Inca Empire

The scale is easier to state than to credit. Tawantinsuyu had no wheeled vehicles, no coinage, no market economy of the Mediterranean kind and no writing in the alphabetic sense. It governed perhaps 9 to 16 million people through a hierarchy of local lords, moved whole communities hundreds of kilometres to break up resistance, fed its armies from state warehouses, and kept its accounts in knotted cords. Its engineers built 30,000 kilometres of road and drained and terraced mountainsides that are still farmed. Its masons fitted blocks of granite so closely, and with such even faces, that the joints are barely visible — without mortar and without iron tools.

It also lasted barely a century. A disputed succession, an epidemic that arrived ahead of the Spaniards, and a landing by fewer than 200 Spaniards in 1532 broke the empire open within two years. Yet the last Inca was not executed until 1572, forty years later, in the great square of Cusco, and the institutions of Andean village life that the empire had leaned on are still working in the highlands today. That combination — extraordinary administrative reach, very short life, and a long, violent afterlife — is what makes the Incas worth knowing properly. So is the difficulty of the evidence. Almost everything written about them was set down by Spaniards and by Andean authors writing after the conquest, from witnesses whose own records had been partly destroyed in a civil war.

At a glance

How did the Incas begin?

The Incas were one of a number of Quechua-speaking peoples living in the valleys around Cusco, and for a long time they were not the strongest of them. Their own account of their origins, as Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa collected it in 1572, is a foundation myth of the kind the Andes produced in quantity: four brothers and four sisters emerged from a cave called Tampu-tocco, "the house of windows", near Pacariqtambo, and walked north in search of land. Ayar Cachi, the strongest of the brothers, was tricked back into the cave and sealed in; Ayar Uchu sat on a stone huaca at Huanacauri and was turned to stone himself, becoming the Incas' most venerated shrine; and Manco Capac and Mama Huaco went on to take possession of the Cusco valley. The story was not folklore at a safe distance. It was tied to the huarachico, the ceremony in which young men of the Inca nobility were armed as warriors and made their offerings at Huanacauri, and it gave the ruling lineages a common descent and a title to the land.

The list of rulers that follows the myth is where history begins to be arguable. Sarmiento gives twelve Incas from Manco Capac to Huascar, and the early ones have reigns measured in improbable numbers: he credits Viracocha, the eighth, with 119 years of life. Nobody now reads these figures as chronology. What the archaeology of the Cusco region shows is a modest polity of perhaps a few tens of thousands of people, whose advantage was the position of its valley, astride routes between the altiplano and the Amazonian slopes. Its neighbours were larger and richer: the Colla and the Lupaca on the altiplano around Lake Titicaca, the Chincha on the south coast, and further north the Chimú, whose capital Chan Chan was a vast adobe city of palaces, workshops and reservoirs. The Incas were, in the middle of the fifteenth century, one hill kingdom among several.

Their expansion before the imperial phase was slow and largely local. They fought the Ayarmaca for farmland within sight of Cusco, and Viracocha Inca pushed a little way into the Collao. The decisive change came not from a long build-up but from a crisis, and from a young man who exploited it.

How did Pachacuti turn a kingdom into an empire?

The crisis was the Chanca war. The Chancas, a confederation based at Andahuaylas some 30 leagues west of Cusco, marched on the city, and Viracocha Inca, old and frightened, withdrew to a fortress at Caquia Xaquixahuana with his chosen heir, Inca Urco. His third son, Cusi Inca Yupanqui, refused to go. Sarmiento has him answer his father with the impudence of youth: how could he abandon "Cuzco, city of the Sun and of Viracocha"? He stayed with seven captains and whatever men he could raise, and he won. The Chancas were broken, the statue and standard of their war god Uscovilca were taken, and Cusi Inca Yupanqui took the fringe of sovereignty himself, without his father's consent. He is known to history as Pachacuti, from pachacuti, the turning over of the earth, the word the Incas used for a cataclysm.

The date conventionally given for this is 1438, and its origin matters. It is not in any Inca record. It derives from the chronicle of Miguel Cabello Balboa, written in 1586, and was adopted in the 1940s by the American scholar John Howland Rowe, whose reconstruction of the dynastic timetable became the standard chronology taught ever since. Rowe's dates are a scholarly convention built on a single late source, and radiocarbon work since the 1990s has been chipping at them (see below).

