Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
self had been created. Within a century, the Incas had become masters of the greatest empire
yet seen in the Americas - an empire stretching over five thousand kilometres from southern
Colombia to northern Chile, boasting a population of perhaps twenty million, and which was
ruled by a god-emperor who claimed direct descent from the sun.
Quite how this great empire would have developed, however, will never be known. Within
eighty years of their conquest of the Altiplano, the Inca empire was brought to a catastrophic
end by a small band of Spaniards led by
Francisco Pizarro
, who landed on the coast of
northern Peru and set about a war of conquest that would change the Andean world forever.
THEOCRATIC COMMUNISM: THE POWER OF INCA RULE
The Inca empire combined authoritarian government with rational and egalitarian social
and economic organizations, a unique system that has been described as
theocratic com-
munism
. Though the powerful Inca armies played a key role in the empire's expansion,
many regional groups submitted voluntarily, such were the advantages of Inca rule (and the
futility of resistance). Conquered peoples were required to accept the official state religion
- which saw the Inca ruler as the direct representative of the sun god Inti - but beyond that
they were also allowed to maintain their own religious and cultural practices. Local rulers
whosurrendered voluntarily were oftenallowed toremain inplace, while theAndean peas-
antry was left to work the land in return for supplying tribute either in the form of produce
or labour service (
mita
). The enormous food surplus created by this system was used to
feed standing armies and the ruling Inca elite of priests, administrators and nobles, as well
as providing insurance against crop failure and famine for the peasantry themselves. The
labour service was used to construct a massive network of roads, the monumental palaces
and temples that graced Cusco and other major Inca sites, and the sophisticated agricultural
terracing and irrigation systems that greatly increased food production.
As well as this civil engineering, the genius of the Incas lay in their
administrative bur-
eaucracy
, which succeeded in controlling the movements of goods and people to an aston-
ishing degree, despite having no written language, creating a level of prosperity, wellbe-
ing and security that the people of the Andes have probably never seen matched before or
since.
The Spanish conquest
From the Incas' point of view, the arrival of the first conquistadors in 1532 could not have
come at a worse time. Just five years before, the empire had been swept by a devastating epi-
demic - probably smallpox, introduced to the Americas from Europe by Spanish conquista-
dors. Almost a third of the population are thought to have died, including the ruling Inca,
Huayna Capac
. Huayna Capac left his empire divided between two of his sons: his favour-
