by Marie Arana
He had good reason for wanting to bring change to the Mexicas: it was clear something drastic needed to be done. The Triple Alliance had grown so quickly, become so unruly, that it was threatening to come apart at the seams. Tribes conquered in brutal wars had begun to chafe under their Aztec masters. A general truculence had swept over the land, and, as a result, an angry spirit of rebellion lingered in the outlying territories like a low-grade fever. The populace, battered by ongoing fears of violence, was in a constant state of agitation. To keep them under control, Tenochtitlán’s military now commandeered every aspect of society, turning a former theocracy of priests and Sun worshipers into a virtual paramilitary state. Soldiers were deployed at the slightest provocation, and a coterie of powerful generals had emerged to edge out the nobility on important state decisions. Soon the military was involved in commerce as well, serving as guard for a burgeoning class of powerful merchants that traded in all manner of goods from the shores of the Caribbean to the banks of the Rio Grande. The central plaza of Tenochtitlán had become nothing so much as a magnificent, well-policed bazaar for rich, freewheeling entrepreneurs, and a lively trade of gold and silver—once the province of kings and princes—was now a buoyant market at large.
Here was a profound cultural shift. Precious metals under the Aztecs had become a commodity like any other. Just as shells, feathers, and tools were fungible currencies in the vibrant marketplace of the day, so too were the “excrement” and “tears” of the gods. The manufacture of gold and silver was now so widespread among the Mexicas that citizens at the periphery of empire paid tributes to the state in bracelets and necklaces; even ingots and precious stones. A wealthy protobourgeoisie had materialized to accommodate it. To some, this economic exuberance might have signaled a welcome progress, but, to Montezuma, it was one more indication that things had gone badly awry. Too many liberties had been taken. The economy no longer answered to the state, and, for this progressively ungovernable bedlam, the military was to blame. Authority needed to be put back into the hands of the nobility. His government would clamp down.
Montezuma’s first move was to reverse modifications that his predecessor, the warrior-emperor Ahuitzotl, had made to the very fabric of Mexica society by favoring a man’s merit over his caste. Montezuma spared no time in dressing down the plebeian soldiers who had risen through the army’s ranks to exercise what he perceived as exaggerated power. Never mind that they had spilled their blood to win him an empire. They were commoners, undesirables, and would be treated as such. He ordered them to wear simple cotton tunics and shave their heads. In a time when style and vestment defined one’s status in the ruling hierarchy, this was a humiliating blow. Among those fighting forces, after all, were officers who had suppressed rebellions and maintained authority in time of perpetual war. To Montezuma’s armies, this draconian response seemed misplaced, excessive. Resentment began to simmer among the rank and file.
The corrections did not stop there. Intent on consolidating the royal house’s power, Montezuma II now declared that a nobleman’s bastard children—whose status in Aztec society had never been questioned—would no longer enjoy hereditary rights. Not surprisingly, a wave of abortions followed. Montezuma’s 150 expectant concubines made haste to terminate their pregnancies, convinced that their issue would have no place in the Aztec future. That purge, which began quietly enough in palace boudoirs, turned into a very public bloodbath when the emperor sent his guards to slay all the tutors and handmaids of the imperial nursery. He wanted it made clear that the purification and reeducation of the bloodline was to be complete.
Montezuma then moved to reduce the power of the wealthy merchants, the majority of whom were living splendidly in the neighboring metropolis of Tlatelolco. Once he had extracted a healthy tribute from them, he introduced a new economic model. Henceforward, the empire’s financial center would be in the imperial palace, hefty taxes would be the order of the day, and, with manufacture under unilateral control, the merchants of Tlatelolco would be reduced to mere distributors. The state’s most desirable commodities—including gold, silver, and copper—would be held under strict supervision of the state.
