The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (27 page)

substantially. There were more than fi fteen thousand miles of roads

in the Andes that the Inkas, like the Romans, reserved for nobles, soldiers, and imperial messengers. The
qollqa
warehouses were both an

economic asset and a strategic one in that they stored tribute and supplied Inkan armies. In Peru’s Mantaro Valley alone there were 2,753

of these stone structures, with a storage capacity of over half a million square feet. The warehouses also underpinned Inkan authority

by serving as collection and redistribution points for royal tribute.21

Although the Inkans rewarded their allies with the accumulated

wealth of the
qollqas
, their commitment to reciprocity had its limits.

There is no evidence that they had a formal legal code or police system, but they, like all imperial rulers, developed ruthless institutions

of domination. Special offi cials known as
tokoyrikoq
(those who see

all) were the eyes and ears of the Inka state in the provinces. If they

uncovered disobedience or subversion, the penalties ranged from fl ogging for shirking work to capital punishment for speaking against the

empire. The Inkas punished armed revolts or collective disobedience

with wholesale slaughter. They seized the lands of rebellious communities, destroyed their shrines and
wakas
, and resettled the survivors

as bound laborers on imperial estates. They made an example of disloyal
kurakas
by fl aying them to death and making drums from their

skin and cups from their skulls.

As in Roman Britain and Al-Andalus, subject Andean labor was

the true imperial prize. The Inkas claimed ownership of all property

by right of conquest and required communities to supply tribute in

the form of labor to gain access to arable land. Under the
mit’a
system (
mit’a
means “to take a turn”), in which
ayllus
sent colonists

to exploit distant resources, communities had to furnish the Inkan

Empire with miners, soldiers, porters, craftsmen, and laborers. This

was in addition to sending a portion of their produce and crafts to

the
qollqa
warehouses. In most cases, the
kurakas
based these assessments on long-standing reciprocal obligations in the
ayllus
.

It also seems likely that the Inkas were in the process of developing new strategies of extraction at the time of the Spanish conquest.

Their primary goal was to cut through the reciprocal institutions

of authority and exchange to make empire building more lucrative.

They had begun to make heavy use of
yanaconas
, men who had

138 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

become divorced from their
ayllus
, in a variety of roles ranging from

simple laborers to trusted imperial retainers. The Inkas’ main goal in

promoting this individuality over communalism was to restructure

Andean society. Using careful censuses, they began to organize conquered communities for military and labor service by dividing them

into units of ten, fi fty, one hundred, fi ve hundred, one thousand, fi ve

thousand, and ten thousand people. The Pizarrists interrupted this

experiment, but it is clear that the enormous wealth and impressive

monumental architecture of the Inkas refl ected their well-honed ability to wring labor tribute from their subjects.

Competition to control these vast riches probably sparked the

fratricidal civil war between Atawallpa and Waskar. Their father,

Wayna Qhapaq, was pushing the Inkan borders northward into

Ecuador in the 1520s when he died so unexpectedly. With the imperial inheritance uncertain, the Cuzco bureaucracy and the Inkan

high command each backed a different son. As the military candidate, Atawallpa had the advantage over his half-brother, and his

professional forces killed approximately sixty thousand of Waskar’s

Cuzco militiamen in a series of bloody battles as Pizarro and his

men marched up from the coast.22 Unaware of the true nature of the

Spanish threat, Atawallpa was brutal even by Inka standards in his

treatment of his brother’s vanquished supporters. His men executed

Waskar’s wives and children after capturing Cuzco and took their

revenge on
ayllus
and subject states that had unwisely taken his

side in the confl ict.

Atawallpa’s faction justifi ed their bloodshed and looting on the

grounds that it was part of a cosmic cataclysm (
pachakuti
) that would

usher in a new age. This had occurred four times in the Inkan past,

and Pachakutiq Yupanki, the founder of the Inkan Empire, took his

name from this “turning over of time and space.”23 In 1532, however,

pachakuti
set the stage for Pizarro and new kind of empire.

The Pizarrists did not really conquer Peru; rather, they hijacked

the Inkan imperial state. For the most part, the war-weary Inkan military and bureaucracy were paralyzed for the six months the Spanish

kept Atawallpa alive as a hostage in Cajamarca. Waskar’s partisans

foolishly but understandably hoped to use the invaders against

Atawallpa’s men, particularly after Pizarro installed Waskar’s brother

Manqu as the puppet Sapa Inka. On the other hand, many Inkan subjects similarly hoped that the Spaniards would free them from impe-Spanish

Peru 139

rial servitude. Their assistance was invaluable to the undermanned

and undersupplied conquistadors. Andeans tending the vast network

of
qollqa
warehouses in the Mantaro Valley supplied and equipped

the roughly thirty-fi ve thousand auxiliaries, most of whom were

Waskar’s men, which rounded out the Spanish forces. The Pizarrists

used this local support to root out and destroy the remnants of

Atawallpa’s army.

The Spanish relied on Andean military assistance to fi nish the

work they began at Cajamarca, but Pizarro and his men lacked the

ability and patience to maintain the Inkas’ fi nely tuned systems of

imperial extraction. Having risked their lives to topple a great empire,

they expected immediate rewards. The conquistadors therefore

embarked on a frenzied orgy of plunder when they took possession

of Inkan shrines and cities. Waskar’s supporters in Cuzco originally

welcomed them as saviors, but they quickly grew disgusted as the

Spaniards began to loot. Mocking Inkan traditions and customs, the

Pizarrists pried hundreds of golden plaques from the Temple of the

Sun and carried off its golden sacrifi cial altar. Nor did they confi ne

themselves to confi scating moveable precious metals. Ill-disciplined

conquistadors slaughtered the royal llama herds for their tongues,

which they apparently considered a delicacy, and took
aclla
women

as concubines. Rampaging conquistadors repeated this scene at every

major Inkan settlement in the highlands.

