Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve Episode two hundred and forty six. The
Incan Empire. Last week I introduced the people of the Andes and the Inca
in terms of geography and mostly social history. To an extent, there is
little that separates the Inca from multiple other Stone and Bronze Age civilizations. The
Inca would have absolutely trounced the Mycenean Greeks, for example. Of course,
the problem is that they're not going to face the Mycenean Greeks. They are
going to face the early modern Spanish, whose tempered steel blades, gunpowder,
horses, and above all European diseases. Today, I want to cover the
Inca Empire in greater detail, focusing on his political structure and its military structure,
since those will be crucial issues going into the Clash of civilizations when Pisaro
arrives in the early sixteenth century. Then next week we'll switch gears and talk
a bit about Pisaro, because he actually visits the edges of the Inca Empire
and then goes home to Spain before returning to conquer it, and a lot
happens in the interim, by the way. So with all that introduction.
Let's get started right at the outset. Let me say two things. One,
the Inca Empire was a short lived phenomenon. In reality, it lasts
only about a century. Of course, we have no idea how long the
empire would have lasted had the Europeans not reached the New World at the end
of the fifteenth century. Two, it is very difficult, especially early on,
for us to ascribe specific dates to events pertaining to the Inca Empire.
There are a few reasons for this. First, largely thanks to the Spanish
conquest, there is little indigenous writing that survives. Second, as I mentioned
last time, the Inca were not above manipulating time for political purposes, so
it's difficult to tell if something happened on a given date or if that event
has been moved to suit political expediency. Third, the Indian peoples just didn't
calculate time in the same way as the people from Europe. Time was much
more cyclical. So given all those caveats, here's what we can say.
Around the end of the first millennium CE, the Inca were just one of
several ethnic groups jockeying for political position in southern Peru. However, sometime around
fourteen hundred CE, the Inca emerged as the dominant political polity. It's nearly
impossible for me to say anything for certain before the fifteenth century. Early Incan
history, like most histories, frankly, is shrouded in myth and legend.
According to these myths, the Inca were engaged in warfare from the word go
with their neighbors in and around Cusco. Cusco itself was reportedly founded by Manku
Kuakap, who is essentially the Eneas of the Inca. The archaeological origins of
this Inca society are almost as sketchy as the historical mythical record. Now.
The problem here is that, in part, we can't recreate Cusco before the
Imperial period, because Cusco was entirely rebuilt during the Imperial period deliberately. The
evidence that we do have suggests that early on and the Incas shared in quite
a lot in common with the chiefdom based society. Gift giving, for example,
was common a way to establish social and political ties. There are a
few allusions to the benefits associated with war and the capture of labor, but
not much of any specific nature, at least not in any record that survives.
The meteoric rise of the Incan Empire has a lot in common with several
other notable empires in the past. Perhaps most importantly, the Inca got lucky
and that they were blessed with four or even five silent emperors in succession.
We all know the story of the Antonine emperors in Rome A Trajan Hadrian,
Marcus Aurelius, and Antoninus Pius led the empire to its greatest heights. We
also know what happened when they were gone. The same goes for the Carolingian
Empire or the Persian Empire of the classical Kimanid era. In an age of
absolute personal rule, it really helps to have a good ruler. About fifty
accounts of the Incan Empire were written in the decades after said empires collapsed,
giving us the bulk of our historical information about the imperial period. That being
said, distilling exactly how the Inca won their empire might still be impossible even
today, for all the reasons I specified at the beginning of the show.
The reign of Rocca Inca, the eighth ruler on the standard list of Inca
rulers, usually marks a narrative transition from raiding an alliance to straight up territorial
expansion. Rocca, we know, first used a key marriage alliance with the
people to the west of Cusco to cement his power and kickstart his expansionist policies.
But what really seems to have started things was defense. The Chanka,
another ethnic group in the same region, attacked Cusco in the early fifteenth century,
but the Inca repulsed their advances, and this seems to have propelled them
into their imperial phase. After all, offense is usually the best defense.
That being said, and again I hate to constantly muddy the waters here,
but I do want to point out that not scholar believes that there ever was
an attack from the Chunka. This might be Inca propaganda intended to mask what
was really just naked aggression. Most scholars today agree that Chanca existed and were
a crucial enemy. These wars, however, seems like most agree, are
probably vastly exaggerated in order to pump up the image, I suppose of the
empire's founder. The earliest target for Inca expansion was the rich and fertile land
around Lake Titicaca. This is if you look on a map about one hundred
and fifty miles southeast of Cusco. These early Incan campaigns were successful, However,
they had the result of bringing the Inca into contact with dangerous and hitherto
unknown foes, and so it's hard to tell when, but at some point
point further expansion south, at least in the early fifteenth century, seemed unlikely
as they'd run into too many opponents. So simultaneously the Inca were pressing north
into today what we would call Ecuador. The evidence today suggests that these conquests
took about fifty years in some places and in other places the border regions,
they were never completely successful. Even in fifteen thirty two, many of the
areas on this outside of the various valleys, were not under Inca control.