In these ways did Montezuma II achieve his goal to centralize power, although the fury he reaped as a result would ultimately be his undoing. No famine, no plague, no war—and Montezuma’s rule was eventually visited by all three—would be as ruinous as the loathing he now invited from his subjects. He was as hated within his realm as without. Enemies made auguries about the tlatoani’s imminent destruction and the return of an angry, vengeful god. Evil omens began to be reported: a tongue of fire had pierced the night sky and brought down a rain of sparks. A thunderbolt had ripped through the volcano god’s temple. A comet with a long, sinister tail had streaked overhead at sunrise. The lake waters surrounding Tenochtitlán had foamed up in a rolling boil. An army of men hunched over galloping deer had been glimpsed in a clouded mirror. The evidence for impending doom was so overwhelming that rebellious tribes took heart and began to look for alliances with anyone willing to wage war against the tyrant of Tenochtitlán. And yet no one could doubt that the man had done what he had set out to do: he had secured unconditional power for the Aztec nobility. He had preserved the purity of his race. Sisters in royal families would now continue to wed their brothers, as was the custom; cousins would propagate with cousins; and the sacred blood of ancestors would be passed on in a perfectly preserved chain. No one, not even the most celebrated warrior, could penetrate that closed circle. As for the gold and silver that Montezuma so favored, it was now corralled within the perimeters of his imperial walls.
If Hernán Cortés thought Montezuma’s glittering gewgaws were worthy of the Spanish king’s attention, he had a point: the tlatoani’s treasures were marvels of surpassing beauty. They had so dazzled Cortés that he saw little else. More than the breathtaking sight of the luminous capital on the lake—more than the impulse to take that shining citadel by force—it was the gold and silver that gleamed from Montezuma’s throat that piqued Cortés’s ambition. Nothing else mattered much after that: not the culture that the Mexica represented, or the history that had gone before, or the architectural splendors of a differently imagined universe. It was the “barbarian lord’s baubles” that launched the cruel history that was to follow.
QUITO
Ecuador, 1520
With the Pacific to the west and the Amazon to the east, the Incas were confident that they had absorbed almost all civilisation.
—John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas
Even as Montezuma fretted about racial purity, three thousand miles away, the Lord Inca Huayna Capac, too, began to worry about the integrity of his royal line. He came to the conclusion that it was high time he married one of his sisters and produced a solid heir to the throne. The Lord Inca had hundreds of concubines by whom he had left a sizable progeny, but like his counterpart in the land of the Mexicas, he descended from a long line of rulers who believed that marrying within the royal family would ensure purity of bloodline and a legitimate successor. The marriage he finally consummated with his sister produced Huascar, a spoiled, capricious boy whose privileged place in the royal household evoked nothing so much as an inflated sense of entitlement. To mark his arrival, Huayna Capac called for a lavish festival and a chain of pure gold, thick as a man’s forearm and long enough to span the main plaza of Cuzco. On the appointed day, a legion of noblemen from all corners of the Tahuantinsuyu paraded the seven-hundred-foot cable through the streets, dancing joyously, holding the gold aloft so that it gleamed in the sun. The name Huascar itself means “chain” in Quechua, the language of the Incas, and, true to the moniker, the boy remained firmly fettered to Cuzco, unwilling to stray far from his father’s palaces. Born of high blood, raised with every assurance that he was the chosen one, Huascar did not inherit his father’s expansive spirit or his curiosity about the work of empire and the lands and mines from which his fortune sprang. Arriving at manhood at a remove from
his more adventurous, illegitimate brothers and from the wayfaring Huayna Capac himself, Huascar gained a reputation as something of a wastrel. Cruel, cowardly, and vain, he developed the habit of demanding sexual favors from other noblemen’s wives. Although he could not possibly have foreseen it, his character, like that of Montezuma’s, would play a central role in the loss of empire.
Maintaining the royal bloodline was not the only preoccupation these two great civilizations shared. Montezuma was fully engaged in battling rebellions in far reaches of empire when Huayna Capac began to be pestered by similar troubles. Faraway conquests by dead ancestors now plagued the living. Huayna Capac’s father, Tupac Inca Yupanqui, one of the most aggressive expanders of the Tahuantinsuyu, had built roads, bridges, and crossed the desolate Atacama Desert many decades before to push his empire’s frontiers to the remote shores of what is now Chile. In the process, he had found metal making in full swing among the conquered tribes of the South. Triumphant in those forays and addicted to adventure, Tupac Inca had gone on to conquer lands in the North, and, in Quito, he was delighted to find that there, too, there were mineral rewards in the newly won ground. Pressing on to the Galapagos Islands, he came away with a surprisingly bountiful booty of dark-skinned slaves, gold curios, brass chairs, and the hide and jawbone of a beast he had never encountered before in the flesh: a horse. His victorious armies came home to Cuzco weighed down with gold, silver, emeralds, spondylus, turquoise, and—most precious of all—jade. Tupac Inca happily installed all of it in his palaces and temples, thrilling the royal family, securing his place in legend, and inspiring his son Huayna Capac to greater glories.
