According to Inca oral tradition, Inca started out as a small town called Cuzco. The first emperor was named Pachacuti. He established a system of succession similar to that of medieval Europe, where the emperor’s son inherits his father’s position as emperor. Unlike in medieval Europe, however, he would not inherit any wealth or other possessions. This made it so that the new emperor’s only way of getting money was to expand the empire and conquer as much land as possible. This seems very harsh, but it was the driving force that caused the Inca empire to expand at an amazingly fast rate. In addition, I think it might reduce sibling rivalry (“My older brother will get the throne, but I’ll get all the money.”)
The Incas were polytheistic, and
…show more content…
Each corner had an Apu in charge of it. The emperor ruled in a a central district that worked sort of like Washington, D.C. does in the US. The Incas did not have their laws written down in one place. People were pretty much kept in line by very specific social expectations. Anybody could accuse anyone of a lower class than them of committing a crime (again, there were no real guidelines for what was considered a crime). Because of this, the higher in the social hierarchy someone was, the less likely they were to receive punishment. This does not mean the system was completely corrupt, though. There were a few people who were specifically able to ignore the class system and accuse anybody of a …show more content…
They could grow a wide variety of different crops in their fields, which had full irrigation systems. Their land was mostly made up of hills and mountains, so they carved the hills into giant stairstep shapes to make flat surfaces they could farm on. The Incas did not have any animal that was good for agricultural labor, so they had only man-powered tools to plow their fields and tear up weeds. They understood that they had to keep the soil full of nutrients, and their main source of fertilizer was bird poop. When the Spanish invaded, they forced the Incas to grow Spanish crops that the Incan farms were not designed for. Because of this, most Incan fields became barren and