One of the most important early Inca campaigns was along the coast from Nasca,
home of the famous Nasca Lines, to Mala, which about eighty two hundred
miles north. This campaign reportedly took a year. Here the Inco met a
variety of determined opponents who evidently put aside their differences briefly in a light against
them, fielding an army of thirty thousand strong. But this is really the
only time that any of these people would put aside their differences. In fact,
the final Inca victory was a result of a trick and not glory in
battle. The Inca used a feigned retreat to get their enemies to come out
of their secure locations. Then when these people were celebrating in the open,
the Inca fell upon them and slaughtered them. They deported the remaining living population
and brought in more compliance settlers to replace the former indigenous peoples. Now,
while all this expansion was going on, the record is full of accounts of
various uprisings that burst forth and had to be put down. The Incan Empire
was, after all, based on the threat of military force, much like
the Assyrian Empire. Revolts had to be brutally suppressed, and they were.
But as I'll discussed more in a moment, this was not easy given that
the Inca never had a standing army, so every time there was a campaign,
a major mobilization effort was required. The late fifteenth century was dominated by
King Waina quakap. By the time he came to the throne, the major
Incan expansions were over. He divided his time between military concerns, mostly to
consolidate his power and administrative duties. Waina Up forces campaigned in Ecuador for over
twenty years with mixed results. The Inca were now faced with sort of the
same problem that confronts basically every empire that doesn't incorporate conquered peoples into its system.
They don't have a large enough population to keep expanding. Even Sparta,
for example, as militarized as it was, never expanded beyond the Peloponnese.
Its population simply didn't allow it. The Inca now find themselves faced the same
problem. Of course, because of the training that the army of the Inca
goes through. If the enemy was willing to meet the Inca army on an
open battlefield, it stood an excellent chance of success. Likewise, if the
enemy pulled back to one stronghold, the Inca couldn't lay siege to well,
the Incas were about unbeatable. But in the jungles of Ecuador, for example,
where the enemy could hide and then launch devastating sneak attacks, well,
the Inca army wilted and as I suppose, just about all classical armies would
win. A Quackup was actually campaigning in the north when word reached him of
an epidemic killing thousands. The epidemic was bearing down on the borders of his
empire even as he discussed the situation with his captains. As I will discuss
more in a later episode, the epidemic was smallpox. It started when Navarez
brought the disease from Cuba in his effort to oust Cortez from his position in
Mexico. Since then it had raged through Central America, and now it headed
south. Win Aquapuck tried to flee, but in early fifteen twenty eight,
he too was struck down. His death would initiate the dynastic struggle which would
plague the Inca pun intended right up to the Riolo Cortez. We will come
back to it in detail in about two weeks. For the balance of the
episode, I want to look at the Inca political system and it's military.
Since the days of the Spanish conquest, the Inca government was usually portrayed as
a finely tuned machine. Whether they admired or hated Inca rule, the authors
usually agreed that Cusco's crowning success was its orderly administration. In the popular view,
which persisted for a long time, an omnipotent emperor presided over a vast
bureaucracy that was mostly composed of local elites who had been recruited into state service.
By applying the same policies everywhere, the Incas soon molded a cultural patchwork
into a homogeneous society. Virtually everything the peasants did from birth to death was
supervised by state officials who called on taxpayer labor to meet state economic and military
needs, the officials who spoke Cuscu Quechua in public affairs, and the people
who adopted some Inca customs into their daily lives. As for religion, the
people's beliefs were eclipsed by a new state ideology that elevated the ruler to the
status of a god on earth. Since the Inca society had simply been organized
before the Great Expansion, they invented a state to rule an empire. This
homogeneous portrait of the realm is still common if you read most histories, but
an image of a uniform and total control is an illusion that's based largely on
frankly Cusco's view of the world. We shouldn't be surprised at that, since
both the Incas and their conquerors were preoccupied with the life and times of royalty,
while the Spaniards did ask hundreds of petty lords about life before and under
the Incas. They gave a lot more weight to the views expressed by Inca
aristocrats. So should we be surprised at all that we end up with a
Inca centric view. I think not. However, research over the past fifty
years or so has proven that Inca intervention in the societies they conquered was not
uniform at all. They transferred, some others they left, just as they
had been before. The Inca tried to apply a standard approach to all the
society as they conquered. However, the people's beyond Cusco were a mosaic of
cultures, and one size fits all was definitely not going to work. That
being said, for all we know, the Inca Empire might have grown more
cohesive over time like the Roman Empire did, but it was too short lived
to ever find out. Like many Indian peoples, the Inca envisioned their society,
history, and land as a uniformed whole. They divided the world and
its people into four parts, whose political and cosmic center lay at Cusco.
The name of the realm, which was actually Twani Sanhu means the four parts
together. Each of these parts was headed by a great lord or apu,
who advised the emperor in Cusco and directed affairs for one of his four divisions.
