Was this the great killer of the 1520s in the Incan Empire?
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Was this the great killer of the 1520s in the Incan Empire? Perhaps future archaeological discoveries will give us more definite information.
The pandemic not only killed great numbers in the Indian empires, but it also affected their power structures, striking down the leaders and disrupting the processes by which they were normally replaced. When Montezuma died, his nephew, Cuitláhuac, was elected lord of Mexico. It was he who di rected the attacks on the Spaniards during the disastrous re treat from Tenochtitlán, attacks which nearly ended the story of Cortes and his soldiers. Then Cuitláhuac died of smallpox. Probably many others wielding decisive power in the ranks of the Aztecs and their allies died in the same period, break ing dozens of links in the chain of command. Bernal Diaz tells of an occasion not long after Tenochtitlán when the In dians did not attack “because between the Mexicans and the Texcocans there were differences and factions”43 and, of equal importance, because they had been weakened by smallpox.
Outside Tenochtitlán the deaths due to smallpox among the Indian ruling classes permitted Cortes to cultivate the loyalty of several men in important positions and to promote his own supporters. Cortês wrote to Charles V about the city of Cholula: “The natives had asked me to go there, since many of their chief men had died of the smallpox, which rages in these lands as it does in the islands, and they wished me with their approval and consent to appoint other rulers in their place.” Similar requests, quickly complied with, came from Tlaxcala, Chalco, and other cities. “Cortes had gained so much authority,” the old soldier Bernal Diaz remembered, “that Indians came before him from distant lands, especially over matters of who would be chief or lord, as at the time smallpox had come to New Spain and many chiefs died.”44
Similarly in Peru the epidemic of the 1520s was a stunning
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blow to the very nerve center of Incan society, throwing that society into a self-destructive convulsion. The government of the Incan Empire was an absolute autocracy with a demi god, the Child of the Sun, as its emperor. The loss of the emperor could do enormous damage to the whole society, as Pizarro proved by his capture of Atahualpa. Presumably the damage was greater if the Inca were much esteemed, as was Huayna Capac. When he died, said Cieza de León, the mourning “was such that the lamentation and shrieks rose to the skies, causing the birds to fall to the ground. The news traveled far and wide, and nowhere did it not evoke great sorrow.” Pedro Pizarro, one of the first to record what the Indians told of the last days before the conquest, judged that had “this Huayna Capac been alive when we Spaniards en tered this land, it would have been impossible for us to win it, for he was much beloved by all his vassals.”45