Destruction Of The Inca Empire Analysis

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An Empire’s Demise Although the great Inca Empire succumbed to the few hands of Francisco Pizarro and his men, Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1609) depicts Huayna Capác’s premonition of the death of himself and his empire through the eyes of subjects to the Inca Empire. Born to a Spanish conqueror and an Inca princess, de la Vega utilizes histories of his classmates’ families’ accounts of the horror and tailors it to his Spanish audience to make the gruesome truth more palatable and easily digestible, at one point attributing the downfall to Inca Huayna Capác rather than the Spaniards. In contrast to Pizarro’s destruction of the empire with disease and new weaponry, de la Vega’s history illustrates Peru’s subtle colonization …show more content…
The defeat of the Inca Empire was shocking: Pizarro only had 168 men against Atahualpa’s army; however, with the help of the Spanish importing disease to the empire and alliances forged in the centralized empire, Pizarro took modern-day Peru. When de la Vega inquired an Inca elder about the downfall of the empire, it was not the disease, new weaponry, or Pizarro’s brutal tactics against Inca fighters he attributed the demise of the empire to, but rather “the last words spoken to [them] by [their] Inca did more to defeat [them]…than did all the weapons that [de la Vega’s] father and his comrades brought with them.” Huayna Capác had predicted he was going to die and he had a vision that when the “foreigners”, which happened to later be the Spaniards, came to conquer, it will be in the people’s best interest to abide to their new rulers for “their laws will be superior to ours, and their arms will be invincible…abide in peace.” When the white, bearded Spaniards arrived, they imposed a caste system based on the subjugation of indigenous people and enslaved Africans. While there was a degree of fluidity in the caste system in regards to passing, it forced indigenous people and Africans into subjection until it became inevitable and they accepted their roles in …show more content…
While the takedown of the Inca Empire was in reality bloody and violent, de la Vega chose to display a Spanish friendly retelling of the beginning of Inca-Spanish relations rather than challenging Spanish thought. A Spanish audience was his target audience, but his tone to his own people hints at him accepting his role in the caste system even to his peers. Today, the caste system leaves a legacy of oppression on indigenous people and Afro-Latinos, but if historians like de la Vega were even more prevalent, their pain would be molded to be consumable by their
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