The Conquistadors (36 page)

Prostitution was allowed, but these women ‘lived in the country in wretched thatched huts, each one separately, and they were forbidden to enter the towns and villages in order that no virtuous women should ever encounter them'.

The division between commoners and nobles was absolute, the gulf between them widening as the empire grew and the need for rigid obedience became more imperative. The
orejones
and the
curacas
had a monopoly of the high administrative and religious appointments. They paid no taxes and lived in considerably luxury, eating off gold and silver in fine houses, dressed in fine cloth and having several wives. The price they paid was complete subservience to the Inca. If they entered his presence they changed into poorer clothing and bore on their shoulders a burden symbolic of that subservience. The loyalty of
the ruling class was thus assured, and it was from them that the standing army, the personal bodyguard of the Inca, was drawn. This army may have numbered about ten thousand and was the cadre for the build-up of the much larger local forces in the event of war. The dependence in these circumstances upon the regional militia was one of the weaknesses of the empire when faced by the Spaniards. Such an army could only keep the field for a limited time, the normal period being not more than twenty days. But though such central organization had its weaknesses in the face of invasion from the outside, within the fabric of the existing Andean culture its supremacy was complete, its ruthless efficiency still evident today in such great works of construction as the road system, the fantastic hanging cities like Machu Picchu, or the huge fortress complexes like Sacsahuamán at Cuzco. Their system of agriculture produced food for all in abundance and a sufficient surplus to feed the enormous number of workers employed in these unproductive projects.

Though the function of many of their public works was partly religious and ceremonial, religion never acquired such complete ascendancy as in the Aztec empire. Captives were sometimes sacrificed, so too were children offered by their parents, but this was usually associated with some crisis, such as lack of rain. The normal sacrifice was a llama or an alpaca, the heart of the beast being wrenched out and offered to the gods. More often the Indians were content to make an offering of meat and burn a candle to the gods in the form of a ball of wool floating in oil or fat.

The simplicity of their rites has not changed in the last four hundred years; they have simply been transferred to the Roman Catholic faith, so that it is not unusual to see an offering placed at the foot of some statue whilst the Indian family, holding their candles, kneel before it. And in the high Sierra a Christian version of the old household gods will be carried to the church to the accompaniment of the age-old sound of the hand drum, the reed flute and the twelve-foot-long bamboo trumpet. At carnival time, after the rains, the misery of their life deadened by
chicha,
they will erect tall branches of willow or eucalyptus, festoon them with paper streamers and, to the sound of firecrackers and music, dance round them. The site chosen for this version of the maypole dance is sometimes macabre. At Cajamarca, for instance, they dance on the graves of their ancestors, on the hill known as the Necropolis of Otuzco, where the exposed rock is punctured by little window-like sepulchres.

Water was almost certainly a part of Inca religious ceremonial – hardly surprising since they lived in a world of rushing rivers, cascades and springs, with here and there a bubbling eruption of mineral waters out of the bowels of their volcanic terrain. Tambo Machay, near Cuzco, a sanctuary built around a mountain spring, almost certainly had religious significance, and the strange runnels cut into the rock of that extraordinary observatory site just beyond the fortress of Sacsahuamán, the similar runnels of Rumy Tiana above Cajamarca and at the
central water point, the fountain, at Machu Picchu suggest that divination by water formed some part of their religious ceremonies.

Their gods were not as numerous as the Aztec gods, but, like the Aztecs, they worshipped the natural phenomena of the world in which they lived, except for Viracocha, the Supreme Being, the Creator. The enormous religious complex twenty miles down the coast from Lima still bears the name of the older god, Pachacamac, which the Incas equated with their own Viracocha. But though they incorporated him into their own mythology, they nevertheless felt the need to overtop the Pachacamac temple with a larger pyramid. This Temple of the Sun, looking east over the green Lurín valley, west over the Pacific, is the largest religious structure in Peru, larger even than the great fortress pyramid at Paramonga rising abruptly above the sugar-cane green of the Forteleza river two hundred miles to the north. Now partly restored, it dominates the ruins of the Temple of Pachacamac, dominates the whole fantastic adobe site.

