World of the Incas

AP World History

Mr. Soff
Chapter 11: The Americas on the Eve of Invasion

Postclassical Mesoamerica, 1000-1500CE

After the collapse of Teotihuacan, the Toltecs moved into the political power vacuum and established a culture with a strong military ethic and a cult of human sacrifice and war.
Toltec influence spread over much of central Mexico. The legend of Topilzin/Quetzalcoatl, which claimed that a Toltec faction would one day return and claim the throne, was well known to the Aztecs (successors to the Toltecs) and may have influenced their response when the Europeans arrived.
The Aztecs gained control of the important Lake Texcoco region in the post-Toltec era, ands made their capital at Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs had a reputation as tough warriors and fanatical followers of their gods.
By the time of Moctezuma II, the Aztec state was dominated by a king who represented civil power and served as a representative of the gods on earth. The cult of human sacrifice and conquest was united with the political power of the ruler and the nobility.
Aztec religion, which incorporated many traditional Mesoamerican elements, was a vast, uniting, and sometimes oppressive force in which little distinction was made between the world of the gods and the natural world. Major deities included Tlaloc, god of rain, and Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec tribal god. Nezhualcoyotl, an Aztec king and poet, promoted a kind of monotheism, but the idea didn’t last. Human sacrifice increased significantly.
To feed their people, the Aztecs used an ingenious and successful system of irrigated agriculture highlighted by chinampas (beds of aquatic weeds, mud, and earth that had been placed in frames made of cane and rooted to the lake floor).
A special merchant class, the pochteca, regulated markets, and the state oversaw a vast tribute network.

Aztec Society in Transition

As the empire grew, a new social hierarchy replaced the old calpulli (kinship-based clan) system of social organization.
The rights of Aztec women seem to have been fully recognized, but in political and social life their role, though complementary to that of men, remained subordinate. Lack of technology meant women were required to spend significant time hand-grinding maize (corn), a staple crop.
The area controlled by the Aztecs may have included 20 million people.
Each city-state was ruled by a speaker chosen from the nobility. In many ways, the Aztec Empire was not unlike the subject city-states over which it gained control.
These city-states, in turn, were often left unchanged if they recognized Aztec supremacy and met their obligations.

Twantinsuyu: World of the Incas

With a genius for state organization and bureaucratic control over peoples of different languages and cultures, the Incas achieved a level of integration and domination previously unknown in the Americas.
The coastal empire of Chimor preceded the Incas. With the help of their leader Pachacuti, and his successors, Twantinsuyu (the Incan Empire) spread from modern-day Colombia to northern Argentina.
The Incas adopted the practice of royal split inheritance, which required new land and wealth. This may have caused the empire’s growth. The Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was the center of Incan religious life.
The Incas developed a state bureaucracy, headed by an inca and four regional governors (who in turn, divided their realms).
They spread their language, Quechua, used colonists, and built extensive road networks (dotted with tambos, or way stations) to encourage unity.
The empire also demanded mita, mandatory labor on church and state lands. Andean people practiced parallel descent. In addition to local ayllus (clans), a class of yanas (people living outside their ayllu) provided important service. Though the empire was a masterpiece of statecraft, a system of royal multiple marriages as a way of forging multiple alliances created rival claimants for power and the possibility of civil war on the eve of the Spanish invasion.
Incan cultural achievements included beautiful pottery, art, and metalworking, the quipu (a system of knotted strings for recording numerical information), land and water management, extensive road system, statecraft, and architecture.
The Incan and Aztec empires are best viewed as variations of similar patterns and processes, of which sedentary agriculture is the most important. Basic similarities underlying the variations can also be seen in the systems of belief and cosmology and in social structure.

The Other Indians

The diversity of ancient America forces us to reconsider of ideas of human development based on Old World examples.
Population figures are hard to pin down but in 1500, the Americas may have had roughly the same number of inhabitants as Europe (between 57-72 million people).
Chieftainship based on sedentary agriculture could be found outside the major American empires. Cultural diversity was particularly great in North America. Most American societies (outside the Incas and Aztecs) were strongly kin-based, unlike in Europe and Asia.
The Americas contained a broad range of societies, from great civilizations with millions of people to small bands of hunters. In many of these societies, religion played a dominant role in defining the relationship between people and their environment and between the individual and society.

Key Terminology:
1. Topiltzin:

2. Quetzalcoatl:

3. Tenochtitlan:

4. chinampas:

5. pochteca:

6. calpulli:

7. metates:

8. ayllus:

9. split inheritance:

10. mit’a:

11. yanas:

12. quipu:

Focus Questions:
1. Describe societies in the Americas during the postclassical period.

2. Which group of people had the highest social status in all Mesoamerican civilizations?
3. What was the relationship between the Toltecs and their predecessors in central Mexico?

4. How did the Aztecs view the cultural achievements of the Toltecs?

5. In the period shortly after the arrival of the Aztecs in the valley of Mexico, what was the nature of the political organization of the region?

6. The Aztecs awaited the appearance of an eagle landing on a cactus with a serpent in its mouth. What would happen when this event occurred?

7. What was the impact of expansion and conquest on the Aztec social system?

8. What was the central figure of the cult of human sacrifice and the most sacred deity of the Aztecs?

9. How did the Aztecs view history?

10. What was the nature of the Aztec economy?

11. What was the Aztec agricultural innovation using the lakes of central Mexico?

12. How did the Aztec view the nature of marriage and the family?

13. What was the most significant difference between the women of Mesoamerica and the Mediterranean world?

14. What was the nature of the Aztec administration of subject territories?

15. What was the principal reason for Inca expansion and conquest?
16. What was the Andean principal of inheritance?

17. What were tambos?

18. In terms of the integration of a centralized empire, how did the Incas and Aztecs compare?

19. The modern image of the Inca Empire as a carefully organized system where every community contributes to the whole and the state regulates the distribution of resources is similar to what economic/political system?

20. What class of people did the Aztecs have that the Inca did not have?

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World of the Incas

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