Like most pre industrial civilizations, certainly pre French Revolution civilizations stripped to the
bone, the Inca system was politically an hereditary monarchy. A layer beyond the
aunt, however, we find an elaborate hierarchy, complete with ancestor worship,
as well as class and ethnic hierarchies. I hope by now you've learned from
this podcast, but there was rarely, if ever, such a thing.
Isn't real absolute monarchy, even in the dregs of the Dark Ages, kings
and emperors needed the constant support and consent of the men that they ruled.
If not, the result was civil war or at least rebellion. There were
very few elections back then, so civil war kind of was the election process.
Now, the emperor and his family in the Inca system stood at the
apex of the political and social pyramid. Obviously below them were two classes of
aristocratic Inca kin and one class of honorary Inca nobility. In fifteen thirty two,
the most exalted aristocrats were ten royal kin groups called panqua. In theory,
a new panaqua was created with each royal succession as part of a convention
called quote spiritual inheritance end quote. In this custom, the quote unquote most
able son became the new sovereign. In the final version of Inca government,
the king was an absolute ruler, and so much as that exists, that
is, he was a divine being with a celestial mandate to rule the world.
In practice, however, as I mentioned before, the very human monarch
had to work closely with Couscoe's contentious aristocracy to take the throne and to rule
from it. The royal epics recounted time and time again how rulers had been
elevated, then counseled, then assisted, and then deposed and even assassinated by
their relatives. The two faces of this monarchy, which really could be the
two faces of any pre modern monarchy, by which I mean there's an omnipotent
ideal, a sort of godlike figure, and then there's a negotiated, very
real, practical side. And these are found throughout the Inca oral histories as
well. Because the Incas drew no neat distinctions among different aspects of power.
The emperor melded political, social, military, and sacred leadership into one person.
Ideally, his existence passed through three distinct stages. Early in life,
he had to show himself to be a warrior worthy of his lineage and the
support of Cuscoe's nobles. Once anointed by the son to rule the land,
he was revered as a deity whose powers and prerequisites were unique among the beings
who walked the earth. Then, in death, his descendants accentuated his perpetual
vitality as he feasted, conversed with the dead and the night, and retired
to his quarters for repose. When a ruler took office, he assumed a
new personal title that replaced his given name. Ironically, just as many British
monarchs, to the sovereign was to marry his principal wife at that same time,
so that at the coronation it was actually not the installation of an inca
emperor, it was the installation of a new royal couple. As you might
expect, many of the emperor's days were filled with ritual pomp and festivals,
all the usual stuff. And there were the usual traditions who might meet with
the emperor, like there were in let's say Augustus's realm or Justinian's Constantinople.
Men were expected to remove their footwear and approach the inca emperor carrying a burden.
The court surrounding the emperor was also meticulously organized. Wives and lords sat
around the emperor according to their rank. When Pizarro arrived, some of his
men reported that no one dared raise their eyes in the presence of the emperor.
Quick aside. Throughout these episodes, and I'll talk about this more next
week, you will never hear me say the words Francisco Pizaro wrote. Unlike
Cortez, our new conquistador, Pizaro was illiterate. His brother, however,
he had to both or not, and we're going to get a lot of
information from them, mostly from Pedro Pizaro. For example, when the emperor
traveled, he was carried on an elegant litter. Pedro Pizaro, Francisco's brother,
reports as follows quote, he was seated on a wooden stool a little
more than nine inches high. This stool, called a dujo, was a
very lovely reddish wood and was always kept covered with a delicate rug. Even
when he was seated on it, the ladies brought his meal and placed it
before him on tender, thin green rushes. They placed all his vessels of
gold, silver and pottery on these rushes. He pointed to whatever he fancied,
and it was brought. He was eating in this manner one day,
when I was present, A slice of food was being lifted to his mouth
when a drop fell on the clothing he was wearing. Giving his hand to
the Indian lady, he rose and went into his chamber to change his dress,
and returned wearing a dark brown tunic and cloak. I approached him and
felt the cloak, which was softer than silk. He explained that it was
made from the skins of bats that fled by night in Putrato Viejo, and
that bite the natives end Quotum. When a new emperor came to the throne,
the occasion was attended by all the pageantry one might expect for a man
believed to be a god. All the eminent lords in the land who could
travel to Couscoe did on this ceremony. By the way, there were substant
human sacrifices. Sadly the ascension of a new emperor meant that two hundred children
ages four to ten would be sacrificed alongside them. When huge numbers of sacrificed
yamas and alpacas, as well as clothing, seashells, gold, and silver.
After an emperor died, he was mummified and his mummified remains remained in
Cusco. Again referencing Pedro Pissaro, he recalled quote, most of the people
of Cuscu served the dead, I've heard it said, who They daily brought
out to the main square, setting them down in a ring, each one
according to his age, and there the male and female attendants ate and drank.
