Inca Political Power, by Kevin Lane [2022]
Very complex rulership traditions with rapid growth, matrilineal succession, co-rulerships, diarchy, leading to civil war and weakness on eve of conquest
Kevin Lane wrote:
CHAPTER SIX
INCA POLITICAL POWER
… Undoubtedly, the death knell of the Inca Empire was the coming of the Spanish, yet vested interests within the imperial state, especially between local forces and wider imperial politics, were providing increasing stress to the body politic, leading eventually to the Inca Civil War of 1529–32. Essentially, the powerful centrifugal force of the state and organization of Inca control were increasingly pitted against that of the local Cuzco panacas. The panacas, from the Quechua root word pana, meaning ‘brother’s sister or cousin’, were segmentary, ayllu-like organizations of hereditary royal houses built around the veneration of ancestral mummies, or rather life-in-death Inca kings. While containing many similarities to the ayllu, it was a term particular to the Inca.
Therefore, while it is true that the Inca, like most Andean people, observed parallel descent, that is, sons descended from fathers and daughters from mothers, the fact that the term panaca is rooted in a female suffix indicates that something else is at play here. To explain, the Inca also practised split inheritance, where a new sapa Inca ascended the throne with the title and little property, while the recently deceased Inca kept his household (panaca) and reign-accumulated wealth. In these circumstances, the latter’s main attendants were his female relatives, the same female relatives that would subsequently provide the ruling Inca’s main wives (known as coyas). As such, a number of scholars have loosely interpreted the panaca as a group of brothers and their sisters who have descended along matrilineal lines from a common male Inca ancestor. This was a group whose members practised exogamy: marriage outside the lineage group.
Indeed, the marriage between a sapa Inca and high-ranking panaca women (usually the Inca’s sisters, half-sisters or close cousins) ensured two things: first, the support of his wife’s panaca, and second, support for the Inca’s sons and erstwhile heirs through recourse to their mother’s panaca lineage. In Andean – and Inca – society the role and agency of women was underestimated by Spanish chroniclers. …
… [At] the heart of the panaca was veneration of a dead Inca. Veneration of the dead had a long pedigree in the Andes, but with the Inca and the panacas it was taken to new extremes. For instance, by the time Huascar came to the throne in 1525 he had to contend with eleven panacas of sacred deceased kings, each with their own political agenda. This agenda was inherently conservative, aimed at preserving the rights and prerogatives of their particular household. No wonder that Huascar attempted to restrict them in a bid for stronger centralized control and governance. Needless to say, at this turn of events by Huascar, most of the panacas then allied with his half-brother, rival and eventual successor, Atahualpa (r. 1532–3). The rise and fall of the Incas have to be understood under these dual, and sometimes competing, lens of royal and panaca power, their respective roles in succession and governance, and what this meant for how the empire evolved towards its eventual nemesis.
Both the standard and long timelines for Inca history provide a relatively short chronology – between 95 and 150 years – for the rise of the empire. In all respects, then, this expansion had been at a vertiginous rate, and state and community institutions struggled to keep pace with its growth, which at its largest extent stretched over 4,000 kilometres (nearly 2,500 mi.) from northern Ecuador, down to northwestern Argentina and Chile. Given the pressures of managing such a vast empire, it comes as no surprise that the expansionist Incas of the fifteenth century, especially the last undisputed Inca, Huayna Cápac (r. 1493–1525), were attempting to renew the institutions of the empire, escalating the use of colonists (mitmas), regulating the flow of labour tribute (mit’a), while seeking to professionalize the army.
These reforms went hand in hand with others to ameliorate the inherently unstable and complex system of Inca succession, by instituting first, possibly under Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui (r. 1438–71), the designation of a principal wife (or wives) – the coya – of the Inca from whose sons the next Inca would be selected. While this did not always succeed, with often the most able or ruthless making it to the tasselled throne (the Inca insignia of royalty was the mascaipacha, a tasselled fringe), it established at least some sort of basic order to their royal inheritance system. This was followed by a further, more drastic, reform under Topa Inca Yupanqui (r. 1471–93), which ruled that the Inca’s coya had to be his full sister (although in the end this usually meant his half-sister, first cousin or female relatives of the same generation). Given the number of secondary wives and concubines, this was seen as a means towards controlling potential successors to the throne, and it was not unheard of for the Inca to have numerous full and half-brothers killed off upon ascending (something that Topa Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Cápac certainly did early in their reigns).