What Pachacuti did after 1438 matters more than the year. He rebuilt Cusco as an imperial capital, straightening and paving the streets, bringing two rivers into stone channels, and reconstructing the Coricancha, the temple of the Sun, its walls dressed with gold sheet. Inside it he set up the mummified bodies of the seven Incas before him, seated in order of seniority on a gold-covered bench, each with a gold mask, headdress, bracelets and sceptre, and endowed them with lands, herds and attendants, so that the dead kings became part of the cult that overawed visiting lords. He reorganised the state's labour system and its accounts, taking a census of the population of Cusco and its districts by quipu and building the graded hierarchy of officials that the chroniclers describe. He began the practice of moving whole communities, the mitimaes, to garrison conquered land and to break the continuity of local resistance. Sarmiento's chapter on the subject is specific about the method: families were taken from each district, thirty from one and a hundred from another according to size, and sent to a province as far from home as possible, "so far from their native country that they could not communicate with their relations or countrymen". They were given land and seed and told to learn the language of their new neighbours.

He also made his sons into generals. Tupac Inca Yupanqui, his heir, was sent north into Chinchaysuyu while his father was still alive, and by the end of Pachacuti's reign the empire included the altiplano, much of the north coast, and the headwaters of the Amazonian rivers.

How far did it expand, and how fast?

Tupac Inca Yupanqui, who succeeded around 1471, is credited with the largest conquests: the Chachapoyas of the northern cloud forest, the Chimú of the north coast, and a march south into Chile as far as the Maule river. The Chimú conquest, placed in the 1460s or early 1470s, is the one that turned Tawantinsuyu into the dominant power of the central Andes, absorbing a state with its own capital, its own language (Yunga) and its own hydraulic engineering. Tupac Inca is also said to have sailed into the Pacific on a raft expedition that brought back gold, black people and a horse's jaw — a story that appears in Sarmiento and in other chronicles and that nobody has ever been able to confirm or disprove.

His son Huayna Capac, who took the throne around 1493, spent most of his reign in the north, fighting the Pastos and the Quitos in what is now Ecuador, building the northern capital at Tumipampa (modern Cuenca) and pushing the frontier into southern Colombia. Under him the empire reached its greatest extent: the four quarters, Chinchaysuyu to the north-west, Antisuyu to the east, Collasuyu to the south and Cuntisuyu to the south-west, all radiating from the plaza at Cusco. That is the empire the map draws in 1506.

The speed of it is the striking thing. A state that in 1438 controlled the Cusco valley and little else held a 4,200-kilometre chain of highland provinces two generations later. That is roughly the distance from Lisbon to Tehran, across some of the highest and most broken terrain on the planet, and it was achieved without horses, without written orders and without a standing army in the European sense.

The dates of the expansion are now in dispute, and honestly so. Radiocarbon dates from Inca sites in Ecuador, Argentina and Chile have repeatedly come out earlier than the chronicle chronology allows. Dennis Ogburn's 2012 study of the chronology argued that the Spanish writers mistook lists of provinces ordered geographically for lists ordered chronologically, so that the sequence of conquests in the histories is partly an artefact of how the Inca records were arranged. Work published in 2017 by Marsh and colleagues went further: the Inca expansion south into Mendoza probably began in the late fourteenth century, and the push into Ecuador began around 1430–1460, both earlier than the Cabello Balboa timetable permits. If that is right, the empire is older than 1438 and its growth was less explosive than the schoolroom version. The conventional dates are still the ones in use, including here, but they should be read as a framework, not a record.

How was the empire governed?

The empire was divided into four suyus, and each was administered by governors drawn from the Inca nobility, assisted by record keepers and by a corps of inspectors. Sarmiento describes a general visitation in which Pachacuti appointed sixteen inspectors, four for each quarter, to count the population, order irrigation channels cut, terraces built and pasture reserved. Below the governors, the state ruled through the existing local lords, the curacas, confirming them in office if they submitted and replacing them if they did not. This was government by co-option: the empire took the ethnic lord's own machinery of rule and bolted it onto the Inca state, which is why it could be so large and so thin at the same time.

The decimal system is the best-known feature of that machinery, and it is often described more neatly than the sources allow. Cieza de León, writing in the 1550s, says that the Inca appointed officers over ten Indians, fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, five thousand and ten thousand, each responsible to the one above, so that, in his account, an order for ten thousand men needed nothing more than a word of command. That is a decimal scaffold with quinary steps in it, and how strictly it operated in practice is unknowable. What is certain is that the state counted households, not individuals, and taxed them in labour.

