CHAPTER IV THE SPANISH DISCOVERY AND INVASION UNDER PIZARRO [Illustration: ANCIENT STREET OF CUZCO.] While the empire of the Incas was approaching the zenith of its greatness in America, Spain was extending the power and prestige of the House of Austria throughout Europe under the sovereignty of the Emperor Charles V. And the proud dynasty of the Hapsburgs, whose double-headed eagle was destined to obscure the Sun of Tahuantinsuyo and to efface the sacred Rainbow in its shadow, did not represent a more exalted royalty in the Old World than did that of Manco-Ccapac in the New. There are even some points of resemblance between the two monarchies, so remotely separated in origin and traditions. In Peru, as in Spain, the army and the Church were the only occupations worthy of the nobility; in both countries, wars of conquest were fought in the name of religion, with the emblem of salvation in one hand and that of destruction in the other,—the Inca with the golden disk and the catapult, the Spaniard with the Cross and the sword; and both led their armies against the infidel with the determination to destroy his idols and to establish the true worship. However much we may condemn the method of the Spanish conquerors, their mission was not altogether mercenary in its purpose. It is not strange that the yellow metal dimmed their consciences when it blazed before their eyes on the temples of Mexico and Peru; yet, even then, as Prescott says: “In the motives of action, meaner influences were strangely mingled with the loftier, the temporal with the spiritual.” The hardy and romantic adventurers who followed in the wake of Columbus were not merely sordid gold hunters; they were the descendants of soldiers who had for centuries fought in the holy wars of the Cross against the Crescent, and in their veins flowed the blood of the knight-errant and the crusader. Gold they sought with eagerness and without scruple; but they wanted glory almost as much as they wanted gold, and in the pursuit of both, they carried aloft the banner of the Church, and sought the blessing of its ministers. As soon as a newly discovered land was taken possession of in the name of the King of Spain, the Cross was elevated in token of the triumph of Christianity. Columbus erected the Cross in Hispaniola, and Cortés followed up his victory over the Aztecs with their forcible conversion to the true faith. In Peru, a less pious discoverer than Columbus and a more ruthless invader than Cortés employed the sacred office of the priest to aid him in accomplishing an act of treachery so odious that it dims the glory of his conquest and places him below the standard even of mediæval adventurers.