In so far as succession was concerned, the essential problem at the centre of Inca royalty could be said to be the lack of primogeniture within Inca power politics. Even in countries with primogeniture – such as feudal Europe in the ninth to fifteenth centuries – the eldest did not necessarily inherit the throne. But primogeniture established a set of rules that could, and would often, be followed. The lack of such a clear line of succession brought serious instability to the Inca inheritance system, in which the strong and ambitious could oust the weak and less able. It also brought in its wake periods of chaos that would wreak havoc on the nascent institutions of the empire. …
… [The] succession travails of the last three Incas before the civil war demonstrates how complex and dangerous inheritance of the empire could be, both for the winners and losers. These moments of crisis were made even more convoluted by the role played by the panacas – the royal households of dead Incas – and courtly intrigues of the various wives and concubines of the ruling Inca.
In turn, many of these women belonged themselves to panacas and were therefore habitually engaged in furthering the interests of their own section, household and, in the case of wives or mothers from regions outside Cuzco, those of their geographical areas. This occurred when Paullu Inca (later Cristóbal Paullu Inca; 1518–1549) ascended the Inca throne in 1537; his mother, Añaz Colque, was from the Huaylas province and her son favoured that region.
Neither Huascar’s nor Atahualpa’s mothers were coyas to Huayna Cápac, although Huascar did have his mother marry the mummy of Huayna Cápac in a bid to further legitimize his claim to rule. This example of necrogamy was only possible because the dead in the Andes retained a degree of agency and vitality in accordance with their status in life and observable oracular powers in death. As deceased-yet-living divine beings, the Inca royal dead wielded considerable power through their panacas.
As alluded to earlier, the panacas were the households created around the figure of a sapa Inca at the time of his death. The Inca practised split inheritance, whereby the heir to the throne inherited nothing except his authority, while the remaining wives, concubines, sons and daughters of the dead Inca formed a panaca that took care of his body and became part of the ritual ceque system around Cuzco. From within the ranks of the new household, a person or persons speaking for the dead Inca in his living-in-death oracular capacity were selected. These panacas held on to the lands and estates conquered or adjudicated to them during the life of the titular Inca and could hold considerable authority in the regular councils and deliberations with the ruling Inca. This was especially true of powerful panacas, such as that of Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui (Hatun panaca, although he was initially of the Iñaca panaca) and Topa Inca Yupanqui (Capac panaca). The prestige of these households was not centred on how old the panaca was, but rather how much it possessed, which is why later households, particularly those of Pachacutec, Topa Inca and Huayna Capac, with vast property gained through conquest were particularly influential.
The panacas, in comparison to the ayllus, were matrilineal, and therefore a medium through which women could wield influence and power. Indeed, given that a ruling Inca only founded his household at the time of death, during life he maintained close ties with his mother’s kin and panaca. Furthermore, in the Andes at this time women were not in as subservient a position as their counterparts in Europe, or as they would later be under Spanish rule. In a highly dualistic society (one divided into unequal, reciprocal halves), women invariably occupied the lower half, while men belonged to the upper one (lower and upper were known respectively as hurin and hanan, and were the classic dual division present throughout Andean society). Nevertheless, the relationship between men and women in Andean society, and especially among the ranks of the elite, was essentially complementary. Therefore, ruling Incas usually selected their coyas and secondary wives from the royal households to cement their power and alliances in Cuzco, as well as with the panacas. Women from influential households were much sought after. In turn, these women maintained ties with their original households and strove to further the panaca’s interests through through their sons and the advantageous marriage of daughters. Women also owned land and resources in their own right, giving a solid foundation to their power.
No woman was more powerful than the coya, the principal wife of the sapa Inca (usually his full sister or in some cases his half-sister or first cousin). Half-sisters and first cousins were also ranked as full sisters under Inca kinship terminology. There could be more than one at any one time. The marriage and union of the Inca to the coya was seen as recreating the original sacred couple of the Andes, the so-called yanantin, the marriage between the Sun (father) and the Moon (mother). As mothers to the prospective heir, they wielded considerable influence, especially if their son attained the mascaipacha while still a youth, as seems to have happened with Huayna Cápac. In this respect Mama Ocllo’s swift action following the death of her husband, Topa Inca Yupanqui, was instrumental in securing the throne for her son, Huayna Cápac. The power of women in these affairs of state is underlined by the fact that periodically the women from particular households were also selected for termination during the during the various succession crises. When Atahualpa defeated Huascar in 1532, he had him and all his family, including a large number of his mother’s kin from the Capac panaca, executed. In fact, such was his rage and anger at this panaca that he had the mummy of Topa Inca Yupanqui – the titular head of the Capac panaca, and his paternal grandfather – burnt.
