Inca Empire

Three brothers and three sisters

formationDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

When Pedro de Cieza de León visited Cuzco around 1550, he sought out surviving descendants of Huayna Capac and members of the Orejones, the Inca nobility most respected for their own knowledge of the past, and asked them directly where their people had come from. What they told him, he suspected, had been exaggerated by generations of retelling - but it was the fullest account he could get, and he wrote it down as given.

A cave called the House of Production

In a time when the peoples of the region lived in disorder, killing each other and sunk in vice, three men and three women appeared at a place near Cuzco called Pacarec Tampu - "the House of Production." The Orejones gave the men's names as Ayar Ucho, Ayar Cachi Asauca and Ayar Manco, and the women's as Mama Huaco, Mama Cora and Mama Bahua. Other traditions Cieza recorded gave entirely different names for the same six figures - Balboa's version calls the founding brother Manco Capac rather than Ayar Manco, and Garcilaso de la Vega's account agrees on Manco Capac but names only one sister, Mama Ocllo, as his wife. No two chroniclers who wrote down this story told it quite the same way.

Royal Danish Library · Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

A doubt the storyteller did not hide

Cieza himself was frank about his own scepticism. What he believed actually happened, he wrote, was that three valiant and powerful brothers - whatever their real names - conquered and acquired the lordship they came to hold, and that later generations dressed up an ordinary conquest as a divine origin to justify calling their rulers children of the Sun. He allowed, without much conviction, that what the Orejones told him of magical stone-throwing and earth-splitting might be the work of sorcerers rather than embellishment - but concluded, either way, that no better explanation was available to him.

A brother sealed in a cave

formationDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

The six siblings who emerged from Pacarec Tampu did not go directly to Cuzco. They founded a settlement at Pacarec Tampu itself and gathered great stores of gold there before moving on - and it was during this early stage of the story that one of the brothers, Ayar Cachi, showed a strength his siblings found less impressive than alarming: with stones hurled from his sling, he was said to split hills apart and throw their fragments up to the clouds.

A trap dressed as an errand

Rather than share credit for such power, the other brothers deceived Ayar Cachi with gentle, flattering words, asking him to return to the cave where their treasure was kept and fetch a golden vase they claimed to have forgotten. He agreed without suspicion. The moment he was inside, his brothers sealed the cave's mouth with stones so thoroughly that no trace of the opening remained, and the ground shook violently enough, the story goes, that whole hillsides collapsed into the valleys below. Ayar Cachi was worshipped afterward as a sacred being, Huanacauri, the brother whose death - engineered by his own kin - the Incas would trace their descent from without ever quite admitting how it had happened.

A city named for a killing

The surviving siblings pressed on toward the valley that would become Cuzco, then inhabited by other peoples entirely. One version of the story credits a sister, sent ahead to find the best site for a settlement, with killing a local inhabitant, cutting out his lungs, and walking into the valley with them still in her mouth, bloody, to terrify the population into flight. Whatever the literal truth of any of this, the founding brothers made themselves masters of the valley without serious resistance, named their new settlement Cuzco, and began the work of building an empire from a city whose own origin story, by the admission of the men who told it, had already cost one of its founders his life.

A king who fled and a son who laughed

expansionDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

For generations after its founding, Cuzco remained one regional power among several in the southern Andean highlands, its kings ruling a lordship rather than an empire. That balance held until the Chanka people, having already conquered the neighbouring Quichuas and occupied much of the province of Andahuaylas, decided that a rich and famous city like Cuzco was worth adding to their own conquests. Their commander, Hastu Huaraca, led an army out of Andahuaylas toward the Inca capital, laying waste to the settlements along the way.

A ruler who chose flight over defence

When word reached Cuzco that the Chanka were coming and that neither the aged king Viracocha Inca nor his own heir, Inca Urco, had made any preparation to meet them, the city's leading nobles were thrown into open panic. Viracocha Inca left the city entirely, taking his household to the valley of Yucay rather than face the threat directly. His son and designated successor, Inca Urco, treated the danger as a joke, laughing off warnings that should have alarmed him as much as anyone.

