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The conquistadors disparaged steep Inka highways because they had been designed for sure-footed llamas rather than horses. But they were beautifully made—this road, photographed in the 1990 s, had lasted more than five hundred years without maintenance.

 

European-style roads, constructed with horses and cars in mind, view flatness as a virtue; to go up a steep hill, they use switchbacks to make the route as horizontal as possible. Inka roads, by contrast, were built for llamas. Llamas prefer the coolness of high altitudes and, unlike horses, readily go up and down steps. As a result, Inka roads eschewed valley bottoms and used long stone stairways to climb up steep hills directly—brutal on horses’ hooves, as the conquistadors often complained. Traversing the foothills to Cajamarca, Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Hernando lamented that the route, a perfectly good Inka highway, was “so bad” that the Spanish “could not use horses on the roads, not even with skill.” Instead the conquistadors had to dismount and lead their reluctant animals through the steps. At that point they were vulnerable. Late in the day, Inka soldiers learned to wait above and roll boulders on their foes, killing some of the animals and frightening others into running away. Men left behind could be picked off at leisure. Multiple ambushes cost the lives of many Spanish troops and animals.

To be sure, horses confer an advantage on flat ground. But even on the plains the Inka could have won. Foot soldiers have often drubbed mounted troops. At the battle of Marathon in 490
B.C.,
the outnumbered, outarmored Athenian infantry destroyed the cavalry of the Persian emperor Darius I. More than six thousand Persians died; the Greeks lost fewer than two hundred men. So dire had the situation initially appeared that before the fight Athens sent a messenger to Sparta, its hated rival, to beg for aid. In the original marathon, the courier ran more than a hundred miles in two days to deliver his message. But by the time the Spartan reinforcements arrived, there was nothing to see but dead Persians.

The Inka losses were not foreordained. Their military was hampered by the cult of personality around its deified generals, which meant both that leaders were not easily replaced when they were killed or captured and that innovation in the lower ranks was not encouraged. And the army never learned to bunch its troops into tight formations, as the Greeks did at Marathon, forming human masses that can literally stand up to cavalry. Nonetheless, by the time of the siege of Qosqo the Inka had developed an effective anti-cavalry tactic: bolas. The Inka bola consisted of three stones tied to lengths of llama tendon. Soldiers threw them, stones a-whirl, at charging horses. The weapons wrapped themselves around the animals’ legs and brought them down to be killed by volleys of sling missiles. Had the bolas come in massed, coordinated onslaughts instead of being wielded by individual soldiers as they thought opportune, Pizarro might well have met his match.

If not technology or the horse, what defeated the Inka? As I said, some of the blame should be heaped on the overly centralized Inka command structure, a problem that has plagued armies throughout time. But another, much larger part of the answer was first stated firmly by Henry Dobyns. During his extracurricular reading about Peru, he came across a passage by Pedro Cieza de León, the Spanish traveler who observed three roads between the same two cities. Entranced by the first exhibition of Inka booty in Spain, Cieza de León had crossed the Atlantic as a teenager and spent fifteen years in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, traveling, fighting, and taking notes for what would become a massive, three-volume survey of the region. Only the first part was printed in his lifetime, but by the twentieth century historians had found and published most of the rest. Dobyns learned something from Cieza de León that was not mentioned in Prescott’s history, in the Smithsonian’s official
Handbook of South American Indians,
or in any of the then-standard descriptions of Tawantinsuyu. According to Cieza de León, Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa’s father, died when “a great plague of smallpox broke out [in 1524 or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom.”

Smallpox not only killed Wayna Qhapaq, it killed his son and designated heir—and his brother, uncle, and sister-wife. The main generals and much of the officer corps died, wrote the Inka chronicler Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, “all their faces covered with scabs.” So did the two regents left in Qosqo by Wayna Qhapaq to administer the empire. After the dying Wayna Qhapaq locked himself away so that nobody could see his pustulous face, Salcamayhua reported, he was visited by a terrifying midnight vision. Surrounding him in his dream were “millions upon millions of men.” The Inka asked who they were. “Souls of the lost,” the multitude told him. All of them “would die from the pestilence,” each and every one.

The story is probably apocryphal, but its import isn’t. Smallpox has an incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major epidemic. Smallpox radiated throughout the empire like ink spreading through tissue paper. Millions of people simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever, vomiting, severe pain, oozing blisters everywhere on the body. Unable to number the losses, the Jesuit Martín de Murúa said only that the toll was “infinite thousands.”

