The Last Days of the Incas (8 page)

Eventually a series of large, complex polities emerged, such as the Tiwanaku, Wari, and Chimu. By
A.D
900, in the region of Lake Titicaca, for example, the Tiwanaku civilization had already flourished for more than seven hundred years, had erected giant, perfectly cut stone monoliths and temples, had forged copper tools, and had created and maintained a capital of some 25,000 to 50,000, people, located high up on the altiplano at 12,600, feet in elevation (the population of London at the time, by comparison, was less than 30,000,).

By
A. D.
1400 the Kingdom of Tiwanaku had long since disappeared while, on the northwestern coast of Peru, the Chimu Empire had gradually conquered river valley after river valley, eventually extending its rule for nearly a thousand miles, from Tumbez in the north all of the way down the coast to where the modern capital of Lima now lies. Had the Spaniards arrived in Peru one hundred years earlier than they did, say in 1432 rather than in 1532, the Spanish chroniclers would no doubt have written excitedly about the great Chimu Empire and about its golden treasures—while the tiny Inca kingdom far to the south would have been largely ignored.

As Chimu lords administered their empire, built irrigation canals, and collected the taxes in the form of labor from the masses of peasants under their control, far to the south, however, the tiny Kingdom of the Incas suddenly began to explode. According to Inca legend, the Inca “Alexander the Great” who began this process was a man named Cusi Yupanqui. At the time of his ascension sometime in the early fifteenth century, the Kingdom of the Incas spread over a relatively minuscule area that was centered around the valley of Cuzco, located at 11,300 feet in the Andes. The Kingdom of the Incas was no different from other kingdoms that had existed
in Peru, however, with peasants relinquishing their power to warrior kings who, in this particular case, maintained their exalted positions by claiming divine descent from the ultimate source of all life, the sun.

Because land and resources were finite, the lords of Peru’s scattered highland kingdoms and smaller polities were constantly on guard against the attacks of others, or else were busy planning attacks themselves. Rulers had to protect both the fertile soil they had either inherited or seized as well as the peasants who supported and defended them, if their kingdoms were to survive. Only by maintaining the integrity of their realms could the rulers and their associated elites maintain themselves in power and thus retain their own privileged lifestyles. No matter what other characteristic a ruler might possess, the primordial one was that he be good at warfare. And since theirs was a competitive world in which a hostile and expanding kingdom beyond their borders could at any time prove lethal to their own, the elites realized that there was an obvious advantage in possessing as large a kingdom as possible. The larger the kingdom, the more warriors that could be assembled, and thus the less vulnerable the kingdom would be to attack.

According to Inca oral history, in the early fifteenth century, the Kingdom of the Chancas, which lay centered in the Andahuayllas region to the west of Cuzco, began coveting the fertile valleys controlled by the tiny Kingdom of the Incas. Marshaling an army, the Chancas began marching east, determined to annex the Incas’ kingdom and thus expand their own. Victory seemed imminent, for the Incas were few in number and were both weak and politically divided.

The Inca king on the throne at the time, Viracocha Inca, was already quite elderly. Rather than fight, he chose to flee the capital, holing up in a fortress and basically abandoning his kingdom. One of his sons, however, Cusi Yupanqui, seized the initiative: he quickly made alliances with nearby ethnic groups, raised an army, and then marched out defiantly to meet the Chancas. In the fierce battle that ensued—one that included heavy wooden clubs tipped with stone or copper spikes—the Incas decisively defeated the Chancas. An event that had once loomed as an imminent disaster had been transformed into an overwhelming victory.

