The Inca Empire covered nearly 800,000 square miles of western South America and was built without writing, iron, wheeled vehicles, or private property. What existed instead was a system of communal obligation and redistributed resources that grew from a single tribe in a mountain valley around 1240. This is how that happened.
The word 'Inca' gets used as a shorthand for an entire civilization — roughly like calling medieval Europe 'the Papacy.' The Incas were properly speaking the ruling group of Quechua-speaking people centered at Cuzco, and the Inca was simply the title of their chief. The civilization they built in the Andes between roughly 1240 and 1532 covered nearly 800,000 square miles along the western edge of South America — the largest state ever created in the pre-European Americas — and it operated without writing, without wheeled vehicles, without iron, and without private property in land. That last point keeps getting glossed over. The Incariate ran on communal labor and communal ownership. Land belonged to the tribe. Animals belonged to the tribe. There was no money in the sense we mean. What developed instead was an elaborate system of obligations and redistributed resources, spread across an enormous and varied landscape from high-altitude grasslands to Pacific desert coast to Amazonian slopes. Understanding how that system built itself — from a single tribe in a mountain valley around 1240 to the largest state in the Western Hemisphere — is the actual story of the Incas.
The Bolson of Cuzco — a valley about seventy miles long and sixty miles wide, sitting at roughly 11,000 feet but with a surprisingly temperate climate — was where the tribe that would build the largest empire in pre-European America first settled around 1240.
The Bolson of Cuzco and the Tradition of Manco Capac
Around the sixteenth parallel of south latitude, in the central Andes, is a valley — bolson in Spanish, meaning pocket — about seventy miles long and sixty miles wide. It sits at about 11,000 feet but has a climate considerably more temperate than that altitude usually implies, something resembling the south of France rather than what you'd expect from the numbers. This was the Bolson of Cuzco — a Quechua word meaning navel or center. And around 1240, according to tradition, a tribe of the Quechua stock arrived there under a leader named Manco Capac. The founding tradition has Manco Capac and his wife Mama Ocllo coming as children of the Sun, carrying a golden wand from Inti — the Sun — that would sink into the earth at the spot where they were to build their capital. It sank in the Bolson of Cuzco. Manco Capac went to teach the men agriculture, give them a religion, and establish a social organization. Mama Ocllo went to teach the women to spin, weave, and maintain the household virtues. This is a founding myth doing several things simultaneously. It's explaining the transition from nomadic to sedentary life. It's providing divine sanction for the authority of the ruling lineage. And it's preserving, in mythological form, real historical information about when and how a particular tribal group settled in the Cuzco valley. Manco Capac is the Peruvian version of a figure that appears across many cultures — the culture-bringer who arrives and transforms wandering groups into an organized society. His Peruvian counterparts include the Chinese Fohi, the Hindu Buddha, the Egyptian Osiris, and the Mexican Quetzalcoatl.
The Tribal Organization Behind the Myth
The sister-marriage claim that most accounts of the Incas include — that the Inca was required to marry his sister to keep the bloodline pure — runs into a basic problem. The same tradition tells us that Manco Capac established the social organization of Cuzco, and that organization was the standard tribal system of its time, in which marriage within the gens was strictly prohibited. You could not marry within your own kinship group. The claim that Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo were both brother and sister and husband and wife contradicts the very social laws the tradition credits him with establishing. The tribe was divided into twelve gentes, five belonging to one phratry and seven to the other. The two groups occupied Upper and Lower Cuzco respectively, and they acted separately in religious observances and social games. Two elected chiefs governed: the Capac Inca, the chief military leader, and the Uillac Umu, the civil head of the tribal council. A twelve-member council held the actual governing authority. This was not a monarchy in any European sense. The office of Inca was elective. The tribal council chose the war chief based on demonstrated ability and could remove him for failure — which they did, as the historical record makes clear later. Every able-bodied man was a warrior trained from infancy. War was waged for subsistence, for prisoners, for the prestige of military achievement — not for territorial expansion in the modern sense, since the Indians had no concept of private land ownership to expand into.
Confederation and the Earliest Expansion
The named successors of Manco Capac — Sinchi Rocca, Lloque Yupanqui, and Mayta Capac, all of the 13th century — are figures about whom almost nothing specific is known. What the tradition preserves about their period is that the Cuzcans began establishing predominance in the surrounding region less through conquest than through drawing neighboring tribes into confederation for mutual defense and offense. This was the highest form of political organization available to the Indians at the time, and it laid the foundations of everything that followed. Capac Yupanqui, ruling around the beginning of the 14th century, found pretexts for actual war and conquered tribes to the west as far as the pass of Vilcanote, overlooking the Titicaca Basin. Inca Rocca, the next Inca, apparently concentrated on internal improvements — which suggests the Incariate was becoming wealthy enough to support them. Yahuar Huaccac had a disastrous tenure. Then came Uira Cocha, who began a remarkable series of conquests. Uira Cocha conquered the Collas and annexed the entire Titicaca Basin — the seat of the earlier Pirua civilization, by then occupied by pastoral tribes too high for successful agriculture. The copper mines of that region gave the Cuzcans access to better materials for weapons and tools. Trade networks developed between the highlands and the lower elevations, exchanging maize and cotton for wool, potatoes, livestock, and copper. And a system of colonization began that would later develop into the mitimaes.
The battle against the Chancas confederation, fought on the heights above Cuzco, was the turning point of Inca history. Yupanqui's victory over the invading Chancas won him election as Inca — replacing his deposed brother — and earned him the title Pachacutec, meaning 'he who changes the world.'