Inca Empire

The Inca Empire, known to its people as Tawantinsuyu ('the realm of the four parts'), was the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas, dominating the Andean world of western South America in the century before the Spanish conquest.

While the kingdom of Cusco existed earlier, the empire is conventionally dated from 1438, when the ruler Pachacuti, after repelling an invasion by the rival Chanka people, launched a programme of expansion and reorganised the state into Tawantinsuyu, divided into four great provinces radiating from the capital, Cusco. Pachacuti, his son Túpac Inca Yupanqui, and his grandson Huayna Capac extended Inca rule through a combination of military conquest, diplomacy, and assimilation across an immense territory stretching some four thousand kilometres along the Andes, encompassing modern Peru, much of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile, and parts of Colombia and Argentina. The empire was held together by a remarkably sophisticated and centralised administration. A state religion centred on the worship of the sun and the divine status of the ruling Sapa Inca legitimised the regime; an extensive network of stone-paved roads, the Qhapaq Ñan, with relay runners and storehouses, bound the realm together; a labour-tax system known as the mit'a mobilised the population for public works, agriculture, and military service; and accounts were kept using the quipu, a system of knotted cords, despite the absence of writing. The Incas were masterful engineers and builders, constructing terraced fields, irrigation systems, and monumental architecture, of which Machu Picchu is the most famous example. On the eve of the Spanish arrival the empire was gravely weakened by a devastating war of succession between the half-brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar, compounded by epidemics of European disease that had spread ahead of the conquerors. In 1532 Francisco Pizarro captured Atahualpa, executing him in 1533 and seizing Cusco, effectively ending the empire, although a remnant Neo-Inca state resisted from Vilcabamba until 1572.

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