Royal Danish Library · Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

A city that looked past its own king for a defender

With the throne offering no leadership, the frightened nobility turned instead to another of Viracocha's sons, Inca Yupanqui, and asked him to take charge of the city's defence. He answered pointedly: when his father had once wished to give him the royal fringe, the nobles themselves had refused and insisted his "cowardly brother" take it instead; he had never sought the throne through usurpation, but now that Inca Urco had shown himself unfit, it fell to the city to do what the moment required. The Orejones agreed to settle the question of who would actually rule only once the war itself was won - and Inca Yupanqui, given command of a city his own father and brother had already abandoned to its fate, set about organizing its defence.

Pachacutec

expansionDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

Inca Yupanqui prepared Cuzco's defence with whatever time the city had left. He promised land and privileges to anyone from the wider province willing to come and fight as a citizen of Cuzco, drawing reinforcements from beyond the city's own walls, and appeared in the great square wearing a lion's skin over his head as a sign that he meant to be as strong as the animal it came from. When the Chanka army pitched camp on a hill overlooking the city, the people of Cuzco dug concealed pits filled with sharpened stakes along the approaches, and the women and children, seeing the enemy for the first time, filled the streets with their own frightened cries.

A parley that ended in blows

Inca Yupanqui first tried to avoid a general slaughter, sending word to the Chanka commander Hastu Huaraca proposing a negotiated settlement. Hastu Huaraca thought little of the offer and wanted the matter settled by battle alone, though his own relatives eventually persuaded him to meet the Inca in person. The meeting achieved nothing: both men had already decided on war, and their own heated words turned quickly to open fighting between their armies at the city's very approaches.

A victory that unseated a brother as well as an enemy

The battle raged for a full day and into the night before Inca Yupanqui broke the Chanka assault decisively; by most accounts, barely five hundred of the invading army escaped alive, Hastu Huaraca himself among them. Inca Yupanqui returned to Cuzco in triumph and put the question he had deferred squarely to the city's own nobles: he had defended them while his father and brother had done nothing. The Orejones agreed, and by common consent stripped Inca Urco of the succession and gave the royal fringe to Inca Yupanqui instead, who took the name by which history would remember him - Pachacutec, "he who remakes the world." A regional lordship that had nearly fallen to a rival power instead had, in the same crisis, found the king who would turn it into an empire.

Royal Danish Library · Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

A kingdom wealthy enough to covet

peakDrafted from Rowe, Acta Americana, vol. 6 (1948)

Pachacuti's own reign, and that of his son and successor Topa Inca Yupanqui, turned a highland lordship that had barely survived one invasion into a state expanding on every frontier at once. Much of that expansion came, as it had at Cuzco itself, through campaigns that began as something smaller than their own eventual consequences - an unauthorized raid by one of Pachacuti's own generals into central Peru committed the empire to holding territory five hundred miles from its nearest secure outposts, and rather than retreat from the obligation, Pachacuti chose to conquer the intervening land outright to make good on it.

The richest kingdom on the continent, taken whole

That same overextension eventually brought the empire into direct war with Chimor, the wealthy kingdom of the north coast that rivalled Cuzco in organization if not in territory. An army under Pachacuti's son Topa Capac, with the young heir Topa Inca serving alongside him, broke Chimor's own resistance in 1470 and carried its king back to Cuzco in honoured exile, along with plunder richer than any campaign before it had produced. Pachacuti used part of that wealth to cast golden statues of the Creator, the Sun and the legendary ancestress Mama Ocllo, and to gild the walls of Cuzco's own Temple of the Sun.

Rowe, Acta Americana, vol. 6 (1948) · Håkan Svensson · CC BY 2.5

An empire administered rather than merely conquered

What distinguished the Inca expansion from a simple run of conquests was the infrastructure built to hold what had been taken. Roads radiating out from Cuzco linked the new provinces to the capital; a system of compulsory labour service, the mit'a, moved workers and soldiers alike according to the state's own needs rather than local custom; and administrators kept the accounts of an empire that had no writing system on quipus - knotted cords whose colours and knot patterns, read by trained specialists called quipucamayocs, recorded numbers with enough precision to run the business of a continent-spanning state and, according to some of the same specialists, to serve as reminders for historical and ceremonial knowledge besides.

