CHAPTER I
THE INCA EMPIRE
For many centuries before the Spanish conquest and before the rise of the Incas a succession of great empires existed in Peru. Ruined edifices of unknown date prove that at some remote period advanced civilisations and powerful nations were developed in the coast valleys and on the Andean plateau. In tombs which vastly antedate even these megalithic palaces and fortresses, cotton twine, woven cloth, and cobs of maize have been found. The domestication and breeding to perfection of the llama as a beast of burden, and the alpaca as a fleece-bearer, the development of potatoes, maize, and the quinoa grain, must have consumed untold cycles of time. There is no doubt of the remote antiquity of the civilisation of the Indians who inhabit the Andean plateau south of the equator, nor that their culture was wholly self-developed, owing nothing to outside influences.
About the year 1000 the Incas were merely one of several tribes living on the high, beautiful, and fertile plateau of Cuzco, which lies on the eastern edge of the gigantic uplift of the Andes. Down the precipitous gorges into the steaming and impenetrable forests of the Amazon plain the civilised Indians never cared to go. The maize, quinoa, and potatoes upon which they depended for food could not flourish in the intense heat and heavy rainfall of those regions. Neither themselves nor their llamas and alpacas could thrive in the montaña or forested plain. Their natural habitat was the rough plateau, broken by numerous valleys, which lies between the Eastern and the Central Cordilleras, and extends from the Vilcañota "nudo," shutting it off from the Titicaca basin, to the transverse range of the "Cerro de Pasco," in the North. The ocean lies two hundred and fifty miles south-west, beyond the Central and Maritime Cordilleras and the bleak plateau which lies between them.
This great central section, on whose eastern edge near its southern border we first find the Incas, is the heart of Peru. Although the climate of a few of its gorges is almost tropical, the valleys have the temperature of Italy or Spain; higher up the crops of northern Europe flourish; then are pasture lands, and above all bleak wilds and peaks covered with perpetual snow. At the dawn of authentic Peruvian history this favored region was thickly inhabited by many independent tribes; probably all speaking dialects of the same language, and certainly very similar in their industrial life and social customs.
Tradition recounts that the Incas had migrated to Cuzco from unknown ancestral seats—by some conjectured to have been the shores of the prehistoric fresh-water sea of the Amazon plain—under the leadership of Manco Capac, the first of an unbroken line of sovereigns who claimed descent from the Sun-god and ruled the Incas until the Spanish conquest. The Incas developed a religion whose elaborate and rigid ritual, which regulated every act of their lives, finds its best parallel among the Hebrews. Each family had its household god; each sept worshipped an imaginary ancestor; the whole nation adored the sun as the progenitor of the reigning family, and the monarch's person was revered as divine. So profound was the religious feeling of this people that they finally rose to the conception of a supreme deity—a creator of the universe. His temple filled one side of the great square at Cuzco.
Even more remarkable than their religious system was the social and industrial organisation of the Incas. Private property in land did not exist. It belonged to the septs and was from time to time allotted to the heads of families. Every person was obliged to work, all males being divided into classes according to age and strength, and suitable labour assigned to each. The produce, whether crops or livestock, was divided between the government, the priesthood, and the communes. Scarcity in one section was made up from the plenty in others; public officers annually revised the allotments, and turns at the irrigation works were taken in accordance with fixed rules. Not a spot of cultivable land was left unused. Habitations were built on rocky hills; deserts or the sides of barren cliffs were used for cemeteries; whole mountain sides were terraced up thousands of feet, and land was literally created by years of patient labour employed in bringing earth in baskets and laying it on the bare rocks. By no people has irrigation been more extensively and successfully applied, and in spite of their ignorance of iron and steam, of labour-saving appliances and instruments of precision, the Incas constructed a system which in real effectiveness has never been surpassed. Many of their canals, reservoirs, and terraces were allowed to crumble by the Spanish conquerors, but modern Peru still lives upon the half-ruined fragments of the mighty works of the Incas.
Secured from want by this intelligent socialism, their lives and rights safe under laws administered with inflexible severity, bound closely by family and governmental ties, trained from childhood in industry and obedience, the Incas seemed destined to dominate and absorb the more loosely organised tribes with whom they came in contact, provided that they did not become inert, stationary, and unwarlike, and cease to produce individuals possessing initiative. The dynamic elements indispensable to expansion were furnished by the ruling clan and by fanaticism. The offspring of Manco Capac partook of his divinity and each emperor left numerous sons, whose descendants constituted a privileged class. In the process of time there gathered around the emperor thousands of men of his own kindred, devoted from their birth to warfare and statecraft.