Not everyone was elated by Tupac Inca’s exploits. The conquered became increasingly resentful about their enslavement to distant despots and gods. Whereas Tupac Inca had spent a lifetime expanding his rule, his son now found himself faced with the task of simply holding on to what had been won. The troubles began in the South, in highlands that surrounded Lake Titicaca, precisely where the empire’s most productive silver and copper mines were located—precisely where mining would focus for the next five hundred years. A skilled warrior and passionate defender of his father’s demesne, Huayna Capac now sent forth his powerful armies to quell a number of bloody insurgencies. He decided to follow these with a goodwill expedition. He was completing a “pacification” tour of the borderlands in Chile, assuring himself that the royal mines were out of harm’s way, when he learned that the conquered peoples of the North, too, were rising up against him. Near Tumbes and Quito, where rivers glittered with gold, his governors had been found with their throats slit. Leaving Huascar to govern in Cuzco, Huayna Capac called for his younger sons Atahualpa and Ninan Cuyochi to prepare for a military campaign that would wind north through the towering cordillera, cross the eyebrow of the jungle, and make its way along the magnificent Royal Road, the Capac Ñan, to root out the malcontents.
Not least on Huayna Capac’s mind as he crossed his vast empire with a retinue of thousands, stopping at sumptuous rest houses along the way, were his mineral riches. Enamored of his father’s glittering spoils and fired by a material avarice unmatched by his predecessors, Huayna Capac was determined to keep a merciless lock on the Tahuantinsuyu. He assembled a vast army of hundreds of thousands as he traveled overland, pressing the locals into service. Eventually he prosecuted a harsh war against the people of Quito, but the fighting was so fierce and the Quiteños so stubborn that at the end of it, his royal troops were left starving and in rags. When, at last, the Inca received a mighty wave of reinforcements from Cuzco, he was able to repel the colossal force that had united against him: the naked, wild men of the Quillacingas tribe, the obdurate freedom fighters of Pasto and Cayambe, and the cannibals of Caranqui who had been stalking those gold-rich highlands for years, ripping out the hearts of many an Inca warrior who dared cross into it.
Unnerved, the Lord Inca’s opponents scattered into the hills. It was a hard-fought war, lasting many years, and slaughter on both sides was so common that the lakes ran red with the blood of the fallen. All the same, Huayna Capac was determined to keep his grip on that geologic wonderland—crazed with emeralds and shot through with the lambent essence of sun and moon—and so urged his warriors to unimaginable brutality. Forbidding the capture of prisoners, he ordered his armies to decapitate tens of thousands of enemy soldiers and cast their headless corpses into the waters. Today a lake in the Ibarra region of Ecuador is still known in Quechua as Yahuarcocha: “pool of blood.”
By the time Quito was “pacified”—a horrifying, grisly process that took more than a decade to accomplish—there was hardly a Quiteño male left over the age of twelve. “You are all children now,” Huayna Capac proclaimed as he declared peace and went off to rest in the palace his father had built in nearby Tumipampa. The Inca dedicated himself to building magnificent lodgings for himself in numerous locations to secure his domination. He oversaw the mass conversion of Quiteños to sun worship, to the language of Quechua, to the labors that Cuzco required. Aided in this brutal business of subjugation by his son Atahualpa—born of a Quito princess—and his eldest son, Ninan Cuyochi, the Lord Inca settled into the fertile, scenic valleys of the region, transferring his court from Cuzco to Tumipampa and governing the empire from afar. So it was that even as he succeeded in securing the frontiers, Huayna Capac ended up fracturing the carefully forged firmament of Tahuantinsuyu, creating a new capital in Quito, a rift in its armies, doubts about the succession, and leaving capricious, unstable Huascar to manage Cuzco, the umbilical of an increasingly volatile world.