Above the curacas stood the Inca bureaucracy proper: the tucuyricu, the inspector who toured the provinces in the ruler's name; the quipucamayoc, who kept the knotted records; and the great nobles of the panacas, the royal lineages descended from each dead Sapa Inca, who owned estates, herds and servants in perpetuity. The Sapa Inca's own household was enormous and its needs were met by yanakuna, retainers detached from their home communities and attached permanently to the person of a lord or to the state. The acllakuna, chosen women, were dedicated to the Sun's service, to weaving and to producing textiles that were politically as valuable as gold.

The roads held it together. The Qhapaq Ñan, the royal road, ran the length of the empire and connected the four quarters to the plaza at Cusco; UNESCO, which inscribed the surviving network in 2014, puts its total length at more than 30,000 kilometres, with four main routes leaving the capital and 273 component sites selected for inscription. Suspension bridges of woven rope crossed the gorges, causeways crossed the deserts, and flights of stone steps crossed the passes. Along the road stood tambos, way stations with storehouses and accommodation for officials and armies. Messages travelled by relay: Atahualpa, answering a Spanish question at Cajamarca, said that a message reached Cusco in five days by runners posted from village to village, but that a single man would take fifteen.

How did the state feed and tax its people?

The Incas did not tax in money, because they had none. They taxed in work. Every household owed the state a share of its labour, the mit'a, and the state decided what that labour would do: build terraces, cut irrigation canals, quarry and haul stone, weave cloth, serve in armies, work the estates of the Sun and of the Inca, or carry goods along the roads. Cieza describes the system as running through the decimal grades, with each officer responsible for producing the men of his unit when called. In return the state was expected to feed the workers, provide drink and clothing, and keep the storehouses full against famine.

The scale was enormous. Terence D'Altroy's survey of the Inca fiscal regime notes that households in the Huánuco region told Spanish inspectors in 1549 and 1562 that they had performed thirty-one different obligations, each assessed on the population recorded in periodic censuses. He also notes the physical infrastructure of the system: one storage complex in the upper Mantaro valley, with about 3,000 qollqa (storehouses), could in principle have fed an army of 35,000 men for a year, and Cotapachi, near Cochabamba in what is now Bolivia, had some 2,400 storehouses. Dried meat, chuño (freeze-dried potato), maize, quinoa, chilli and cloth went into these buildings and came out for armies, for festivals and for the relief of famine.

The land itself was worked in a way that looks communal from a distance and was more complicated close up. The ayllu, the kin group that held land and obligations in common, allocated plots to households according to need, and the state claimed the produce of the Inca's and the Sun's fields. Colonial writers, and later Peruvian intellectuals, described a tidy three-way division of all land between the Sun, the Inca and the people. The reality was more uneven. The Sun's estates and the Inca's estates were real and were worked by mit'a labour, but how much land they took, and how much the local lineages kept, varied from province to province and depended heavily on how hard a local lord had resisted.

Agriculture was the state's largest single investment. The Incas built terraces (andenes) up the mountainsides, with stone retaining walls and gravel fill for drainage, and cut canals that carried meltwater for tens of kilometres. They domesticated and herded llamas and alpacas in the high pastures, using llamas as pack animals and both for meat and wool; they preserved meat by drying it in the cold, and potatoes by freezing and treading them into chuño, which keeps for years. The result was a high-altitude economy that could support dense populations and feed armies at 4,000 metres.

Reciprocity and redistribution, not buying and selling, were the working parts of the economy. D'Altroy sets out the Andean vocabulary: balanced reciprocity between households of equal standing (waje waje), asymmetric reciprocity in which poorer households work for richer ones in the expectation of a share of the produce (minka), and state redistribution, in which the elite handed out cloth, chicha, coca and chilli at feasts. Such generosity did not replace household production, and it did not replace the exchange that went on in the northern and coastal societies which already used monetary instruments before the conquest. What it did was bind people to their lords, reinforce rank and give access to goods that were otherwise hard to get. The point is not that the Incas failed to understand money; it is that their idea of how resources should move had no place for it.

What did the Incas record, and how?