The attendants made fires for each of the dead in front of them,
with firewood that was worked and cut until it was quite even very dry,
and lighting them burned everything they had before them, so that the dead should
eat of everything that the living hate, which is what was burned in these
fires. The attendants also placed before these dead certain large pitchers of gold or
silver or clay, each as he wished. And here they poured out the
chica that they gave the mummies to drink, showing it to him, and
the mummies toasted each other, and the living and the living toasted the dead.
When the vessels were full, they emptied them over a circular stone they
had for an idol in the middle of the plaza, around which there was
a small channel, and the beer drained off through the underground pipes. End
quote. A different Spaniard who saw the mummies was astonished. Quote. Their
bodies were so perfect that they lacked neither hair, nor eyebrows, nor eyelashes.
They were in clothes such as they had worn when alive, with yantas
on their heads, but no other sign of royalty. They were seated in
the way Indian men and women usually sit, with their arms crossed over their
chests, the over the left, and their eyes cast down. I remember
touching a finger of the hand of Juanna Kappak. It was hard and rigid,
like that of a wooden statue. The bodies with so little that any
Indian could carry them from house to house in his arms or on his shoulders.
They carried them wrapped in white sheets through the streets and squares, the
Indians falling to their knees and making reverences with groans and tears, and many
Spaniards taking off their cap end quote. Below the emperor was the willak Umu,
or high priest. He was the second most powerful person in the empire.
Beyond his religious duties, he was often the emperor's field marshal in times
of war. Below him were the different families of the Emperor. There was
significant intermarriage, of course, between different aristocratic factions. These factions also played
a major role in determining the next emperor, so we can guess that there
was a fair amount of jockeying for a position within the court, like there
is in just about any court. Rank though was judged in this case by
blood proximity to the emperor and never on age women. Especially the sovereign's principal
life. He could have had. Several were powerful figures in the royal line,
according to our sources, like the acumenated Persians. The Inca married sisters
or first cousins in order to keep the line pure. We have no evidence
that this resulted in any inbreeding issues, probably because the Incan Empire did not
exist long enough for those problems to crop up. This also seems to have
been a change in practice that happened sometime during the imperial period. Another change
with the designation of a quote primary wife end quote, only her offspring would
be considered potential errors to the throne. This just sort of makes sense.
You don't want scores of offspring competing for one spot, or you run into
the kind of dynastic issues that are going to help to undermine the Ottoman Empire.
The Inca's political system undoubtedly evolved over time, but their history's flexibility makes
it really hard to pin down the timing and the nature of these changes.
Still, the chronicles are our best source for insight as to how the practices
of power helped shape the government structure. These suggest that the royal successions and
marriages were pivotal moments for conflict and maneuver, although certain rulers also tried ideological
reformations that would have enhanced their positions some years ago. Different historians through attention
to the bloody infighting inherent in royal successions and observed because the situation arose as
a result of Andean rules of succession, typically favoring vigorous actors, really kind
of similar to the Ottomans. Often a lord passed his station to the sun
who showed himself to be the most able, regardless of birth position, but
it wasn't uncommon for a number of able brothers to hold a office successively.
Among the Inca's factional competition meant that successful aspirants won the throne through political intrigue,
coup, murder, and sometimes even civil war. Cusco was the heart
of the Incan Empire. It would not have odd visitors in the way Technostiklan
did. Cusco was the sacred center of the empire and its administrative hub,
but it would be wrong to talk about it as a great city in the
way we can talk about the capital of old Mexico. It was a city
of thatched roofs and temples, the core of which covered about one hundred acres.
To put that into perspective for you, by comparison today, New York
City is one hundred and ninety three thousand acres, So Cusco was about point
zero five percent as large as New York City is today. Not a fair
comparison by any means, but one that was just intended to give you a
sense. The town and its suburbs were larger, encompassing terraced fields and intricate
networks of canals and baths. It's hard to imagine Imperial Cusco today, because
the Spaniards began altering it basically as soon as they took possession of the city
in fifteen thirty three. One thing that anyone who has been to Cousco notices
is the mountains. Cusco is one of the highest cities in the world.
The city lies at an elevation of eleven three hundred feet, but still,
despite this, it's productive. There are numerous streams, and the surrounding valleys
are well suited to growing a variety of highland crops. Despite the fact that
maybe it wouldn't have compared to technos declan in size or splendor, Certainly,
Cousco was the greatest city in all of South America in the sixteenth century.
Its elegance even impressed the Spaniards. Pisaro's personal secretary wrote, quote, the
city would have four thousand residential homes between the two rivers surrounding it, and
they are on the slope of a mountain, and at the head of the
city and the same mountain there is a fort with many rooms end quote.
The population of the urban central sector was only about fifteen to twenty thousand people,
with an additional fifty thousand in the surrounding districts. If you were to
go out, say five miles in all directions, then you could get a
total for the Inca capital of maybe one hundred, one hundred and fifty thousand
people. The Inca famously said that their capital had been built in the image
of a Huma, though whether they meant that literally or figuratively is anyone's guess.
