Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire

“ It is possible that the Spanish general, even so early as the period of his residence at San Miguel, may have meditated some daring stroke, some effective coup-de-main, which, like that of Cortes, when he carried off the Aztec monarch to his quarters, might strike terror into the hearts of the people, and at once decide the fortunes of the day. It is more probable, however, that he now only proposed to present himself before the Inca, as the peaceful representative of a brother monarch, and, by these friendly demonstrations, disarm any feeling of hostility, or even of suspicion. ”

“ The Inca shall be established with his wives and household, and shall have every privilege and liberty consistent with security. His nobles and people are to be admitted to him without hindrance, and for the present he shall be allowed to conduct the affairs of the empire—with our guidance and counsel when it seemeth expedient. The nobles shall be treated as befitteth their rank, and we'll have no violence offered any man or woman, noble or other. ”

“ The mere circumstance of acting on a concerted plan would alone make a small number more than a match for a much larger one. But it was not necessary to admit the whole of the Indian force into the city before the attack; and the person of the Inca once secured, his followers, astounded by so strange an event, were they few or many, would have no heart for further resistance;—and with the Inca once in his power, Pizarro might dictate laws to the empire. ”

“ Yet, once in the field, the Inca did not usually show any disposition to push his advantages to the utmost, and urge his foe to extremity. In every stage of the war, he was open to propositions for peace; and although he sought to reduce his enemies by carrying off their harvests and distressing them by famine, he allowed his troops to commit no unnecessary outrage on person or property. "We must spare our enemies," one of the Peruvian princes is quoted as saying, "or it will be our loss, since they and all that belongs to them must soon be ours." ”

“ Nor was this due to the fact that it alone, under Inca domination, had reached the stage of stable and diversified social organization; for the archaeology of Peru and [Pg 189] Bolivia shows that the Empire of the Incas was only the last in a series of central Andean civilizations which it excelled, if at all, in political power rather than in the arts, industrial or aesthetic.
Our knowledge of the religious and mythic ideas of these various groups reflects their relative importance at the time of the Spanish conquests more than their natural diversity. ”

“ It was no longer a contest for a province, but for the possession of an empire. Atahuallpa's troops, flushed with recent success, fought with the confidence of those who relied on their superior prowess; while the loyal vassals of the Inca displayed all the self-devotion of men who held their own lives cheap in the service of their master.
The fight raged with the greatest obstinacy from sunrise to sunset; and the ground was covered with heaps of the dying and the dead, whose bones lay bleaching on the battle-field long after the conquest by the Spaniards. ”

“ The subjugation of the Chancas, with their allies the Huancas, led to a vast extension of the Inca empire, which now reached to the shores of the Pacific; and the last years of Yupanqui were passed in the conquest of the alien coast nation, ruled over by a sovereign known as the Chimu. Thus the reign of the Inca Yupanqui marks a great epoch. He beat down all rivals, and converted the Cuzco kingdom into a vast empire. ”

“ These facts must be carefully borne in mind in pursuing inquiries relating to the history of Inca civilization. It is also essential that the nature and value of the evidence on which conclusions must be based should be understood and carefully weighed. This evidence is of several kinds. Besides the testimony of Spanish writers who witnessed the conquest of Peru, or who lived a generation afterwards, there is the evidence derived from a study of the characteristics of descendants of the Inca people, of their languages and literature, and of their architectural and other remains. ”

“ The chief of the six Indian races, including the Quichuas and the warlike Chancas, which formerly occupied the central mountain-region of Peru. The Incas became the dominant race about 1000 A.D., and built up a vast and peaceful civilisation, in which a purely socialistic government was successfully administered. This Inca Empire was destroyed by the Spanish under Pizarro in 1533, but the Inca Indians still survive as a race in Central Peru, where they are known as industrious and honest agriculturists. ”

“ Above all, we were told much of the long line of Inca monarchs, the royal family, whose last great king, Huayna Capac, had died not a great while before the coming of the Spaniards. He was represented as dividing the throne between his sons Atahualpa and Huascar, who soon quarrelled and began a wicked and merciless fratricidal war with armies and other civilized arrangements. Then, we were told, came Pizarro and took advantage of this unfraternal war, arrayed one brother against the other, and thus was enabled at last to conquer the empire. ”

“ When the Incas conquered a country and people they so arranged affairs as to incorporate the people as part of the empire. They called their domains grandiloquently "the four quarters of the earth." They did not govern this great territory by brute force as did the Aztecs—although they knew how to use the sword if necessary—but by methods dictated by prudent and profound policy, productive of peaceful success. ”

“ From photograph, courtesy of Hiram Bingham, Director of the Yale Peruvian Expedition.
The conditions which thus fostered local and intensive cultural evolutions were scarcely less favourable—once the local valleys had reached a certain complexity—to the formation of extensive empires. As Cieza de León remarks, conquest was easy where refuge was difficult; and the Inca conquerors themselves found that the most effective weapon they could employ against the coastal cities was mastery of their aqueducts. ”

“ Such appears to have been the fatal defect underlying the conflict of Huascar, at Cuzco, with Atahualpa, whose initial strength lay in his possession of Quito, and whose career was brought to an untimely end by the advent of Pizarro. Despite the fact that Inca power had been clearly crescent within the generation, it is by no means certain that the political conditions which the Spaniards used to advantage might not, if left to themselves, have disrupted the great empire.
There is reason to think that such a rupture had occurred at least once before in the history of Andean civilization. ”