The deliberate destruction of one’s direct ancestors was an extreme measure in a culture that so venerated the dead. Yet this radical action demonstrated … [firstly] that the panaca was rooted in matrilineal concepts. Atahualpa belonged through his mother, Tocto Ocllo Cuca, to Hatun panaca, Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui’s household. Therefore, Atahualpa only visited destruction on his patrilineal side. [Secondly] it was possible to effectively wipe out a royal household.
Destruction of Topa Inca Yupanqui’s mummy and household could easily have paved the way for the eventual eradication or relegation of this panaca, and shows how Inca history, based as it was on oral tradition, could be – and probably was – periodically rewritten. This might explain why there were extra-panacas that did not figure with a personage on the king list. These included in the hanan half of the king list, the Cusco and Iñaca panacas (to which Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui had originally belonged), while in the hurin half of the same list there were the Masca, Sauaseray and Yauri panacas.
In turn, the panacas were linked to ten non-royal ayllus (Chauin Cuzco, Arayraca, Guaycaytaqui, Tarpuntay, Sañoc, Sutic, Maras, Cuicusa, Masca, Quesco), which had places named after them in the Cuzco region. These ten ayllus all had ancestors with acquired, imagined or projected links to either the Inca origin myth (as in the case of the Maras) or to the original inhabitants of the Cuzco area, and as such they were of higher status than the provincial ayllus of the commoners. The relationship between the aristocratic panacas and non-royal ayllus demonstrates yet again the unequal, reciprocal duality at the heart of Inca, and Andean, social structure. This leads us to an equally thorny subject related to the convoluted Inca succession system: how was Inca rule organized?
Arcane arguments about how Inca rulership was effected have raged since the 1960s. It might seem an overly esoteric discussion, but it is important for understanding how the Inca projected themselves and their power throughout the empire. These scholarly discussions have oscillated between what we will call the orthodox view, that the Inca were a standard single-ruler monarchy, and the non-orthodox view, that the Inca king list reveals a diarchy (rule by two) or even triarchy (rule by three) at play. The problem is compounded by the fact that all scholars researching this base their arguments on the same early ethnohistoric accounts. Ethnohistoric accounts often written by Spanish chroniclers who themselves were trying to make sense of what they saw or what they had interpreted from indigenous witnesses. In essence all these sources are flawed, and the truth within them, as it is, can be reinterpreted in many different ways.
Nevertheless, with respect to Inca rulership and sifting through the different arguments and co-arguments for single monarchy versus different forms of co-rulership, it seems plausible that, given the inherent dualism of the Andean worldview, some form of co-rule might have existed within the empire, with a ruling sapa Inca and a weaker, attendant co-ruler. This would go a long way towards explaining the intriguingly close association between the ruling Inca and a number of fringe characters in Inca narrative history, such as Capac Yupanqui, Amaru Topa and Tarco Huaman, among others. Indeed, in the ultimate expression of duality, the person of the sapa Inca himself was divided into two, one part containing his physical human self and the other his brother icon, or huauque, which accompanied him in life and death and could even officiate for him at rituals, in battle ceremonies and public events. This is why the sapa Inca could quite literally be in two places at the same time.
