History of the Conquest of Peru

Four years after finishing his Mexico, Prescott turned to the other great Spanish conquest and published this in 1847. It opens with the Incas at their height: the roads, the quipu records, the storehouses, a state that fed and organized millions without money or writing in any form Europe recognized. Then Pizarro comes ashore with fewer than two hundred men, and the book moves to Cajamarca, the seizure of Atahualpa, the room filled with gold, and the civil wars among the conquerors that killed more Spaniards than the Incas ever did. Prescott’s verdicts belong to his century, but his eye for character and his control of pace have not dated. Offered here as a free PDF and EPUB.