The Incas kept accounts in knotted cords. A quipu is a set of pendant cords hanging from a main cord, with knots tied at different positions and in different forms; colour, spin, fibre and the placement of knots all carried information. Cieza's description is the clearest early one: the cords recorded "from one to ten, and from ten to a hundred, and from a hundred to a thousand", with one branch for one kind of account and another for another, and specialist accountants in each provincial capital who could read them. What the quipus were used for is documented: censuses, tribute assessments, storehouse inventories, and the calendar of the state's obligations. Whether they also encoded narrative history is the open question, and it has been argued both ways for a century.

The men who kept them, the quipucamayoc, were a hereditary profession. Betanzos, who married one of Atahualpa's daughters and wrote in Cusco in the 1550s, reports something that explains a great deal about the sources: when the Spanish governor Vaca de Castro tried, a few years after the conquest, to establish the Inca succession, the old men of Cusco told him that the quipus and their keepers had been destroyed. Chalco Chima and Quizquiz, Atahualpa's generals, had killed every quipucamayoc they could find and burned the cords, on the grounds that a new world was to begin. Four very old survivors were produced, and they agreed with one another — but the record they reconstructed was already a salvage operation.

The Incas also recorded in other media. Fine textiles carried tocapu, the small stepped and chequered motifs woven into tunics and other cloth of rank, which seem to have functioned as emblems of status and perhaps of lineage. Ceramics, metalwork and the layout of buildings carried meanings that are now only partly legible. And there was oral history, performed: the deeds of each Inca were sung at festivals by specialists, and the royal panacas maintained their own versions, which is one reason the chronicles disagree with one another.

The disagreement is not trivial. Take Atahualpa's mother. Sarmiento says she was Tocto Coca, a cousin of Huayna Capac of the Inca lineage; Cieza says she was a woman of Quilaco named Tupac Palla; López de Gómara, followed by others, makes her a princess of Quito, which would give Atahualpa a claim to the northern kingdom he grew up in. Sarmiento's editor, Clements Markham, argues that Gómara must be wrong because Huayna Capac only went to Quito twelve years before his death, by which time Atahualpa was grown. The argument is reasonable and it is still only an argument. Where the sources conflict, the honest course is to say so, which is what the Incas' own descendants did when the Spaniards asked them.

What did the Incas believe?

The state religion was the cult of the Sun, Inti, and the Sapa Inca was his son and his living image on earth. The Coricancha in Cusco was the centre of that cult, and its wealth was staggering. A notary who entered Cusco with Pizarro reported a house 350 paces square entirely plated with gold, from which 700 plates were taken down; from another building the Indians stripped gold worth 200,000 pesos, which the Spaniards refused because it was too heavily alloyed. Sarmiento, who could still see the building standing, describes two great images of gold flanking the image of the Sun, one of the creator and one of lightning, each with its own lands, herds and servants.

Below the Sun stood a hierarchy of huacas: shrines, springs, mountains, caves, oddly shaped stones and the mummified bodies of dead Incas, each with its own custodian, its own offerings and its own oracle. Sarmiento lists the huacas around Cusco and records that at some of them the Incas made the sacrifice they called capacocha, burying children of five or six alive with offerings of gold and silver vessels. Betanzos describes the consecration of the Sun's house with the same rite: llamas killed and burned, maize and fine cloth offered, and boys and girls buried alive in the building. The Incas practised human sacrifice, in other words, though on nothing like the scale of the Aztecs, and mostly at the great moments of state religion — the consecration of a temple, the accession of an Inca, the death of one.

Religion was also administration. The Sun's estates were worked by the same mit'a labour as the Inca's; the acllas wove the cloth that clothed the army and the nobility; the calendar of festivals structured the agricultural year and the labour obligations that went with it. Sarmiento, who was writing to prove that the Incas had been tyrants, says plainly what he thought the cult was for: Pachacuti enriched the House of the Sun with new oracles and images "to appal ignorant people and produce astonishment, that they might help in the conquest of the whole land". That is a hostile witness's judgement, but it is not far from how the state used the sacred. When the Spaniards came they understood instinctively that the huacas were political, and the extirpation campaigns of the later sixteenth century set out to destroy them as such.

How did the succession war break the empire?

Huayna Capac died in the north, at or near Tumipampa, some time between about 1524 and 1527. The chronicles do not agree on the year, and they do not agree on the cause: a European epidemic is the usual explanation, smallpox in most accounts, measles in others, and the timing fits the pattern of diseases that ran ahead of the Spaniards through the Americas. What is not in doubt is the consequence. The Inca died without a clear settlement of the succession, and two of his sons by different mothers each had a power base.