Larco Museum, Lima · Rowe, Acta Americana, vol. 6 (1948) · bobistraveling · CC BY 2.0

The empire at its widest

peakDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

Under Huayna Capac, Pachacuti's own grandson, the empire reached a territorial extent no Inca ruler before or after him would match: a dominion running from the river Ancasmayu in the north to the river Maule in the south, a span of more than twelve hundred leagues along the spine of the Andes. Huayna Capac spent much of his own reign in the far north, at Quito, extending Inca authority into what is now Ecuador and consolidating conquests his father had begun.

Royal Danish Library · Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

A fortune brought to a provincial capital

The scale of Huayna Capac's own wealth, concentrated at his northern base rather than at Cuzco itself, struck contemporaries as extraordinary even by Inca standards. More than five hundred loads of gold and a thousand of silver were said to have been brought to Quito on his own orders, along with quantities of precious stones and fine cloth. He was feared throughout his dominions as a stern administrator of justice - a reputation his own subjects, by every account, respected rather than merely endured.

A ruler whose own success left the succession untested

Huayna Capac's long residence at Quito, so far from the traditional seat of Inca government at Cuzco, was itself a quiet sign of how far the empire had already outgrown the compact highland kingdom his great-grandfather Pachacuti had built it from. It also meant that when his own death eventually came, it would fall not on the empire's traditional heartland but on a frontier capital far from the court structures and settled expectations that might otherwise have managed his succession more smoothly.

A plague that arrived before the Spaniards did

contractionDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

At the height of his own power, Huayna Capac was struck by a contagious disease sweeping through the empire's provinces - a pestilence that killed, by the chroniclers' own count, more than two hundred thousand people across the land. Every sacrifice offered at the temples and huacas on his behalf failed to save him. As his condition worsened, he called his captains and relations to his side and addressed them on several matters before he died.

A dying prophecy about the ship

Among the things Huayna Capac reportedly said in his final days was a forecast that the strangers who had already been sighted offshore in a ship would return in force and conquer the land. Cieza himself doubted the story, suspecting either invention after the fact or, if the king really did say it, that some darker power had spoken through him - since no ordinary man, he reasoned, could have known the Spaniards were already arranging their own return as conquerors.

Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

An inheritance nobody could agree how he had left it

What Huayna Capac actually intended for his own succession, the sources cannot settle. Some say he divided the empire between two sons, giving the northern dominion around Quito to Atahualpa, the son who had always accompanied him on campaign, and the rest to Huascar, his son by his own sister and the wife he had most wanted as his heir. Others insist he made no such division at all, and simply confirmed Huascar as sole heir to the whole empire, to the satisfaction of the people of Cuzco. Whichever account was true, the ambiguity itself was enough: within a few years of Huayna Capac's death, his two sons were at open war over an inheritance neither could agree the other was entitled to.

A cup made from a general's skull

contractionDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

War between Huascar and Atahualpa became certain once each brother's own supporters realized neither would yield the succession without a fight. Huascar commanded the loyalty of Cuzco itself and its surrounding heartland; Atahualpa held the army and the native lords of the northern provinces around Quito, along with the captains who had served under their shared father in his own northern campaigns. Huascar's general Atoc marched north to confront him, exhorting his own troops to defend their rightful Inca and sending Orejón envoys ahead to urge Atahualpa to submit rather than plunge the empire into civil war.

A laugh, then an execution

Atahualpa's answer to the peace embassy was to laugh at it, then, after a round of threats, to have the messengers killed outright. He handed command of his own army to his general Chalcuchima and continued his own journey in a rich litter carried by favoured attendants while the armies did the fighting in his name. The two forces met near Ambato, where Chalcuchima's own reserve of five thousand chosen men struck Atoc's exhausted troops at the decisive moment, breaking them completely. Atoc himself was captured, tied to a post, and killed with deliberate cruelty; Chalcuchima had his skull made into a drinking cup rimmed with gold. Between both sides, as many as fifteen or sixteen thousand men died in the battle - a toll later observers, judging by the scattered bones still visible at the site, suspected was an understatement.

