In the year 1911, the young explorer Hiram Bingham was exploring the mountainous cloud forests of Peru. He was chasing a rumor that had been circulating for many years, a rumor that an entire lost city might lie somewhere high in the Peruvian Andes in a valley known as Urubamba. Bingham was skeptical, but upon hearing a tip from a local guide, he decided to climb to the top of the precarious mountain trail and investigate. He later wrote about how his journey unfolded. So lofty are the peaks on either side that although the trail was frequently shadowed by dense tropical jungle, many of the mountains were capped with snow. There seemed to be little in the way of ruins, and I began to think that my time had been wasted. However, the view was magnificent. On all sides of us rose the magnificent peaks of the Urubamba Canyon, while 2,000 feet below us, the rushing waters of the noisy river. Bingham climbed a little higher, hacking through the dense forest and fighting off the effects of altitude sickness that would often creep up on travelers in the high passes of the Andes. Soon, he stumbled across something that must have made his heart skip a beat. Presently we found ourselves in the midst of a tropical forest beneath the shade of whose trees we could make out a maze of ancient walls, the ruins of buildings made of blocks of granite, some of which were beautifully fitted together in the most refined style of Inca architecture. Bingham was impressed, but the more he explored, the more he realized that this was no mere scattering of ruins. A few roads farther along, we came to a little open space on which there were two splendid temples or palaces. The superior character of the stonework, the presence of these splendid edifices, and of what appeared to be an unusually large number of finely constructed stone dwellings led me to believe that this might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America. His trek turned into a frenetic scramble as crumbling ruins gave way to yet more and more ruins, and it became clear that a large settlement did indeed lie here under the dense scrub and undergrowth. For an hour and 20 minutes, we had a hard climb. A good part of the distance we went on all fours, sometimes holding on by our fingernails. Here and there, a primitive ladder made from the roughly notched trunk of a small tree was placed in such a way as to help one over what might otherwise have been an impassable cliff. The heat was excessive. The ruins that Bingham had discovered were the remains of a royal estate of the kings of a people known as the Inca. It had lain completely abandoned for nearly four centuries on top of the craggy peaks of the Urubamba Valley. Today, it is one of the most recognizable and distinctive ruined places in the world, and it is known as Machu Picchu. It had once been an outpost of an empire that stretched right across the continent of South America, and formed its most extensive and sophisticated civilization, an empire that had tamed one of the most hostile environments on Earth. As Bingham explored the overgrown ruins over the following weeks and months, clearing away the vegetation that rolled over these ancient walls, he must have asked himself how had the people of this region built such a mighty fortress in the clouds? How had this great city gone undiscovered for so many centuries, and with no signs of war or destruction on its stones? What in all the world had happened to the Inca people of the cloud forest? My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to The Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask what do they have in common? What led to their fall, and what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to look at the story of the Inca Empire. I want to explore how this unique culture grew up in one of the most extreme mountain landscapes that our planet can provide. I want to explain how they built the largest empire to ever arise in the Western Hemisphere, and I want to tell the story of how their society finally came to an end in the most dramatic and cataclysmic way imaginable. The Andes Mountains are the largest continental mountain range in the world. They stretch more than 7,000 kilometers across the South American land mass from north to south, a distance that stretches about a sixth of the way around the circumference of the Earth. They form part of the eastern edge of what's called the Pacific Ring of Fire, a nearly continuous chain of volcanic belts, lava-filled oceanic trenches, and towering mountains that stretches right around the coast of the Pacific Ocean. This is one of the most seismically active areas in the world, with around 90% of the world's earthquakes and about 75% of its volcanoes occurring along this enormous ring. Since their formation around 10 to 6 million years ago, these soaring peaks have had a dramatic effect on the circulation of the Earth's atmosphere, and they have given rise to some of the world's most extreme landscapes. To the east, they act as a wall to the continent's rain clouds, pooling and gathering them, and resulting in the vast jungle rainforest of the Amazon, home to over 400 billion trees. Although the Andes Mountains sit right beside the Pacific Coast and are nearly 3,000 kilometers from the Atlantic, still more than 90% of the water that falls in these mountains will drain into the Atlantic Ocean. These rainwaters follow the enormous watercourse of the Amazon River and bring a super abundance of life to this vast plain. But the land on the Pacific side of the mountains couldn't be more different. In fact, the desert that has formed on the western side of the mountains is the driest place on earth, and it is known as the Atacama. The Atacama Desert may be the oldest desert on earth, and has experienced its extreme climate for at least the last three million years. It's so dry because the winds that blow up the coast of Chile and Peru are cold winds from the Antarctic, parched of any moisture by the sub-zero conditions of the pole. The Atacama is so arid that even though it contains several mountains higher than 6,000 meters, many are still completely free of glaciers. Some weather stations set up in the desert in modern times have never detected any rain. This extreme aridity, as well as its broken, rocky landscape, means this desert is frequently used as a filming location for science-fiction films set on the planet Mars. In fact, in 2003, a team of scientists even went out into the driest parts of the Atacama Desert and repeated the same tests that the Mars Viking rovers had used to try to find life on the surface of the red planet. The tests returned negative, detecting no signs of life. But across this desert, about 40 rivers do flow down from the mountains. These desert rivers form rich oases, and for at least the last 10,000 years, humans have made their home here. This was one of the last stops on humanity's journey of more than 30,000 kilometers from the deserts of Ethiopia. Many common plants were domesticated and farmed in these valleys which receive virtually no rainfall, foods like avocados, peanuts, beans, squash, peppers, sweet potatoes, and a variety of fruits including pineapples and guavas. It's in these fertile river valleys that the very earliest civilizations of this region began. In Inca conceptions, the universe was created by a god named Viracocha. He also created mankind, and crafted humans out of stone, as one surviving Inca hymn recounts. Oh creator, root of all, Viracocha, end of all, lord in shining garments who infuses life and sets all things in order, saying, “Let there be man! Let there be woman!” Molder, maker, to all things you have given life. Watch over them. Keep them living prosperously, fortunately in safety and peace. In fact, the Inca were only the latest in a long string of human civilizations that rose and fell in the region of the Andes. The coastal basin of the Atacama Desert is thought to be one of the few so-called cradles of civilization in the world, along with others like Mexico, the Indus Valley, the basin of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in China, and the Tigris Euphrates Valley in Mesopotamia, all places where city-dwelling human societies have independently risen up. Some memory of these early days is recalled in the Inca's version of their own history, known as the Chronicle of the Incas. In ancient times, they say the land and the provinces of Peru were dark and neither light nor daylight existed. In this time there lived certain people who had a lord who ruled over them and to whom they were subject. The name of these people and that of their ruler have been forgotten. Today, we do know the names of some of these peoples, and some of the best known of these early precursors are the Moche and the Nazca. During a period roughly equivalent to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, that is, between around 400 BC and 580 AD, the Moche and the Nazca achieved a high degree of organization and sophistication, and expanded their territories across the deserts of the Atacama. They became experts at directing water in the dry landscape, building long canals and rivulets of stone, and soon began to expand their settlements into the foothills and the mountain valleys of the Andes. The Nazca are most famous for the hundreds of remarkable patterns and images that they drew in the landscape of the coastal deserts. This is a rough terrain broken by stones and rubble, and so, to ease travel and trade between their settlements, the Nazca cleared long roads in the desert. But soon, these desert lines seem to have taken on a more decorative and perhaps mystical