Again, given the destruction that took place after the imperial period, the
streets were laid out in a rough grid, but all were very narrow.
This, after all, was a society that did not use the wheel for
transportation. Of course, as with any capital, there was a royal section
to the city that other ordinary people were not permitted to enter. There were
many temples and shrines throughout the city, but the largest and most important was
Krikkanasha, or the Golden Enclosure. Today it's most commonly referred to as the
Temple of the Sun. You can still see the masonry today I visited myself,
though it was converted to a church and the gold plates carted off immediately
after conquest. It was the Empire's most important shrine that, as I mentioned
last time, all other local temples beyond the Temple of the Sun were situated
along lines which emanated out from the central point. Of course, every ruler
and nobleman owned vast estates beyond Cusco. The period of imperial expansion had put
huge amounts of land into Inca pockets proverbially speaking, and the nobility quickly converted
all this into private estates. Every ruler from Wakashaw Inca on ruled vast estates
of their own, and certainly these were more substantial than anything the nobility commanded.
Our picture of the pre Hispanic system of landownership in the Inca Empire has
been clouded by native complaints ready to use European legal ideas to gain control over
land. But even without those complications, control of resources in the Inca Empire
was clouded and entangled. Inca rulers, kin groups, institutions, and other
elite men and women held us states, and there may have been some discretion
involved in who they passed those onto. Most importantly, a deceased ruler's estates
were normally left to his panca or his kin group, following the custom of
split inheritance. The throne passed on to his successor, who then had to
develop his own kin group's resources. The lands of the queen were held separate,
and when she died these went to her relatives, not to the kings.
The natural complexity of the ecology of the region and the slow development of
the estates meant that the parcels belonging to rulers, aristocrats, and local communities
were usually intermingled with one another. Since the Inca elite were linked through blood
and marriage in many ways, ownership of these lands was really really complicated.
Personal choice may have played a role in inheritance, but may not have.
We're not sure. Over the generations, the number in types of claims that
could be placed on particular plots probably multiplied exponentially and created fertile ground for intrigue,
to say the least. So for the balance of this episode, I
will focus on the income military system and how that military translated into provincial rule.
Obviously, because the income military system is going to play a huge role
in the years to come. Of course, it should go without saying that
diplomacy, reward payments, so on and so forth, we're all essential ingredients
in the Inca's formula for creating their empire. But warfare lay at the heart
of the process, both symbolically and practically. Triumphant campaigns put untold resources at
Cusco's disposal, showered glory on the elites, and gave the common folk a
rare chance as soldiers to better their state in life. Although the Inca's negotiated
dominion over many societies while shedding little blood, you should be noted their armies
met considerable opposition, and a few societies resisted the Inca rule for many many
years. Effective Inca strategy thus required mobilizing thousands of military and auxiliary personnel for
campaigns, and these for the last months, sometimes even decades. To meet
their military goals, the Inca created a network of internal garrisons, frontier forts,
and an incredibly remarkable logistical system of roads, support facilities, and supply
depots. Those military activities collectively placed enormous, though sporadic, I should note
demands on the human and natural resources of the Andes throughout the period of Inca
rule. When the Incan Empire exploded, it faced massive obstacles. The Inca
were neither the most populous nor the richest ethnic group in the region. The
Inca balanced annexation through warfare, coercion, and diplomacy. Usually by diplomacy I
mean marriage alliances. But and we have heard this story before, the key
to early Incol's success was that they're neighboring peoples, much like the Ninjas and
all those eighties Karate movies lined up to take them one at a time.
Had these various peoples coordinated really at all, then the Inca probably would have
had a much harder time expanding. By and large, the Inca practiced the
same strategy as countless other successful expansion as peoples, the Romans and the Mongols
probably being the clearest examples. They were generous to those who submitted and vicious
to those who resisted. As the Inca expanded, they switched to a more
stable form of dominion generally, but especially in the highland and northern regions close
to Ecuador. This meant moving from a low intensity form of rule to a
high intensity, high control strategy. Partially this was because of a need to
be more defensive, and so in its nature, the Inca Empire relied on
what we would call defense in depth. Around the periphery of their empire,
they built a variety of strongholds behind which operated mobile attack forces. The forts
were designed merely to hold up the enemy advance until the larger army could arrive,
but there weren't hundreds of these forts. The Inca didn't have a firm
border line like the lines that we enjoy drawing on maps today. Their relationship
with their neighbors was much more flexible. As situations dictated, the Inca could
choose to leave their frontiers permeable, or they could stiffen them up. The
permanent forts were not usually elaborate affairs, though they were of course well tailored
to the kind of threats that the INCA expected. The Incas could expect attacks
with projectiles of limited range and powers mostly arrows, spears, and slingstones,
but they didn't have to cope with things like explosives, mounted attacks, or
siege machinery such as battering rams or catapults. Frontal attacks by shock troops was
the preferred method of taking a stronghold in the Andes, so forts were designed
to repel waves of soldiers in close combat. They usually consisted of walled enclosures
with broad open areas and spare architecture, set on hilltops or at the crest
of steep slopes. Many had several centric walls, moats, so on,
and so forth. The encircling walls were often built with bends and salients to
gain multiple shooting angles on assaulting troops. They weren't totally on like early medieval
castles in any way. Behind the walls, the Inca typically erected elongated platforms
and piles of slingstones. Entry was channeled through doorways that were sometimes offset or
laid out in zigzag patterns in order to foil massive attacks. The largest of
these forts encompassed no more than maybe seven or eight acres, which limited the
number of people who could seek refuge, but kept perimeters relatively short. They
weren't designed to hold large number of soldiers for any length of time, and
armies on the move typically slept in tents even when they were within the fort
structure. Again, you have to keep in mind we're talking about defense in
depth here, so the idea behind the fort isn't really to repel the invading
army. It's to hold it up until your larger mobile force can get there.