The Viracocha of the Incas is believed to have originated in the Inca of that name – the eighth in line – who was regarded as a sort of oracle. He is supposed to have foretold the coming of the Spaniards and, according to Garcilaso, this was the reason they called them Viracochas, in the same way that the Aztecs called their invaders
teules.
‘There was never in the Empire any other recognized god than the Sun, and Pachacamac, the Invisible God.' This is an over-simplification. The Sun was their natural god, since it was upon the sun that their crops depended. The Moon was the Sun's wife. Second in importance was Thunder, the god of war and weather. The Earth, the Sea, even some constellations, were worshipped. Gods peculiar to a conquered tribe were not obliterated, simply incorporated, and in addition to the formal priesthood there were wise men, some of whom had a considerable reputation.

Pachacamac, the ‘invisible God', is always referred to as Tici-Viracocha by Cieza de León, and his explanation of this Supreme Being is of particular interest since the legendary origins of his Tici-Viracocha are similar to the Aztecs' Quetzalcoatl: ‘Before the Incas came to reign in these kingdoms or were known there, these Indians tell a thing that far exceeds all else they say. They state that a long time went by in which they did not see the sun. …' It finally emerged out of Lake Titicaca and shortly afterwards ‘out of the regions of the south there came and appeared among them a white man, large of stature, whose air and person aroused great respect and veneration'. Because he could work miracles, ‘making plains of the hills and of the plains mountains, and bringing forth springs in the living rock', they called him ‘the Maker of all things, their Beginning, Father of the Sun. … They say that in many places he instructed people how they should live and spoke to them lovingly and meekly, exhorting them to be good and not do one another harm or injury, but rather to love one another, and use charity to all.' And Cieza de Leon goes on to tell of another similar man who, by the words he spoke, healed the sick and restored sight to the blind. Threatened with stoning in
the village of Cacha, he knelt, with his arms upraised to heaven, and fire appeared in the sky; this was an eruption, since the stones it scorched became ‘so light that even a big one can be picked up as though it were a cork'. On leaving Cacha he journeyed to the coast where, ‘spreading his cloak he moved over the waves, and never again appeared'.

Who was this man who sailed away into the west and whose name Viracocha means ‘foam of the sea'? Some Spaniards believed he was one of the apostles and claimed that the idol the Indians erected in a temple at Cacha held a rosary in its hands. Cieza de León visited this statue. There was no rosary, but the clothes had marks on them suggesting they were fastened by buttons.

Cieza de León goes on to describe the origins of the Incas. His chapter headings suffice to give an idea of the story: ‘Of how certain men and women appeared in Paccuric-Tampu (the “origin-tambo”). … How the two brothers when they were in Tampu Quiru saw the one that they had lured into the cave emerge with wings of feathers, who told them to go and found the great city of Cuzco. … How, after Manco Capac saw that his brothers had been turned to stone, he came to a valley where he found certain peoples and founded or built the ancient and vastly rich city of Cuzco, which became the capital of the whole empire of the Incas. … Of how the Lord-Inca, after assuming the royal fringe, married his sister, the Coya, which is the name of the Queen, and how he was allowed to take many wives, although, of them all, the Coya was the only legitimate one, and the most important.'

Beginning around the middle of the thirteenth century, the first eight Incas were: Manco Capac, Sinchi Roca, Lloqui Yupanqui, Mayta Capac, Capac Yupanqui, Inca Roca, Yahuar Huacac, and Viracocha. But accurate dates only begin with the two great empire builders – Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (1438 – 71) and Topa Inca Yupanqui (1471 – 93). These two, in the short space of just over half a century, conquered the whole of Peru, parts of Bolivia and Ecuador and most of Chile – an area of about 380,000 square miles. The initial phase – the subjugation by Pachacuti of the tribes in the Cuzco and Urubamba area – can have presented no difficulties. From its source, a hundred and thirty miles south of Cuzco, to the point where it enters the Sacred Valley forty miles to the north, the Urubamba flows through a continuous, but quite narrow grazing valley. It is beyond these two limits that conquest became a major operation. Southward over the height of land, where the little railway station of Santa Rosa (13,000 feet) now stands, the whole country changes, gradually widening out into the open grass plains of the Titicaca region. Northward, the reverse happens, the mountain walls close in, the valley becomes suddenly constricted to a gorge, the Urubamba a raging brown torrent. This would later be the gateway to the Amazon, and, here, to dominate the Indians of the
selva
and to ensure continuity of the rain forest's wealth of exotic produce, the Incas built the stone city of Machu Picchu. To guard the entrance to the Urubamba gorge they also built the cliff-hung fortress of Ollantaytambo.

