The Travels of Pedro De Cieza De Léon; Part 2

In the bloodiest chapter of European colonization, one Spanish soldier chose to document what was being destroyed. Pedro de Cieza de León arrived in Peru in the 1540s, a young man who would spend five years traversing the Andes, interviewing Inca nobles, ordinary citizens, and prisoners of war. He recorded their stories, their legends of creation, their memories of an empire that had taken centuries to build and mere decades to unravel. This volume traces the Incas back to their origins, to a fractured world of warring peoples united by the legendary figure Manco Cápac, and forward through their rise to dominion over the most sophisticated civilization in the Americas. Cieza de León writes with surprising empathy for the conquered, preserving oral histories and cultural details that would otherwise have been lost. Here is an eyewitness account of a world ending, recorded by someone who understood its value even as his own countrymen dismantled it stone by stone.