The fearless Spaniards who conquered America had no idea how dangerous the gold of the Incas was. After all, ancient civilizations mined gold with the help of mercury, which slowly but surely kills not only the owner of the treasure himself, but even his future offspring …
At the beginning of the 16th century, when, as a result of the Great Geographical Discoveries, a new continent of America appeared on the map, the Europeans did not suspect what this threatened them. And the first decades of the conquest of new lands by the conquistadors, Europe enthusiastically listened to overseas gifts: potatoes, tobacco, coffee and the main wealth of the new colonies - gold.
From the very moment when the soldiers of Cortez saw that the new land was literally overflowing with noble metal, they no longer thought about anything. Amazing architecture, deep knowledge of astronomy and mathematics, the ability to predict disasters, grow rich crops and fight drought - all the richest knowledge of the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs was a free addition to the most important treasure of ancient civilizations. The "yellow devil" (as gold was called in Europe) so clouded the eyes of the conquerors that they did not want to know anything else.
And no one thought about why these essentially wild peoples, who are at a low stage of development, have so much gold? After all, the Europeans knew that the extraction of the noble metal is a difficult technological process, and considerable knowledge and skills are required for smelting and making jewelry. And the fact that the methods used in gold mining are not at all harmless.
Where does the metal come from?
Gold, for which the Inca empire was famous, was considered by them a sacred metal - the metal of the sun god. Gold in bulk lay in the temples, walls, floors and ceilings were decorated with it (the ceiling of one of the temples was strewn with openwork gold stars, golden dragonflies, butterflies, birds that floated above people and were so magnificent that their beauty caused awe in everyone who saw them).
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In 1532, the Spanish conquistadors kidnapped the Inca emperor Atahualpa in order to take for him a ransom in the form of gold in an amount equal to the volume of the room in which the arrested emperor was kept. The Indians went to fulfill the demand of the conquistadors. Caravans of mules and endless lines of people brought statues, gold jewelry, precious vessels and other items made of precious metals to the capital for a week. There was so much gold captured by the Spaniards that, having melted it into ingots, the Spaniards carried it home in galleons.
It is estimated that in the entire history of mankind, only 161 thousand tons of gold have been mined in the world. But in the 16th century, Spanish galleons delivered more than 100 tons of gold to the court of the Spanish king in just one year (in Europe at that time no more than 1 ton of gold was mined per year). Of course, such "rich times" were only at the beginning, when the Spaniards ravaged the treasures of the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans and other peoples. All in all, the Spaniards exported from South America over a thousand tons of "poisonous" gold.
But in order to possess such a burst of precious metal, ancient civilizations had to mine it on an industrial scale. And that's how they got it. But the conquistadors did not care about the technology of the Incas, they had to steal as much of the treasure as possible. And what it is - high-quality, low-quality or even poisoned - they did not want to know.
Meanwhile, as it turned out later, the Inca gold was produced with gross violations of technology: it was smelted with the use of mercury. Consequently, all the gold brought to Europe was actually poisoned.
So the hard-hearted conquistadors doomed not only the ancient civilizations of America to death, they planted a time bomb under European civilization. Europe has reaped the fruits of thoughtless greed and predation for several centuries. However, she reaps them to this day, as can be seen with the naked eye.
But what is this method that, like an old woman with a scythe, mercilessly knocked down the descendants of the proud conquerors?
While there is life there is hope?
By the time of the Spanish conquest, the technology of smelting gold was well known in Europe - a similar method was used by the ancient Romans. It consisted in the following: to extract gold from ore, crushed rock was mixed with liquid mercury. In this case, the formed alloy, or amalgam, easily separated from the total mass as heavier. The amalgam was heated to a high temperature, the mercury evaporated, and the result was pure gold.
Some believe that the Spaniards brought similar technology to America. Indeed, in those years Spain had the largest mercury deposit, and local gold miners were considered monopolists on the European continent. Therefore, it came as no surprise to anyone that all the gold smelted before the period of the American conquest was mixed with mercury. But there was not much of it, so no one attached much importance to this feature. But the gold products of the Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, smelted before the appearance of Europeans, were always considered “pure” - everyone thought that they did not know mercury and smelted gold according to their ancient and, of course, harmless recipes.
But, as it turned out, nothing of the kind - recent studies have shown that ancient civilizations also used mercury, and no less intensively than Europeans. The same Incas, as it turned out, in addition to smelting gold, used mercury for the production of cinnabar, used as a dye.
Clothes dyed red and orange were considered the property of the rich and were the favorite clothes of the nobility. Addiction to this extremely dangerous and harmful substance, according to one version, caused the degeneration of an entire people - after all, by the time the Spaniards arrived, the Incas were so weakened that the conquistadors conquered the continent with a small detachment and practically without casualties.
Revenge of the gods
But the vengeance of the ancient gods was not far off: after all, all the gold that went to the courts of European monarchs was mortally dangerous.
Europe was actually covered with a golden (read "mercury") wave - there was not a single royal court on the continent, not a single noble family, which in one way or another did not have American gold in its hands (and how could it be otherwise, if its amount increased by almost 200 times?). On gold spruce-plates, bowls, cups, dishes-
yes, forks, spoons; slept on gold - beds, armchairs, chairs, thrones; gold was worn - crosses, jewelry, crowns, scepters, rings, chains.
The Ugly Duchess, 1525-1530 National Gallery, London
And it is not surprising that most of the European royal courts were ultimately doomed to degeneration - there was not a single crowned family that did without serious diseases passed down from generation to generation.
And for all this one can "thank" the Incas, who not only doomed themselves to death, but also passed the "baton of death" to European civilization.
Or maybe it was a sophisticated revenge of the people who had gone into oblivion?
Egor SHVARTZ