The smallpox virus is thought to have evolved from a cattle virus that causes cowpox; a now-extinct equine virus responsible for horsepox; or, perhaps most likely, the camelpox virus, which affects camels, as the name suggests. People who survive the disease become immune to it. In Europe, the virus was such a constant presence that most adults were immune. Because the Western Hemisphere had no cows, horses, or camels, smallpox had no chance to evolve there. Indians had never been exposed to it—they were “virgin soil,” in epidemiological jargon.

Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in southern India found that the disease killed 43 percent of its victims. Noting the extreme vulnerability of Andean populations—they would not even have known to quarantine victims, as Europeans had—Dobyns hypothesized that the empire’s population “may well have been halved during this epidemic.” In about three years, that is, as many as one out of two people in Tawantinsuyu died.

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430
B.C.,
Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest? To borrow a trope from the historian Alfred Crosby, if Genghis Khan had arrived with the Black Death, this book would not be written in a European language.

As for Tawantinsuyu, smallpox wiped out Wayna Qhapaq and his court, which led to civil war as the survivors contested the spoils. The soldiers who died in the battle between Atawallpa and Washkar were as much victims of smallpox as those who died from the virus itself.

The ferocity of the civil war was exacerbated by the epidemic’s impact on a peculiarly Andean institution: royal mummies. People in Andean societies viewed themselves as belonging to family lineages. (Europeans did, too, but lineages were more important in the Andes; the pop-cultural comparison might be
The Lord of the Rings,
in which characters introduce themselves as “X, son of Y” or “A, of B’s line.”) Royal lineages, called
panaqa,
were special. Each new emperor was born in one
panaqa
but created a new one when he took the fringe. To the new
panaqa
belonged the Inka and his wives and children, along with his retainers and advisers. When the Inka died his
panaqa
mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro’s companion Miguel de Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were brought out on litters, “seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been alive.”

Because the royal mummies were not considered dead, their successors obviously could not inherit their wealth. Each Inka’s
panaqa
retained all of his possessions forever, including his palaces, residences, and shrines; all of his remaining clothes, eating utensils, fingernail parings, and hair clippings; and the tribute from the land he had conquered. In consequence, as Pedro Pizarro realized, “the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices [in Tawantinsuyu] were under the control of the dead.” The mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the
panaqa
’s surviving courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for position, high-level Inka society was characterized by ramose political intrigue of a scale that would have delighted the Medici. Emblematically, Wayna Qhapaq could not construct his own villa on Awkaypata—his undead ancestors had used up all the available space. Inka society had a serious mummy problem.

After smallpox wiped out much of the political elite, each
panaqa
tried to move into the vacuum, stoking the passions of the civil war. Different mummies at different times backed different claimants to the Inka throne. After Atawallpa’s victory, his
panaqa
took the mummy of Thupa Inka from its palace and burned it outside Qosqo—burned it alive, so to speak. And later Atawallpa instructed his men to seize the gold for his ransom as much as possible from the possessions of another enemy
panaqa,
that of Pachacuti’s mummy.

Washkar’s
panaqa
kept the civil war going even after his death (or, rather, nondeath). While Atawallpa was imprisoned, Washkar’s
panaqa
sent one of his younger brothers, Thupa Wallpa, to Cajamarca. In a surreptitious meeting with Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa proclaimed that he was Washkar’s legitimate heir. Pizarro hid him in his own quarters. Soon afterward, the lord of Cajamarca, who had backed Washkar in the civil war, told the Spanish that Atawallpa’s army was on the move, tens of thousands strong. Its generals planned to attack Pizarro, he said, and free the emperor. Atawallpa denied the charge, truthfully. Pizarro nonetheless ordered him to be bound. Some of the Spaniards most sympathetic to Atawallpa asked to investigate. Soon after they left, two Inka ran to Pizarro, claiming that they had just fled from the invading army. Pizarro hurriedly convoked a military tribunal, which quickly sentenced the Inka to execution—the theory apparently being that the approaching army would not attack if its leader were dead. Too late the Spanish expedition came back to report that no Inka army was on the move. Thupa Wallpa emerged from hiding and was awarded the fringe as the new Inka.

The execution, according to John Rowe, the Berkeley archaeologist, was the result of a conspiracy among Pizarro, Thupa Wallpa, and the lord of Cajamarca. By ridding himself of Atawallpa and taking on Thupa Wallpa, Rowe argued, Pizarro “had exchanged an unwilling hostage for a friend and ally.” In fact, Thupa Wallpa openly swore allegiance to Spain. To him, the oath was a small price to pay; by siding with Pizarro, Washkar’s
panaqa,
“which had lost everything, had a chance again.” Apparently the new Inka hoped to return with Pizarro to Qosqo, where he might be able to seize the wheel of state. After that, perhaps, he could wipe out the Spaniards.