significance. The Nazca constructed these lines with simple tools and careful planning, clearing away the rocks and rubble of the desert, and revealing the lighter-coloured sand beneath. Some of these vast patterns are nearly 400 meters long, or the length of four football pitches. Hundreds are simple geometric designs, while more than 70 are depictions of animals including hummingbirds, spiders, fish, condors, monkeys, lizards, and humans, as well as an assortment of trees and flowers. These vast shapes in the sand were invisible from ground level, but they could be seen from the sharply rising foothills and mountains that rose out of the desert. We don't know the full significance of these lines, whether religious or to mark the positions of the stars at certain times of the year, or simply as ostentatious expressions of wealth and power. But if you've ever drawn a picture into the sand of a beach and then climbed up onto the cliff to see it from above, you'll understand this impulse, although on a scale hundreds of times larger. These kinds of vast public works were possible because of the increasing social centralization of these empires, but for reasons we don't entirely understand, both of these early societies soon passed out of history and into dust. While the civilization of the Andes may have begun on the fringes of the desert, it's in the mountains that it reached its most astonishing heights. A short distance inland from the coast, the towering wall of these mountains rises sharply. This is a landscape that is exceptionally hard to live in. It's made up of high, craggy peaks of sandstone, limestone, and granite, and less than 2% of its total area is at all suitable for growing food. The elevation changes dramatically over short distances, with the highest peaks towering up to 6,700 meters or 22,000 feet, roughly two-thirds the cruising altitude of an airliner. The steep, rocky slopes of the Andes hold very little fertile soil, and even at the bottom of its valleys, it's rare to find any fertile earth. The mountains above 4,800 meters are capped with snow and ice all year round, while the snows creep much lower in the winter months. For the people who lived here, altitude was one of the primary ways they measured their landscape. The people of the Andes divided the mountains into distinct zones by height. There was the Quechua Zone between about 2,000 and 3,000 meters above sea level which contained warm valleys free of frost, many of them suitable for growing maize and other lowland crops. Above that was the Suni Zone at about 3,000 to 4,000 meters. On these steep slopes, potatoes were the primary crop. Higher still was the zone known as Puna. Agriculture was impossible here, but there are vast, frosty grasslands where herds of alpaca and llama could be grazed in great numbers, crucial for their wool and meat. Also raised for meat were guinea pigs which were cheap to raise and maintain, happily ate grains too coarse or bitter for humans, and reproduced extremely rapidly. Life for these early people was hard. Infant mortality was so high in the Andes that Inca children were not given a name until their third birthday, and until then was simply referred to with the fitting name Wawa. This rugged landscape was no place for individualism. There were no horses or oxen in the Americas that could help its people carry heavy loads or pull plows, so fields had to be turned by human hands. A group of farmers worked much faster than one on his own, and the dry, cold valleys needed irrigation canals dug through stone and rock, enormous labors that required large work gangs. So, to survive in this tough environment, people needed to pull together. This reciprocal economy formed the basis of the highly controlled and centralized empires that would follow, and would form the hallmark of Andean society right through its history. These early valley settlements were joined by a precarious strand of pathways and roads that traced narrow lines through the mountains. The steep, narrow river gorges were home to quick flowing rivers, and could only be crossed at certain points where it was possible to build a bridge. This meant that there was often only one road between one town and another, a fragile web that slowly turned the landscape of the mountains into a traversible network. Along these roads the people of the Andes would trek with caravans of llamas. These camelid animals are incredibly strong for their size, and are capable of carrying loads of up to 40 kilograms across some of the world's toughest terrain. As a pack animal, they are also essentially self-sufficient. Since they were able to eat any of the coarse grasses growing along the mountain roads, travelers didn't need to bring along any food for their animals, saving precious space for cargo. Along this complex and sophisticated trade route, cocoa leaves, tobacco, and bright feathers passed west out of the jungle while maize, seashells, and dried fish passed east from the coast. This system saw seashells decorating the clothes of people who lived a thousand miles from the sea, and bright tropical feathers decorating the hair of people who had never laid eyes on the jungle. One of the first great cities of this region was called Tiwanaku, and it grew up in what is now western Bolivia, near the vast shores of the body of water known as Lake Titicaca. This is the largest lake in South America and one of the highest in the world, today straddling the borders of Bolivia and Peru. This lake is so vast that it's often impossible to see the other side, and so in the craggy landscape of the Andes, it forms a completely unique place where the narrow valleys and jagged peaks suddenly give way to blue, open skies, the placid surface of the lake reflecting it like a mirror, and a horizon vanishing into the distance. For the whole history of the people of the Andes, this lake would hold a special place in their imagination and would form the center point of their mythology. The city of Tiwanaku held vast pyramid structures and impressive carved gateways cut from solid blocks of stone weighing up to 66 tons. It was home to as many as 20,000 people, and formed one of the first capitals of the Andes. In the Inca creation story, we can see the cultural debt they owed to Tiwanaku. They believed it was the place where light was first brought to the world, when before there had been only darkness. During this time of total night, they say that a lord emerged from a lake in this land of Peru. They say he brought with him a certain number of people and went to the place near the lake where today there is a town called Tiwanaku. There they say that he suddenly made the sun and day, and ordered the sun to follow the course that it follows. Then they say he made the stars and the moon. From the Inca perspective, the light of civilization had been created at Tiwanaku. By the time that the Inca ruled the Andes, this ancient city was already a series of ruins. When the Inca first stumbled upon it, they would have found the ancient city abandoned, a chaotic mess of broken blocks of masonry, the high, grassy plains littered with the fragments of monumental statues, shattered fragments of stone heads staring out of the walls. To the Inca, the meaning of this place was clear; this must have been the workshop where the creator god Viracocha had worked to create the world, and these stone statues were his first failed attempts at creating human life. He made some people from stone as a model of those that he would produce later, together with a chieftain to govern and rule over them, and many women, some pregnant and others delivered. When he made all these of stone, he set them aside and then made another province forming them of stones. In the Sumerian legends, the people of Mesopotamia recounted how the god Enlil created man out of clay, an idea that lived on in the Hebrew bible. Clay was the element of ancient Mesopotamia. It was the substance that built their houses, their pots and tools, the substance that allowed them to develop writing. But in the Andes, the element that the people knew best was stone. In the Andes, stone was everywhere; it towered over you on either side in the valleys, it lay waiting for you if you dug too deeply into the thin soil. It was what you had to cut through to build canals, to build your houses and temples. It even came tumbling and crashing down the mountainsides when earthquakes rocked the ground beneath your feet. So perhaps it's no coincidence that the Inca believed themselves to have been crafted from stone. It's in this city of Tiwanaku that the art of stone carving reached its earliest heights. Today, a great monument known as the Gate of the Sun still stands in ruins, covered with 48 intricately carved figures, perhaps representing something like the signs of the Zodiac. The city of Tiwanaku was grand, with its elites living inside a fortified artificial island guarded by four high stone walls surrounded by a moat. But after a time, Tiwanaku also faded into obscurity. Still, its influence on the region was enormous and all the civilizations that followed would retain something of its unique cultural imprint. One of these civilizations was the Wari. The Wari were experts at water control, and they marshaled enormous work gangs to build vast reservoirs and aqueducts that cut through the dry coastal plains and transformed the landscape of the low Andes. The Wari tamed the desert, building aqueducts up to 40 kilometers long to divert the sparse waters towards their cities. But they were never ornate or showy builders like the people of Tiwanaku. Their buildings were rough constructions, pulled together