Mr. MacQuarrie's description of the historic showdown between Pizarro's rag-tag band of 100 Spaniards and thousands of the finest Incan troops is brilliant. He has a real gift for suspense, and the ability of the Spanish to use their armor, artillery, and horses to slaughter several thousand Incans is vividly brought to life.
While MacQuarrie indicts the Spanish for a great genocidal crime, he does not, to his credit, romanticize the Incans. The Incans did not form a 10 million person empire by playing softball. They engaged in their own forms of conquest, and the system was extraodinarily hierarchical and oppressive to the ordinary Incan. And the Incan emperor was not some well-meaning character out of a Disney movie. His plan was to slaughter the Spanish and then to castrate a few surivors to turn them into suitable guards for his harem.
Still, the rapaciousness of the Spanish is appalling. They had no regard for the Incan civilization and wanted only the gold and silver and the benefits of being the master race.
MacQuarrie convincingly shows that the Spanish armor and horses made them invincible on a flat field of battle. This, and the extraordinary centralization of the Incans that made them vulnerable to the kidnap and coopting of their emperor, explains how a band of 160 men could conquer a nation of 10 million. By the time the Incans figured out the need to engage in a guerilla war, it was too late, and they were defeated by the Spanish.
The book suffers from three important flaws. First, there is no original scholarship here, though MacQuarrie has done an excellent job of culling through the sources and studies that are available. Second, to spice up the story, MacQuarrie imagines events and adds detail to make the narrative read like a narrative -- inserting "undoubtedly" whenever he introduces some such sort of speculation. Third, the story of the Twentieth Century explorers' rediscovery of the lost Incan ruins is not particularly interesting and wastes a good portion of the book. Why not tell us more about how the Spanish stamped out this civilization once the last emperor is executed?
On the whole, a very interesting and informative book.
