An Account of the Conquest of Peru

Pedro Sancho was there. As secretary to Francisco Pizarro, he witnessed the downfall of an empire from inside the Spanish camp, and his account reads like no history book ever could. The pages crackle with the audacity of 168 men facing an empire: the first sight of Inca gold that drove them mad, the bizarre chess match of diplomacy and deception between Pizarro and the Inca lord Atahualpa, and the slow unraveling of a civilization that had never imagined such strangers could exist. Sancho writes without hindsight, without our knowledge of what comes next, and that blindness makes every decision feel genuinely desperate. The text captures the conquistadors' greed and piety in the same breath, their terror and triumph, their bewildered encounters with llamas and altitude sickness and a society organized so differently that it seemed to belong to another world. This is not the conquest as historians would later reconstruct it, but the conquest as it felt to men living it hour by hour, uncertain of tomorrow.