Free WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) by Anne Williams, Vivian Head, Janice Anderson Page B

crowd in the courtyard, while the sharp sound of firing from the soldiers’ arequebuses combined with the pounding of the hooves of the charging cavalry raised a hellish storm of choking smoke and noise over the scene.
    The ceremonial weapons carried by a few of the Inca’s men into Cajamarca were useless against the Spanish arms. The Inca’s men were butchered as they fought with their bare hands to save the Inca. Soon, every way of escape from the courtyard was blocked by the bodies of the fallen. Those remaining inside were hacked to bits by the Spanish soldiers, in the grip of a terrible bloodlust. Only the intervention of Pizarro and several of his officers saved the Inca. As the sun set and darkness fell, the Inca was led away in chains.
    The Inca Empire collapsed. No effort was made to save the Inca, for there was no one with the authority to make the attempt. In the months that followed, while Atahualpa remained a prisoner of Pizarro, his empire was looted of its gold, silver and precious stones. Eventually, after a ‘trial’ that was in reality a farce, Atahualpa was sentenced to death by burning: his fate was to be a true auto de fe . When Atahualpa saw the stake and realized that his body was to be consumed by fire, which would damn him completely in his life after death, he agreed to become a Christian in return for being garrotted. The sentence was carried out on 16 July, 1533.

Ivan The Terrible Destroys Novgorod
    1570

     
    Ivan IV, the first ruler of Russia to take the title ‘Tsar of all the Russias’, was only three years old when he became ruler of the Russian state in 1533. Ivan was the grandson of Ivan III, called ‘the Great’ because he had rid Russia of the Mongols, united all the Russian principalities and states under his own rule and laid the foundations for the great state of Russia.
    Ivan IV, who was born in 1530, came to the throne less than 30 years after Ivan III’s death. He inherited a country that was geographically ill-defined and racially disunited and was still a state in the making. Most of its influences – cultural, religious and social – as well as its most likely enemies, came from the Asiatic east and Byzantine south, not from Europe. So irregular, distant and ill-defined (and tinged with suspicion) was Russia’s relationship with Europe, that a 17th-century king of France wrote to a tsar of Russia not knowing that the man had been dead for ten years. Even the title ‘tsar’, was an Asiatic word, and the great Imperial double-headed eagle that Ivan III included in his emblem came from Byzantium.
    Ivan IV spent most of his reign building on his grandfather’s work, establishing the Russian state on a more firm administrative footing, and subduing surrounding states, such as Astrakhan and Kazan, where 60,000 died during the siege and capitulation of the city of Kazan in 1552. He contributed much to his country’s cultural and commercial development. However, Ivan carried out much of this work, especially later in his reign, with such a savage, ferocious cruelty that even in his own time he was called ‘Terrible’, and it is as Ivan the Terrible that he still figures in Russia’s history.
    Ivan’s childhood had not been a happy one. His mother, who acted as regent during his babyhood, was poisoned when he was eight years old, and responsibility for his care was taken over by a group of men from the ruling class, or nobility, called ‘boyars’, of whom Ivan lived in constant fear. From the time he grew to manhood and began his personal rule, Ivan the Terrible seems to have constantly suspected conspiracies against him everywhere. He always carried a long wooden stave, which he would lash out with when enraged, killing many people in his entourage.
     
    THE OPRICHNINA
     
    To control the Russian people, Ivan established a sort of secret police, or military force, called the Oprichnina, which he founded early in the years of his personal rule in a determined