A victory too far from Cuzco to be made official

Atahualpa's own renown spread through the kingdom on the strength of the win, and his supporters began hailing him as Inca in his own right. He declared he would take the royal fringe at Tumebamba rather than travel to Cuzco for it - though by the empire's own custom, a coronation performed anywhere but the capital was considered invalid. Atahualpa proceeded anyway, treated as a king by his own followers in everything but the one ceremony that would have made the title beyond dispute.

Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883) · Ymblanter · CC BY-SA 4.0

A battle watched from a hillside

contractionDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1883)

Huascar's defeat at Ambato did not end the war. He raised a second, larger army under a new general, Huanca Auqui, reportedly more than eighty thousand strong, and sent it north in forced marches to reach the Cañari country before Atahualpa's own forces could do further harm there. Atahualpa met the challenge in kind, assembling a comparable force at Tumebamba and declaring he would not stop until he reached Cuzco itself.

A commander who fought from a safe distance

The two armies collided in the province of the Paltas, near Caxabamba. Atahualpa himself, by every account, was not present on the field, watching the battle instead from an adjacent hill while his own captains commanded in his name. Despite Huascar's army including many experienced Orejón officers and Huanca Auqui performing his own duty loyally, Atahualpa's forces won decisively; more than thirty-five thousand men were killed across both armies, and the victors pursued the fleeing survivors for miles, killing, capturing and plundering the abandoned camp as they went.

A triumph interrupted by news from the coast

Atahualpa received word of the victory with open joy, declaring that the gods themselves were fighting on his side. He did not press on to Cuzco in person to finish the war, however - word had already reached him that a small company of foreign strangers had landed on the coast days before. Whatever he made of that news at the time, it was enough to make him pause at the very moment his own civil war stood closer to a final resolution than it had ever been.

A Bible thrown to the ground

endDrafted from Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1872)

Francisco Pizarro's company reached Cajamarca in November 1532, where Atahualpa - fresh from his own victory over Huascar's army - waited with a large retinue in the town's central square, apparently unconcerned by a foreign force he outnumbered many times over. Pizarro sent Friar Vicente de Valverde ahead, a cross in one hand and a Bible in the other, to address the Inca directly through an interpreter and urge him, on God's behalf, to go and speak with the Spanish commander.

Royal Danish Library · Markham, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (1872) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

An insult that answered an insult

Atahualpa asked to examine the book the friar carried. Handed it closed, he could not work out how to open it, and when Valverde reached out to help him, Atahualpa struck the friar's arm in anger rather than accept the assistance. He opened the book himself, showed no interest in its pages, and threw it several paces away - answering Valverde's appeal with open scorn, accusing the Spaniards of mistreating his own chiefs and stealing cloth from his storehouses along the road. Valverde returned to Pizarro and reported that the Inca had thrown the Scriptures to the ground.

An ambush sprung in the space of a cry

That was the signal Pizarro had been waiting for. He put on a cotton jacket, took up his sword and dagger, and led a handful of men directly into the crowd of Atahualpa's own retinue, seizing the Inca by the arm himself and crying out "Santiago!" Guns fired, trumpets sounded, and Spanish cavalry and infantry who had been hidden around the square charged into the open space. Terrified Indians fleeing the horses broke down part of a surrounding wall in the crush; the horsemen rode down and killed those they overtook, while the infantry cut down most of those who remained. Pizarro himself would not release his grip on Atahualpa, even as Spanish soldiers killed the litter-bearers holding the Inca aloft until the litter itself began to fall - receiving a minor wound to his own hand in the effort to keep his prisoner alive rather than let him be killed in the general slaughter. Not a single armed hand was raised against a Spaniard the entire time.

