Read Online The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie - Free Book Online Page B

holing up in a fortress and basically abandoning his kingdom. One of his sons, however, Cusi Yupanqui, seized the initiative: he quickly made alliances with nearby ethnic groups, raised an army, and then marched out defiantly to meet the Chancas. In the fierce battle that ensued—one that included heavy wooden clubs tipped with stone or copper spikes—the Incas decisively defeated the Chancas. An event that had once loomed as an imminent disaster had been transformed into an overwhelming victory.
    After deposing his father, Cusi Yupanqui then decided to adopt the name Pachacuti (pah cha KOO tee), which means “earthshaker” or “cataclysm,” or “he who turns the world upside down.” The name was an appropriate one, for Pachacuti immediately began a major restructuring of theInca kingdom, laying out new thoroughfares in its capital, Cuzco, and ordering the construction of buildings and palaces in what has since been called the imperial style of precisely cut stones. According to the chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pachacuti next
    turned his attention to the people. Seeing that there were not sufficient lands for sowing, so as to sustain them, he went round the city at a distance of four leagues from it, considering the valleys, situation, and villages. He depopulated all that were within two leagues of the city. The lands of depopulated villages were given to the city and its inhabitants, and the deprived people were settled in other parts. The citizens of Cuzco were well satisfied with the arrangement, for they were given what cost little, and thus he made friends by presents taken from others, and took the valley of Tambo as his own. *
    Perhaps with the recent memory of the Chanca attack still on his mind and how close the Inca kingdom had come to being exterminated, Pachacuti soon turned his attention to his kingdom’s borders, most of which could be reached within a couple days’ walk. Inca kings in the past had occasionally plundered neighboring villages and sometimes had demanded tribute from them. Pachacuti, however, now became the first Inca king to begin seizing adjacent lands and occupying them on a massive scale. Plunder, Pachacuti no doubt realized, is usually a one-time event, whereas he who controls the means of production—the land and the peasants—by contrast, has a source of power that is virtually inexhaustible.
    Soon, and with an army of conscripted peasant warriors, Pachacuti began a series of military adventures on a scale that no Inca king had ever before envisaged. Turning toward the south, Pachacuti led his army on a campaign that soon pushed the boundaries of his kingdom six hundred miles, marching past Lake Titicaca and then down through what is now Bolivia and northern Chile, conquering as he went. Directing his attention to the north-west, Pachacuti began rapidly to conquer the amalgam of tribes, kingdoms, and city-states that lay strewn across the Andes. Pachacuti’s bold forays and those of his son, Tupac Inca, eventually culminatedin the toppling of the old Chimu Empire, located on the northwestern coast. Within a single lifetime, then, Pachacuti and his son had seized a 1,400-mile stretch of the Andes, from present-day Bolivia to northern Peru, plus much of the adjacent coast. No longer were the Incas a small, pregnable group exposed to the vagaries of other kingdoms’ marauding armies. Pachacuti had become the first Inca king to fashion a veritable
empire
—a vast, multiethnic conglomeration that had been created through conquest and that Pachacuti now ruled over with a tiny band of Inca elite.
    Pachacuti called his new empire Tawantinsuyu, or “the four parts united,” as he divided it into four regions: Chinchaysuyu, Cuntisuyu, Collasuyu, and Antisuyu. * The capital, Cuzco, lay at the intersection where all four
suyus
came together. In a sense, Pachacuti and Tupac Inca had created a conquest enterprise. Through threat, negotiation, or actual bloody conquest, they