Even in fifteen thirty two, the INCA military command structure was not complex
even by the standards of ancient empires, there was no standing army. Levies
were called up as needed. The emperor was the commander in chief. Of
course, below him was a complex hierarchy of commanders all the way down to
the average fighting man. High ranking commanders were normally the blood relations of the
emperor. The Inca did this to prevent civil war. Close blood relations usually
had the same interests. Broadly speaking, putting more capable men in charge of
units might make more sense in the moment, but these men could then create
powerful bonds between themselves and the soldiers they served, and that ladies and gentlemen
is a great way to cause a coup. Today, it's hard to estimate
the size of Inca armies. Both Inca sources and contemporary Spanish ones say that
the Inca could field armies of one hundred thousand men. We should be skeptical
of those numbers for obvious reasons. Certainly, all the Spanish sources list that
they were massively outnumbered. However, it was in their interest to do so
in order to maximize tales of their bravery, etc. Military service under the
Incas was abroad, but not universal labor duty of adult males. In principle,
all able bodied males whose age grade fell between roughly twenty five and fifty
years old were subject to muster on a rotating basis. The elite core of
the army was formed by the Orejonnees, which translates into big ears. This
was a few thousand men who had been trained from youth to know war and
nothing else. They were sort of the equivalent of the Spartan equals. Incan
army has included few specialists other than the officers and the Orejones. There were
some differences, however, Especially late in the empire, the Inca created standing
fortress armies along some of their more troublesome borders, especially in Ecuador. These
tended to be permanent professional soldiers. Because the empire had passed its expansion phase,
there was much less glamor in serving and a lot less booty too.
Hence we can conclude the Inca had a harder time recruiting and had to make
these garrison forces permanent. As a consequence, Certainly, ritual and ideology pervaded
Inca militarism from strategy to tactics. What we cannot say, however, is
how large of a role the ideology played in the Inca's expansion, priests often
served military roles. We do know that Atahualpa, the last real Inca emperor,
had his chief priests lead a major expedition against the province of Rata,
which is modern day Ecuador. And whenever the Inca marched into battle, they
carried an array of idols and religious items with them. This isn't any different,
by the way, from how medieval European armies functioned. Incan religious beliefs
also impacted their battle strategy. For example, the Inca always held festivals on
the night of a new moon and never conducted military operations on that night.
This is a fact that the Spanish are going to use to their advantage.
As we will see, the Inca had a policy of taking captured idols back
to Cusco from people that they conquered, so as to force the conquered people
to travel to Cusco to worship their gods. Was sort of a power play.
When the Inca marched off on campaign, they dispatched multiple contingents who left
at different times. The staggered approach lessened the burden on the communities the armies
had to move through. Any force would have been large. However, as
it would have included a substantial entourage of porters, lives, servants, and
other personnel. The Inca were always careful as they moved their armies. A
lead force preceded the main body by about two or three days march, the
rear guard followed it by two days. In all, troops would be spread
out over more than forty miles, and they had to spread out. The
Inca road system was excellent, but even the provincial centers were not equipped to
shelter thousands of soldiers at one time. Discipline among the troops was kind of
mixed. While on the road, the soldiers were said to be forbidden to
stray from the road or to take any goods from the countryside on pain of
death, and the Spaniards actually witnessed different capital punishment for disciplinary infractions. Thirty
to forty of Ottahuapa's guard were executed when they broke ranks in the face of
a display of horsemanship. Regardless of the order exhibited on the march and in
the camp, however, discipline broke quickly on the battlefield, and looting was
the order of the day following any victories. Few aspects of the Inca Empire
impressed the conquista doors more than its supply and transport system. Besides the road
network, the most renowned aspect of the Inca supply system was the array of
storehouses, which stockpiled an enormous variety of food, arms, clothing, and
other items throughout the empire. Each soldier was supposed to receive a set of
clothing and sandals annually, and some weapons were also provided. They were all
issued blankets, corn peppers, and cocoa leaf. The difficulties of transport in
the rugged Andean terrain required that the storage facilities be replicated regionally. The massive
scale of the system is best exemplified by the hundreds or even thousands of storehouses
at each major center, from Cusco all the way down to the south to
Tupinaya. Each small way of station was located about fifteen miles or so along
the roads, which also stored goods for state travelers, not just military purposes.