A sentence changed by a baptism

endDrafted from Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru (1847)

Atahualpa spent months in captivity after Cajamarca, filling a room with gold and silver as ransom for a freedom Pizarro never actually granted him. Rather than release their prisoner once the treasure arrived, the Spanish put him on trial before a tribunal of their own devising, on charges - idolatry, the killing of Huascar, plotting against the Spanish themselves - that many of Pizarro's own men considered a legal fiction dressed up to justify a decision already made. Atahualpa, when he understood his death was certain, pleaded for his own life in the most piteous terms his captors had yet heard from him, offering any guarantee the Spanish might want and double the ransom already paid if only he were given time to raise it. By one eyewitness's own account, Pizarro was visibly moved as he turned away from the appeal - and proceeded with the execution regardless.

Royal Danish Library · Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

A stake exchanged for a garrote

The sentence was proclaimed by trumpet in the great square of Cajamarca, and two hours after sunset on the twenty-ninth of August, 1533, Spanish soldiers gathered by torchlight to watch it carried out. Atahualpa was led out in chains, Father Valverde at his side making one final attempt to win a genuine conversion rather than merely a formality. Bound to the stake with the firewood meant to burn him already laid around his feet, Atahualpa was offered a different death: convert and accept baptism, Valverde told him, and the sentence would be commuted from burning to the comparatively merciful garrote. Atahualpa asked whether this was truly so, and on Pizarro's own confirmation, agreed. Valverde baptized him on the spot under the name Juan de Atahuallpa, and the Inca who had once thrown a Bible to the ground died by strangulation rather than by fire, still in the same square where his own empire's fate had already been decided nine months earlier.

The wandering Inca

afterlifeDrafted from Markham, The Incas of Peru (1910)

Atahualpa's execution did not end the Inca throne, only Atahualpa's own hold on it. Pizarro needed a native ruler he could govern through, and the councillors of Cuzco, judging Spanish power irresistible, brought out a young prince named Manco in the royal litter to meet the conquerors at the Apurimac bridge. He was escorted to Cuzco and crowned with the full ceremony of his ancestors - a puppet installed with every outward mark of legitimacy, and treated, at first, with real cordiality by Pizarro himself.

Royal Danish Library · Markham, The Incas of Peru (1910) · Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala · Public domain

A yoke that became unbearable

It did not last. As Manco grew into manhood he found himself ruling in name only, while his own people suffered cruelty and injustice under the Spaniards occupying his capital. He escaped Cuzco, raised an army of Orejones - the Inca nobility - and laid siege to the city his own ancestors had built, occupying the fortress of Sacsahuaman above it. The siege very nearly succeeded; only the fortress's fall, and the approach of a relieving force under Almagro, forced Manco to withdraw. He fell back down the Urubamba valley to the stronghold of Ollantaytambo, where he won the last outright Peruvian victory of the war, repulsing an assault led by Hernando Pizarro in person - before being driven out of that position too and retreating deeper still, into the remote mountain country between the Apurimac and Urubamba rivers known as Vilcapampa. There, thirty miles wide and walled in by its own rivers and tropical forest, Inca sovereignty survived the fall of Cuzco by another thirty years.

Markham, The Incas of Peru (1910) · Tydence Davis · CC BY 2.0

Markham, The Incas of Peru (1910) · Esoltas · Public domain

A wife shot to death, and reprisals that followed

Manco rebuilt a court in exile, with temples and a palace raised to replace what he had lost, and watched every approach to his own territory. Pizarro tried repeatedly to negotiate a surrender; Manco, who trusted no Spanish promise, refused every overture. Pizarro's response was to take one of Manco's own wives prisoner, strip and flog her, and finally shoot her to death with arrows - an atrocity that drove Manco to answer with reprisals of his own against Spaniards caught on the roads to Cuzco. When the younger Almagro's own rebellion was crushed and its survivors scattered, a handful of his defeated followers fled into Vilcapampa itself, where Manco, his hostility aimed at Pizarro's faction rather than at Spaniards as such, received them with hospitality and armed them from his own stores.