“ Several successive insurrections desolated the land for some years. These fierce but transient storms, however, excited by individual ambition, need not occupy attention. It is sufficient to say that in these contests a number of the early invaders perished. Indeed, as has been already said, of the men whose names are most conspicuous in this nefarious conquest, scarcely one seems to have ended his days in peace.
The Spanish authority being at length consolidated in Peru, it is desirable to show, in so far as may be possible, the nature of the government which succeeded to that of the Incas. ”

“ Inspired by the hope of vengeance on the conqueror, even boys became leaders of their people, and it was only after a bloody struggle of two years’ duration that the Spaniards were able to regain the mastery and consigned the captive Inca, with all his family, to an ignominious and barbarous death. ”

“ The crime of the Conquest, so deeply resented by the princes of royal Inca blood, could not be appreciated in its full significance by the millions, who were deprived of no rights, since they possessed none, but were simply taken from the welcome task of tilling the farms of their “deity-king” and put to the unaccustomed labor of the mines, under a new master, pitiless in his tyranny and ruthless in destroying their sacred idols. ”

“ The Peruvian institutions, though they may have been modified and matured under successive sovereigns, all bear the stamp of the same original,—were all cast in the same mould. The empire, strengthening and enlarging at every successive epoch of its history, was, in its latter days, but the development, on a great scale, of what it was in miniature at its commencement, as the infant germ is said to contain within itself all the ramifications of the future monarch of the forest. Each succeeding Inca seemed desirous only to tread in the path, and carry out the plans, of his predecessor. ”

“ Though the Inca earnestly entreated to be sent to Spain, and urged the absurdity and impossibility that he could ever intend to rebel against the numerous Spanish colonists who now occupied the whole country of Peru, seeing that his father with 200,000 men was utterly unable to overcome only 200 Spaniards whom he besieged in the city of Cuzco ”

“ The greedy eyes of the Conquerors gloated on the shining heaps of treasure, which were transported on the shoulders of the Indian porters, and, after being carefully registered, were placed in safe deposit under a strong guard. They now began to believe that the magnificent promises of the Inca would be fulfilled. But, as their avarice was sharpened by the ravishing display of wealth, such as they had hardly dared to imagine, they became more craving and impatient. ”

“ It is also true that the natives, the peons of Peru and Ecuador, the descendants of the Incas, never wear anything except black, and still celebrate with impressive and appropriate ceremonies the anniversary of the day on which Atahualpa was strangled. In Chili the custom has died out, for the Inca empire was never able to sustain itself there against the savage{374} Araucanian tribes of Indians who inhabited the southern range of the Andes.
The Inca women in Peru and Ecuador are not at all pretty. ”

“ Although the Incas were not the liberal princes of Marmontel's dream, and although the history of their rule was not an idyll, their meticulous and beneficent tyranny did after long wars of conquest erect in the ancient Tahuantisuyu a great empire of silent obedience, an anticipation of the ideals of State Socialism. Property was collective, and existence subject to strict regulations. The Incas made labour obligatory, supervised all agricultural operations, and respected, when they extended their domains, the rites and customs of vanquished races. ”

“ Every day outrages were perpetrated, at the contemplation of which humanity shudders. They suffered the provident arrangements of the Incas to fall into decay. The poor Indian, without food, now wandered half-starved and naked over the plateau. Even those who aided the Spaniards fared no better, and many an Inca noble roamed a mendicant over the fields where he once held rule; and if driven, perchance, by his necessities to purloin something from the superfluity of his conquerors, he expiated it by a miserable death." [Footnote: Prescott's "Conquest of Peru."] ”

“ They were conquered first by the Inca Tupac Yupanqui, but revolted some years ago and were repressed at terrible sacrifice of life. The tribe hath never taken kindly to our laws and institutions, and hath always resisted the benevolent efforts of the Incas to lift them from savagery. It is true, they fought with our unhappy Huascar against Atahualpa, but they were influenced, I have always thought, less by loyalty to Tavantinsuyu than by their native treachery, for they were once subject to Quito. ”

“ Under their sceptre, the higher orders of the state had made advances in many of the arts that belong to a cultivated community. The foundations of a regular government were laid, which, in an age of rapine, secured to its subjects the inestimable blessings of tranquillity and safety. By the well-sustained policy of the Incas, the rude tribes of the forest were gradually drawn from their fastnesses, and gathered within the folds of civilization; and of these materials was constructed a flourishing and populous empire, such as was to be found in no other quarter of the American continent. ”

“ To carry their plans into effect, it became necessary that the Inca Manco should leave the city and present himself among his people. He found no difficulty in withdrawing from Cuzco, where his presence was scarcely heeded by the Spaniards, as his nominal power was held in little deference by the haughty and confident Conquerors. But in the capital there was a body of Indian allies more jealous of his movements. These were from the tribe of the Canares, a warlike race of the north, too recently reduced by the Incas to have much sympathy with them or their institutions. ”

“ It was noon before the Indian procession was on its march, when it was seen occupying the great causeway for a long extent. In front came a large body of attendants, whose office seemed to be to sweep away every particle of rubbish from the road. High above the crowd appeared the Inca, borne on the shoulders of his principal nobles, while others of the same rank marched by the sides of his litter, displaying such a dazzling show of ornaments on their persons, that, in the language of one of the Conquerors, "they blazed like the sun." ”

“ For instance Mohina and Pinahua, although first overrun by Inca Rocca, were also invaded by Yahuar-huaccac, and then by Viracocha and his son Inca Yupanqui. Each town fought so hard for its liberty, both under their Sinchis and without them, that one succeeded in subjugating one and another defeated another. ”