The Spanish Pioneers by Charles Fletcher Lummis

Now that we have followed Pizarro to Peru, and he is about to conquer the wonderful land to find which he has gone through such unparalleled discouragements and sufferings, we must stop for a moment to get an understanding of the country. This is the more necessary because such false and foolish tales of "the Empire of Peru" and "the reign of the Incas," and all that sort of trash, have been so widely circulated. To comprehend the Conquest at all, we must understand what there was to conquer; and that makes it necessary that I should sketch in a few words the picture of Peru that was so long accepted on the authority of grotesquely mistaken historians, and also Peru as it really was, and as more scholarly history has fully proved it to have been.

We were told that Peru was a great, rich, populous, civilized empire, ruled by a long line of kings who were called Incas; that it had dynasties and noblemen, throne and crown and court; that its kings conquered vast territories, and civilized their conquered savage neighbors by wonderful laws and schools and other tools of the highest political economy; that they had military roads finer than those built by the Romans, and a thousand miles in length, with wonderful pavement and bridges; that this wonderful race believed in one Supreme Being; that the king and all of the royal blood were immeasurably above the common people, but mild, just, paternal, and enlightened; that there were royal palaces everywhere; that they had canals four or five hundred miles long, and county fairs, and theatrical representations of tragedy and comedy; that they carved emeralds with bronze tools the making of which is now a lost art; that the government took the census, and had the populace educated;