The Pizarrists’ relentless campaign of imperial plunder had a devastating impact on Andean society. Two centuries of Inkan rule had

introduced Andeans to the realities of subjecthood, but the Spanish

conquest appeared to bring the very world to an end. Established values and institutions lost their meaning as powerful cults such as Pacha

Kamaq failed to predict the catastrophe or stop the looting. The Inkan

priest of Apurimac, affl icted with the despair that seized the former

imperial ruling class, jumped to his death in a deep river gorge as the

Spanish pillaged his shrine. Similarly, the chronicler Pedro Cieza de

León reported that royal women hung themselves with their own

hair to escape the conquistadors, and an entire village committed suicide after falling to a Spanish attack. Gathering their wives and children with them as they fl ung themselves over a cliff, the village men

declared: “It is better to die in freedom than to live in servitude of

such cruel people.”24 The myth of Wayna Qhapaq’s pestilential butterfl ies was surely born of this desperation.

140 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The Pizarrists themselves faced the challenge of constructing a

new world in the Andes after they had fi nished stripping the Inkan

Empire of its lootable treasure. For the next two decades, Francisco

Pizarro and his followers built a rudimentary conquistador state that

was focused primarily on extorting tribute from defeated Andeans.

The arrival of the fi rst precious metal shipments in Spain in 1534

sparked a rush to the Andes that brought desperately needed reinforcements, but the fl ood of speculators and fortune hunters caused

signifi cant problems. Pizzaro had diffi culty controlling the masses of

would-be conquistadors whose main goal was to replicate his feat at

Cajamarca by fi nding new Andean empires to overthrow. In 1535, he

cleverly distracted his Spanish and Inkan rivals by encouraging his

onetime partner Almagro to go on an ill-fated expedition to conquer

Chile at the head of an army of twelve thousand Andean auxiliaries

led by Paullu Inka, the brother of the new Sapa Inka, Manqu.

This diversion gave the Pizarrists time to solidify their hold

on power. Their fi rst priority was to force back under the imperial

umbrella the subject Andean communities that had used the collapse

of Inkan power to reassert their autonomy. Anchoring his regime in

urban centers, Pizarro founded Lima as his capital and reorganized

Cuzco along the lines of a European city. He turned the Temple of the

Sun into a Dominican monastery, divided the Inkan palaces among

his followers, and forbade them from settling more than one league

from the city because their control over the Andean majority was still

precarious.

The Pizarrists further staked their claim to the remnants of the

Inkan Empire by seizing Inka noblewomen as their concubines.

Although it might appear at fi rst glance that they were continuing the Inkan practice of using intermarriage to build alliances with

defeated elites, the Spanish rarely married the women they treated

as imperial plunder. Instead, they formed informal conjugal relations

with the wives and daughters of Inkan nobles and
kurakas
, many of

whom Cieza described as “very lovely and beautiful,” to claim the

legitimacy and wealth of their families.25

Some of these women may have entered into these relationships

willingly, but it is hard to see how Atawallpa’s widow, Doña Angelina

Yupanqui, would have welcomed the embrace of Francisco Pizarro, the

man who had her husband garroted. Yet she bore him two children.

Similarly, Pizarro had two children by one of Atawallpa’s daughters,

Spanish

Peru 141

Doña Inés Huaylas Yupanqui, before he married her off to one of his

employees. This is why the Jesuit mestizo priest Blas Valera charged

that the conquistadors pushed Inkan women into prostitution: “They

counseled wives to leave their husbands, virgin daughters [to leave]

their parents, and they gave [these women] over to public lewdness,

a thing that had not been seen in the [Inka] kingdom for over two

thousand years.”26 Without question, the most repulsive example of

this sexual imperial exploitation was Cristobal Maldonado’s attempt

to force a nine-year-old Inkan heiress into marriage by raping her.

Inkan aristocrats, who might well have been happy to give their

daughters or sisters to the conquistadors in marriage under the old

system, were humiliated by these unequal relationships. In keeping

with the nihilism of the times, a nobleman in Quito went so far as to

kill all of the women of his household to keep them out of Spanish

hands.27

On a much wider scale, the Pizarrists similarly co-opted and perverted Andean institutions of reciprocity through the
encomienda

system. Not only did the conquistadors loot Inkan shrines and cities, they treated the whole population of the Andes as an imperial

resource. Lacking the manpower to seize and exploit land, they

needed Andean labor to make their new empire pay on a long-term

basis. In his capacity as governor, Pizarro rewarded his followers with

encomienda
grants over entire
ayllus
. This brought the power to

demand tribute in labor, but the land itself was relatively unimportant. For example, in 1534 Pizarro awarded Juan de Barrios authority

over the subjects of a pair of
kurakas
and their
ayllus
near the coastal

town of Ica. The grant gave Barrios sanction to use approximately

1,300 Indians on farms, mines, or “other enterprises.” In return he

was obliged to “teach and indoctrinate the Indians in the matters

of our Holy Catholic Faith, giving them good treatment, and obey

the ordinances that have been drawn up for their welfare.”28 Most

encomienda
grants also required their holders to maintain a horse

and arms to deal with potential uprisings.

With Spanish military manpower stretched thin, the
encomien-

deros
obviously did not have the means to force hundreds of Andeans to work. They instead relied on the
kurakas
to mobilize their

followers to mine gold and silver, weave cloth, and grow cash crops.

The most successful
encomienderos
developed a working partnership

with their
kurakas
and cut them in on a share of the profi ts, but the