After deposing his father, Cusi Yupanqui then decided to adopt the name Pachacuti (pah cha KOO tee), which means “earthshaker” or “cataclysm,” or “he who turns the world upside down.” The name was an appropriate one, for Pachacuti immediately began a major restructuring of the
Inca kingdom, laying out new thoroughfares in its capital, Cuzco, and ordering the construction of buildings and palaces in what has since been called the imperial style of precisely cut stones. According to the chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pachacuti next

Perhaps with the recent memory of the Chanca attack still on his mind and how close the Inca kingdom had come to being exterminated, Pachacuti soon turned his attention to his kingdom’s borders, most of which could be reached within a couple days’ walk. Inca kings in the past had occasionally plundered neighboring villages and sometimes had demanded tribute from them. Pachacuti, however, now became the first Inca king to begin seizing adjacent lands and occupying them on a massive scale. Plunder, Pachacuti no doubt realized, is usually a one-time event, whereas he who controls the means of production—the land and the peasants—by contrast, has a source of power that is virtually inexhaustible.

Soon, and with an army of conscripted peasant warriors, Pachacuti began a series of military adventures on a scale that no Inca king had ever before envisaged. Turning toward the south, Pachacuti led his army on a campaign that soon pushed the boundaries of his kingdom six hundred miles, marching past Lake Titicaca and then down through what is now Bolivia and northern Chile, conquering as he went. Directing his attention to the north-west, Pachacuti began rapidly to conquer the amalgam of tribes, kingdoms, and city-states that lay strewn across the Andes. Pachacuti’s bold forays and those of his son, Tupac Inca, eventually culminated
in the toppling of the old Chimu Empire, located on the northwestern coast. Within a single lifetime, then, Pachacuti and his son had seized a 1,400-mile stretch of the Andes, from present-day Bolivia to northern Peru, plus much of the adjacent coast. No longer were the Incas a small, pregnable group exposed to the vagaries of other kingdoms’ marauding armies. Pachacuti had become the first Inca king to fashion a veritable
empire
—a vast, multiethnic conglomeration that had been created through conquest and that Pachacuti now ruled over with a tiny band of Inca elite.

Pachacuti called his new empire Tawantinsuyu, or “the four parts united,” as he divided it into four regions: Chinchaysuyu, Cuntisuyu, Collasuyu, and Antisuyu.
^*
The capital, Cuzco, lay at the intersection where all four
suyus
came together. In a sense, Pachacuti and Tupac Inca had created a conquest enterprise. Through threat, negotiation, or actual bloody conquest, they subjugated new provinces, determined the number of tax-paying peasants, installed a local Inca governor, and then left an administration in place that was empowered to supervise and collect taxes before their armies moved on. If cooperative, the local elites were allowed to retain their privileged positions and were rewarded handsomely for their collaboration. If uncooperative, the Incas exterminated them and wiped out their supporters. Peasants were a crop, a crop that could be harvested through periodic taxation. Docile, obedient workers who created surpluses, in fact, were a crop more valuable than any of the five thousand varieties of potatoes the Incas cultivated in the Andes, more valuable even than the vast herds of llamas and alpacas that the Incas periodically used for their meat and wool. It was the peasants and their associated lands that the Incas coveted, and it was by taxing the peasants’ labor that the Inca elite continued to increase their wealth, prestige, and power.

Tupac Inca, who had carried out successful campaigns in the north and on the coast, also succeeded in extending the Inca Empire farther east, marching from the high frigid plains of the Andes down into the sweltering Amazon jungle. He then extended the empire’s southern border another seven hundred miles deeper into Chile, past
modern-day Santiago.

By the time Tupac Inca’s son, Huayna Capac, took the throne, the super-nova that was the Inca Empire had reached its zenith and its expansion was almost complete. The empire now stretched from what would later become southern Colombia all the way down to central Chile, and from the Pacific Ocean up over the broad, uplifted Andes with its twenty-thousand-foot peaks and down into the Amazon jungle. Amazingly, an elite of perhaps one hundred thousand ethnic Incas ultimately controlled a population of perhaps ten million individuals. Beyond the empire’s frontiers, there were neither kingdoms nor peasantry left to conquer, rather only non-state peoples who were impossible to control. In these areas the Incas demarcated their borders and built forts to protect themselves from the incursions of the stateless “barbarians.” The Incas’ revolutionary seizure of the Andes had occurred in just two generations, during the reigns of Pachacuti and Tupac Inca. Pachacuti’s grandson, Huayna Capac, therefore, limited his own military campaigns to securing the empire’s borders and to pacifying the last rebellious tribes in the north.