The Incas relied on yama caravans and human porters for transportation. The state
owned hundreds, if not thousands, of yamas, and on occasion, individual
pack trains could include tens of thousands of animals. Although these camelids are supremely
well adapted to the rikers of the mountains. There are some limitations to their
abilities. For example, yama caravans could cover only about eighteen, maybe even
only fifteen miles per day, which is actually the reason that that's the distance
between the storehouses. Typically, two loads of about twenty pounds each would be
rotated among three adult males, but they still break down constantly, and as
anybody who's ever seen a yama in real life knows, when they don't want
to go, they don't want to go, and when they get tired,
the yama just sort of stops right where it is and there's nothing you can
do about it. As a consequence, humans probably carried the majority of portage
on their backs. In reality, they were more reliable and could carry heavier
loads. Of course, they had to be fed from local supplies or carry
their own, but both colonial and modern figures because there are porters still around
Manchu Pichu today, and this suggests that these folks could carry at least twenty
five to thirty pounds on their back per day for upwards of maybe twenty miles.
And as an aside, the porters that the Incas used, they were
both male and female, so it was an equal opportunity business. In terms
of tactics, the Inca followed a few tried intrude strategies. The Inca typically
waited until their entire force was assembled before launching an attack. This was so
that they could bring a massive amount of force to bear on their opponent.
Sometimes this really did go to extremes. In fifteen thirty six, the Inca
commander is going to wait several weeks to attack the Spanish in Cusco until his
army was between one hundred to two hundred thousand men strong, even though the
Spanish only had one hundred and ninety men. The Inca also used feigned retreats
and pincer attacks. It's hard to imagine or even talk about an Inca battle.
Once the armies were joined, they would have been noisy, certainly colorful
affairs. I mean, consider the following Spanish account quote. Over this defensive
gear, they would usually wear their most attractive rich adornments and jewels. This
included wearing fine plumes of many colors on their heads and large gold and silver
plates on their chests and backs. However, the plates worn by the poorer
soldiers were of Copper end quote. The Inca, like most pre modern societies,
lined up for battle according to their kin group. Each group, like
the achaemen in Persian armies, for example, had their own sort of special
weapon. The bow and arrow, as an example, were totally unknown to
the Inca and only used by their levies from the jungle regions. If the
Inca army had a weakness, and this is going to be very important for
our story, it was in its command structure. Commanders always led their men
into battle, but the chain of command itself never seemed to extend past the
lead commanders, so when they fell, no one knew who was in charge,
and the attack inevitably faltered and then inevitably turned into a route the other
way. This is true even in circumstances by the way in which the Inca
are going to enjoy massive numerical advantages in terms of the empire. When the
Inca were victorious, we know that they held grand triumphs in Cusco. In
fact, we know this because Atahualpa was on his way to one when he
ran into Pizarro. Once the conquest was over, the Inca needed a way
to rule over their conquered subjects. In the provinces, the Inca officials were
outnumbered, probably one hundred or more to one, so the Inca adopted a
mixed strategy. The central portions of the empire closer to Cusco they ruled those
directly the coast, north and south. The more distant regions those they ruled
through local elites. Another favored tactic of the Inca was resettlement. They regularly
moved populations large populations around to make them easier to govern and to break up
some ethnic loyalties. By fifteen thirty two, millions of people had been resettled
in this system, so the Inca were not so much inventding new governments as
they were simply reshuffling ethnic groups. There were at least eighty provinces in the
Incan Empire. Each province was divided into two or three parts, called the
sayya, and the Inca used a decimal system to build this. The goal
was to wind up with even groups. Ideally you would have ten thousand heads
of household per sayya. A governor was in charge of each large province,
and this person was ideally in ethnic Inca, but in a pinch, they
could and did recruit local elites. In this case, the INCA favoritability and
inept but ethnically Incan governors found themselves quickly replaced. These governors had a lot
of tasks, from supervising the census all the way to mobilizing their population for
whatever task was required. And as I just mentioned, the INCA used the
decimal system and they tried to organize their heads of households into groups of ten
fifty, one hundred, five hundred one five and then ultimately ten thousand.
That was the goal. The INCA ultimately decided who was the head of household
in each family. What they tried to do was designate an air normally at
the most appropriate transition points, so when the current air enters the sort of
lake endgame of their major stage of life, it was time to appoint a
new head of household. Hence, the INCA were much more intimately involved at
the local level than many of the other empires that we've talked about in this
podcast. Now, of course, this decimal system was never universally used and
it was never perfect. Obviously, sure did they want a ten thousand group
of head of households? Obviously? Yeah they did. Is that easy to
achieve in the pre modern system. No, of course not. So they
got as close as they could, and in fact, we have no evidence
that the decimal system was ever used in Incan provinces in Chile or Argentina.
