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Peru The Incas
The Incas of Cusco (Cuzco) originally represented one
of
these small and relatively minor ethnic groups, the
Quechuas.
Gradually, as early as the thirteenth century, they began
to
expand and incorporate their neighbors. Inca expansion was
slow
until about the middle of the fifteenth century, when the
pace of
conquest began to accelerate, particularly under the rule
of the
great emperor Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (1438-71). Historian
John
Hemming describes Pachacuti as "one of those protean
figures,
like Alexander or Napoleon, who combine a mania for
conquest with
the ability to impose his will on every facet of
government."
Under his rule and that of his son, Topa Inca Yupanqui
(1471-93),
the Incas came to control upwards of a third of South
America,
with a population of 9 to 16 million inhabitants under
their
rule. Pachacuti also promulgated a comprehensive code of
laws to
govern his far-flung empire, called Tawantinsuyu, while
consolidating his absolute temporal and spiritual
authority as
the God of the Sun who ruled from a magnificently rebuilt
Cusco.
Although displaying distinctly hierarchical and
despotic
features, Incan rule also exhibited an unusual measure of
flexibility and paternalism. The basic local unit of
society was the
ayllu (see Glossary),
which formed an endogamous
nucleus of kinship groups who possessed collectively a
specific,
although often disconnected, territory. In the
ayllu,
grazing land was held in common (private property did not
exist),
whereas arable land was parceled out to families in
proportion to
their size. Since self-sufficiency was the ideal of Andean
society, family units claimed parcels of land in different
ecological niches in the rugged Andean terrain. In this
way, they
achieved what anthropologists have called "vertical
complementarity," that is, the ability to produce a wide
variety
of crops--such as maize, potatoes, and quinoa (a
protein-rich
grain)--at different altitudes for household consumption.
The principle of complementarity also applied to Andean
social relations, as each family head had the right to ask
relations, allies, or neighbors for help in cultivating
his plot.
In return, he was obligated to offer them food and
chicha
(a fermented corn alcoholic beverage), and to help them on
their
own plots when asked. Mutual aid formed the ideological
and
material bedrock of all Andean social and productive
relations.
This system of reciprocal exchange existed at every level
of
Andean social organization: members of the ayllus,
curacas (local lords) with their subordinate
ayllus, and the Inca himself with all his
subjects.
Ayllus often formed parts of larger dual
organizations
with upper and lower divisions called moieties, and
then
still larger units, until they comprised the entire ethnic
group.
As it expanded, the Inca state became, historian Nathan
Wachtel
writes, "the pinnacle of this immense structure of
interlocking
units. It imposed a political and military apparatus on
all of
these ethnic groups, while continuing to rely on the
hierarchy of
curacas, who declared their loyalty to the Inca and
ruled
in his name." In this sense, the Incas established a
system of
indirect rule that enabled the incorporated ethnic groups
to
maintain their distinctiveness and self-awareness within a
larger
imperial system.
All Inca people collectively worked the lands of the
Inca,
who served as representative of the God of the Sun--the
central
god and religion of the empire. In return, they received
food, as
well as chicha and coca leaves (which were chewed
and used
for religious rites and for medicinal purposes); or they
made
cloth and clothing for tribute, using the Inca flocks; or
they regularly performed
mita (see Glossary),
or service for
public works, such as roads and buildings, or for military
purposes that enabled the development of the state. The
Inca
people also maintained the royal family and bureaucracy,
centered
in Cusco. In return for these services, the Inca allocated
land
and redistributed part of the tribute received--such as
food,
cloth, and clothes--to the communities, often in the form
of
welfare. Tribute was stored in centrally located
warehouses to be
dispensed during periods of shortages caused by famine,
war, or
natural disaster. In the absence of a market economy, Inca
redistribution of tribute served as the primary means of
exchange. The principles of reciprocity and
redistribution, then,
formed the organizing ideas that governed all relations in
the
Inca empire from community to state.
One of the more remarkable elements of the Inca empire
was
the mitmaq system. Before the Incas, these were
colonies
of settlers sent out from the ayllus to
climatically
different Andean terrains to cultivate crops that would
vary and
enrich the community diet. Anthropologist John V. Murra
dubbed
these unique Andean island colonies "vertical
archipelagos,"
which the Incas adapted and applied on a large scale to
carve out
vast new areas of cultivation. The Incas also expanded the
original Andean concept of mitmaq as a vehicle for
developing complementary sources of food to craft
specialization
and military expansion. In the latter instance, Inca
mitmaq were used to establish permanent garrisons
to
maintain control and order on the expanding Inca frontier.
What
"began as a means of complementing productive access to a
variety
of ecological tiers had become," in the words of Murra,
"an
onerous means of political control" under the Incas.
By the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth
century,
the Inca Empire had reached its maximum size. Such
powerful
states as the coastal Chimú Kingdom were defeated and
incorporated into the empire, although the Chimús spoke a
language, Yunga, that was entirely distinct from the
Incas'
Quechua. But as the limits of the central Andean culture
area
were reached in present-day Chile and Argentina, as well
as in
the Amazon forests, the Incas encountered serious
resistance, and
those territories were never thoroughly subjugated.
At the outset, the Incas shared with most of their
ethnic
neighbors the same basic technology: weaving, pottery,
metallurgy, architecture, construction engineering, and
irrigation agriculture. During their period of dominance,
little
was added to this inventory of skills, other than the size
of the
population they ruled and the degree and efficiency of
control
they attained. The latter, however, constituted a rather
remarkable accomplishment, particularly because it was
achieved
without benefit of either the wheel or a formal system of
writing. Instead of writing, the Incas used the intricate
and
highly accurate khipu (knot-tying) system of
recordkeeping . Imperial achievements were the more extraordinary
considering the relative brevity of the period during
which the
empire was built (perhaps four generations) and the
formidable
geographic obstacles of the Andean landscape.
Viewed from the present-day perspective of Peruvian
underdevelopment, one cannot help but admire a system that
managed to bring under cultivation four times the amount
of
arable land as today. Achievements such as these caused
some
twentieth-century Peruvian scholars of the indigenous
peoples,
known as indigenistas (Indigenists), such as
Hildebrando
Castro Pozo and Luis Eduardo Valcárcel, to idealize the
Inca past
and to overlook the hierarchical nature and totalitarian
mechanisms of social and political control erected during
their
Incan heyday. To other intellectuals, however, from José
Carlos
Mariátegui to Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, the path to
development
has continued to call for some sort of return to the
country's
pre-Columbian past of communal values, autochthonous
technology,
and genius for production and organization.
By the time that the Spaniards arrived in 1532, the
empire
extended some 1,860 kilometers along the Andean
spine--north to
southern Colombia and south to northern Chile, between the
Pacific Ocean in the west and the Amazonian rain forest in
the
east. Some five years before the Spanish invasion, this
vast
empire was rocked by a civil war that, combined with
diseases
imported by the Spaniards, would ultimately weaken its
ability to
confront the European invaders. The premature death by
measles of
the reigning Sapa Inca, Huayna Cápac (1493-1524), opened
the way
for a dynastic struggle between the emperor's two sons,
Huáscar
(from Cusco) and the illegitimate Atahualpa (from Quito),
who
each had inherited half the empire. After a five-year
civil war
(1528-32), Atahualpa (1532-33) emerged victorious and is
said to
have tortured and put to death more than 300 members of
Huáscar's
family. This divisive and debilitating internecine
conflict left
the Incas particularly vulnerable just as Francisco
Pizarro and
his small force of adventurers came marching up into the
Sierra.
Data as of September 1992
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