Soon after subjugating much of what is now known as Ecuador, however, Huayna Capac began to hear strange reports of a new danger confronting his empire, one that would prove far deadlier than any provincial rebellion. Native runners, or
chaskis
, presumably arrived breathlessly at court one day to report that a sickness had appeared in the north, a terrible one that was devastating the inhabitants. The afflicted people first developed frightful skin eruptions all over their bodies, then sickened and died. Even worse, the messengers reported, it appeared that the sickness was now spreading toward Quito, where Huayna Capac and his royal retinue were living. The descriptions were gruesome enough to cause the emperor to seclude himself and to begin to fast, hoping to avoid contact with the mysterious plague. It was already too late, however, for according to the chronicler Juan de Betanzos, Huayna Capac soon

The stricken emperor told his nobles that his son, Ninan Cuyoche, should inherit the empire, if the omens were propitious in this regard and, if not, that another son, Huascar (HUAS car), should ascend to the throne. The Inca nobles soon slaughtered a llama, opened it up, removed its lungs, and then looked carefully at the animal’s veins for an omen. The pattern of veins unfortunately appeared to foretell a bleak future for both Ninan Cuyoche and for Huascar. By the time the nobles returned with the news, however, the great Huayna Capac, ruler of the largest empire in the Americas, was already dead. As they had been instructed, the nobles dutifully went in search of the young king, “but when they arrived at Tumi-pampa, they found that … Ninan Cuyoche was [already] dead of the pestilence.”

Ironically, as Huayna Capac had lay dying from the strange affliction, it was apparently at precisely this moment that he is said to have received the first reports of a strange ship, one that had arrived from the north and had moored before the conquered Chimu city of Tumbez. In his delirious state, the emperor was told of the passengers’ light-colored skin, of their full beards, and of the strange tools (harquebuses) they possessed, some of which made smoke and spoke like thunder. This, of course, was the native version of Francisco Pizarro’s second expedition of 1526–1528, during which he and a handful of men had anchored before Tumbez and an inquisitive Inca noble had climbed on board. Pizarro had no idea at the time that a pestilence from the Old World had preceded him to Peru. Or that even as he was marveling at the wealth and orderliness of Tumbez, that natives elsewhere in the Inca Empire were already being decimated—including the empire’s very ruler, Huayna Capac—by this disease.

Diseases from the Old World had arrived in the Caribbean, however, as early as 1494, introduced by some of the passengers on Columbus’s second voyage. Columbus had not only begun to ferry people over from the Old World to the New, after all, but he unwittingly had also begun to transport microscopic pathogens that were as deadly as they were invisible. Eventually, smallpox, measles, bubonic and pneumonic plagues, typhus, cholera, malaria, and yellow fever arrived, either one by one or in clusters. They quickly spread among the native inhabitants,
who, due to their isolation, had no natural immunities. A plague of smallpox even followed in the footsteps of Hernando Cortés’s expedition against the Aztecs, who called the frightening affliction
huey zahuatl
, or “the big rash.” Wrote the sixteenth-century historian Francisco López de Gómara:

After devastating the Aztecs and inadvertently helping Cortés to conquer their empire, the smallpox plague began moving southward, like a slowly moving wave, disseminating death through Central America and then finally onto the South American continent. There it was transmitted, always ahead of the Spanish advance, by natives who infected others before they themselves died. Sometime around 1527, the germs carried across an ocean by Columbus finally arrived at the outskirts of the Inca Empire, taking the life of Huayna Capac and his heir.