He’s mightily taken by the “black drink” that the monks make, though. He has his doubts, too, about the “little white llamas” – sheep – that the locals let run around everywhere. Though the Incas are no strangers to human sacrifice, Atahualpa takes one look at the Inquisition burning heretics and wonders if these “Levantines” don’t go a bit far.

On arrival, he is no less perplexed by the shaven-headed locals, with their weird cult of the “nailed god”, than Columbus was by the feathered head-dresses on the other side of the pond. After Columbus fails to return, the Spanish court loses its appetite for exploratory expeditions westwards.īut it’s on Columbus’s old ships that, half a generation later, Atahualpa, known to us as the last Inca emperor, sets off for Europe – as described in the main section, entitled “The Chronicles of Atahualpa”. He ends his abject days as a captive court jester in what’s now Cuba. He annoys the locals by abducting their people (“I assured him that it was for their salvation that we had taken those people”) and in due course gets his European posterior kicked. The second section consists of fragments from his comically pious journals. (She also set them on the painful road to herd immunity to Old World diseases.)Īccordingly, things go the worse for Christopher Columbus when he shows up.

Erik the Red’s daughter Freydis (whose party trick of beating her breast with a sword is faithfully entered into the record) befriended the local skraelings – as the Vikings called Native Americans – and, crucially, introduced them to two technologies: horses and iron. First up is a spoof Norse saga, describing how Vikings not only made it to Vinlandia, the coast of North America, but as far south as what is now Panama. The groundwork for this flight of counterfactual speculation is laid in the first two sections. Each of Civilisations’ four parts poses as a historical document, and the main story runs for most of a 16th century that never happened – from when a ragtag Inca expeditionary force, fleeing civil war in South America, makes landfall in Lisbon, to the years after the Battle of Lepanto (which is, spoiler alert, fought between different forces than the real one).

Hhhh by laurent binet