I know. You woke up in the night again, wondering how less than two hundred Spaniards led by an illiterate pig farmer took out a veteran army of two or three hundred thousand Imperial Inca troops, destroyed the greatest empire in the western hemisphere, and took all their gold. It gnaws at you. Who can set your mind at ease? None of the standard answers serve.
Relax. You've come to the right place. Close your eyes, take a breath. Have a cup of adenosine triphosphate blocker, there's a fresh pot.
How? You ask yourself again. How did they lose?
The usual explanations are: technology - the Spanish had guns, steel, and horses. Plague - European diseases, possibly smallpox, had filtered south from Mexico to ravage South America, killing the old Emperor and his heir. Civil War - without a clear line of succession, two brothers fought over the crown (Borla), killing hundreds of thousands, disrupting and exhausting the empire. Culture shock - are these guys gods, or what?
Okay. Everything counts. But you're unconvinced. The plague left enough alive to slaughter each other over the throne. The civil war left enough to bring two hundred thousand against Cuzco. Technology - Really? Two hundred thousand against 190 armored and horsed alien invaders plus a couple K local dupes? You could have just smothered them with your corpses. And by then you knew they were just men and animals.
There's another factor - cultural exchange. The Old World had been swapping secrets since the Pleistocene - tips and tricks passed back forth from China to Africa, Ireland to Iran, for millennia. In the New World information oozed slowly north and south, choked off at the Darien Gap in the Isthmus of Panama, bogged down in the swamps of Columbia - as far as we know, there was no traffic between the polities of South and Central America. No silk route, no sea trade; the Aztecs and Incas had never heard of one another. Northward, the march of civilization tapered off in the Sonora desert and trickled out along the Gulf coast, died in the Mojave, barely touched the forests of the north.
The Spanish had thousands of years of tactical expertise to draw upon; from before the phalanx to beyond the hollow square; from Xenophon to Sun Tzu. Did the Inca armies even know how to stand at attention? Did they march in step? Probably not. As soon as battle lines clashed, it was man on man; pure chaos, no order.
And cultural sophistication; the Spaniards made deals with the disaffected, recently subdued Inca protectorates, using terms, concepts, promises, unknown over here. The ideology of alliance, of diplomacy, was more primitive among the Amerinds.
Kim McQuarrie's book, The Last Days of the Incas, drawing on John Hemmings' The Conquest of the Incas, is good; it lays out a convincing autopsy. One Inca general, Quizo, took the measure of the invaders and learned how to outfight them. But too late, and he was wasted by a bad command decision, ordered to confront Pizarro's forces on the open plain around Lima, where the Inca forces didn't stand a chance, and there he died.
The Incas were beaten by surprise. They didn't have time to adjust to any of it. They were too backward and their enemies moved too fast. They learned; the rebel Manco wore armor and rode a horse. But they didn't learn fast enough.
If they had only known...
If you could go back to warn them...what would you say?
It could have happened. Say an Arab sailor washed ashore in 1501 and married into Inca nobility. Say he saw it coming, the End of Times, and decided to deflect it.
Here's what he'd say:
Don't let them land. When the ships show up, look innocent, offer them gold and women and take them alive. Keep the ones who know anything and can be reasoned with, kill the rest. Let no word leak north. Juice them for knowledge: engineering, steel working, ship building, writing, geography, chemistry, economy, diplomacy, carpentry, strategy, tactics. Languages! The keystone arch. Even the wheel might be useful along the coast. Breed the horses (kill the rats).
Fortify the coast. Don't trust their promises. And, most important,
Learn to trade. You have something everybody back there wants to the point of dementia: gold. Send envoys everywhere - England, China, Holland, Japan, Mali, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Korea...Spain. Offer them gold in exchange for goods and services; for armor, gunpowder, paper, most of all: science. Import experts and pay them in shiny metal. Play them one against the other. You have other commodities - your textiles are at their best, cumbi cloth, as fine as silk. You have maize, many species of potato, peppers, silver, cochineal, quinine. Coca (cocaine), San Pedro Cactus (mescaline) and ayahuasca.
Make it clear that there is more profit in trading with you than in trying to invade you. Deal honestly and sharply. Get the best exchange possible for your gold. You have a lot of it and they want it so badly they're pissing their pants.
If you move fast enough you might be able to get north to the Aztecs in time to warn them, to make some deals.
Peruvian farmlands produce far less now than they did in 1531. Under Inca rule, there was no poverty; everyone was clothed, fed, sheltered, and given 100 or more days paid vacation a year with free drink and entertainment; free medical care until death for everyone of whatever condition. There was always a surplus of goods.
There was no merchant class, no useless middle-men; there was, in fact, no money. Everyone worked from maturity to retirement. Even the aristocracy performed real functions. The concept of reciprocity between ruler and ruled was deeply instilled in the Andes; these weren't Asian potentates or medieval dukes; you didn't work your laborers to death or starve them or slaughter them in war. Their contribution to the state was strictly defined. The concept of "democracy" would come slowly to the Tawantinsuyu but when it did there would be no beggars on the street, no old women starving alone in their apartments; no piss-smelling projects, no unemployment, no one dying of liver failure because their insurance denied the procedure.
Information technology would come quickly to the Inca - they were good at numbers; the quipu, their knotted-string accounting technology, is seen to have used a binary system.
They were smart, hard-working, prosperous, constantly learning - if they had held their own against the European incursion - as did Japan - they could have emerged as a solid player in global economics. A strong partner.
Had they not been taken so much by surprise.
Damn shame, too.
Damn shame, too.
All right. That's the how and why of it. Tonight you'll sleep.
Postscript:
Another little element in the equation - the Conquistadors had a leader with much guts, Francisco Pizarro. The Incas had Lucky Chicken, who ransomed the empire for his life and lost it anyway; who sold out his gods for a less painful death. If one of his generals had been in his place - QuizQuiz who fought until his own troops killed him so that they could go home; Challcuchima who burned to death looking his killers in the eye, or Ruminahui, "Stone Eye," who, tortured for the secret of hidden treasure, likewise went to the stake in silence - there would have been a different outcome. For a while.
