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. In part, a natural human aversion to lost causes explains this neglect, and in this case the victors and vanquished fared alike. 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. 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. 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.
Prescott lived in the age of Manifest Destiny, before the dawn of anthropological relativity. 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’s moral certitude makes us wince today, but his factual knowledge and overwhelming eloquence served to intimidate generations of historians. 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. 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. For Peru, we now have John Hemming’s The Conquest of the Incas, but the book is a disappointment.
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. Hemming has examined an impressive range of sources, both printed and archival, and his compilation of biographical detail on the Indian participants is especially praiseworthy, though the interested reader will now wish to consult James Lockhart’s Men of Cajamarca for more information about the Spanish side. Indeed, Hemming seems to know almost every stone and wildflower in the Andes, but this painstaking factuality is a poor substitute for the insight of Prescott and Padden. In this reconstruction of the subjugation of the Peruvian Indians, from Pizarro’s seizure of Atahualpa to Toledo’s execution of the pathetic last Inca, we are treated to a series of cardboard figures enacting an issueless historical play, unless greed and an instinct for survival are to be judged the sum of human existence. Whatever his prejudices, Prescott conveyed in his histories a sense of what the protagonists were about, and so does Padden. In Hemming’s book, the essence of both the Spanish and the Inca cultures is never spelled out, and therefore the most deeply felt motives of the champions of these two great traditions are lost to the reader. Even the surface manifestations of each culture are mentioned in a series of asides, awkwardly tucked into various chapters of a chronological account of events.
The unwillingness of Hemming to confront and assess either culture is most unfortunate. In an ostensibly impartial account of this epochal struggle between two views of human existence—in which Inca stonework is praised in the same breath as the baroque churches of the Spanish—little credit, and often considerable injustice, is done to both. I think in particular of Viceroy Toledo, whose unpleasant duty it was to consolidate the Spanish conquest, and to whom Hemming does a disservice. As any historian who has read his official correspondence knows, Toledo had great compassion for the natives of Peru. But the viceroy shared with crown and conquerors the heartfelt conviction—dismissed by Hemming in a sentence or so—that an Incaic representation of human and divine authority could not be allowed to exist in de facto rivalry to that of the Spanish monarchy and Catholicism, and hence the seemingly ruthless campaign to “consume the seed of the Incas” (p. 451). In short, this book supplements, but does not supersede, Prescott, and the conquest of Peru awaits its Padden.
