Temple

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            .. What cannot be emphasised enough is that the conquest of the Incas by the Spanish conquistadors represents perhaps the single greatest collision of cultures in the history of human evolution.

            Here was the most dominant seafaring nation on earth— bringing with it all the latest steel technology from Europe —-clashing with the most powerful empire ever to have existed in the Americas.

            Unfortunately for historians, and thanks largely to the insatiable gold lust of Francisco Pizarro and his blood thirsty conquistadors, the greatest empire to have inhabited the Americas is also the one about which we know the least.

            The plunder of the Incan empire by Pizarro and his army of henchmen in 1532 must rank as one of the most brutal in written history. Armed with that most overwhelming of colonial weapons—gunpowder—the Spaniards cut a swathe through Incan towns and cities with “a lack of principle that would have made Machiavelli shudder” to use the words of one twentieth-century commentator.

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