out of uncarved field stones and locked together with mud for mortar. But they still liked to build big. The walls of their cities were sometimes two to three meters thick and up to 12 meters high. The Inca built on the foundations laid by the Wari, sometimes quite literally. At certain sites you can see the walls of the Wari built from small stones, but with Inca additions extending and upgrading them in their distinctive signature style of massive megalithic stones. For reasons we don't quite understand, the Wari soon embarked on a rapid series of expansions that saw their power spread across the Andes. Some have guessed that they might have adopted a new expansionist religion that drove them to conquer their neighbors. Others have speculated that climate shifts may have reduced the habitability of their traditional desert territory, meaning that expansion may have been a matter of survival. Either way, they were incredibly successful. Between the mid 6th to mid 7th century, while Europe continued to reel from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, the Wari expanded across the hostile mountains of the Andes and brought people after people under their banner. Wherever the Wari went, they built terraces. Each terrace was a remarkable feat of engineering and displayed an intimate knowledge of the soil and the plants that grew in it. The walls of these terraces were sloped backwards, angled to hold in the earth and resist earthquake damage. They were floored with broken stones for drainage which were then covered by gravel and sand. Finally, the Wari would gather rich topsoil, digging it up from the lower elevations and the river valleys and carrying it up the mountain paths, laying it out to form the top layer of the terrace. This was constantly fertilized and turned over to aerate the soil. The stone walls of the terraces absorb the heat of the sun during the day and then slowly release it into the earth throughout the night, when frosts in the mountains could be severe. This technique allowed the people of the Andes to grow food at even the highest altitudes, and transformed these rocky slopes into shelves of fertile land. In this manner, tomatoes, squashes, and pumpkins, even types of tobacco were grown in the high peaks of the Andes. One remarkable site known as Moray is thought to be a kind of laboratory where the Andean people could develop new strains and hybrids of crops for growing at high altitudes. Moray is a breathtaking series of circular terraces, looking at first glance something like a Roman amphitheatre, about 30 meters deep. Moray is located at a height of 3,500 meters above sea level, but its descending terraces act as a kind of artificial climate, with each terrace increasing the temperature as you descend in steady increments. In fact, the temperature difference from the top to the bottom of this well can be as much as 15 degrees Celsius. These ingenious techniques made the people of the Andes some of the earliest masters of bioengineering, and meant that their farmers could practice a strategy of resilience through diversity. The people of the Andes cultivated more than a thousand varieties of potato and over 150 varieties of maize. They would sometimes plant as many as 200 varieties of potato in a single field, each with different levels of frost resistance, different levels of drought resilience, and immune to different blights. These foods could be naturally freeze-dried in the cold, dry mountain air, allowing them to be stored for years on end, and ensuring that even in the immensely changeable environment of the Andes, any crisis could be ridden out. The cryptic indigenous document known as the Huarochiri manuscript pays tribute to the hard work of these ancient ancestors who made the rocky landscape of the Andes bloom. In very ancient times when a great number of people had filled the land, they lived miserably, scratching and digging the rock faces and ledges to make the terraced fields. These fields, some small, others large, are still visible today on all the rocky heights. It wasn't only in the realm of terrace building that the Wari passed on their knowledge to the Inca. They also pioneered the kind of administrative empire that would lay the blueprint for what the Inca achieved. In every new town and city that the Wari folded into their empire, they built an administrative building built to a standard plan, suggesting a high degree of centralization in the empire. The imperial power of the Wari lasted for more than 400 years, but for reasons we can never entirely know, around the year 1000, it rapidly came apart. By the year 1100, all of the major Wari centers were abandoned and never reoccupied. The Wari Empire passed into dust, but its legacy continued. The Wari had introduced the idea of an empire that would unite the territories of the Andes, and now some of their former client states would try their hand at taking up their mantle. What followed was centuries of fragmentation and warfare in the mountains as rival states competed to fill the power vacuum that the Wari had left behind. From these wars, the Inca would rise. They would model themselves both culturally and politically on the Wari, even dressing their nobles in woven tunics descended from Wari traditional dress. They built their imperial capital of Cusco modeled on the Wari cities, and all of this was designed to send a clear message; the days of chaos are coming to an end. The heirs of the old empire have arrived to bring order once more, and these heirs are the people of the Inca. I want to take a moment here to discuss the sources available to us. The Inca never developed a written language, and so kept no written records. They recorded their extensive epic poetry, their messages and administrative information, in a remarkable system of rope knots known as quipus. These quipu used knots of different sizes, positions, and colours to represent different information, and these could be decoded by people initiated in their art, who were known as quipucamayocs. One early eyewitness named Hernando Pizarro records seeing these quipucamayocs at their mysterious work. They count by certain knots on cords and so record what each chief has brought. When they had to bring us loads of fuel, maize, chicha, or meat, they took off knots or made knots on some other parts so that those who have charge of the stores keep an exact account. These quipu have never been deciphered in modern times, and it's unclear how much information they actually encoded. It's possible that they were used as memory joggers which could help someone to recite poetry or messages they had committed to memory. If you had to remember hundreds of lines of poetry by heart, you can imagine that it might help to write down the first word or letter in each line, and it's possible that the quipu operated in something like this way. But this means that the quipu isn't much good unless the person who created it is there to decipher it, and in the years since the fall of Inca society, the knowledge of how to read the quipu has been lost. This means that the earliest documents we have to learn from were made by Europeans and were written during their invasion of the Inca lands. These sources generally fall into three categories; these are eyewitness accounts in the form of Spanish chronicles and memoirs, accounts written after the conquest by Spaniards and other Europeans, and finally, the accounts of native authors in the decades following the conquest, who were trained to write in Spanish schools. The Catholic church also kept voluminous records about Inca culture, beliefs, and religious practices. Somewhat ironically, these accounts were designed to make these practices easier to eradicate, but today they form some of the most useful documents for understanding the lives and beliefs of these ancient people. There were only six known eyewitness accounts of the Inca at the time of the Spanish contact. Four of these were written immediately after the conquest. They are vivid and detailed, but of course are coloured by the world views of their authors and the role they played in the destruction of Inca society. Two further eyewitness accounts were written many decades after the conquest and are generally considered less reliable. There's also a huge confusion of secondary sources written by people who didn't witness the events of the conquest and simply interviewed others, and many of these are considered highly unreliable. But a couple do stand out. One of these is the Spaniard Juan de Betanzos. He was one of the few Spaniards who became fluent in the Inca language of Quechua and married an Inca princess who had quite astonishingly also been previously married to both of the great players in this drama, the last Inca King Atahualpa, and the Spanish conquistador Pizarro. Betanzos’ knowledge of the Inca language, his interviews with his wife, and his exceptional understanding of the culture of the Andes led to a book called The Narrative of the Incas, which relates Inca history as told to him by his wife's people. Another crucial account is that of Pedro Cieza de Leon, a Spanish Jew who had converted to Christianity in order to be allowed to travel to the New World and become a conquistador. He wrote down a number of remarkable documents known as the Chronicles of the Inca, in which he documents everything he could learn about how the Inca people thought of their own history. But he makes no secret of the fragmentary and unreliable nature of some of what he heard, as he writes in one of his chapters. These Indians have no letters and can only preserve their history by the memory of events handed down