Huascar was in Cusco, the legitimate heir by the rules of the Inca lineage, and was recognised there. Atahualpa was in the north, where he had spent years campaigning with his father, and where the armies were. Sarmiento's account is a catalogue of small provocations that became a war: Huascar torturing and killing the Cusco nobles who had come south with his father's body, believing they had left Atahualpa behind to rebel; Atahualpa sending gifts and being told his messengers had been mutilated; the Huancavilcas rising and Atahualpa crushing them and keeping the army.

The war that followed, usually dated 1527–1532, was fought with large armies and extreme cruelty. Atahualpa's generals Chalco Chima and Quizquiz won a string of battles — at Riopampa in the Ecuadorian highlands, at Cusipampa, on the plain outside Cajamarca, at Pumpu, at Yanamarca — and drove Huascar's forces back on Cusco. Huascar took the field himself, was surrounded in a ravine, and was pulled out of his litter and taken prisoner. Atahualpa's men then went through Cusco killing the members of Huascar's lineage and his children, and burning the quipus. The empire that Pizarro reached in 1532 had a victorious army in the north, a captured legitimate king in Cusco, a claimant who had not yet been crowned, and an aristocracy that had just been decapitated.

This is the single most important thing to understand about the conquest. The Spaniards did not defeat a united empire. They walked into a civil war, and they were recruited into it.

How did 164 Spaniards take Cusco?

Francisco Pizarro left San Miguel de Piura on 24 September 1532 with, by the count of his own secretary Francisco de Xerez, 62 horsemen and 102 foot soldiers, of whom twenty had crossbows and three had guns. Xerez's own mustering figures are 67 horse and 110 foot before nine men were sent back to the garrison; the total he then gives is 164, which is four short of what his own subtraction produces. The familiar figure of 168 men in modern accounts is probably that subtraction, taken at face value. At Cajamarca, on Saturday 16 November 1532, they found Atahualpa encamped with an army in the tens of thousands, and did what no one expected: they hid in the buildings around the square, let the Inca's procession enter, and then attacked.

The ambush is described by men who were there. Xerez has the friar Vicente de Valverde approach Atahualpa with a cross and a breviary, explain the Christian faith through an interpreter, and ask him to submit to the Emperor; Atahualpa asked for the book, could not open it, struck the friar's arm, and threw it down. That was the signal. The Spaniards came out of the buildings with horses and steel, and in the panic the crowd surged and the walls of one building collapsed. Atahualpa was taken alive, largely because Pizarro wanted him alive. The dead were counted in the thousands, almost all of them Indian.

The ransom followed. Atahualpa offered to fill a room 22 feet by 17 with gold, up to a line half way up the wall and "the height of a man and a half", and to fill it twice over with silver. The metal came in over months from Cusco and from the shrines of the empire. Melting began on 3 May 1533; when the accounts were closed, Xerez's report gives 326,539 pesos of good gold and 51,610 marcs of silver, with a fifth reserved for the Crown and the rest divided among the conquerors, horsemen receiving nearly twice what foot soldiers got. Atahualpa was then tried on charges of usurpation and of killing his brother, condemned, baptised in the square, and garrotted in 1533. Pedro Pizarro, who was there, says he saw the governor weep because he could not spare him.

Pizarro marched south, collecting allies: Huanca groups who had been crushed by Atahualpa's generals, Chachapoyas, and above all the Cañari of the Ecuadorian highlands, who had been Atahualpa's enemies and became the Spaniards' most reliable auxiliaries. He entered Cusco on 15 November 1533 and crowned Manco Inca, a son of Huayna Capac, as Sapa Inca. For a year or so the arrangement held: Manco ruled with Spanish backing, the Spaniards took the gold, and the last organised Inca armies in the field were hunted down.

Why did resistance last until 1572?

It did not last by accident. In 1536 Manco Inca broke with the Spaniards, raised an army from the provinces and laid siege to Cusco. The siege lasted months; the Spaniards held the plaza and the Coricancha, the Inca forces burned the city around them, and the fighting was as bitter as anything in the conquest. Manco then withdrew to Ollantaytambo, defeated a Spanish force sent after him, and finally fell back into the mountain province of Vilcabamba, beyond the reach of the roads.