We know that the Inca king list, like much of Andean society, was divided into two separate halves, belonging respectively to the lower (hurin) and upper (hanan) dynasties. Traditionally, this king list has been viewed as being sequential, in that two follows one, three follows two and so on. Yet a closer look at the matter of the king lists … suggests that Manco Capac, the first Sapa Inca, was the common, possibly mythical, ancestor to both lineages, and that the subsequent hanan and hurin lists were coeval rather than sequential, with the hurin personage serving as a sort of ruling understudy to the current sapa Inca. …
… Indeed, considering the many anomalies that emerge within the written sources concerning the contemporaneity of many of these individuals with each other, duality and some sort of diarchy – including the actions of a sapa Inca’s effigy double, or huauque – would seem the most logical explanation for this confusing plethora of names, peoples and overlapping roles. In this sense, perhaps the best example of a possible functioning diarchy is the joint conquests of Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui and his son, Topa Inca Yupanqui, during the former’s later reign. With advancing age (he lived until his late fifties or early sixties), Pachacutec seems to have stayed in Cuzco more and more, delegating the expansion of the empire to his son and heir. Here might be a model for co-rulership, in which the sapa Inca and his second performed different, though complementary, functions within the Inca state. An earlier example would be that of Viracocha Inca (eighth ruler) and his son Inca Orcon, before Inca Urcon’s precipitate death at the hands of his brother, Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui.
It seems that in most cases the second ‘ruler’ engaged in the running of Cuzco, or some other aspect of Inca statehood. For instance, another potential secondary Inca (with a different function) was the figure of Amaru Topa, another son of Pachacutec. Some sources relate that he was originally selected as the heir to the tasselled throne but that he was too gentle for the rigours of power – his main interests lying in water engineering and agriculture – so he was demoted, and his brother Topa Inca Yupanqui stepped up to take his place. Nevertheless, it is possible that Amaru Topa and other, eventually less worthy, individuals maintained a differential relationship with power at the apex of Inca society. In the case of Amaru Topa, this relationship involved being charged with oversight of infrastructure projects and economic well-being.
The relative anonymity of Tarco Huaman and his descendants as secondary rulers to Topa Inca Yupanqui, Huayna Cápac and possibly Huascar suggests that, as the Inca state developed, the power of the diarchy weakened, with authority vested increasingly into the figure of the sapa Inca and his huauque. Indeed, it could be that the ostensible duality among early Inca rulers became less so as the power of the state and more vertical forms of government became both more popular and desirable. Similarly, moves to curtail the power of the panacas, especially by Huascar, could be viewed in much the same light. …
… What all this confusion about Incas, women, duality and royal households [tells] us, however, is that the Spanish did not quite grasp the intricacies of Inca rulership: how it was articulated between the highest echelons of society, and how the sapa Inca, in turn, negotiated his authority with the coyas, secondary wives, concubines and panacas. What is equally true is that the institutions of Inca government were in a state of flux at the beginning of the sixteenth century: a deep process of reorganization that the Spanish disrupted and selectively dismantled, keeping and perverting certain institutions, such as the people–state labour obligations known as mit’a.
Through this process of state creation, reformulation and consolidation, one figure that appears again and again is that of the Villac Umu, the high priest of the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco and the religious centre of the empire. Possibly established under Pachacutec Inca Yupanqui, the position of the Villac Umu, second only to the divinely ordained sapa Inca, was the maximum religious authority in the empire, charged with protecting Punchao, the sacred image of the morning Sun. He was selected from among the panacas and was therefore a descendant of one of the royal Inca lineages. Irrespective of whether he originally came from hanan or hurin Cuzco, he became a member of the lower half upon being Villac Umu. In a partnership of the sacred in the Inca Empire, the sapa Inca retained ultimate divine authority in yet another unequal relationship with the Villac Umu, this time centred around spiritual power and authority. Yet the Villac Umu retained considerable authority, especially in endorsing a new sapa Inca through the placing of the mascaipacha. Although mostly serving in a religious capacity, they did also sometimes serve as army generals, especially under Atahualpa and Manco Inca, the latter being one of the neo-Inca rulers of the rump Vilcabamba kingdom (1537–72), established after defeat at the hands of the Spanish in the early 1530s.
Aside from the Villac Umu, the sapa Inca was served by Incas of royal blood: the members of the various panacas. As we have seen, this was a double-edged sword; these individuals’ loyalty was primarily to their household, and the dead Inca sitting at the top of that particular power pyramid. Nevertheless, Incas of royal blood formed a large influential group within the society and politics of Cuzco, and included brothers, sisters and nephews and nieces down various iterations of kinship ties to the ruling Inca. Together they formed the Incacuna (the Inca people), their ranks furnishing administrators and governors in the provinces, generals for the armies, and soldiers for the royal bodyguard or elite corps – the nearest the Inca had to a standing army. As the Inca’s blood kin, they formed the familial bulwark and royal court of the empire, although, as mentioned previously, this loyalty was constantly tested by the pull of their panacas.
