Free The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie

subjugated new provinces, determined the number of tax-paying peasants, installed a local Inca governor, and then left an administration in place that was empowered to supervise and collect taxes before their armies moved on. If cooperative, the local elites were allowed to retain their privileged positions and were rewarded handsomely for their collaboration. If uncooperative, the Incas exterminated them and wiped out their supporters. Peasants were a crop, a crop that could be harvested through periodic taxation. Docile, obedient workers who created surpluses, in fact, were a crop more valuable than any of the five thousand varieties of potatoes the Incas cultivated in the Andes, more valuable even than the vast herds of llamas and alpacas that the Incas periodically used for their meat and wool. It was the peasants and their associated lands that the Incas coveted, and it was by taxing the peasants’ labor that the Inca elite continued to increase their wealth, prestige, and power.
    Tupac Inca, who had carried out successful campaigns in the north and on the coast, also succeeded in extending the Inca Empire farther east, marching from the high frigid plains of the Andes down into the sweltering Amazon jungle. He then extended the empire’s southern border another seven hundred miles deeper into Chile, pastmodern-day Santiago.
    By the time Tupac Inca’s son, Huayna Capac, took the throne, the super-nova that was the Inca Empire had reached its zenith and its expansion was almost complete. The empire now stretched from what would later become southern Colombia all the way down to central Chile, and from the Pacific Ocean up over the broad, uplifted Andes with its twenty-thousand-foot peaks and down into the Amazon jungle. Amazingly, an elite of perhaps one hundred thousand ethnic Incas ultimately controlled a population of perhaps ten million individuals. Beyond the empire’s frontiers, there were neither kingdoms nor peasantry left to conquer, rather only non-state peoples who were impossible to control. In these areas the Incas demarcated their borders and built forts to protect themselves from the incursions of the stateless “barbarians.” The Incas’ revolutionary seizure of the Andes had occurred in just two generations, during the reigns of Pachacuti and Tupac Inca. Pachacuti’s grandson, Huayna Capac, therefore, limited his own military campaigns to securing the empire’s borders and to pacifying the last rebellious tribes in the north.
    Soon after subjugating much of what is now known as Ecuador, however, Huayna Capac began to hear strange reports of a new danger confronting his empire, one that would prove far deadlier than any provincial rebellion. Native runners, or
chaskis
, presumably arrived breathlessly at court one day to report that a sickness had appeared in the north, a terrible one that was devastating the inhabitants. The afflicted people first developed frightful skin eruptions all over their bodies, then sickened and died. Even worse, the messengers reported, it appeared that the sickness was now spreading toward Quito, where Huayna Capac and his royal retinue were living. The descriptions were gruesome enough to cause the emperor to seclude himself and to begin to fast, hoping to avoid contact with the mysterious plague. It was already too late, however, for according to the chronicler Juan de Betanzos, Huayna Capac soon
    fell ill and the illness took his reason and understanding and gave him a skin irritation like leprosy that greatly weakened him. When the nobles saw him so far gone they came to him; it seemed to them that he had come a little to his senses and they asked him toname a lord since he was at the end of his days.
    The stricken emperor told his nobles that his son, Ninan Cuyoche, should inherit the empire, if the omens were propitious in this regard and, if not, that another son, Huascar (HUAS car), should ascend to the throne. The Inca nobles soon slaughtered a llama, opened