Vilcabamba was a small state, but a real one. Manco ruled there until he was murdered in 1544 by Spanish refugees he had taken in. His son Sayri Tupac succeeded as a child, and under pressure from the new viceroy negotiated his submission: he left Vilcabamba in October 1557, entered Lima in January 1558, was received with honour, given estates in the Yucay valley, and died in 1560 or 1561. His half-brother Titu Cusi took over in Vilcabamba, and for a decade played a sophisticated double game, negotiating a treaty at Acobamba in 1566 (ratified by Philip II in 1569) while maintaining his independence and his own claim to be the true Inca.

The end came with a viceroy who would not tolerate a rival. Francisco de Toledo arrived in 1569, and in 1571, when Titu Cusi died and the war faction in Vilcabamba killed the friar Diego Ortiz, he declared war. The expedition under Martín Hurtado de Arbieto took Vilcabamba on 24 June 1572. Túpac Amaru, Titu Cusi's young successor, escaped and was hunted for weeks before Martín García de Loyola captured him. He was tried in Cusco on charges that included the murder of the friar, baptised, and beheaded in the great square on 24 September 1572.

Baltasar de Ocampo, who was in Cusco and watched it, left an account of what that day was like: the square packed so tightly that "if an orange had been thrown down it could not have reached the ground", the 400 Cañari guards with their lances, the two Mercedarian friars who had catechised the young man, and the cry that went up from the Indian crowd when the executioner produced the knife — a cry, he says, that sounded like the day of judgement, and which made the Spaniards themselves weep. Toledo's own king was not pleased. Philip II is said to have told him on his return that he had been sent to serve kings, not to kill them.

What survived the conquest?

The first thing that survived was catastrophe. The population of the Andes collapsed in the century and a half after 1532, under the impact of epidemic disease, the breakdown of the state's food systems, and the violence of the conquest and the wars that followed. Whole provinces emptied. The Spanish state replaced the Inca one, but it kept many of its pieces: the mita survived as forced labour for the mines, above all Potosí; the curacas survived as the intermediaries of colonial tribute; the ayllu survived as the unit of landholding and taxation. Toledo's reforms of the 1570s reorganised the surviving population into compact villages (reducciones) and codified what was owed, and in doing so fixed the shape of Andean rural life for centuries.

Quechua survived and spread. It had been the language of the state and of the road; the church adopted it for evangelisation, and it became the lingua franca of the colonial Andes, which is why it is still spoken across the central Andes today, from southern Colombia to north-west Argentina. The material culture survived more thoroughly than the political one: the terraces are still farmed, the canals still run, the llamas and alpacas are still herded, the techniques of freeze-drying and weaving are still in use, and the Qhapaq Ñan is still walked, in places, by the communities that maintain it.

The memory survived as politics. The Incas became the legitimating ancestor of Andean rebellion: Túpac Amaru II, who rose against the Spanish in 1780, took the name; the indigenista intellectuals of the twentieth century, from José Carlos Mariátegui to Luis Eduardo Valcárcel, made the Inca past the basis of a critique of Peruvian society, arguing over whether the empire had been a lost communal utopia or a tyranny, and the argument is still live in Andean politics. Modern Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador all claim the Inca inheritance, and the tourism economy of Cusco and the Sacred Valley is built on it.

What has not survived is certainty about the empire's own account of itself. The quipus remain largely unread. The chronicles are testimony given decades after the events by men with their own cases to argue — Sarmiento wrote at the viceroy's commission to prove that the Incas had been tyrants and that Spain's title was just. Archaeology has been filling the gaps: the hilltop sites, the storehouses, the terraces and the radiocarbon dates are now the strongest evidence for how the empire worked and when it grew. The result is an empire that is better understood than it was fifty years ago and still less well understood than its roads and walls suggest it should be.

Common myths about the Inca Empire

Timeline of the Inca Empire

What the map shows next

At 1470 on the map the empire is still expanding: Tupac Inca Yupanqui's armies have taken the north coast and are pushing into Ecuador, and the Chimú state drawn at 1440 on the map has disappeared into a province. The map's borders for those decades are coarse, and the shading on the northern frontier in particular should be read as a claim rather than a line.

At 1532 on the map the empire is drawn at its greatest extent, on the eve of the ambush at Cajamarca; at 1571 on the map the last remnant is the small mountain province of Vilcabamba, and the rest of the Andes is Spanish. Between those two frames lies the entire conquest, and the map's dates — 1440 to 1571 — mark out the imperial century rather than the state's constitutional life.