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The Inca Empire
Tawantinsuyu, the Andean state that ran more than 4,000 kilometers along the spine of South America
The Incas called their state Tawantinsuyu, the four parts together, and in less than a century it grew from a kingdom around Cusco into the largest empire in the Americas before European contact. It governed perhaps 10 to 12 million people without wheeled vehicles, draft animals larger than the llama, or markets in the European sense, and it kept its records on knotted cords called khipu rather than in writing as usually defined. A road network, the Qhapaq Ñan, ran tens of thousands of kilometers through mountains and deserts. Quechua, the empire's administrative language, is still spoken by millions of Andean people, and Machu Picchu, Sacsayhuamán and the stone foundations of Cusco keep its engineering in plain view.
Tawantinsuyu followed the Andes for more than 4,000 kilometers, from the Ancasmayo River near the modern border of Ecuador and Colombia to the Maule River in central Chile. It joined three very different environments: the narrow coastal desert along the Pacific, watered by river oases, the high valleys and puna grasslands of the mountains, where terraced fields climbed the slopes, and the forested eastern flanks descending toward the Amazon. Its four quarters, Chinchaysuyu, Antisuyu, Kuntisuyu and Qullasuyu, met in Cusco. At its peak around 1527 it covered about 2 million square kilometers. Its territory now lies in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and southwestern Colombia, centered on the highlands between Cusco and Lake Titicaca.
According to Inca tradition, the dynasty began in Cusco under Manco Cápac, but the empire's expansion dates from Pachacuti, who seized power around 1438 and reorganized the realm. He and his successors Topa Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Cápac conquered peoples from Ecuador to Chile, resettling whole communities and requiring labor service, the mit'a, for roads, farms and armies. A war of succession between Huayna Cápac's sons Huáscar and Atahualpa had just ended when Spanish forces under Francisco Pizarro arrived. They captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 and executed him in 1533. European diseases, war and Spanish forced-labor systems, including a colonial version of the mit'a used in the silver mines of Potosí, caused a steep population decline. The last Inca stronghold, at Vilcabamba, fell in 1572.