Then came what looked like a serious attack on the English from the rear. A French knight and a troop of men-at-arms made a sally from Agincourt Castle and seized Henry’s baggage train and the 1,000 peasants that looked after it. Thinking that he would have to repel an attack from his rear as well as cope with renewed fighting on his front, and seeing that many of the French prisoners and wounded still had their weapons, Henry ordered the slaughter of all French prisoners in English hands. He also warned that any Englishman who disobeyed his order would be hanged.
Although many of the English nobles and senior officers, thinking of the fortunes in ransom money to be made from the prisoners, refused to follow the order, the common soldiers did, and many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of French prisoners were slaughtered before the order was rescinded.
Modern historians have condemned Henry V for his order, forgetting that he was acting within the codes of an age much harsher and more cruel than our own. Then, too, it is probable that the number actually butchered was considerably less than suggested in accounts of the battle in the years after 1415. It is a matter of record that nearly 2,000 prisoners, still alive, were in Henry’s train when he moved on to Calais. One of them, Charles, Duke of Orléans, was to spend 35 years in captivity in England while his ransom money was raised.
Like many war crimes, Henry V’s ‘crime’ was the result of a decision taken in the heat of battle in response to his realization that certain specific actions by the enemy could, if not checked, turn victory into defeat. His action was not condemned by his contemporaries, English or French: indeed, French commentators blamed the leaders of the French army for not withdrawing when they could see that the battle was lost. Despite his ‘crime’, Henry V remains England’s most heroic king and Shakespeare’s ‘star of England’, whose sword was made by Fortune [– and, Henry would have added, by God].
Pizarro Destroys the Inca State
Christopher Columbus returned to Europe from his first voyage of discovery across the Atlantic in 1493. His enthusiastic report to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain of his findings and his assessment that the New World had vast riches ready for the taking could not have come at a better time. Spain had recently ended several centuries of struggle to rid their country of the infidel Moo. It was full of religious fervour and had a good supply of soldiers and fighting men willing to risk their lives for the sake of those riches in gold and silver that Columbus had described.
In Central and South America, the Spanish conquistadors found two great, rich empires. Although they had witnessed years of burnings in the name of religion in their own country – Torquemada’s years as Inquisitor General in Castile and Aragon had seen some 10,000 people sentenced to death by the dreadful auto de fe – the Spanish used their shock and horror at the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice in the name of religion in Mexico as an excuse for their ruthless suppression of the Aztecs and the looting of the empire’s wealth.
Two decades later, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire of Peru was every bit as rapacious and murderous as that of his fellow Spaniard, Hernan Cortés, in Mexico. However, unlike Cortés, Francisco Pizarro was a rough, uneducated man, unable to read or write and totally unversed in the social graces or the ways of diplomacy. He was nearly 40 years old when he arrived in the New World in 1509. He helped Balboa found a colony on the Darien isthmus, and in 1515 he crossed the isthmus to the Pacific side of America, to trade with the native Americans there.
Pizarro made three great voyages of discovery down the Pacific coast of South America, setting out each time from or near the little colonial capital of Panama. On each, he put in at various points on the coast, exploring a little inland and getting to know something of the nature of the vast Inca empire, most of which lay hidden on the high plateaux of the Andes.
Although the Inca empire had reached peaked only about 100 years before Pizarro arrived on the scene, it had been in existence for several centuries, built on much older civilizations about which little is now known. This is partly because the earlier peoples of Peru had not developed any form of writing or picture writing and partly because the Spaniards’ indoctrination of the Indians they conquered was so thorough.
Archaeologists and historians have discovered that the states of South America that preceded the Incas, who pulled them all together into one vast empire, were as advanced as anything in Mexico. They had highly bureaucratic societies, well-developed agricultural techniques, including the use of irrigation, and rich cultural bases, as demonstrated by their finely woven and designed textiles, fine pottery and metalwork, and jewellery. They had also developed a sophisticated building technique that allowed their stone buildings, made without mortar, to withstand the strong earthquakes regularly experienced in the Andes. All this, the Inca Empire inherited and built upon.
The first Inca, or emperor, appeared in Peru some time in the 13th century. He and his successors gradually melded together the various states and peoples in that part of South America, creating a vast empire that stretched for 3,200 km (2,000 miles) down one of South America’s coasts, contained one of the world’s greatest mountain chains and reached inland as far as the rain forests of the Amazon. It was ruled by the absolute Inca, aided by a highly organized governing bureaucracy, many of whose members were his blood relatives and children. The capital of the Inca Empire was Cuzco, in the central highlands. The empire’s huge army, whose officers, like the government bureaucrats, came from the Inca’s extended family, expanded its operations through the empire by using an amazing network of roads which, by the time the Spaniards arrived, stretched 5,230 km (3,250 miles) from Quito in the north to Talca in central Chile. This road network was to make the Spanish conquest of Peru relatively simple and speedy.
The Inca was the divine symbol on earth of the sun god whom the Peruvians worshipped. Unlike the Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas were not bloodthirsty in their religious observance. Captives were sometimes sacrificed and in times of difficulty, such as drought, parents might sacrifice a child, but the usual sacrifice was a llama or an alpaca. Offerings to the gods were often as simple as a cone of spun wool, set down on the temple steps. Pizarro and his men did not know this when they arrived in Peru and expected to deal with people as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs. This perhaps explains the cold-blooded violence with which Pizarro conducted his first meeting with the Inca.
Pizarro’s third expedition to the Andes sailed out of Panama in January 1531. He had under his command three small ships carrying 180 men, 27 horses, arms, ammunition and stores. By September 1532, Pizarro had established a garrison settlement at a place he called San Miguel on the river Chira.
Far away in the heart of Peru, the last Inca, Atahualpa, had just concluded the victory over his brother that gave him control of the whole Inca Empire, not just the northern part of it bequeathed to him in 1527 by his father, Huayna Capac. Historians have puzzled over the question of why this Inca should have divided and thus weakened his kingdom. They have come to the conclusion that Huayna Capac, hearing about the tall, bearded strangers from across the sea who were becoming such a strong presence in the north, while mounted on strange and enormous animals the South American people had never seen, decided to put the more vulnerable part of his country in the hands of his son Atahualpa, a strong and ruthless warrior. Whatever the reason, the fact was that the great Inca Empire was not as fully united and strong as it needed to be to meet this unprecedented crisis in its history.