The Four United Realms (Tawantinsuyu) in 1491
One of the bird's-eye-view books which I always recommend (with some caveats) to people on where scholarship stands on our understanding of the civilization of the Western Hemisphere, is Charles C. Mann's "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus".
Besides Spain and its history in the Indies, the history and civilization of the Western Hemisphere is among the most misunderstood, ideologized, politicized, distorted, dismissed, and glossed over in world history.
We need to go back to the medieval mind of the Castilian warrior adventurer who first laid eyes upon this world.
When the societies of the Antilles, Mesoamerica, Peru and the great vast interiors were unveiled to the Iberian imaginary, many of those Iberians had been Jews and Muslims just a generation or two prior. Indeed many continued practicing Islam until it was explicitly outlawed, with the last remaining practicing Muslims expelled from Spain in the early 1600s. By then Mexico and Peru had long been part of the Spanish empire. Jews were "officially" expelled in 1492 after the Alhambra Decree but there remained a sizeable converso and even judaizer population in both the Iberian peninsula and the Indies.
In this way, Spain is different from the rest of Christian Europe. Yes, it has history of Germanic rule with the Visigoths like much of the rest of western Europe with their Franks and Saxons. It is Latin like the rest of Europe west and south of Germany. But it is also Carthage, it's also Al Andalus. And the society that was wrought from 711 to 1492 on the peninsula made an indelible mark on the way this society saw ethnic and cultural diversity, culture war (in the strictest and most literal sense), and integration. Hispanic Latins of that age were empire builders of the old order. They did not set up merchant colonies or mere merchant ports but rather territorial extensions of their country. Kingdoms under the crown of their own king. Unlike the Germans, English, and French, they had references historical and cultural of a concept called in Iberian historiography as "convivencia". By the time of the last of the Trastamaras, the crusading mentality had been transplanted to the Indies where one can still see the continuing framing of the other in terms of Christian versus Muslim. In Mexico Tenochtitlan, the temple courtyards and towers are called "mezquitas" or mosques. Educated Indian priests and teachers are referred to as "alfaqui", the Arabic term for doctor of man of letters.
Even so, it was in this cultural milieu from whence the conquistadores came. Men who grew up in a society that knew the power and wealth of Islamic civilization (Granada, Cordoba, Mamalik, Uthmaniyya), men who had been to Italy and, according to Bernal Diaz del Castillo, even to Constantinople, by then under Ottoman rule. These are the ones who were dazzled by what they saw, even when measured up to what many of them had already seen in the Mediterranean world. The more we begin to understand and uncover, the closer our wonder will be to that of the first conquistadors who beheld these teeming millions who built a completely separate world, hidden from the other one (and vice versa!)
And now back to Charles Mann and "1491"...
Charles Mann's description in "1491" gives us a glimpse into world the Castilians came to witness while it was in full splendor if already being shaken by tumult:
In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia. Bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude-as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand foot peaks of the Andes between. "If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptibility, " wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, "the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day."
The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America-some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking different languages-into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the emperor. The unity was not merely political: the Inka wanted to meld together the area's religion, economics, and arts. Their methods were audacious, brutal, and efficient: they removed entire populations from their homelands; shuttled them around the biggest road system on the planet, a mesh of stone-paved thoroughfares totaling as much as 25,000 miles; and forced them to work with other groups, using only Runa Simi, the Inka language, on massive, faraway state farms and construction projects.
Charles Mann goes on a bit later on the economic conditions of the state:
These (inefficiencies) surely occurred but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu "managed to eradicate hunger," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though no fan of the Inka, he conceded that "only a very small number of empires throughout the whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat."
When Tawantinsuyu swallowed a new area, the Inka forcibly imported settlers from other, faraway areas, often in large numbers, and gave them land. The newcomers were encouraged to keep their own dress and customs rather than integrate into the host population. To communicate, both groups were forced to use Runa Simi (Qheswa), the language of their conquerors. In the short run this practice created political tensions that the Inka manipulated to control both groups. In the long term it would have (if successful) eroded the distinctionss among cultures and forged a homogeneous new nation in the imprint of Tawantinsuyu. Five centureis later the wholesale reshuffling of populations became an infamous trademark of Stalin and Mao. But the scale on which the Inka moved the pieces around the ethnic checkerboard would have excited their admiration. Incredibly, foreigners came to outnumber natives in many places.
How vastly different and how unbelievable to people from a civilization where as J.H. Elliot puts it, "the rich ate and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the population starved." This was a late medieval Europe where upon the flunctuation of prices of foodstuffs, in France, for instance, an equal proportion of people died from famine as died in the U.S. Civil War. I will make a post on the Hispanic world's concept of Tierra de Jauja or Pais de Jauja, an almost mythical land of plenty based on an actual Inka province of Peru.
J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), p. 306.
David R. Weir, "Markets and Mortality in France, 1600-1789," in John Walter and Roger Schofield, eds., Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 229.
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), pp 74, 84-85.
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