Pachacuti

Emperor of the Inca Empire (r. 1438-1471)

• Born: c. 1391
• Birthplace: Probably Cuzco, Inca Empire (now in Peru)
• Died: 1471
• Place of death: Near Cuzco, Inca Empire (now in Peru)

Pachacuti, through personal courage, brilliant political sense, and administrative genius, was primarily responsible for the creation of the Inca Empire in its final form.

Early Life

Pachacuti (pah-chah-KEW-tee), the ninth emperor of the Inca in a direct line from the perhaps legendary Manco Capac, who founded the dynasty about the year 1200, was, with his son Topa Inca Yupanqui and his grandson Huayna Capac, one of the three greatest Inca emperors. Since he was said to have been about eighty years of age when he died in 1471, he presumably was born in Cuzco, the capital, about 1391, the son of Viracocha Inca and Runtu Coya. As the son of the emperor, Pachacuti was thoroughly educated in military science and the art of administration, but almost nothing is known about his life before the dramatic events of 1437-1438 brought him to the throne.

The Inca had no written historical records, and what is known of their origins is to be found in chronicles written after the Spanish Conquest. These were based on the memory of native historians, however, who used the quipu, knotted ropes that served as memory devices, to recall the events of Inca history. Certainly, from the beginnings of Pachacuti’s reign, the chronicles must be considered generally reliable, though it is possible that he may have dictated an account of his accession in order to justify the legitimacy of his claim to the throne.

During the reign of Viracocha, the Inca Empire, an area from the country north of Cuzco to the shores of Lake Titicaca, was threatened by various tribes on its borders to the north and west. In 1437, the Chanca, a warrior tribe in the Apurimac Valley northwest of Cuzco, defeated the Quechua, thus upsetting the balance of power the Inca had maintained among their enemies, and pushed through the Quechua country to the Inca frontier. Viracocha, apparently assuming that Cuzco could not be held, fled the city, while Pachacuti became the leader of a cabal that was determined to defend Cuzco and to put Pachacuti on the throne. He organized the city’s defenses, and, even though the Chanca actually broke into the city itself, he drove them out. In one account, he is described as wearing a lionskin as he personally led his troops in battle. Later he won a great victory over the Chanca at their stronghold of Ichupampa, west of Cuzco, virtually destroying them as a tribe, and in 1438 he became emperor. At this time, by one account, his father gave him the name Pachacuti, translated variously as cataclysm or Earth upside down, which suggests that even at that time he was determined to change the Inca Empire completely.

Life’s Work

The chronicles do not agree on the exact nature of Pachacuti’s claim to the throne. According to some, he was Viracocha’s eldest son and thus his legitimate heir but was, in effect, disinherited by his father on behalf of Inca Urcon, a younger brother. By another account, he was a younger son, and when Viracocha resigned the throne to Inca Urcon, the latter made Pachacuti governor of Cuzco while he retired to the enjoyment of his vices. What is certain is that Pachacuti, after his victory in the Chanca War, made Viracocha his virtual prisoner, was given his blessing, and by methods that are not clear, brought about the death of Inca Urcon. Viracocha died soon after.

Pachacuti spent the first three years of his reign in Cuzco, consolidating power and creating an entirely new leadership; then, in 1441, he embarked on a three-year tour of inspection of the empire and the reconquest of the territory of those tribes that had rebelled against Inca rule during the Chanca incursion. Only then did he undertake the military campaigns that made him the most remarkable conqueror of any South American Indian leader.

His first campaign, in 1444, took him into the Urupampa Valley, in an area now called Vilcapampa, north of Cuzco, and then west into Vilcas. Later he conquered the Huanca tribe in Huanmanca (the modern areas of Junín and Huancavelica) and the provinces of Tarma, Pumpu, Yauyu, and Huarochiri. When Hastu Huaraca, the defeated Chanca leader, organized opposition to the Inca in the Apurimac Valley, Pachacuti again defeated him in battle and achieved his submission and a grant of warriors for the Inca army. Later he won a great victory at Corampa, and in a campaign against the Soras, which culminated in a successful two-year Siege of Challomarca, their capital, he achieved virtual control of all central Peru south of Ecuador. He then sent his Chanca auxiliaries south into Collao, followed with his main army, defeated the Canas at Ayavire, at the end of Lake Titicaca, and in a decisive battle at Pucara eliminated Collao power. This military victory was probably in 1450.

Pachacuti’s firm control of the imperial administration and of the armies by which it was maintained is indicated by the fact that when he dispatched his general Capac Yapanqui into the province of Chucurpu and then learned that Capac had exceeded his orders and had advanced farther into the lands beyond Chucurpu, he ordered him back to Cuzco and had him executed for disobedience, even though the expedition had added more land to the empire than he had anticipated.

By 1457, Pachacuti had conquered all the territory between the coastal range of Peru and the valley of the Marañón. In 1463, he gave command of the army to his son (and heir), Topa Inca. This force of forty thousand men began in 1464 the subjugation of Chimor, an advanced civilization on the northern Peruvian coast that was, in a sense, Greece to Cuzco’s Rome. By 1470, with the fall of the Chimor capital of Chanchan (modern-day Trujillo), this conquest was complete. Other commanders under Pachacuti’s orders conquered the territory beyond Lake Titicaca and as far south as the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. In all, these conquests created an empire of sixteen million people, extending from Ecuador to northern Chile and Bolivia.