* * *
It was during this time, in the late 1520s, as he enjoyed the bucolic comforts of Tumipampa, that the Inca potentate began to hear strange reports about sightings his spies had made along the coast, near Tumbes. Messengers—chasquis—who ran long distances to deliver news to the Inca, reported that they had seen bearded men with fair skin and ferocious countenances approach the shore in large wooden houses. Huayna Capac asked the chasquis what part of the world these strangers had come from, but the messengers could say only that they appeared to travel the seas in those houses, and that they came ashore during the day and slept adrift at night. They were bold, loud, foul smelling, and could move like the wind on water. They could make a terrible thunder issue from their vessels, along with wild bursts of fire and puffs of dark smoke. They could split a tree from a great distance. They could kill with invisible arrows. Communicating with little more than mime and hand signals, the bearded ones had asked about the lord of the land. What was his name? Where did he live?
Hearing this, Huayna Capac was stunned, not a little frightened. He asked the chasquis to repeat the stories again and again, marveling at the strangeness of their testimony, fearful of what it might mean. Some years earlier, an oracle had predicted that the Twelfth Inca would be the last. He hadn’t given the augury much credence at the time, but here it was now—as ominous as thunder, as real as sundered trees—and all of it coming so soon after his glorious defense of the Tahuantinsuyu. He was, after all, the Twelfth Son of the Sun.
Some chronicles paint Huayna Capac as audacious in his contact with those foreigners. One Spanish friar recounted that two of his countrymen wandering ashore were captured by chasquis and brought to the Lord Inca, whereupon he granted them an audience and heard them out. Interpreting their gestures, he deduced their interest in his jewelry. He was taken aback by the pettiness of that fixation and angered by rumors that such ragtag vagabonds posed any danger to his rule. As the friar told it, Huayna Capac had the intruders hacked to pieces, cooked, and served up to his court for dinner. In yet another historic, highly graphic account of the conquest, the Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala depicts a conversation between Huayna Capac and the sailor Pedro de Candía: “Is this the gold you people eat?” the Inca ruler asks the hungry Spaniard in perfect astonishment, offering a plate of gold nuggets. “Kay quritachu mikhunki?”
Fearless or fearful, if Huayna Capac was to
rmented by the possibility of an alien invasion, that darkening cloud on the Pacific littoral vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The wooden houses sailed off to the north, taking their bizarre, bearded masters with them, and, as weeks went by, other perils took their place. A plague of epic proportions, such as never had befallen the inhabitants of those lands, is said to have torn along the coast, felling hundreds at first, then thousands, and hundreds of thousands. It was a horrible, nameless sickness, manifesting in red, inflamed sores that morphed into suppurating pustules, eating at human flesh, spreading indiscriminately from village to village and from shoreline to mountain. In time, as Huayna Capac’s armies marched along the Capac Ñan, carrying the disease with them, the pestilence coiled over the cordillera, aided by random vectors—cloth, food, sandflies—until it consumed Cuzco and wiped out countless members of the royal family as well as their servants. Eventually Huayna Capac, who lingered in his beloved gardens in Huancavilca, not far from Quito, became infected with the disease and, feeling all too mortal, called his orejones—his noblemen—to his bedside to talk about the future of the empire.
Perhaps he had forgotten, in his fevered state, that he had designated Huascar for the throne long before, when he had consorted with his sister for the specific purpose of breeding the Thirteenth Inca. Perhaps, being away from Cuzco for so many years, he had forged stronger bonds with his sons Atahualpa and Ninan Cuyochi, the princes who had been warring loyally by his side. All the same, Huayna Capac was suddenly and quite impulsively convinced that his throne should go to the eldest of these, Ninan Cuyochi. He was lucid enough, however, to seek assurances that he was making the right choice. To decide the question, his high priests hastily conducted a ritual of the kalpa, in which they read the inflated lungs of a slaughtered llama. What they beheld in that ballooned mass was unequivocal: Ninan Cuyochi was the wrong choice. When the priests undertook another kalpa to determine the suitability of Huascar, he, too, was deemed unfit for the task.