If you were ethnically a non Inca, then the only way into the top
of their power structure was to be named a quote Inca by privilege and quote,
but this, ladies and gentlemen, was rare. To keep the system
running and free from corruption, the administration in Cousco used various levels of inspectors
or judges to tour the realm and ensure that the rule were being followed.
Evidently, officials in Cusco did not totally trust everyone in the provinces, and
to maintain social order, the Inca applied many of their own customs to the
societies that they ruled, but they never invented massive law codes or anything more
formal like that. They did have rules that were intended to make sure that
people stayed where they were supposed to be. A resettled colonist was tortured if
he tried to go home for the first time. The second time he was
executed. There was the usual class consciousness that we would expect to find in
a pre modern society. For example, you couldn't judge someone unless you were
in at least the same social rank as them. Obviously, this put the
lower orders at a severe disadvantage, which was intentional. Men and women were
also punished differently for the same crime, but they were both punished. Incest
violations resulted in both parties being beaten and shaved, but then the man was
sent to the mines and the woman to the temple for service. Most penalties,
as you probably guessed, involved some form of physical punishment. The INCA
managed provincial affairs through a network of regional centers and secondary facilities, all connected
by a highway system that was the absolute best in the New World. One
Spaniard, who saw much of the inc And world wrote, quote, for
it was their custom, when they traveled anywhere in this great realm, to
do so with great pomp, and to be served with great luxury, as
was their customed. It is said that, except when it was necessary for
their service, they did not travel more than four leagues, about fifteen miles
a day, and so that there would be sufficient provisions for their people.
At the end of each four leagues there were lodgings and storehouses, with great
abundance of the things that could be had in this land, and even if
it was uninhabited, there had to be lodgings and storehouses end quote. In
the records, all the highway installations are called tampo, although the term refers
most properly to lodgings. There were two thousand or more of these spread out
across the Empire, and the provincial centers themselves were a kind of forced urbanism,
and very much like many Roman towns, after the collapse of the central
authority, they were abandoned. Upgrading and maintaining the roads was a constant effort
throughout the imperial period. From these administrative centers the governor would administer to his
people. In terms of actual architecture, several historians have called the Inca builders
quote, builders of architecture, of power quote. Everything was intended to reinforce
the Empire's might in the mind of whoever was looking at the structure. There
were no purely administrative buildings. However, everything had a secular and a sacred
use in the Inca system. Obviously, it should go without saying the Inca
had no concept of a separation of church and state. But most of what
has been written about the ink And Engineering relates to the roads. The ink
And Roads were a wonder of Bronze Age engineering, built without the aid of
precise surveying equipment. The roads spanned nearly thirty five thousand miles. Stone and
wood steps were augmented by woven rope bridges used to cross steep but narrow ravines.
The eastern route of the Imperial Road cuts a path from Cusco to modern
day Argentina. In the north, another parallel route cuts through the mountains before
descending to the deserted coast. Throughout both of these main arteries there are lateral
roads that run perpendicular. Some of these roads get as high as five thousand
meters above sea level. Inc And roads vary greatly in their scale, construction
technique, and appearance. For the most part, they vary between one to
three yards in width, with thousands of drainage ditches and culverts spread out to
keep them clean and clear of debris. As you approached Cusco, they were
paved with cobblestones, but in the provinces they would have been mostly dirt.
To get over the rivers, the INCA built rafts, not bridges, but
they did use bridges. The INCA built massive suspension bridges of wood, fiber
and brush. These could span distances of up to forty yards. However,
they could only support a few people at a time, and no one.
If it was windy, then the bridge swee swighing perilously back and forth,
back and forth both the distant canyon floor. Probably not something I would try,
even in the best of conditions. The last issue I want to discuss
here is resettlement. No state policy affected the landscape more than resettlement. As
a rule, inc and leaders selected six to seven thousand families from a new
province to be settled somewhere else. This would have been about twenty five to
thirty three percent of the total population, at least in most places. Sometimes
the INCA tried to move people to new locations that were ecologically similar, but
not always. The reason the INCA did this was security. They wanted to
lower the probability of rebellion, and so far as we can tell, it
worked. New colonists were generally supported by the state for one to two years,
but after that they were expected to defend for themselves. So that does
it for our introductory episodes, we've got the lay of the land, we
understand something about the Inca, their culture, their political and military systems,
and so on and so forth. Next time, I'm going to introduce Francisco
Pizarro, because, as I mentioned a few episodes ago, he actually visits
the Inca Empire on two occasions, doesn't get to conquering until the second time
around. Now, if you've enjoyed the episode, feel free to check out
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SI two point zero. You know, I've having a great time going back
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