from generation to generation and by their songs and quipus. I say this because their narratives vary in many particulars, some saying one thing, and others giving a different version. Indigenous accounts are often fraught and difficult to interpret. One remarkable hybrid document was dictated by the Inca king named Titu Cusi who, after the conquest, narrated his first-hand account of the Spanish invasion to a missionary named Fray Marcos Garcia. The resulting book is called An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru, and was published nearly 40 years after contact in 1570. This document captures an incredible snapshot of the confusion and fear of first contact, but even Titu Cusi recognizes the difficulty in accurately reporting events from so long ago. As the memory of men is frail and weak, it would be impossible to remember everything accurately with regard to all our great and important affairs unless we avail ourselves of writing to assist us in our purposes. One final document known as the Huarochiri manuscript gives us just a glimpse into the lives and beliefs of these Andean peoples prior to contact with Europeans. The book was compiled in the 16th century, a full 70 years after contact, and under the supervision of the Spanish cleric Francisco de Avila, who believed the people of the Andes to be engaged in devil worship. But despite these complications in its creation, the book does attempt to record all that the surviving Andean people of Huarochiri province remembered about the myths, religious notions, and traditions of their people, and paints a vivid picture of what life was like for people like the Inca. Together, these fraught and difficult accounts come together to paint a picture of what happened to bring South America's largest empire crashing down. In the Inca conception of their own history, their story began with a small band of highlanders who migrated to a place called Cusco, a warm valley in the highlands of southern Peru. This valley is around 40 kilometers long and drained by the Huatanay River. We don't know when this band of settlers may have arrived, or even if this event happened at all, but estimates for when it may have been usually land around the year 1200. In Europe at the time, the English crusader king Richard the Lionheart had just died, passing the throne to the infamous King John. To the east, Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first shogun of Japan, had toppled the emperor and turned himself into a military dictator. Somewhere in the high Andes, a band of travelers settled down in a place that they would soon call home. The Inca creation myth describes the scenes that these first migrants would have seen upon their arrival. In the place which is called today the great city of Cusco, there was a small town of about 30 small, humble straw houses. The rest of the area around this town was a marsh of sedge with sharp edged leaves. Houses of this time were built from rough stones carved into well-fitted but irregular shapes, and thatched with a kind of mountain grass known as ichu, which grows up to a meter tall in the mountains above an altitude of three and a half kilometers. The straw from this grass was used for a wide variety of purposes by the Inca, and was gathered as soon as the rainy season ended in May. The name of the new Inca capital, Cusco, comes from the Quechua name Qusqu Wanka, or the Rock of the Owl. The site of Cusco had long stood at the crossroads of empires. It lay right at the point where the territories of the Wari and the Tiwanaku had crossed, meaning that it benefited from both of their influences and formed a kind of hybrid culture. According to one legend, the story of the Inca people began when a cave opened up in this region and four men, all brothers, walked out of it, along with their wives. One of these was named Ayar Oche. Then Ayar Oche stood up, displayed a pair of large wings, and said he should be the one to stay at Guanacaure as an idol in order to speak with their father, the sun. Then they went up on top of the hill. Ayar Oche raised up in flight toward the heavens so high that they could not see him. The sun had ordered him to go to the town that they had seen. There they would find good company among the inhabitants of the town. After this had been stated, Ayar Oche turned into a stone, just as he was with his wings. There, Manco Capac and his companion, with the help of the four women, made a house. Having done this, Manco Capac planted some land with maize. Another origin myth states that the Inca began on an island in Lake Titicaca, and were then given the task of civilizing the world of the Andes. They then migrated northwards to the site of Cusco, using a golden staff to test the ground everywhere they went. On arrival in Cusco, the staff sank into the ground, and they knew that this would be the place they would call home. Wherever they really originated, these stories give us a glimpse of how the Inca viewed themselves, and it's an image we might find familiar from countless other empires throughout history. They believed that it was their destiny to expand and conquer, and to bring civilization to the peoples that surrounded them. Their achievements were remarkable; they would soon embark on a rapid expansion that would see them grow to become the greatest empire ever seen in the Western Hemisphere in what may have been as little as 50 to 80 years. The Inca credit this expansion to the work of one great king, a man called Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. In Quechua, his name means ‘He who overturns time and space’, and according to traditional understanding, Pachacuti was a figure something like Alexander the Great, a conqueror of unmatched skill and energy. If the Inca Chronicles are to be taken as fact, then during his reign, Cusco grew from a small town into the capital of an empire that covered nearly the whole of western South America. Pachacuti was born in Cusco, in the palace known as the Cusicancha. As he grew up, he would have gazed out over the hills as the sun washed the grassy valley sides, and watched birds fly over the yellow thatched rooftops of the city. Perhaps it's here that he began to dream of what a power this city could one day become. As a boy, it's recorded that he learned history, laws, and language, but Pachacuti was not intended for the throne. That honour lay with his older brother Urco, who his father had named as his heir. But Pachacuti's time would come when the Inca faced a desperate threat. Sometime in the early 15th century, a people known as the Chanka invaded the lands of Cusco. Their armies marched into the fertile valley and surrounded the capital. Pachacuti's father the king and his brother the crown prince both fled, believing the city to be lost, but Pachacuti stayed behind. The Inca army must have been on the verge of desertion, but according to the story, Pachacuti stood up on the walls and rallied the Inca soldiers behind him. When the Chanka fell on the city walls, he led them in a bitter defense and against all the odds, managed to repel the invaders. It's said that Pachacuti fought so fiercely that even the stones of the mountains rose up to fight the Chanka invaders. Reading between the lines, I think it's possible that the Chanka army was caught up in one of the frequent earthquakes and landslides that rock this region, and this may have contributed to the failure of their invasion. Whatever the cause, Pachacuti's victory was so celebrated that his father had little choice but to name him his successor around the year 1438. From the moment he became king, Pachacuti embarked on a series of grand construction projects, rebuilding Cusco after the war with the Chanka, and turning it into a city that would be the envy of the entire region. He led his inspired Inca army in an astonishing series of victories that stretched their territory even further. Part of Pachacuti's success seems to have been that wherever he conquered, he also built. He constructed vast irrigation channels and cultivated terraces in every territory he expanded into, and during his reign, the road system of the Inca expanded dramatically until it stretched more than 5,000 kilometers from Ecuador to Chile, allowing his army to travel quickly to wherever it was needed. Cieza de Leon describes this ambitious building work in his Chronicles of the Inca. The empire of Peru is so vast that the Incas ordered a road to be made. They were built from half league to half league, small houses well roofed with wood and straw lining the roads at regular intervals. The order was that in each house there should be two Indians with provisions stationed there by the neighboring villages. In this way, the lords were kept informed of all that happened in every part of the empire, and they arranged all that was needful for the ordering of the government. Milestones were placed about every seven kilometers along these roads, marking the distances to the next city for weary travelers. The Emperor Pachacuti was also a poet, with many traditional Inca poems attributed to him. Among these are hymns to the god Viracocha, asking for blessings for his people. Lord Viracocha, who says, “Let there be day, let there be night,” who says, “Let there be dawn, let it grow light,” who makes the sun, your son, move happy and blessed every day, so that man whom you have made has light. But Pachacuti
