounced, Atahualpa turned with tears in his eyes to Pizarro and asked, "What have I done, or my children, that I should meet such a fate? And from your hands, too, you, who have met with friendship and kindness from my people, with whom I have shared my treasures, who have received nothing but benefits from my hands!"" Pizarro turned away without reply.

  On August 29, 1533, two hours after sunset, they lit the torchlights on the plaza and tied Atahualpa, chained hand and foot, to a stake surrounded by the fagots of his funeral pyre. The friar who had first lectured him on the blessings of Christianity appeared once again to hold up the crucifix before him and warn him of eternal damnation if he did not renounce his pagan religion and accept Christ. Atahualpa refused to yield. Finally, the priest promised Atahualpa that if he converted they would provide him with a quick death by garroting him rather than subjecting him to the extended agonies of the stake. Desperate, the Inca complied, accepting baptism with the name Juan de Atahualpa in honor of Saint John the Baptist, on whose day this unhappy event happened to fall. Then the executioner performed his gruesome task while the Spaniards muttered prayers for the salvation of the Inca's soul.

  The end of the story of the Conquerors reads like a morality tale. Adam Smith decried "the sacred thirst of gold" that drove the explorers and Conquerors into the New World, and he was right .16 The quenching of that thirst led most of these men to a bad end, beginning with Balboa himself.

  Pizarro's original company broke into factions that drowned the spirit of their great adventure in bloody internecine quarrels over leadership and spoils. After the enormous efforts they had invested in the conquest of Peru and the terrifying risks they had faced, many of the men never realized their dreams of returning to Spain with their golden wealth to live the easy life. Some lost their lives in battles with the Indians or in civil wars among themselves. Others lost their gold, because it was too heavy to carry in the constant fighting-like Ruskin's man on the sinking ship. And many lost it in betting for high stakes in gambling games with friends.

  The history of the Pizarros ends in the most bizarre tragedy. Hernando Pizarro returned to Spain with his treasure in 1540, where he was imprisoned at the behest of his enemies for twenty years and emerged an old and infirm shadow of the great soldier he had once been. Francisco Pizarro was assassinated in 1541, while having dinner in his own home in Lima, by conspirators from a group of dissidents. As the swords were plunged into his body, he cried, "Jesu!" and kissed the cross he had traced with his finger on the bloody floor.

  In time, after the Spaniards had grabbed every loose piece of gold and golden object they could find, the joy of plunder had been exhausted. Mining, which was serious business, had to take over. The Peruvian mines were great river gorges, shaped like caves and often reaching as far as sixty feet into the earth. Totally dark, these passages had room for only one man at a time, who crouched his way in, scraped out as much gold as he could from the rocks, crouched his way out, and was followed by another man to perform the same task.37

  Under the Incas, this hard work was supervised and carefully modulated to prevent exhaustion and to sustain the lives of the miners. Under the Spaniards, the merciless labor of the mines was devastating to the natives, as it was in every other golden venture of the Europeans in the New World. What an irony! Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, emphasizing the importance of Spanish gold to the Roman Empire fifteen centuries earlier, tells us that "Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru or Mexico of the old world.... The oppression of the simple natives [of Spain], who were compelled to work in their own mines for the benefit of strangers, form an exact type of the more recent history of Spanish America."38

  Later on, when the Portuguese began to exploit the huge gold resources of Brazil, the death rate of the Indians was so high that the native population was decimated and great numbers of African slaves had to be imported to take their place. The descendants of these black slaves account for a significant part of today's population in Brazil. There was also the usual story of the transmittal of the white men's diseases, but the conditions of virtual slavery at the mines threw human li
fe away as though it mattered not at all.

  Most ironic, the deluge of gold from the New World did not even bring Spain the wealth and power that the Conquerors had originally promised and that the king anticipated. But that is the topic for our next chapter.

  monumental mass of gold and silver sailed across the Atlantic from the New World to Spain during the 1500s.* According to one authority, the total European stock of gold and silver at the end of the century was nearly five times its size in 1492.1 The volume was so enormous that the armed convoys that transported the treasure to Europe averaged about sixty ships; on occasion, the convoys included as many as one hundred ships. Each of these vessels carried over two hundred tons of cargo in the 1500s and around four hundred tons on larger ships in the 1600s.2 In 1564 alone, 154 ships arrived at Seville to debark their cargo of treasure.' At the end of the sixteenth century, the precious metals accounted for the bulk of the value of everything shipped from America to Spain.

  As we trace the impact of all that gold on the European economy in the course of the sixteenth century, we shall see that the story has an ironic twist at the end. Gold had to face silver as a rival for most of history, but a serious rival to both precious metals was blossoming by the end of the sixteenth century-forms of paper money as debt instruments issued by private parties instead of by governments. All the excitement about gold in the 1500s was in essence a celebration of the past. While no one was paying much attention, the future was beginning to emerge.