Below them were the Inca-by-privilege. These were members of non-Inca groups from the Cuzco region. In part, they also made up the bulk of the ayllus, associated with the panacas mentioned above, and through intermarriage with members of these same royal households became secondary kin, or what the indigenous chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala termed huaccha Incas (literally ‘poor Incas’) to the sapa Inca. In total, Inca-by-privilege came from the 26 different ethnic groups found within the Cuzco area such as the Mayu, Anta, Poques, Urcos and Chilque. This Inca-by-privilege social class filled the intermediate level ranks of administration and were mostly confined to running, both economically and ritually, the core lands around the Inca capital, Cuzco.
Alongside the Inca-by-privilege were another minor elite class, these were the lords-by-privilege. Lords-by-privilege were individuals elevated to positions of power personally by a given Inca, similar to the yanacona lords mentioned earlier. The position was normally non-hereditary and could be revoked at a moment’s notice. Detached from the ayllus, these lords-by-privilege owed their position and power solely to the Inca, and as such their loyalty to the ruler was paramount. Examples of these individuals are found in early colonial sources, such as the case of Pedro Astaco, whose father, a servant of Topa Inca Yupanqui, was elevated to the lordship of a town near Cuzco. Almost a type of super mitma, an important function assigned to them was to govern recalcitrant or distant regions.
Below these various categories of Inca and privileged ranks came the native lords of the land. Conquered, or persuaded by the Inca to join them, these lords could be powerful personages in their own right. Evidence suggests that the Inca themselves – at least in the highlands, where power had tended to be both heterarchical and segmented – promoted the concept of single or dual leaders, or curacas, for the different provinces. The coast already had a long tradition of rulers or kingdoms such as Chimor, Ychma and Chincha, along the North, Central and South coast respectively, but the highlands had been notoriously Balkanized since the fall of the Tiahuanaco and Wari empires during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Having a lord hold sway over a larger area of land made it easier for the Inca (and afterwards the Spanish) to govern. Some of these lords and their people, such as the lord of Chincha, were loyal subjects of the Inca. The lord of Chincha was given the distinct honour of being carried on a litter like the sapa Inca himself; he was eventually killed at the hands of the Spanish while still holding the royal litter during the capture of Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca in 1532.
Other lords, especially those who had but recently been incorporated within the empire, were much more circumscribed in their loyalty. It was they, as well as the followers of Huascar – the defeated party in the Inca Civil War – that first went over to the Spanish, with dramatic consequences. Securing loyalty was always a problem for the empire; in the fiercely independent Andes of the Late Intermediate and Inca Period, loyalty was first to one’s ayllu or community, or, in the case of the panacas, to their dead liege lord and household. Therefore, given the highly personalized nature of Inca conquest and their policy of split inheritance, practically every new sapa Inca had to go on numerous campaigns to subdue the manifold rebellions that tended to flare up upon the death of the previous sapa Inca. The chronicles are replete with stories of the various campaigns that new rulers had to engage in before being able to initiate wars of conquest, and this is probably why, when tabulating conquered lands, the deeds of certain Incas repeatedly show the same places being conquered and brought into the empire. For instance, Huayna Cápac spent the first years of his reign pacifying and expanding the south of the empire, as well as putting down major rebellions in the Titicaca area and along the north coast of Peru. Only then did he feel free enough to engage in conquering campaigns to the north, towards modern-day Ecuador and into the very southern border of Colombia, ultimately the furthest northern extent of the empire.
In conclusion, at the midpoint of the third decade of the sixteenth century, the Inca Empire was at its peak of expansion but dragging with it myriad problems stemming from rapid growth and insufficient reform of the sinews that held the state together. Local ayllus, regional lords and Cuzco itself, divided between the panacas, non-royal ayllus and Inca-by-privilege, all vied against the centralizing tendency of the sapa Inca and state institutions such as the lords-by-privilege, the yanacona, the acllacuna and the mitma. Every empire has a breaking point, and although predicting the point of collapse is often a futile exercise in hindsight, the auguries for the future of the Inca Empire must have been foreseeing storm clouds. They would have been right: within ten years the Inca had all but collapsed, and with them one of the most powerful, resplendent and unique empires the world had ever seen.
The Source:
Kevin Lane, The Inca: Lost Civilizations, Reaktion Books 2022
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.