Topa Huallpa died within a few months—poisoned, according to Huascar’s supporters. At this point, the Spaniards reaffirmed their alliance with Huascar’s following, placing Huascar’s brother, Manco Inca, on the throne and assisting him in dispersing the remnants of Atahuallpa’s army. The real Spanish conquest of Peru occurred during the next few years, when they prevented Manco Inca from reestablishing control over the coast and the north, much of which was still loyal to Atahuallpa or under no control at all. By 1535 the Inca ruler realized that the Spaniards were more dangerous than any threat posed by the remnants of Atahuallpa’s followers. But it was too late. His attacks on the Spanish settlements were beaten back, and he was eventually driven into a remote mountainous area called Vitcos, where he established an independent Inca state that lasted until 1572. Inca culture at the time of the conquest
The rapid incorporation of so many mountain and coastal desert polities before 1532 calls for explanation. It is tempting to view such expansion in the context of the instantaneous breakup in 1532, when some of the same forces were likely to have been at work: dispersed territories, interlocked with some belonging to other powers in the region, and multiethnic and polyglot agglomerations in neighbouring valleys. Each political unit—as eventually was the case with the Inca state itself—was likely to share pastures, cultivated terraces, and beach installations; hegemonies shifted according to local and regional circumstances. The Early, Middle, and Late Horizons were temporary concatenations, and none lasted for very long. The Spanish invasion interrupted these alternations: a player had entered the field who ignored the local rules and who did not fathom the true sources of Andean wealth, which was not silver but an intimate familiarity with local conditions and possibilities and the ability to pool vastly different geographic and ecological tiers into single polities. Social and political structure
According to the incomplete evidence provided by the Spanish eyewitnesses, the Inca themselves considered the term Inca applicable only to the descendants of the 12 individuals who traditionally are said to have ruled from Cuzco. Of the 12, only four or five can be documented to have been actual historical personages. The others may have been products of later efforts to legitimate and enhance the royal genealogy. There is also the possibility that some of the “earlier” names were actually a parallel line of personalities, possibly with different functions that may have been considered “heathen” by the Spanish. This hypothesis cannot be verified with the sources now available.
In addition to the 12 lineages, the ranks of “Inca by decree” or “as a privilege” are also mentioned by some of the Spanish sources. Their origins and functions were just as nebulous as those of the royals: one of the few Andean sources, Poma da Ayala, claims that some of the inhabitants of the Cuzco basin who were conquered early during the expansion of the Late Horizon were “granted” or “promoted to” Inca status. They were “improved,” according to Poma da Ayala, although his own case is weakened by his claim that his ancestors, who lived many hundreds of miles north of Cuzco, had benefited from such social mobility.
The administrative organization of Tawantinsuyu is poorly understood, although its origins are known to lie in the earlier ethnic subdivisions. Claims have been made that authority was left in the hands of traditional lords who simply had to demonstrate their fealty. Other Spanish sources make reference to an administrative reorganization, in which all of the conquered groups were shoehorned into a decimal system. There is some evidence that decimal subdivisions were present in the Cajamarca region of northern Peru; and at the time of the conquest the decimal vocabulary apparently was in the process of being imposed on the rest of the country, presumably to rationalize the multiplicity of local and divided loyalties. The administrative papers available for a part of the Huánuco region allow the identification of a “hundred-households” unit with five actual hamlets, all of which were near each other. Since these records were kept house by house, it has been possible to test the significance of the decimal vocabulary at its lowest level. What is meant when the records speak of “lords of 10,000 households,” however, cannot now be fathomed.
A clearer picture has emerged of the ethnic lords incorporated by the Inca into their realm. Some had ruled only small units—a few hundred households; others, like the Huanca or the Lupaca claimed to have had 20,000 domestic units. There is no record of the size of the coastal Chimú polity, which must have been quite large. The Chincha claimed 30,000 “fires,” and the Chimú may well have been even larger before their defeat by Cuzco.
Usually, two lords ruled each ethnic group—which has been one of the arguments for considering as plausible a dual rule in Cuzco as well. The best evidence of the duties of the ethnic lords has come from the Aymara kingdom of the Lupaca: at one point in Inca history they rose in rebellion against Cuzco rule, and in the decades immediately prior to the arrival of the Europeans they were busy leading “6,000 soldiers” on faraway battlefields in what is now Ecuador. The testimony of the Lupaca, collected in 1567, claims that on such adventures they did not return to their lands for the harvest but devoted most of their energies to war, and in return they were exempted from farming, road building, and other state chores.
There was no tribute system in Inca statecraft, just as there had been no contributions in kind in earlier Andean polities. The peasantry owed only their energy, which was delivered through the well-understood mit’a system. Led by their traditional leaders, the people appeared for their obligations, lineage by lineage. The best quipu record of these obligations has come from a group who lived in the Huánuco area. Just as they had provided energy for their own lords, under Inca rule this group sent dozens of couples to labour on public works or to produce the grain that, as beer, was “fed” to the mummies of deceased Inca kings. Others became soldiers or helped fill the warehouses; some carried loads along the Inca highway system, while still others were soldiers under the command of their traditional lords. Using this quipu, it has been possible to test the claim that there was no tribute system: of its 26 cords only two deal with articles submitted in kind, wild honey and tropical feathers, both of which were lowland commodities that were gathered and not cultivated.
The absence of tribute was closely connected to the absence of markets. Just as all households owed some of their energies to their ethnic lords, to the shrines, and to Cuzco, so too their household needs were satisfied by the claims they could make to the reciprocal services of their kinfolk or their ethnic peers or to the administrative services of their ethnic authorities. It is probable that with the growth of the Inca state over time, this formula was breached, particularly in the case of prisoners of war and other populations moved from their traditional areas for state purposes.
The most elaborate example of the structural changes that emerged from the need to create new state revenues was the expansion and reorganization of corn production for military purposes in the Cochabamba Valley. This region was the largest single corn-producing area in the highlands. One of the later kings removed the native population and set up a large state enterprise (more than 2,000 warehouses), to which some 25 highland groups were sent on rotation, lineage by lineage. Each ethnic group was responsible for particular strips that were traced across the valley by Cuzco surveyors. In 1575 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo used this Inca precedent to establish the repartimiento system that provided labour for the silver mines at Potosí. Inca technology and intellectual life