The Conquistadors (35 page)

In road building, however, the Incas were supreme. Paradoxically, it was their superb network of highways that made the Spanish conquest possible. The royal roads of the Incas finally extended 3,250 miles from Quito in the north to Talca in central Chile, spanning 35° of latitude. They were military roads every bit as vital to the maintenance of the empire as the roads constructed for the Roman legions. In the coastal area the roads of the Chimú and other city-states were developed and extended until the main artery was 2,520 miles long and up to about 24 feet wide, with lateral link roads connecting it to the Andean highway. Pack llama stairways climbed as high as 15,600 feet. Rope cables, some of them as thick as a man's body and renewed each year, slung the roads across deep river gorges. Road markers were set up at each
topo
(4
miles) along their entire length and there were rest houses (
tambos
) about every twelve miles for the Inca and his retinue as
he travelled his empire; some of these were, in fact, fortresses with magazines containing arms and everything else required for the equipment of armies travelling light to deal with insurrection. Small post houses about every five miles housed runners (
chasquis
); these men, with their distinctive chequered tunics, were used for the relaying of dispatches at the incredible rate of 150 miles per day. Verbal dispatches were often supplemented by the
quipu,
and though these knotted strings were primarily for recording taxes and the contents of Government storehouses, it is probable that there was some sort of code in existence based on numbers. Certainly a strand of the royal fringe marked the dispatch as emanating from the Inca himself.

The knotted strings of the
quipu
were the exact equivalent of the notched sticks of the old tally system used in Europe. Pedro Cieza de León, writing immediately after the conquest, states that ‘in the capital of each province there were accountants whom they called
quipu-camayocs,
and by these knots they kept the account of the tribute paid by the natives of that district in silver, gold, clothing, flocks, down to wood and other more insignificant things, and by these
quipus
at the end of the year, or ten or twenty years, they gave a report to one whose duty it was to check the account so exact that not even a pair of sandals was missing'. By this means the cacique of Huacara-Pora could account for every item he had given to the Spaniards since Pizarro arrived in that valley ‘without a single omission … and I was amazed thereby'. And he adds, ‘the wars, cruelties, pillaging and tyranny of the Spaniards had been such that if these Indians had not been so accustomed to order and providence they would all have perished. … After they (the Spaniards) had passed through, the chieftains came together with the keepers of the
quipus,
and if one had expended more than the others, those who had given less made up the difference, so that all were on an equal footing.'

This ‘equal footing' was the cornerstone on which the empire was based. ‘No-one who was lazy or tried to live by the work of others was tolerated; everyone had to work. Thus on certain days each lord went to his lands and took the plough in hand … even the Incas themselves did this to set an example.' This was, of course, a purely symbolic ritual intended to give a lead to the rank and file. If a man was fit ‘he worked and lacked for nothing; and if he was ill he received what he needed from the storehouse'. Nevertheless, the ‘equal footing',
as in all centrally-controlled, bureaucratic, or communist, states, was a façade supporting a two-caste system. The fact that penalties for transgression of the Inca laws were less severe for the bureaucratic élite only emphasizes the importance of the upper caste in the maintenance of the system. In modern communistic terms they were the ‘party' members.

The basis of the Inca state was the worker, and the basic unit of the worker was the
ayllu.
This was a village grouping of families, a virtually self-sufficient unit that varied in size with the nature of the terrain. The grouping was historic, a natural development in mountainous country where each valley or grassy upland was almost completely isolated. The difference under the Inca system was that the isolated communities were connected by royal roads. These, designed for conquest in the first place, became subsequently the lines of communication that made central planning and organization possible. The other fundamental change was that the
ayllu
or clan land was appropriated by the state and reallocated, part to the people, part to the state, and part to the sun god, the
ayllu
paying a form of labour tax by tilling and harvesting the state and religious lands. It also washed the gold from the placer deposits in the rivers and got the silver from the mountain mines, refining it from the lead and tin and sulphur with which it was mixed by ‘burning the hill, and, as the sulphur stone burns, the silver falls in lumps'.

Each autumn that part of the land loaned by the state to the commune was re-allocated, each married couple being entitled to a
topo.
This varied in size according to the number of mouths the family had to feed; in general it was about an acre. Each able-bodied worker had to marry by the age of twenty, otherwise a bride was chosen for him. Since the
puric,
or worker, was the basis of Inca society, the reproduction of this essential raw material of empire was encouraged; marriage was simply a matter of joining hands and exchanging sandals. The labour force for working state and religious lands was based on the decimal or
quipu
system; ten workers made a, field unit under a leader, ten of these units had a foreman, ten foremen a headman. And so it went on, from the village unit to the tribal unit, from the tribal to the provincial, from the provincial to the regional, and finally from the regional, which was one of the four quarters of the empire, to the Inca himself.

There was almost no way by which a male child could escape from his ayllu. As he was born, so he died. Garcilaso tells us:

Children were brought up very severely, not only among the Incas, but among simple people as well. From birth, they were washed in cold water every morning, then wrapped in swaddling covers … This custom of a cold dip was said to strengthen the child's legs and arms and give him greater resistance to the severe mountain climate. His arms were kept tightly bound until the age of four months. Indeed, during the entire first cycle, he remained attached night and day to a netting that was as hard as wood, and which was stretched across a chest with only three legs, to make it rock like a cradle. In order to nurse her child, the mother leaned down to him, without ever untying him or taking him up in her arms. He was fed the breast three times a day, morning, noon and night, and never at other hours, even if he cried and called his mother. The women always nursed their own children, no matter what their rank; they abstained from all relations with their husbands as long as they were nursing, and until the child was weaned, it received no other food than its mother's milk. When the time came to take the child out of its cradle, in order not to have to take it into their arms, the mothers put it in a hole, dug in the ground, which was as deep as the child's chest. When he reached the age where he could walk on his hands and feet, he nursed kneeling, and walked round his mother to change breasts, without her giving him any help whatsoever. At the birth of the baby, the mothers took less care of themselves than they did of their children: after having given birth, either in their homes, or beside a river, and having washed the new born baby, they washed themselves and went back to work as though nothing had happened. There were no mid wives, properly speaking, and those women who served in this function were more like witches than anything else. This was the common custom among all the Indians in Peru, whether rich or poor, nobles or commoners.

