(16) AZTEC & INCA EMPIRES

The preeminent empires of pre-Columbian America, although sadly best known to history (and myself) as foils to the Spanish Empire – albeit because of defeats unparalleled in history for just how few Spanish forces conquered such populous empires in so short a span of time.

I have more knowledge of the Aztec Empire prior to the Spanish Conquest – if only for the lurid horror stories of its imperial religion of human sacrifice on a scale unprecedented in the region, or anywhere else for that matter. However, the nature and extent of Aztec human sacrifice is often disputed as historical propaganda – as indeed is the so-called Black Legend of anti-Spanish history when it comes to the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire – with some fairness on both sides.

The Inca Empire was the largest empire in pre-Colombian America, almost ten times larger than the Aztec Empire and perhaps two or three times as populous but not as brutal. The size of the Inca Empire is quite striking for an empire predominantly in mountainous highlands – “one of the greatest imperial states in human history” created and maintained “without the use of the wheel, draft animals, knowledge of iron or steel, or even a system of writing”. Or largely without money or markets apparently, like Star Trek but without the post-scarcity. Also one without the more characteristic grain cultivation of other agricultural states – instead cultivating potatoes.

Which makes its defeat even more striking than that of the Aztecs, particularly as the Spanish leader Francisco Pizarro started with about a third of the forces of his counterpart Cortes against the Aztecs – a mere 168 soldiers – and was over 60 years of age at the time. Now that’s how to spend your retirement years!

Although Pizarro was perhaps luckier in his timing with a civil war of succession to the Inca imperial throne – as well as capturing and holding the reigning Inca ruler hostage.

Of course, the primary factor for the fall of both empires was the disease or diseases spread ahead of the Spanish who brought them – and which ravaged the native American populations who had no acquired resistance to them. While that would seem to be the greatest scale for the role disease has played in the fall of empires, disease has played a recurring role in the decline or fall of other empires, including the Roman Empire – as is the subject of Plagues and Peoples by historian William H. McNeill.

I have less knowledge of the Inca Empire prior to Spanish Conquest, although that seems apt as it’s an empire that has a quality of mystery or at least mystique to it. That includes the legendary “lost cities of the Incas” to which they retreated as a vestigial empire – the neo-Inca state – as well as “periodic attempts by indigenous leaders to expel the Spanish colonists and re-create the Inca Empire until the late 18th century”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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