If Pachacuti were only a conqueror, he would be less remarkable. In fact, his supreme achievement was the creation of a political structure that survived with great stability until the civil war that broke out over the question of imperial succession shortly before the arrival of the Spanish. It was Pachacuti who inaugurated the system of populating conquered lands with colonists who eventually intermarried with the local population and gave them identity as Inca, and he created the mitimaes system, by which dissident elements in a conquered territory would be moved as colonists to another region where Inca rule had been accepted. He also instituted a system of runners to carry royal messages, which gave the empire the kind of coherence that only rapid communication could make possible.

In religious matters, Pachacuti simplified and redefined the rites of the Incas and incorporated the deities of conquered peoples into the Inca pantheon. Above all, he was determined to make each conquered nation an organic part of a larger whole. Often after conquering a nation, he would take its king to Cuzco, bestow on him lavish gifts and hospitality, and then send him home to rule as his proconsul. He also completely reorganized the imperial school in Cuzco, where not only the sons of the Inca caste but also those of conquered lords studied economics, government, military science, the arts and sciences of the Inca, and Quechua, the language of the empire.

Many of the engineering achievements of Pachacuti are still seen in Peru. In 1440, he began the complete rebuilding of Cuzco, and at about the same time the great fortress of Sacsahuaman, the house of the sun north of the city, was begun by twenty thousand laborers, a monument so massive that it was not completed until 1508, during the reign of his grandson. Though scholars no longer agree whether Pachacuti ordered the construction of Machu Picchu, it is probable that he was responsible for its later development as a bastion of Inca defense. He also encouraged terracing to take advantage of the steep Andean terrain for agriculture and is credited with the development of the greatest Inca irrigation systems.

When Topa Inca returned from his conquest of Chimor and Ecuador, Pachacuti partially resigned the throne to him, serving until his death in 1471 as a kind of coregent. This arrangement ensured a smooth transfer of power and enabled Topa to embark on more conquests when he became emperor, though some accounts suggest that as a result of Pachacuti’s declining physical powers, he had no choice but to share power with his son.

Significance

Pachacuti was not only a valiant warrior but also a statesman with a clear understanding of the requirements of imperial administration. The laws and the political structure he created survived almost a century until his descendants, forgetting the need for imperial unity in their quarrels over the succession to the throne, weakened the empire at precisely the moment that the soldiers of Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco Pizarro landed on the Peruvian coast in 1532. It seems unlikely, in fact, that the Spanish conquest of Peru would have been possible, at least with Pizarro’s small force, if it had been attempted when Pachacuti was at the height of his power.

Though Pachacuti’s wars with those immediate neighbors who had conspired against the Inca were fought to the death and often culminated in massacre, his conquests through the rest of his empire were followed by liberal treatment of his subjects. For Pachacuti, war was a necessary evil, the last application of political methods to achieve Inca hegemony and the order that, under his leadership, accompanied it. If war in the reigns of his predecessors was a means of personal aggrandizement not unlike hunting or sport, it was for Pachacuti the work of trained professionals and an instrument of public policy. His armies fought aggressively, but their success was in large part a result of Pachacuti’s attention to logistic detail. When their victories had been achieved, he directed their energies to the administration of the conquered territory and the creation of those public works that would make them more productive.

For these reasons, Pachacuti must be considered not only the greatest conqueror among all South American Indian leaders but also the most brilliant ruler.

Bibliography

Brundage, Burr Cartwright. Empire of the Inca. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. A thorough discussion of Inca civilization from its origins until the arrival of the Spanish, this study synthesizes the chronicles and scholarship to provide the most probable account of these events.

Cieza de León, Pedro de. The Incas. Edited and translated by Harriet de Onis. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. Cieza’s account, first published in 1553, is the most objective early account of the Incas. This objectivity and annotations by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen make it a basic text for understanding Inca history.

Cobo, Bernabé. History of the Inca Empire. Edited and translated by Roland Hamilton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Cobo was a Jesuit priest who went to Peru in 1599 as a missionary to the Indians. Most of his manuscript was lost; what remained, published in 1653, was largely concerned with pre-Columbian America. This work is based on Cobo’s archival research in Mexico City and Lima and on interviews with descendants of the Inca royal dynasty.

D’Altroy, Terence N. The Incas. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Study of the Inca Empire from its beginnings to its fall. Reconsiders the social, political, and economic structure of the empire in the light of recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, index.

Davies, Nigel. The Incas. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995. A close analysis of the Spanish sources of Incan history, the archaeological evidence, and scholars’ interpretations. Davies argues that little is known with certainty about the Inca rulers.

Garcilaso de la Vega. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Translated by Harold V. Livermore. 2 vols. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Completed in 1604 and first published in 1609 as Primera parte de los comentarios reales, Garcilaso’s history of Peru cannot be ignored but must be used with caution and corrected by reference to Cobo and Cieza de León.

Hyams, Edward, and George Ordish. The Last of the Incas. London: Longman, 1963. This work is concerned primarily with the Spanish conquest of Peru and the events that immediately preceded it, but its second chapter is a thorough discussion of Inca civilization and the events of the reign of Pachacuti.

Malpass, Michael A. Daily Life in the Inca Empire. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Written for complete newcomers to pre-Columbian history, the text carefully defines Inca terms and anthropological concepts as it describes Inca culture and history. Includes illustrations and a handy glossary.

Means, Philip Ainsworth. Ancient Civilizations of the Andes. New York: Gordian Press, 1964. A thorough study, originally published in 1931, of all the cultures and civilizations of Peru from the earliest prehistoric times to the Spanish Conquest. Means devotes two chapters to Inca history that are valuable, though partially superseded by later scholarship.

Rowe, John Howland. “Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest.” In Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian H. Steward. Vol. 2. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1949-1959. Rowe’s seven-volume study is primarily concerned with social and cultural aspects of Inca civilization, but it is important for the dating of pre-Conquest events generally accepted by later scholars.