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was also capable of extremely ruthless tactics. As the Inca Empire expanded, peoples who repeatedly refused to bow to his rule were forcefully relocated, dragged from their homes by Inca soldiers, and sent to far-flung corners of the empire as colonists. But the expansion of the Inca Empire was not always violent. Pachacuti relied on an intricate intelligence network of spies and informants who would infiltrate neighboring states and bring back reports to him on their power and wealth. He would then send messages to the rulers of these kingdoms, and send them luxurious gifts such as high quality textiles and cocoa leaves, as Cieza de Leon recalls. They always arranged matters in the commencement of their negotiations so that things should be pleasantly and not harshly ordered. They marched from Cusco with their army and war-like materials until they were near the region they intended to conquer. Then they collected very complete information touching the power of the enemy. The Inca sent special messengers to the enemy to say that he desired to have them as allies and relations, so that with joyful hearts and willing minds, they ought to come forth to receive him in their province and give him obedience as in the other provinces, and that they might do this of their own accord. He sent presents to the native chiefs. The promise of this gesture was clear; join the Inca Empire, and I will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. It seems that most of the neighboring rulers accepted this offer and were peacefully folded into the empire, but it wasn't without an implicit threat. Refusal to accept Inca rule resulted in an invasion, and any rulers who resisted were executed without exception. The Inca army at this time was a fearsome force. Any commoner could be conscripted as part of the Inca system of organized labor, and every able-bodied man was expected to take part in a war at least in some capacity at least once in their life. The Inca army could reach the astonishing size of 140,000 men. The Inca had no iron or steel, and had no real technological advantage over other cultures in the Andes, so they often relied simply on their sheer force of numbers to overwhelm their opponents. Their weapons were hardwood spears launched using spear throwers, arrows and javelins, slings, as well as clubs and maces made from the hard wood of the chonta palm, with blunt or spiked heads made of copper or bronze. They wore armor made of wood and animal skin sometimes lined with these metals, and on their backs, warriors wore small, round shields made of woven palm wood slats and cotton. Their favorite tactic was to ambush their enemy in steep valleys, rolling rocks down the hillside, and trapping them in avalanches. They would march into battle to the beating of drums, the blowing of trumpets made of wood, conch shells, or horn. The army must have made a tremendous sight when it all massed together and marched off to war, and it's not hard to see why many kingdoms elected to take the Inca paycheck rather than face them in battle. The logistical network that supported the army was no less impressive; Inca soldiers marched along immaculately maintained highways through the mountains, over bridges across the towering gorges. Along the road, they were sheltered in barrack-like shelters called tambos, and were fed from the well-supplied storehouses called qullqas. Because of this talent for organization, the Inca army was able to move faster and amass a greater force than any of their rivals. Once the Inca had taken control of a town whether peacefully or by force, they would always build one of their large fortified storehouses or qullqas just outside it. These they would fill with food; freeze-dried potatoes and corn, beans, dried meats, and other long lasting foods, as well as clothing, blankets, and shawls, even sandals, which would then be distributed to the population. The capacity of this storage system was staggering. In just one region known as the Mantaro Basin, there were nearly 3,000 of these storehouses, with a capacity of 170,000 cubic meters, or around 70 Olympic swimming pools. These qullqa storehouses were always placed in ostentatious positions; on top of hills or on the side of cliffs so that everyone in the valley below could see them. The message they were designed to convey was clear; you are now part of the Inca Empire. The empire will provide for you. All your troubles are over. As part of their policy of expansion, the Inca practiced an incredibly inclusive attitude to religion. Like everything else, religious belief in this region was incredibly diverse. The Huarochiri manuscripts records some of the extreme variation from town to town in the myth of just one goddess named Chaupi Namca, and how she relates to other gods and mythical figures. In each village and even region by region, people give different versions and different names, too. People from Mama say one thing, and the Checa say another. Some call Chaupi Namca the sister of Pari Caca. Others say she was Tamta Namca's daughter. Others still say she was the sun's daughter, so it is impossible to decide. In this atmosphere of extreme religious diversity, the Inca saw benefits to absorbing the gods of others into their pantheon. In territories they conquered, local religions and cults were allowed to continue, and where possible were actually folded into the existing mythos of the Inca. When they conquered the people of Huarochiri province for instance, they happily took on their god named Pacha Kamaq. He became a god of the Inca, too, although of course, the creator god Viracocha kept his prime position. In the Huarochiri manuscript, the people of this province even attribute the many victories of the Inca to the help of their god and his son, Maca Uisa. When Tupac Inca Yupanqui was king, they say he first conquered all the provinces, then rested happily for many years. But then, enemy rebellions arose from some provinces. These people didn't want to be the peoples of the Inca. The Inca mobilized many thousands of men and battled them for a period of 12 years. The Inca, grieving deeply, said what will become of us? He became very downhearted. One day he thought to himself, “Why do I serve all these gods with my gold and my silver? Enough; I'll call them to help me against my enemies.” Maca Uisa arrived and sat at the end of the gathering. The Inca king goes on to plead with the gods to help him in putting down these rebellions. Some of them make excuses, telling him that they are too powerful, and their fury would destroy not just the rebellious provinces but the entire land. But soon, the Huarochiri god Maca Uisa speaks up. “Inca! Midday sun! I will go there. I'll go and subdue them for you right away, once and for all.” As soon as they brought him up a hill, Maca Uisa began to rain upon them. Maca Uisa reduced all those villages to eroded chasms by flashing lightning and pouring down more rain, and washing them away in a mudslide. Striking with lightning bolts, he exterminated all the great lords and other strong men. Only a few of the common people were spared. The result of this miraculous intervention is that the Huarochiri god is welcomed with open arms into the Inca religious system. From that time onward, the Inca revered Paria Caca even more, and gave him 50 of his retainers. This open-mindedness allowed the Inca to incorporate a vast and diverse range of peoples into their empire, and expand rapidly. When they conquered the lands of the central Peruvian coast around the year 1470, they took one great temple to the god Pacha Kamaq that contained a famous oracle. During their occupation of the area, they allowed the temple's priests to continue worshiping their own gods, although they did add an additional few buildings to allow worship of Inca gods like Viracocha to take place there as well. Of course, one of the most remarkable outposts that the emperor Pachacuti built is the one that opened this episode. Around the year 1440, he ordered the construction of the outpost in the Peruvian cloud forests that would one day be known as Machu Picchu, perched on a mountain ridge rising half a kilometer above the valley floor, with steep cliffs plunging down on either side. It's not clear exactly what this town was designed for. It was never self-sufficient, relying on constant supplies ferried up to it from the valley floor, and so, it must have served a very specific purpose. Some believe it may have been a royal retreat chosen for the beauty of its location, while others argue that it may have been a plantation or trading post for high-value commodities like cocoa leaves, which the Inca chewed and brewed into tea for a mild narcotic effect. More than a hundred steps of white granite connect the town's temples and houses, its water reservoirs, terraces, and its temple to the sun. In its day, it must have been a magnificent sight, with its rooftops of ichu thatch gleaming bright in the sun, its fields overflowing with corn and potatoes, while herds of llama zigzagged up the narrow mountain roads to supply it with all the necessities of life, and the clouds rolled endlessly over its grassy slopes. The reign of the great King Pachacuti saw the kingdom of Cusco reorganized into an entity known by its people as Tahuantinsuyu. In Quechua this means ‘four regions together’ and has been translated as something like ‘the realm of the four parts’ or ‘the land of the four quarters’. This was now a stable imperial state made up of a central government ruling over four provincial governments; Chinchasuyu in the northwest, Antisuyu in the northeast, Kuntisuyu in the south, and Qullasuyu in the southeast. The roads leading to each of these four provinces all met at a crossroads in the central plaza of the city of Cusco, where the babble of dozens of languages would have been heard on the streets. In