The Inca power, unlike that of Montezuma, was absolutist, based on control by a hierarchy of officials over the forced labour of the core area of Cuzco and of tribes subjugated in about a century and a half of expansion. Most aspects of life were meticulously regulated from above, and the net effect was that the resources of the Empire, apart from the necessary subsistence of the masses, were channelled into providing the power, the glory, and the luxury of ‘the Incas’, the ruling family and its associates, and above all of ‘the Inca’, the autocrator at the head of the pyramid; but this was a cosmic structure, as much sacred as secular, and the Inca, the son of the Sun, was the source from which all blessings flowed—light, life itself.^[38] Elaborate records were kept by the quipus or knotted cords; two paved roads, along the coast and along the plateau, with transverse links through the- 71 -mountains (altogether some 15,000km), ensured communications from Ecuador to northern Chile; they were well provided with tambos or post-inns and an elaborate system of relay runners, so that it took only five days to send a message from Quito to Cuzco, 2000km.^[39] The roads and runners were important factors in the rapidity of the Spanish conquest of the country, the tradition of massive forced labour in its exploitation when conquered. As in Mexico, local discontents and revolts and political rivalries greatly facilitated the conquista.^[40] There was no lack of Indian agents, puppets, and allies; nor of terrorised porters to provide the transport services of the armies. If the weakness of the Aztecs was that they were not yet consolidated into a firm state structure, but caught at the ‘moment of crystallization’ from a tribal to an urban-centred society, the weakness of the Incas was the converse—a state structure too rigid and centralised to take the shock of a blow directly to its head—the Inca Atahualpa.^[41]

At the time of Pizarro's arrival, Atahualpa had recently defeated his half-brother Huascar in a bitter succession war, and was endeavouring to exterminate any possible rivals in the imperial family. He waited for Pizarro at Cajamarca, high up on the plateau, apparently thinking that there this strange but tiny invasion could be crushed or absorbed; and it is fair to say that the fate he envisaged for them was probably a ghastly one: it was slay or be slain.^[42] Within an hour or two of the meeting of the two men, on 16 November 1532, the Spaniards had seized Atahualpa's person—which was sacrosanct—and slaughtered thousands of his followers, too bewildered to resist. Some months later, having collected a huge ransom, they charged Atahualpa with ‘treason’: he accepted baptism to purchase death by strangling rather than by burning alive. Some of the conquistadores were horrified by this foul play, although probably more were in favour, and may indeed have enforced it on Pizarro. There yet remains a beautiful but heart-rending native elegy for Atahualpa: all things, all people, are engulfed into suffering.…^[43] For now the Empire seemed no more than a headless trunk, utterly at the disposal of the victors.

This was at the end of July 1533; a year less a day from the meeting at Cajamarca, Pizarro entered Cuzco. By the middle of 1534 the Quitan provinces had been secured; Pedro de Alvarado of Guatemala, who had diverted a projected South Seas voyage to the nearer and surer riches of Quito, was bought off, leaving his ships and many of his men as reinforcements to the more authorised conquistadores. The seal was set on the conquista by the formal establishment of Spanish municipalities at Jauja, Cuzco, and Quito.

More significant than these was the foundation, on 6 January 1535, of the Ciudad de los Reyes (the Three Kings of the East), better known as Lima. The contrast with Cortes's rebuilding of Mexico is striking: although its fabled and its real wealth lay on the high Andean plateaus, Spanish Peru, much more than Nueva España, was oriented to the Pacific. Simple climatic factors played a part, for one can hardly envisage a metropolis in the unhealthy tierra caliente of Mexico, while Lima is not only more hospitable than the plateaus, with their- 72 -

- 73 -extreme temperatures and rarefied air, but owing to the Humboldt or Peru Current is remarkably cool for its latitude.^[44] The Conquista at this stage was looking to landed settlement rather than mining—there was still much Indian gold to be collected, and the silver of Potosi was unknown—and the irrigated coastal valleys were again much more favourable than the plateaus for Iberian agriculture and horticulture. But the raison d’être of Lima and its adjacent port Callao was to be a secure base by the sea; the more so as, after the first shock, Inca resistance was rallying.

Resistance culminated in 1536, after Almagro's departure with a large proportion of the Spanish force on the first entrada into Chile—the ‘New Toledo’ promised him beyond Pizarro's ‘New Castile’; this was clearly Pizarro's diversion of an over-strong rival. But during Amalgro's absence a great rising was led by the Inca Manco Capac, whose brother Paullu, however, had gone with Almagro and on his return was to prove the most committed of Spanish associates. Manco himself had been recognised as puppet Inca, but suspicion was mutual; he was subjected to (literally) obscene outrage and escaped to seek revenge. There was very desperate fighting at Cuzco, and Lima itself was threatened. Appeals for aid brought responses from Cortes—probably with ulterior motives—in New Spain and Espinosa in Panama, and Alvarado came from Guatemala, though he merely added another element to the internecine factions of the conquerors.

- 74 -Once the first major effort at Cuzco had failed, Manco was unable to maintain his immense but ill-organised forces. By the end of 1539 resistance was broken; Manco retreated to the tangled mountains of the Amazonian slope, between the Apurimac and the Urubamba. Here, only some 125km from Cuzco, he reigned in sadly diminished state until in 1544 he was murdered by Spanish refugees from the civil wars, to whom he had given hospitality. This pathetic relic of Inca power around Vilcabamba survived, a thorn in the flesh of Spanish authority, until 1572, when the last of the Incas to rule, Tupac Amaru, was captured and ‘executed’—after the customary ‘conversion’ to the Faith; a judicial murder by the Viceroy Toledo which shocked the more settled colonial society of the time. The name Inca lived on as an honorific for those Indian grandees of the royal line who had come to terms, which might be very comfortable terms: Manco Capac's great grand-daughter, whose father was a great-nephew of St Ignatius Loyola, was created Marquesa de Oropesa, the only hereditary fief in Peru. But in the last great nativist rising, in 1780–1, a direct descendant of Tupac Amaru, Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, proclaimed himself Tupac Amaru II: with his failure and barbarous execution, even the name of Incas was blotted out, being proscribed as a formal signature.^[45]