PSYCHEDELIC POTATOES FUCK UP SPANISH EMPIRE, POPE DECLARES TRIPPING SACRAMENT

Let’s get one thing straight: Francisco Pizarro was a greedy, illiterate, cock-eyed freebooter who wouldn’t know treasure if it bit him on his chorizo. When he rocked up in Peru in the 1530s, he had one thing on his mind: gold. Shit-tons of it. But in *this* timeline, the Inca had something way, way better.

See, a few years prior, a revered shaman near Cusco had a vision. Not of gods or monsters, but of the humble potato—specifically, a strain we’ll call *Solanum hystericus*, the “screaming potato.” According to the (probably fabricated) notes of one Friar Diego de Porres, a single bite of these purple-black tubers would make you “witness the birth of stars and the sexual congress of mountains.” When Pizarro’s goons started shaking down locals for Atahualpa’s ransom, instead of getting rooms full of gold, they were handed baskets of muddy, unimpressive-looking spuds. Initially, the Spaniards were pissed. A potato? You could find those anywhere! This was about as useful as a marzipan cock-ring. That is, until one particularly bored soldier named Rodrigo—a man whose chief passions were gambling and fornication—got hungry and chucked one in a fire. An hour later, his compatriots found him stark naked, weeping with joy, and attempting to baptize his own horse, convinced it was the apostle James.

The news spread faster than syphilis through aNeapolitan brothel. Forget gold—that was just shiny ballast. These potatoes, *las papas divinas*, were a direct line to the Almighty. When shipments reached Spain, King Charles V—a man perpetually stressed about French incursions and his own spectacular chin—ate a boiled spud and promptly spent three days locked in his chambers, emerging with a new foreign policy apparently dictated to him by a talking tapestry of Gideon. The Habsburg court went absolutely feral for the things. Tournaments were replaced with mass vision quests. Court portraiture got *weird*, full of eight-headedJesuses and saints with peacock feathers for eyes. The market for gold collapsed, replaced by a fanatical, state-sponsored obsession with psychoactive horticulture.

Europe’s upper crust, from the Fuggers to the Medicis, all clamored for a taste. An entire wing of the Vatican was converted into a climate-controlled potato cellar. The Pope, Clement VII, after a particularly face-melting experience with a potato gratin, issued the papal bull *Gloriosus Tuberosum*, declaring the Peruvian potato a bona fide sacrament. This, naturally, made the Protestants lose their goddamn minds, insisting that getting high as balls was *not* in the bible, leading to the brief but vicious War of the Boiled and Fried. The Spanish Inquisition was repurposed to hunt down anyone faking their potato-induced ecstasies or, even worse, growing bootleg spuds. The entire colonial enterprise pivoted from violent mining to obsessive, paranoid farming, with the Spanish jealously guarding their psychedelic crop like a dragon squatting on a mountain of lumpy, purple ketamine.

The Inca, meanwhile, suddenly found themselves in the position of being the world’s most sought-after agricultural consultants, and probably had a good long laugh about it. The Spanish Empire, instead of being built on pillaged bullion, was now precariously balanced on a hallucinogenic tuber that made kings think their chairs were flirting with them. Was it better? Who knows. Probably smelled nicer. It just goes to show that history can turn on a dime, or in this case, on a single, divinely fucked-up potato.