Quechua, the word ‘Inca’ meant ‘lord’, and at this time it also began to be used about the particular ethnic group or caste that ruled the empire from the city of Cusco. It's not clear how many of these people there may have been, but estimates range from about 15,000 to 40,000. But they would soon rule over an empire of more than ten million people, and the king who reigned in Cusco would soon be known as the Sapa Inca, or ‘the lord without equal’. As with many aspects of folkloric history, it's possible that Pachacuti's achievements have been exaggerated. Mythical retellings of history naturally tend towards what's called the great man theory of history. Simply put, it just makes a better story to imagine that one hero is responsible for the construction of an empire. It's possible that Inca expansion should actually be credited to the reign of several kings, and with various less glamorous economic and social developments. But whether this is true or not, Pachacuti's name would forever be inscribed in the memories of the people of the Andes. This great poet king of the Inca died around the year 1471, and on his deathbed he is said to have uttered the following lament. I was born as a lily in the garden and like the lily, I grew. As my age advanced, I became old and had to die, and so, I withered and died. The son of Pachacuti, a man named Topa Inca, followed in his father's footsteps to expand the empire even further until only one true rival existed in the region, a people known as the Chimu. These were a desert people who built the vast triangular mud brick city of Chan Chan on the coast of northern Peru. The Chimu had grown rich diving for the highly prized shells of the mollusk spondylus that thrived off their desert coast. Their divers paddled out in boats and sank to the bottom of the ocean with stones tied to their feet, holding their breath for minutes at a time beneath the waves. Whole sections of the Chimu city of Chan Chan were given over to the industry of shell production, where the mollusks were cleaned out, the shells were polished and carved, and from there distributed and sold to the whole region. The Chimu dressed their priests and kings in remarkable gold decorations, and were perhaps the last powerful rival to the Inca. But by the year 1470, the Chimu too were conquered, and Inca power in the region was now all but unchallenged. At Cusco, the Inca celebrated their imperial ascendancy with the construction of an enormous ceremonial center, as well as an imposing structure that they called the Puma's Head, or in Quechua, Sacsayhuaman. We don't know entirely the function of this structure. Due to its towering walls, later European observers would refer to it as a fortress, but it may have also served a religious function. Sacsayhuaman was the largest megalithic structure ever built in the Western Hemisphere. Its walls are built of vast interlocking stones carved so perfectly that they fit together without mortar, so closely that it's impossible to fit even a pin between them. Centuries of expertise at stone carving culminated here in some of the finest stone working ever seen, slaved over by vast work gangs of conscripted labourers. We can only guess at the enormous human cost that moving these stones must have incurred. The Inca moved them without pack animals, using only mats of wooden logs and ropes, and the muscle power of thousands of workers. One 16th century Spanish observer, Pedro Pizarro, would later write an eyewitness account of what Sacsayhuaman must have looked like in its golden age. On top of a hill they had a very strong fort surrounded with masonry walls of stones, and having two very high, round towers. In the lower part of this wall, there were stones so large and thick that it seemed impossible that human hands could have set them in place. They were so close together and so well fitted that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints. The whole fortress was built up in terraces and flat spaces. The estimated volume of stone used in its construction is over 6,000 cubic meters. Estimates for the weight of the largest andesite block go as high as 200 tons, or about 100 times the weight of the average stone used to build the pyramids of Giza. The closeness of the stones and their lack of regular order are thought to be an adaptation developed over centuries to help these walls survive the devastating earthquakes that regularly rock the Cusco region. It's said that during an earthquake, the stones of these walls dance in their place, jittering and juddering, but always falling back to where they began. Cusco wasn't a city in the way we think of one, as a center of trade. There were no markets or squares, no workshops or places of business. It was forbidden for foreigners and commoners to stay in the city overnight, and it was home purely to the temples and priests as well as the king in his palace and the officials of the empire. At its heart was the Coricancha, or the golden enclosure, what the Spanish would refer to later as the temple of the sun. This was the spiritual and ceremonial heart of the empire, and during the most important rituals, the mummified remains of dead emperors would be brought out into the main square where crowds of thousands would come to see them. The chronicler Pedro de Cieza de Leon recorded the magnificence of the Coricancha’s appearance based on the evidence given to him by Cusco's surviving Inca princes and the few remaining eyewitnesses who had seen the temple in its glory days. Its circumference is some 400 paces, surrounded by a high wall of the finest masonry and precision. In all Spain, I have not seen anything to compare to these walls, nor the placement of their stones. The stone is somewhat black in color, rough, yet excellently cut. At mid height runs a band of gold of some 17 inches in width and two in depth. The doors and arches are also embossed with sheets of this metal. In one of these houses, the grandest of all was the figure of the sun of great size and made of gold, and encased with precious stones. There also were placed the mummies of the Incas who had reigned in Cusco, each surrounded by a great quantity of treasure. From its seat at Cusco, the Inca Empire expanded until it encompassed a truly vast expanse of territory, and ruled over as many as 12 million people. This enormous swathe of land was nearly ten times the size of the Aztec Empire in Mexico, with twice the estimated population. At two million square kilometers, it covered a land mass equal to the Western Roman Empire in Europe and the Qin Empire in China. It reached as far north as the jungles of southern Colombia, and stretched south over barren coastal desert and snowy mountains to about a hundred kilometers south of Santiago in Central Chile. It was actually one of the few empires in history to ever stretch so far from north to south. Most powers stretch horizontally from east to west, in the same direction as the planet's rotation, and the reasons for that aren't hard to see. Most cultures prefer not to go too far outside the climate they're used to. In the Northern Hemisphere, that means if you go north, things get colder and darker, and as you go south, things get hotter. But going east or west doesn't tend to change the climate all that much. But the Inca bucked that trend. Their empire stretches from north to south for an astonishing 4,000 kilometers, or about a tenth of the way around the globe. In Europe, this is enough to stretch from the snowy tundras and icy glaciers of Iceland down to the baking desert sands of the western Sahara. In North America, this would get you from Canada's Hudson Bay, where polar bears wander across the frozen waters, down to the balmy beaches of Jamaica. But in the Andes, it's the mountains themselves that form the largest consistent environment, and it's across these that the empire of the Inca spread. The Inca were deeply suspicious of the Amazon Rainforest and the foothills that descended down into it. They called this region rupa-rupa, meaning hot-hot, which gives you a sense of how they felt about it. The hills that looked out over the forests are known as the eyebrow of the jungle, jutting out as they do over the cloud forest below. The Inca tended to keep well clear of the rainforest's dark, shady depths. They traded with its people for brightly colored macaw feathers, and on a number of occasions seemed to have attempted to spread their empire down into the forest with military power. But what little information we have about these expeditions tells us that they invariably met with disaster. But the Inca were fascinated by this place, by the exotic animals and plants that flourished in the Amazon Basin. The jaguars, snakes, and tropical birds of the jungle appear constantly in Inca art high up in their mountains. The Inca economy is one of the most fascinating aspects of their society. To the extent that we can fit its structure into modern definitions, many have described it as an early example of state socialism or even communism. As far as we can tell, the idea of private property didn't exist in Inca society, and they progressed on the basis of shared ownership of assets, resources, and the means of production. When an Inca couple got married, they were given a house and a plot of land by the state, which they would use to produce enough food to support themselves. The state provided them with seeds and tools, and whenever the couple had a child, they were given another bit of land to help feed it. Each family was also provided with two llamas which were good for transportation and wool, and also produced manure for their fields. In return, the family