Pachacuti and the reorganization of the Inca state

Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui — known to the Incas as Cusi Yupanqui before his accession — was the ninth Sapa Inca of the dynasty of Cusco and the ruler traditionally credited with transforming a small highland kingdom into the imperial state of Tawantinsuyu. His reign, conventionally dated from about 1438 to 1471, marks the hinge of Inca history: the period in which the pre-imperial Cusco state became, in less than a generation, a continental power stretching from central Chile to southern Colombia. Pachacuti is associated with a sweeping program of religious reform, administrative reorganization, monumental construction, and territorial expansion. The chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, drawing on testimony collected in 1572, treats Pachacuti as a second founder of the Inca state — the figure who, more than any other, made the empire possible.

Whether or not every reform credited to Pachacuti is correctly attributed, there is no doubt that the institutional structure of the Inca Empire as it existed at the time of the Spanish conquest was the work of his reign and of his immediate successors, his son Túpac Inca Yupanqui (r. c. 1471–1493) and his grandson Huayna Capac (r. c. 1493–1527). The political system, the state religion, and the physical shape of the capital that Pachacuti built survived essentially intact into the 1530s.

The Rise of Pachacuti and the Chanka War

The accession of Pachacuti is dated by the chronicles to the late 1430s, in the aftermath of a devastating invasion of the Cusco valley by the Chanka, a powerful neighboring kingdom of the Andahuaylas region to the west. The Inca ruler at the time, Viracocha (not to be confused with the creator god of the same name), is said to have fled the city with one of his sons, leaving the defense of Cusco to another son, the young prince Cusi Yupanqui. According to the most elaborate version of the story, recorded by Sarmiento de Gamboa, Cusi Yupanqui rallied the defenders, received a vision of the creator Viracocha promising him victory, and routed the Chanka in a battle fought at the gates of Cusco. The traditional date of this battle is 1438.

The Chanka war, whether or not it occurred exactly as the chronicles describe, was a turning point. It demonstrated that the small Cusco state could defeat a much larger neighbor, and it gave the victorious prince a basis for deposing his father and taking the throne. The accession of Cusi Yupanqui, under the throne name Pachacuti (“he who remakes the world” or “transformer of the land”), is dated to the same year. The rest of Pachacuti’s long reign was devoted to a systematic transformation of the Inca state.

The Reorganization of Cusco

The first major project of Pachacuti’s reign was the rebuilding of Cusco. The pre-imperial city was, by the standards of the period, a modest settlement of several thousand inhabitants clustered around a few monumental buildings. Pachacuti is credited with redesigning the city as a ceremonial capital whose plan reflected the cosmological order of the empire. The city was divided into a grid of canchas (rectangular compound blocks) organized along the dual division between Hanan Cusco (upper Cusco) and Hurin Cusco (lower Cusco), and the great Coricancha — the Temple of the Sun — was rebuilt as the religious center of the state.

Four great roads, each associated with one of the four suyus of the empire, were made to radiate outward from the Coricancha toward the four quarters of the world. The plan of the city, as reconstructed by the ethnohistorian Tom Zuidema in The Ceque System of Cusco (2002), was a microcosm of the empire: the four suyus and the dual division of the city together expressed the social and political order that Pachacuti sought to impose on the wider Andes. The great fortress of Sacsayhuamán, which dominates the northern skyline of Cusco, was begun under Pachacuti as a ceremonial and military center, and its three tiers of cyclopean walls are traditionally attributed to his reign. The reconstruction of Cusco was accompanied by the forced resettlement (mitma) of entire communities from the surrounding regions into the capital, and the resettlement policy became one of the most important instruments of Inca imperial rule.

The Reform of State Religion

Pachacuti is also credited with a major reform of state religion. The principal innovation was the elevation of the cult of Inti, the Sun, to a position of central importance in the imperial cult, in association with a corresponding emphasis on the divine status of the Sapa Inca as the son of the Sun. The figure of the creator Viracocha was retained, but the Inca dynasty was now presented as the chosen people of the Sun, with Pachacuti himself cast as the chosen instrument of cosmic renewal.

The reform of religion was accompanied by the construction of a network of temples, shrines, and huacas across the empire. Pachacuti is said to have personally identified the sacred landscape features of the empire, including the famous huacas of the Cusco valley, and to have reorganized the ceque system of radial sightlines around the Coricancha. The state cult was staffed by a hierarchy of priests and mamaconas (temple women), headed by the Villac Umu, the High Priest of the Sun.

Administrative and Military Reforms

The administrative structure of the empire was likewise rebuilt under Pachacuti. The basic unit of government remained the ayllu, the kinship-based community that held land collectively and provided labor service to the state. The new element was a systematic organization of the empire into provinces each ruled by a governor appointed by the Sapa Inca. The provincial administration of the Inca Empire was built around a network of administrative centers, state granaries, and roads that allowed the central government to monitor tribute, mobilize armies, and resettle conquered populations.

The labor system of mit’a — rotating labor drafts that required each ayllu to provide a quota of adult men for state work — was standardized and extended. Under the mit’a system, subjects of the empire provided labor for state farms, mines, road construction, terracing, military service, and the construction of monumental buildings. The economic surplus produced by the mit’a system was stored in qollqas — state granaries — and redistributed during famine, war, and religious festivals. The military was reorganized in parallel: Pachacuti is credited with the introduction of a system of standing armies quartered in Cusco and along the empire’s frontiers, and with the development of tactics that the Incas would use in their rapid expansion of the 1450s and 1460s.

Territorial Expansion

Pachacuti’s internal reforms were coupled with a major program of territorial expansion. Within a few years of his accession, the Incas had absorbed the Chanka, the Quechua polities of the Apurímac, and a number of smaller kingdoms in the central highlands. By the late 1450s, armies under Pachacuti and his brother Cápac Yupanqui had reached the central coast of Peru, incorporating the rich valleys of the Chincha, Huarochirí, and Cañete. By the end of his reign, the empire extended from the Ancash region in the north to the Titicaca basin in the south, and from the Pacific coast to the eastern Andean slopes.

The empire that Pachacuti bequeathed to his successors was already the largest state ever to emerge in the pre-Columbian Andes. His son Túpac Inca Yupanqui would extend it to its greatest extent, pushing into Ecuador, the Atacama desert, and the Argentine northwest. But the institutional structure, the religious system, the labor organization, and the imperial ideology on which these later conquests were built were the work of Pachacuti, and they remained essentially intact for the next century.