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The twenty-six-year-old Charles celebrated victory as he celebrated marriage to a girl he came to adore. After an engagement to Mary, the six-year-old daughter of Henry VIII and his aunt Catherine, designed to undermine the Franco-English entente, he switched to marrying Infanta Isabella, aged twenty-three, the pale, red-haired daughter of Manuel of Portugal who offered a Croesan dowry. Isabella was well educated and, confidently wearing a medallion inscribed Aut Caesar aut nihil, determined to marry only a great monarch. She got her Caesar, while her brother João III married Charles’s sister, Catarina. The first cousins met for the first time at their Seville wedding, but she was extremely pretty. They fell in love, honeymooning happily at the arabesque Alhambra in Granada, where he built a new palace and imported carnations to plant in her honour.

The young empress ‘sleeps every night in her husband’s arms; they stay in bed until 10 or 11’, observed a Portuguese diplomat, ‘always talking and laughing together’. Charles boasted that his hands were shaking from erotic exhaustion – ‘I can’t write with my own hand’ – as he was ‘still a new bridegroom’, and Isabella conceived at once, surviving an agonizing labour with regal grit. She requested a veil, and when a midwife advised her to scream if necessary, she replied, ‘I’d rather die. Don’t talk to me like that: I may die but I will not cry out.’^* The baby was named Philip. Although Charles selfishly treated her as a breeding machine – she endured seven pregnancies – and left her for four years at a time as he defended his empire, he loved her, praising her ‘great beauty’. He trusted her too, appointing her regent; he praised her decisions as ‘very prudent and well conceived’.

In May 1529, it was Isabella who permitted that coarse conquistador Pizarro to set off for somewhere called Piru. ‘We order that Captain Pizarro be entrusted with governing it for the rest of his life,’ she wrote. ‘We give permission for him to take 250 men with him.’

In December 1530, Pizarro sailed from Panama, arriving fortuitously just as the Empire of the Four Parts Together reeled from a war of succession. Conqueror and father of fifty sons, Inca Wayna Capac, who had ruled for thirty years, had expanded Four Parts to its greatest extent, from the Peruvian heartland to the Andean mountains and Amazonian swamps, pushing into today’s Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador – victories celebrated by flaying vanquished lords, impaling their heads on stakes and stretching their skins on to drums. The Sapa Inca knew about the European arrival even before Cortés’s conquests, but in 1524, while fighting in south-western Colombia, he contracted smallpox brought by the Spanish, dying in an epidemic along with his chosen heir. The Four Parts was divided between two sons, Huáscar Inca who was to rule from his new city of Quito, and the favourite Atahualpa as autonomous king of Cuzco in the south – an arrangement that soon proved disastrous. Huáscar seduced the wives of his nobles and seized the fiefdoms of former Incas, leading to tension with his brother whom he arrested. When Atahualpa escaped, the brothers, backed by feuding royal clans, fought one another with armies of 50,000 apiece until Huáscar was captured.

Just as Pizarro was about to arrive, Atahualpa laid on a sadistic show, forcing his half-brother to watch as all his wives and children were tortured then killed. He was leading an army of 40,000 towards the capital Cuzco when he encountered Captain-General Pizarro and his 106 infantrymen and 62 cavalrymen, a family affair that included three Pizarro brothers. The Spaniards agreed to greet Atahualpa, who was resting in a nearby spa in Cajamarca. In the city square there, the Castilian artfully concealed artillery in surrounding buildings. When Atahualpa was borne by his retainers into the square, Pizarro’s friar offered a breviary. The Inca threw it to the ground, and the conquistador ‘gave a signal to the gunner that he should fire shots into the midst of the Incas’.

THE INCA AND THE CONQUISTADOR