would give over all the food they didn't eat into the common storehouse. Instead of taxes, they contributed directly with labour, agreeing to perform a service known as mit’a whenever called upon. This would involve laboring on a construction project for part of the year or working in a particular workshop making cloth or pottery, say. If they were a fast runner, their service might be to work as a message carrier on the roads, or if they were strong and able-bodied, to fight in the army. While performing this work, all food and accommodation was provided by the state. Inca nobles were exempt from this labor tax, and also any officials who were responsible for more than a hundred people. Other than food and water, cloth was perhaps the most important resource in the Andes. It was crucial for clothing of course, but was also needed for making containers to store and transport food. The bulk of this textile manufacture was done by women who were provided with all the raw materials involved in spinning, dying, weaving, and plaiting to produce thread, cloth, and rope. Andean society required millions of meters of thread, and the women of this region would have gone about the streets with their drop spindles, devices that allowed them to spin while walking around and taking care of their other duties. The hierarchy of this society was rigidly enforced, and peasants had little independence or power. The authorities even conducted inspections of people's homes to ensure that commoners did not own any gold or silver, have any valuable clothing, or keep more than ten animals. This entire system of organized labor was centrally planned from Cusco and quite remarkably operated without a single word ever being written down. All the information on how many taxpayers there were, the number of men available for military service, the quantities of cloth and food produced and required, the numbers of children and elderly people, all of this was recorded on the quipus, those systems of knots that could only be interpreted by a learned quipucamayoc. With its sprawling territory, its well-oiled centrally coordinated economy, and its state-of-the-art road network, the Inca Empire was now at the height of its power and confidence. But events were already brewing in the wider world that would soon bring them into contact with powers far outside their past experience, and which would ultimately lead to the wholesale collapse and disintegration of their entire society. If we were to soar over the city of Cusco in the year 1500, we would see it in the throes of an impressive and somber procession. The Inca king at the time, a man named Huayna Capac, was returning to the city at the head of a massive army after conquering a fierce people known as the Chachapoyas in the cloud forests to the north. The chronicler Cieza de Leon recalls what a royal procession of this period looked like. Round the litter marched the king's guard with the archers and halberdiers, and in front went 5,000 slingers, while in the rear there were lancers with their captains. On the flanks of the road and on the road itself there were faithful runners who kept a lookout and announced the approach of the lord. So many people came out to see him pass that the hillsides were covered and they all blessed their sovereign, raising a great cry and shouting. But the army was not in a mood of celebration. In fact, all the soldiers, even the king himself, were weeping. Their faces were painted black. That's because the emperor's mother, the Empress Mama Ocllo, had recently died, and his war in the jungle hills had been waged partly in order to gain the tributes needed to stage her funeral; cocoa leaves, ceremonial foods, and captives who were destined to become the servants of his mother's mummified body. In preparation for the festival, the entire ceremonial court was purified with ceremonies and sacrifices. This melancholy ceremony passed through the gate of Cusco and up the road to the Coricancha, the golden temple where the mummy of the queen mother would be placed. The drums and conches and other instruments would have sounded a mournful tune as the king approached his palace, and the lands of the Inca all joined together in mourning. Although the Inca had no way of knowing it, on the other side of the ocean, some 10,000 kilometers to the east, preparations for another very different procession were taking place in a city known as Rome. For the Christians of Europe, the new year was drawing close, and the year 1500 AD would be a milestone date, a millennia and a half after the date given to the birth of Jesus Christ. In the Christian world, the half- -millennium marked a time of enormous change. The Catholic monarchs of Spain had recently conquered the last Muslim kingdom in Europe, capturing the city of Granada in southern Spain, and unifying the Iberian Peninsula under a Christian king. New lands had been discovered on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and European settlement of the Caribbean had begun. But the ancient holy city of Jerusalem had also fallen to a new rising power, the Ottoman Empire. The ancient Christian capital of Constantinople had fallen only decades before, with Ottoman influence now growing in Eastern Europe. Far from bringing good Christian morals to the New World, settlers like Columbus had become notorious for their use of slavery and torture, refusing to baptize local people in order to justify their continued enslavement. The pope at the time, Alexander VI, was a member of the powerful Borgia noble family and was infamous for fathering several children by various mistresses. Dark, momentous things seemed to be happening in the world, and people became obsessed with one passage in the Book of Revelations that referred to the end of the world coming at the half-time after the time. This was believed to refer to a millennium and a half since the date of the nativity. To mark the occasion, in the year 1500, the painter Botticelli painted a grand artwork showing the nativity scene being attended by angels, and included the following apocalyptic inscription in Greek above it. This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted according to the 11th chapter of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three and a half years. When Rome's river Tiber flooded in the year 1497 and months later the papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo was struck by lightning, rumor spread that the half-millennium would bring death and devastation, perhaps even the coming of the antichrist and the end of days. But the beleaguered Pope Alexander was determined that the celebrations would mark the dawn of a new beginning for the Christian world. In the final days of the year 1499, the city of Rome was cleared of litter and its vagrants and homeless were driven from the streets for a remarkable ceremony. To mark the half-millennium, the pope had decided to demolish a wall that bricked up the entrance to Saint Peter's, known as the golden gate, supposedly the one through which Christ himself had passed when he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The pope was surrounded by a choir singing hymns, among them notably Psalm 118. Open for me the gates of the righteous. I will enter and give thanks to the lord. This is the gate of the lord through which the righteous may enter. Carrying a mason's hammer in hand, the pope stood from his throne and approached the old bricked-up wall. Then, he struck it three times. A team of masons joined in to finish the job, and they all crashed through the ancient doorway in what must have been a burst of dust and rubble, smashing their way into the new half-millennium. The end of days did not come for Christian Europe at the year 1500, but there is a bitter irony that they were in fact about to unleash a wave of destruction on the other half of the world that would match anything described in the Book of Revelations. For the empire of the Inca, the clock was now ticking, and the funeral procession that passed through the streets of Cusco, the soldiers with their faces painted black, the blowing of conches, and everyone present weeping, all of it may as well have been mourning for the entire society that ruled over the mountains of the Andes. The Inca emperor at the time of the half-millennium was a man named Huayna Capac, whose name meant ‘the young mighty one’. He had come to power at the age of 25 in the year 1493, just one year after Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Caribbean. The Emperor Huayna Capac was a conqueror by nature. During his long reign, the Inca army was constantly on the move, and the empire expanded further into present-day Chile and Argentina. He soon became hell-bent on subjugating the tropical northern territory of what is now Ecuador and Colombia. These wars in the jungle were bitter and difficult, a quagmire that must have sapped the energy and strength of the empire. The terrain here was difficult, covered in dense forest and mangrove swamps, and the Inca soldiers were not used to the climate. But Huayna Capac refused to give in. He spent as much as 10 years waging his war in the north, and all this time his messengers would have traveled back and forth along the long Inca road network, carrying orders from the king and bringing back news from his administrators in Cusco. This constant warfare must have become a daily fact of life in the empire that everyone simply grew to accept. Many young people in Cusco would not have remembered a time when the king had resided in the capital, or when the empire had known peace. We don't know for sure, but while leading his armies through