At puberty the male child assumed the breech clout. Thereafter his life was spent working for his family and for the state, or in the armed services, either fighting or doing garrison duty, or in the labour corps building roads and cities.

Because of the vertical variations of climate, the crops the worker grew were incredibly various. Cotton on the coast complemented the llama wool of the Sierra as the raw material of clothes, even armour and a sort of war helmet. The dominant food was maize and potatoes – there were twenty varieties of maize and no less than 240 varieties of potato. Terracing and irrigation were developed on a grand scale, the water being channelled from as much as forty miles away. Game was protected, being rounded up, region by region, in the royal hunt, which was a yearly event involving anything up to thirty thousand warrior-beaters. The predators were slaughtered, poor stock culled to provide meat for the villages, and the vicuna and the guanaco, the wild llama, shorn for their fine wool. Yet, though their pastoral-agrarian economy was extremely advanced, the only form of plough was a copper-shoed digging stick; if they knew about the wheel, they did not use it. An abundant supply of docile labour, the terracing system in the
mountains and intensive cultivation in the irrigated areas discouraged the development of more mechanized farming methods, just as the mountain terrain of their natural habitat discouraged the development of any form of wheeled transport. They had the
puric
for cultivation, the llama for transport. That was sufficient. Man hours were the basis of their civilization. And though the
puric
had security, he had little freedom.

This was true also of the élite. The
orejones
(the big-eared ones) were born of the blood royal; they lived and died within the
ayllu
of the Inca. Their life, however, was very different. They were given a good education – mathematics, religion, language and the Inca version of history – culminating in tough examinations. To mark them out from the rest of the population their ears were pierced and the hole enlarged until it would take the gold or jewelled earplugs that indicated their station. There was also a second class of administrators – the
curacas
– necessitated by the rapid growth of empire. It was Inca policy to administer newly-acquired territory through the existing administrative machinery – under supervision, of course, and after suitable indoctrination of the local ruling class. A man could climb to the privileged position of
curaca
by ability. This was his limit. But a woman could go further. At puberty there was a hair-combing ceremony, and if a girl were particularly beautiful or showed exceptional ability in weaving or other feminine craft, she could be chosen to attend a school at Cuzco or at one of the provincial capitals. She had a chance then to marry into the nobility or to become one of the ‘daughters of the sun', a royal concubine, living a life of segregation and at the disposal of the Inca alone.

The position of women generally is covered in great detail by Garcilaso in his
Royal Commentaries.
The Virgins of the Sun were the élite, the chosen of the royal blood. At Cuzco they were housed in a ‘convent close by, but not within the Temple of the Sun'. They were chosen for their beauty and lineage at puberty so that there should be no doubt about their virginity. There were about fifteen hundred of them. At maturity they became
mamacunas,
and there were five hundred or so virgins in service to look after them. ‘All the table service in their convent, as well as that in the Temple of the Sun, was either gold or silver. They also had the privileges of a garden of precious metals, similar to that of the temple.' If one of the Virgins was so misguided as to ignore her vow of chastity and get caught, the law demanded that ‘she was to be buried alive and her accomplice hung; he, his wife, his children, his servants and all his close relations; and, in order that the punishment should be complete, his llamas were also to be put to death, his fields destroyed, his house razed to the ground, and the entire place was to be strewn with stones, so that nothing could grow there again'. The main occupations of the Virgins of the Sun was to spin and weave the garments of the Inca and his Coya, and also the cloths that were offered up to the Sun at the time of sacrifice.

The provincial ‘convents' (there is now a reconstruction of one of these
at Pachacamac near Lima) were organized on the lines of the Cuzco establishment, but since these virgins were not of the blood-royal, the materials they wove could be distributed by the Inca to those he wished to reward. Moreover, Garcilaso tells us, they were the Inca's concubines and

when the Inca wished to possess one or other of these women, he had her summoned and she was brought to wherever he happened to be. … Those who had once had relations with the king could not go back into the convent. They were brought to the royal palace, where they served as attendants or ladies-in-waiting to the Queen, until the day they were sent back home to their provinces, richly endowed with land and other benefits. … Each convent had a governor, who had to belong to the Inca class, and who was surrounded by a majordomo and numerous other assistants. The tableware in all these convents was also of gold and silver. In fact, it might be stated that all the precious metal that was dug in the imperial mines served no other purpose than that of decorating the temples, convents, and royal palaces. … Other women of royal blood lived in the palace, and observed the vow of perpetual chastity, without, however, adding to it that of confinement. … They were called
occlos
and were treated with the greatest consideration. Nor was their chastity feigned. … Married women were generally dedicated to the care of their homes; they knew how to spin and weave wool or cotton, according to whether they lived in cold or hot regions. They did little sewing, however, for there was hardly any needed, Indian garments, both masculine and feminine, being generally woven in one piece in the proper length and width. … All the men and all the women worked together in the fields.