Inca and Spaniard: A Battle of Two Cultures

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himself on the back for having brought the light of Christianity into another dark corner of the New World. No doubt many Spaniards believed that their success in crushing the Inca Empire was indeed God's Will, and something for which every Indian, in his heart, was grateful. Yet did it not occur to these proud lords of the Earth that, behind the complacent smiles, the downcast glances, and the pious expressions of Christianity, the Inca wore on his very soul the emblems of defiance, of perseverance, and of true belief... in himself and his people?
Certainly there was another reality that lay beneath the veneer of Inca submission. In the Sixteenth century, the Inca People had witnessed the unimaginable. They had seen their entire world turned upside down, their most cherished traditions banned and cast aside, their leaders persecuted as heretics or devils while their rights as a people were simply taken away by an alien race that must itself had seemed like a race of ...

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the forbidding mountainsides to make them suitable for agriculture, and had built roads, bridges and fortresses from huge, perfectly-fitted blocks of stone. And then of course, there was the gold. The Inca ruler, Atahualpa, was ransomed for what was calculated in the Twentieth Century to be six million dollars worth of the precious metal. [3] Clearly, this was no race of savages patiently waiting to be civilized. From the first, the Inca government attempted rationally to understand the newcomers. Using their own considerable knowledge and beliefs, they made every attempt to understand the Spaniards in terms of Inca society and religion. As tales of Spanish might filtered inland ...

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