the forests of Colombia, it's possible that the Inca Huayna Capac may have heard rumors, rumors of a strange and mysterious power growing even further to the north, strangers who had arrived by boat and who brought a wave of destruction in their wake. Whole villages were being wiped out, laid low by some mysterious force. Perhaps Huayna Capac dismissed these rumors at first, that is, until one day he began to develop a fever the likes of which the Inca had never encountered before. His condition rapidly deteriorated and in the year 1527, the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac, the emperor of all the Andes, died suddenly of this mysterious disease in the jungle a thousand miles from home. Perhaps it's on his deathbed that those rumors came back to him about the strangers who had been sighted far in the north. One Inca chronicler, Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, recorded what was supposedly the dying words of King Huayna Capac that take the form of a prophecy of doom. Our father the sun has revealed to me that after the reign of twelve Incas, his own children, there will appear in our country an unknown race of men who will subdue our empire. I think that the people who came recently to our own shores are the ones referred to. The reign of the twelve Incas ends with me. I can therefore certify to you that these people will return shortly after I have left you, and that they will accomplish what our father the sun predicted they would. Whether or not these were actually his dying words, they certainly show the apocalyptic mood that had begun to sink in among the snowy peaks and deep valleys of the Andes Mountains. Within a few weeks, the emperor's mummified body began its 2,000 kilometer journey south to Cusco. His lords carried him on a throne bound tightly in white cloth. The procession traveled along the great Chinchasuyo road that separated the coastal plains and the towering mountains above, a caravan of lords and warriors, porters and llamas, slowly climbing up through the terraced roads and canyon valleys. When they arrived back in Cusco, they found the city a devastated place. While the king had been away, the plague had reached the capital city and killed countless numbers of its citizens, along with many lords and officials. The entire empire was reeling from the destruction, and bodies must have piled up in the streets, with hardly enough people left to carry them away. In some areas, as many as nine out of every ten people died. In one moment of lucidity during his fever, the Emperor Huayna Capac had chosen his son Ninan Cuyusi to ascend the throne as the next Sapa Inca, but this was to be an ill-fated choice. Ninan Cuyusi was an infant and he died only days after his father, possibly of the same disease. The empire was without a ruler, and now multiple claimants to the throne were gathering their armies. Within a year, the Inca realm would be torn by a civil war that would result in the deaths of tens of thousands of its people and the sacking of many of its cities, while diseases like the one that had felled their emperor were only just beginning their spread around every town and city in the mountains. Before the Inca had even set eyes on a single European, the contact of the two worlds had unleashed chaos. Back in the traditional capital of Cusco, one of Huayna Capac's sons named Huascar declared himself the rightful ruler, but in the rebellious northern region of Quito, another of his sons was in charge of a sizable army. This man's name was Atahualpa, and it's in his hands that the Inca Empire would finally crumble into ash and flame. In his work, A True Relation of the Conquest of Peru, the eyewitness Francisco López de Xerez gives the following description of the Inca prince Atahualpa. Atahualpa was a man of some 30 years of age, of fine appearance and disposition, somewhat stocky, his face imposing, beautiful and ferocious, his eyes bloodshot. Atahualpa was a fierce and tenacious battlefield commander who led the battle-hardened troops that had been fighting in the jungle war in the north. Ignoring his older brother Huascar’s claim to the throne, he declared himself the rightful ruler of the northern region of Quito. The Inca Empire had now effectively been divided in two, and a tense stalemate emerged that would last for five years. Huascar, ruling from the old city of Cusco, was by any measure the most legitimate and legal king of the Inca. He was four or five years older than his half-brother Atahualpa, but although he was a brave commander, he had a mild and gentle temper. But Atahualpa was of a very different temperament, as the historian W.H. Prescott recalls. Warlike, ambitious, and daring; he was constantly engaged in enterprises for the enlargement of his own territory. His restless spirit excited some alarm at the court of Cusco. Before long, the land was once again plunged into war. It's said that Atahualpa was captured early on and placed in a wooden cage, but he managed to escape and return to his armies. His soldiers were battle tested, and they were also remorseless and brutal in their tactics. When Atahualpa captured the city of Tumebamba, it's recorded that he put its inhabitants to the sword and burned all of its houses and temples to the ground. His campaign of destruction continued into the south, as Cieza de Leon recalls. Many Indians tell about how, to quell the king's anger, they sent a large group of children and carrying green bouquets in their hands and palm leaves, to ask for his grace and friendship and to look beyond any past injuries. With so many cries they begged him and with such humility that it would be enough to break even hearts of stone. But they made little impression on the cruel man Atahualpa, because they say that he ordered his captains and people to kill all those who had come, which was done, sparing only a few children and the sacred women of the temple. Some of these Spanish sources certainly have incentive to exaggerate the brutality of Atahualpa, considering the role they would later play in bringing about his downfall. But I think it's clear that he was at least very ruthless in the prosecution of his campaign. One story even recounts him burying some rebel chieftains alive, as Juan de Betanzos recounts. He said that he planted that garden with people of evil hearts. He wished to see if they would produce their evil fruit and works. These tactics, however brutal, do seem to have worked. By the spring of the year 1532, Atahualpa had pushed south until he was within a few kilometers of the capital of Cusco. His older brother Huascar hastily gathered all the troops he could from the countryside, many of them untrained men and boys, but it would not be enough. The two armies met on the plains of Quipaypan, each with around 60,000 soldiers, the booming of their voices and battle cries, the bashing of wooden shields, and the thundering of drums, the clatter of bronze maces, javelins, and arrows. When the two armies met, Atahualpa's experienced troops prevailed, and Huascar was defeated. He was taken prisoner and placed in a cage just as Atahualpa had been. Atahualpa also seems to have purged members of the royal court who may have had stronger claims to the throne than he did, as Francisco Xerez recalls. To ensure the obedience of the country, he tried to get rid of all pretenders to the crown. He did not spare even the illegitimate princes, because perhaps one or other of them might like to follow in his evil example. These executions and persecutions lasted for several years. Atahualpa was now well on his way to becoming the 13th Sapa Inca, the next in a line of kings that stretched back a hundred years to the reign of the poet king Pachacuti. He made the astonishing announcement that he intended to move the Inca capital from its ancestral heartland of Cusco to his own home town of Quito. He would uproot the entire Inca nobility, strip Cusco of its wealth, and turn Quito into a capital that would dwarf it in magnificence. Atahualpa must have been riding high. His land may have lain in ruins, his people may have been ravaged by disease and war, but the entire world now seemed to bow down beneath him. He wasn't to know that events in the world outside had already overtaken him and made his victory over his brother all but irrelevant. A shadow was now stretching over all the lands of South America. Soon it would grow to cover the Andes. Within only a matter of days, they would encounter another power that would outmatch them in technological sophistication, and that would arrive with only one goal in mind, to topple the empire of the Inca and conquer these lands for themselves. The Inca didn't know it yet, but this power had already landed on their continent, and soon they would meet it face to face.
These must cost loads in terms of footage and image licenses, let alone the editing work - thanks for pulling them together and at such good quality!
I am a filmmaker so I am well aware that producing these videos is definitely not a quick or simple task… even with the narrative and audio already there to work from! Great work.
I always relisten to the podcasts with the videos. They're amazing
Looks like the Incas are back on the menu boys!
Been looking forward to this one a lot. Visited Peru and Machu Picchu a few years ago and read/watch/listen just about anything I can find on the Inca because of that trip.
I'd also recommend the book Turn Right At Machu Picchu if you want an entertaining read with some historical factoids in it.
I love watching these again with the videos as well as the audio versions.
Very excited to find out what the next episode will cover!!!