Killed over a game of bowls

That hospitality killed him. One of the refugees, a violent man named Gomez Perez, was playing bowls with the Inca when his own insolence provoked Manco to push him back with a rebuke. Perez, in a sudden rage, struck Manco with the wooden ball hard enough to kill him outright. The Inca's own household cut down all eight of the Spaniards responsible, burning them out of the house where they took refuge and shooting the survivors as they fled the flames. Manco had reigned in Vilcapampa for a decade, watching events, still hopeful to the end that a new viceroy and new laws from Spain might yet improve his people's condition. He left three sons - Sayri Tupac, Titu Cusi Yupanqui and Tupac Amaru - to carry on the resistance he had built in the mountains his ancestors had never ruled from before him.

The last Inca

afterlifeDrafted from Markham, The Incas of Peru (1910)

Sayri Tupac inherited his father's throne in Vilcapampa still a minor, governed by regents until he came of age - and, unlike Manco, he eventually chose to leave. The Spanish viceroy, the Marquis of Cañete, spent years pressing for exactly this outcome, and in 1557, after careful negotiation and rich gifts carried in by trusted intermediaries, Sayri Tupac agreed to come out of the mountains and live among the Spaniards. He was received cordially at Lima, granted a pension and an estate in the Urubamba valley, married a granddaughter of the murdered Inca Huascar, and was baptized alongside her at Cuzco. He died in 1560, the first of Manco's sons to choose accommodation over resistance - and the last Inca to die a natural death.

Markham, The Incas of Peru (1910) · AgainErick · CC BY-SA 3.0

A brother who would not be moved

Titu Cusi Yupanqui, who succeeded him in Vilcapampa, proved a harder case. Spanish envoys arrived at his own court seeking to persuade him, as his brother had been persuaded, to submit; Titu Cusi received them courteously, listened to every argument, and simply temporized until the embassy gave up and went home. He did allow one friar, Diego Ortiz, to remain behind as a missionary, and eventually accepted baptism himself under the name Felipe. When Titu Cusi then fell fatally ill, the same Spaniards who had promised his people miraculous cures found themselves blamed for his death: Ortiz and the interpreter who had accompanied him were killed by the Inca's own household, and a second Spanish embassy, arriving before news of the death had even reached Cuzco, met the same fate at the border of Vilcapampa.

A reluctant king, and an invasion with its pretext ready-made

Titu Cusi's own younger brother, Tupac Amaru, had been kept in seclusion in the House of the Sun on the grounds of his inexperience, and played no part in the killings that followed his brother's death. It made no difference. Once the crisis passed, Vilcapampa's own chiefs brought him out of seclusion and crowned him regardless - the full Inca regalia, the fringe, the mantle, the ceremonial litter, placed on a man who had wanted none of it. For the Spanish viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, the deaths of the two Spanish envoys were exactly the pretext an invasion of Vilcapampa had been waiting for. He sent a column under Martin Hernando de Arbieto that fought its way down the Urubamba valley and through the mountain passes; Tupac Amaru, fleeing toward friendly tribes in the lowland forest with canoes already waiting on a river to carry him to safety, was overtaken and captured on 4 October 1571.

A public execution, and a cry the Spaniards themselves could not silence

Tupac Amaru was marched back to Cuzco in his own imperial robes, a rope around his neck, and given a mock trial that condemned him to beheading. Church leaders across the city - the Bishop of Popayán, the heads of every religious order, the Jesuit rector - went on their knees before Toledo begging that the young Inca's life be spared and his case sent to the king in Spain instead. Toledo refused. Tupac Amaru was baptized in his cell, led out through streets packed with weeping Indians, and beheaded on a public scaffold before Cuzco's own cathedral - a crowd's grief loud enough, one witness wrote, that "it seemed as if the day of judgment had come." Even some of the Spaniards present were said to be horrified, knowing the young man they had just killed had committed no crime of his own. His head was displayed on a pole; his body was carried to his mother's house. Not forty years after Pizarro first met Atahualpa at Cajamarca, the line of Inca sovereigns that had ruled from Cuzco, then survived in exile among the mountains of Vilcapampa, ended on a scaffold in the same city its own founders had built.