Lima
1615 the old man clutches a parcel fat and square that he's dragged from one end of a fallen Empire to the other
He is a mixed-race Christian the son of an Inca aristocrat and a former translator for priests seeking to study and suppress
native Andean beliefs
Fifteen years before he'd had his property confiscated after suing to get his ancestral lands back since then
He's wandered the country observing the disappearing Inca life compiling a chronicle complete with illustrations
It's a history of the Inca but also a catalogue of abuses by the colonial Spanish his conclusion
Spain must reform the government in a way that protects native people and values their culture. He's carried this book all
1,000 loose pages of it through harsh terrain and bandit country
that it survived to this point is a minor miracle and now he's finally sending it to its intended recipient the king of
Spain so Guaman Poma de Ayala takes the only copy of his life's work and hands it to a man aboard a ship
No one will see it again for 300 years
When you get off the plane the first
Thing you notice is how thin the air is and as you exit the airport a man in a poncho
offers you a Styrofoam cup full of coca leaf tea to help you deal with the Andean altitude and your hotel has
oxygen tanks in the lobby
Cusco sits at nearly three thousand four hundred meters or eleven thousand two hundred feet in altitude
when you walk the cobblestone streets you feel dizzy and have to stop for a breath after a few blocks and
Then you start to notice something strange
Every large Spanish building in the city has been built on a foundation of Incan stone
That's because the Spanish didn't build Cusco they merely built on top of it
it was in fact the Inca who despite the altitude built a city here and
Not just any city mind you a city that ruled the largest indigenous Empire to ever exist in the Americas
the Inca Empire spanned
2500 miles along the Pacific coast of South America
Stretching from present-day Colombia to Chile and it ruled as many as 12 million people but sheer numbers can't really convey
What an impressive feat that was because the Inca also controlled some of the most varied and harsh terrain on the planet
Ranging from snow-capped mountains to the humid Amazonian jungle to the Atacama Desert parts of which haven't seen rain in nearly 400 years
Walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu a fairly short route
You can still follow today and he'll pass dusty valleys
lush agricultural terraces alpine tundra and
Jungle, the massive andes themselves create these micro environments forcing the moisture out of passing cloud formations
So part of the inca heartland remain wet while earth in the other areas. Stay powder dry
in fact many settlements stand at altitudes that are difficult to breathe in for anyone but the Andeans whose lungs have adapted to
absorb more oxygen
actually
After building all of these celebratory churches on the foundations of the Incan capital of Cusco the Spanish moved the capital to Lima
partially because they couldn't handle the altitude but
Despite the complexity of ruling over and building in such varied environments
The masonry of the Inca highway cuts through all of them at times tunneling through solid rock
winding its way through ruins of settlements, fortresses,
Terraces and temples and the Inca built this sophisticated state without iron tools the wheel
riding or draught animals money or a written language
However, they did have quipu, a series of knotted ropes that help them calculate complex equations and remember numbers and dates
but the rest of their culture their folklore their religion and their history was all
Oral, which becomes a bit of a problem when it comes to telling the history of the Inca Empire
Because while the conquest is well documented
We have no sources from before the period of the Spanish conquest
Like the buildings of Cusco where Spanish constructions stand on inca foundations all of our stories of the Empire
Come to us to one extent or another via their colonizers
following the Spanish conquest dozens of priests
Administrators and former conquistadors set to work interviewing native people in order to capture the Empire's oral history
and while these accounts are better than nothing their usefulness is
mixed at best
See after the fall of the Inca Empire a struggle began over the Empire's cultural legacy Spanish authorities
stripped the valuables from shrines leveled temples suppressed native religious practices and
Confiscated the Imperial mummies and the part of that campaign
Involved collecting and telling the Incas oral histories some of the priests collected these stories in hopes
It would assist in conversion but many considered the Inca devil worshipers or wrote specifically to make their rule appear illegitimate
justifying the Spanish conquest
conversely more sympathetic accounts came from
Conquistadors who married into the inca elite and had a closer relationship with the culture but these two can display a major gap in understanding
even after living in Peru for decades the Spanish didn't really
Understand the Inca or any of the other people who lived under the Empire's banner
Their ideas about religion society and politics were just too different for these chroniclers to capture accurately
For example, the Inca didn't perceive history in a linear fashion to tell the history of their four province Empire
They wouldn't start at the beginning
They'd tell the history of the most important province beginning to end
before moving on to the neck
Most important and so on and it's from one of these Spanish accounts that we get the date of the Empire's founding
But even that is controversial and maybe entirely wrong
the closest we have to a native perspective comes mostly from a generation of mixed-race authors the sons of marriages between
Inca noble women and their Spanish conquerors all Christians who were born after the Empire's destruction among them was blas fira a
mixed-race jesuit whose pro inca views especially those about native languages being suitable for discussing church doctrine may have led his order to
Imprison then exile him to Spain eventually
He was murdered and his work burned during an English pirate raid
Only a few excerpts remain from his history mostly in the work of another half Inca chronicler
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega who wrote extensively on the Empire's history
but while vega's book Royal commentaries of the Incas is considered the first literary masterpiece by a Native American
It has problems as a work of history because you see Vega left Peru as a teenager and published his chronicles forty-nine years later
Meaning his memory of the oral history had likely degraded not to mention
He was writing with a specific objective in mind while Guam and Poma
rallied against Spanish abuses and Valera pushed for indigenous language and culture to be seen as equal Vega portrayed the Inca Empire as a
Perfect society one without poverty where aristocrats like his family provided everything a person would need in
Fact it appears that this mode of argumentative history was a hallmark of Andean culture to the Incas
It seems history was not necessarily about capturing reality in a fully accurate picture
But rather in molding the past to make a specific point, for example
the Spanish found multiple Incan families in Cusco told elaborate but conflicting versions of the same history each using it to
Justify their claim to a piece of land and as a result of these conflicting testimonies modern
historians have come to vastly different conclusions about the Empire depending how they read the sources and
because of this Incan society has been portrayed as everything from a communist utopia to a
Totalitarian nightmare and details of the Empire's founding continue to be debated
But the history's paired with archeology do tell us this in the early 13th century a line of kings began
Coalescing around what would become the city of Cuzco?
Manco capac the semi-mythical founder and as the legends say one of the first people to walk the earth
Established the kingdom of cuzco before turning to stone
Then came his successors each taking the ruling title of Sapa Inca each named for their greatness in
Construction and war and they each took names that matched their glory and were also pretty baller if I do say so myself
Such as the valorous
generous Inca the left-handed the splendid accountant the
Magnanimous and my personal favorite he who weeps blood they built the city and expanded their territory
creating the Inca ways of life and bringing order to a chaotic world or
Perhaps not because archaeological evidence indicates that many of the things we consider Incan accomplishments their farming terraces
building style
Agricultural products statecraft roads and knotted quipu were actually inherited from previous Andean societies
But regardless of their source the Inca were about to use these tools on a scale
No one had ever seen because in Cusco the Sapa Inca had a son
He was not the oldest nor the favorite of his father, but he was intelligent brave and with a ruthless vision
He had a birth name but that is not how he would be known. He would be known as the earth shaker
Pachacuti first emperor of the Inca and a man who would remake the world in
Cataclysm
Special thanks to educational tier patrons Ovid Xia Turk Joseph blame and Gerald Spencer diamond