Peru is presented as a Spanish-claimed territory in Blackthorne’s explanation of European expansion, and as one of the clearest examples of the consequences of that expansion. In his map lesson to Toda Mariko and Toranaga, its name marks more than a place on the far side of the world: it stands for the conquest of the Inca nations, the destruction of their culture, and the wealth Spain drew from American gold and silver.

Peru on Blackthorne’s map

Blackthorne sketches a world map in sand to explain how Europeans divide and claim overseas lands. The map distinguishes coastlines that Europeans know from vast interiors they have not explored. Peru is among the American territories he identifies as Spanish-owned, alongside Mexico; he describes Spanish claims as extending across nearly the whole of the southern continent. The map therefore presents Peru both as a recognizable part of European geographic knowledge and as a possession asserted through a political and religious system that Toranaga finds difficult to accept.

The contrast between mapped coastlines and unknown interiors also limits what Blackthorne’s lesson claims to show. His account is about European knowledge, navigation, and imperial assertions, not a detailed description of Peru’s landscapes or everyday life. The country enters the scene through the language of maps and ownership, while the human cost of that ownership comes into view as he explains what conquest has done.

Spanish conquest and its consequences

Blackthorne describes the Inca nations as conquered and their culture as obliterated. He says that hundreds of thousands of people were enslaved, and connects the conquest to the advantage held by Spanish forces equipped with modern guns while the Indigenous peoples had none. In his account, military imbalance makes the European claim more than a line on a map: it enables the destruction of existing political and cultural orders.

He also explains how religious and political maneuvering supports conquest. Priests accompany the conquistadores; after some princes convert, existing enmities are used to turn one prince against another, allowing a realm to be absorbed piecemeal. Peru consequently appears within a process that combines armed force, conversion, and the exploitation of divisions among local rulers rather than as a territory acquired by cartographic declaration alone.

Wealth, claims, and the limits of the lesson

Blackthorne links Spanish power to the gold and silver taken from the Inca and Mexican territories and sent back to Spain. Peru’s place in the lesson is thus bound to the material returns of conquest: the extraction of precious metals helps explain Spain’s wealth, while the destruction and enslavement described alongside it expose the human costs concealed by imperial claims.

The episode also sets Blackthorne’s account against Toranaga’s skepticism about the rights claimed by European rulers. By tracing a dividing line across Brazil and explaining the division of overseas lands between Portugal and Spain, Blackthorne shows how legal documents authorize claims to non-Catholic territories and the replacement of their governments with Catholic rule. Peru broadens that explanation from a formal division of claimed lands to the violence and cultural loss that follow. It remains a place encountered through Blackthorne’s report, but its function in the narrative is decisive: the map’s apparently orderly boundaries lead to a history of conquest, exploitation, and contested legitimacy.