But this, like the great move southward to Bolivia and Chile, lay in the future. Pachacuti's interest was the conquest of the existing tribes of the Sierra. Mountain barriers meant nothing to his warriors. They moved steadily north, from valley to valley, until they had occupied the richest valley of all, Cajamarca. It was at this point that Pachacuti executed his brother, Capac Yupanqui, for letting his warriors advance beyond the limits he himself had set. Pachacuti's genius was administrative. The task of continuing the expansion of empire he now passed to his son, Topa or Tupac, whilst he concentrated on consolidating the conquests and organizing Cuzco as the capital of empire.

Topa's marches rank amongst the greatest in military history. His first long march was northwards, with over two hundred thousand warriors, across the heights of the Andes to conquer the Cañari Indians, and having incorporated these fierce warriors into his army, he went on to subdue the Quito people of Ecuador. Down to the coast then, conquering more tribes and making a seaborne expedition, presumably first to Salango island and then to Puná; the latter would certainly have had to be subdued if he were to safeguard his line of march, which was now south along the coastal desert strip.

The defence works of the Chimú cities were supposed to have been prepared on the basis that the attack would come from the south, from the direction of Cuzco – presumably on the assumption that, coming from the north, Topa Inca took them by surprise. Even the briefest examination of Chan-Chan makes nonsense of this theory. In that flat desert country anything but an all-round defensive system could easily have been turned. In fact, the ruins show that each walled unit was in the form of a rectangle. The reason for the downfall of these cities was almost certainly the vulnerability of the water supply and the physical contrast between these rich farming communities and the hardy warrior race from the Sierra, together with the fact that they were separated from each other by broad stretches of desert.

Topa Inca overran them one by one, then crossed the Andes and launched his armies into the lowlands of the Amazon basin. A swift turn-round to meet an uprising in the Titicaca region, and after subduing the tribes there in two big battles and gaining control of the central Bolivian Highlands, he crossed the Andes again, descended into the coastal plain and attacked into Chile, the territory of the warlike Araucanian Indians. This fighting march took him as far as latitude 35° south, to the río Maule, which became the southern limit of the Inca empire. The total distance covered by the armies of Topa Inca in their sweep north and south was in the region of ten thousand miles, and it was made through some of the most difficult country in the world, fighting sometimes on the edge of the snowline at anything up to 13,000 feet, sometimes in the humid heat of the Amazon rain forest, sometimes in the arid desert country of the coast.

All these conquests he consolidated by the benevolent despotism laid down by his father and by the communication system he built himself. He came to the throne very young, probably at the age of eighteen, for his father handed the
royal borla on to him in 1471, a few years before his death. When Topa died in 1493 his army is said to have numbered three hundred thousand and the empire of the Incas was complete.

Where, or in what place, he is buried they do not say. They tell that a large number of women and servitors and pages were killed to be laid with him, and so much treasure and precious stones that it must have amounted to more than a million [gold pesos]. Even this figure is probably less than it was, for there were private persons who were buried with over a hundred Castellanos. Aside from the many who were buried with him, many men and women in different parts of the kingdom hanged themselves and were buried, and everywhere mourning went on for a whole year, and most of the women cut off their hair, binding their heads with hempen ropes; and at the end of a year they did him his honours. What they say they used to do, I do not choose to set down, for they were heathenish things.