The World полностью

* At other times of the year, the priests celebrated the Flaying of Men in honour of the skin-hungry god Xipe Totec, when the Speaker watched gladiatorial fights and wore the flayed skin of victims. Such sacrifices were emphasized by the Spanish to justify their conquest, but the Mexica’s sophisticated and literate culture was much more complex than that: it is likely that in these earlier decades the rate of sacrifice was less frenzied than it later became.

* Noble children were educated in special schools linked to temples. Children and adults played patolli, a rubber-ball game, on special courts, that had been since the Maya kingdoms part of royal ritual. The monarchs often played the game; spectators sometimes bet so heavily on the results that they had to sell themselves into slavery; and losers were often killed – a sort of real Squid Game.

* The ultimate grand dame, Atotoztli, daughter of Motecuhzoma I, married Tezozomoc, son of Itzcoatl, and was the mother and often regent of the next three rulers, starting in 1478 with Axayacatl, grandson of both Motecuhzoma I and Itzcoactl (and father of the last of them Motecuhzoma II).

* The capital Tenochtitlan, built on a grid system and approached across the water by a causeway or in a barge or canoe, was now a wonder of the world with 250,000 inhabitants, much larger than Seville with 45,000.

Incas, Trastamaras and Rurikovichi

THE EARTHSHAKER AND THE IMPOTENT

Just as Motecuhzoma was consolidating his empire, far to the south-west, unbeknown to him, another empire builder, Inca Yupanqui, was creating the Tawantinsuyu, the Four Parts Together, the largest empire of the Americas.

Born in the small kingdom of Cusco in Peru, Prince Yupanqui (Honoured) seized the throne from his father and brother. The family believed they were descended from a sacred and wandering stranger-king. Yupanqui’s father Inca Viracocha named another son as heir, but the two of them abandoned the capital during an enemy invasion. Yupanqui refused to go, rallied the people and defeated the invaders, taking the spoils to his father, who refused to recognize him as senior to the chosen heir and ordered his killing. Rebranding himself as Pachacuti – Earthshaker – Yupanqui seized the throne, humiliating the father and embarking on almost forty years of conquests that subdued most of Peru. He beautified Cusco, building the monumental Golden Temple of the Sun at its centre and the Saqsawaman fortress complex with its zigzag walls above the city, and in the mountains he erected the mysterious but astounding terraced palace of Machu Picchu with its royal quarters and Sun Temple.

When he was too old to fight, his son Tupac Inca Yupanqui expanded along the Andes into Ecuador, building a second capital Quito and embarking on an expedition into the Pacific.

These two charismatic Sapa Incas almost completed the empire in just fifty years. The Sapa Inca – Unique Inca – was the title of the divine monarch whose mission from the Sun was to rule the world, but he was also the Son of the Sun and the Lover and Benefactor of the Poor, though he would eat off gold and silver. Wearing a braided turquoise diadem, with a tassel on his forehead, and pendulous earspools, and bearing a feathered staff and a golden mace, he was guarded by 5,000 Long-Ears in red and white tunics. The coronations of Sapa Incas were celebrated by the strangling of 200 children aged four to ten, whose death rites, designed by Pachacuti, saw the burning of mourning clothes and the slitting of the throats of 2,000 llamas, while ‘A thousand boys and girls will be brought and buried for me in places where I slept or enjoyed myself.’

Pachacuti was the ninth Sapa Inca, a god-king who never died. After death, Inca royalty was mummified and revered alongside a golden statue, a surrogate, sitting in their palaces where attendants served them drinks and dressed them in gold decorations; sometimes they attended important events on their thrones. These long-dead ancestors, kings and queens, advised the Sapa Incas. The Incas deployed armies of around 35,000 soldiers and even, on rare occasions, of 100,000, all wearing multicoloured plumes and gold, silver or copper plates, wielding maces, clubs and bows, and singing songs such as ‘We will drink from the skull of the traitor, we will adorn ourselves with a necklace of his teeth, we will play the melody of the pinkullu with flutes made from his bones, we will beat the drum made from his skin and thus we will dance!’ War and trade were facilitated by pack animals, llamas and alpacas; the empire, 2,500 miles long, was linked by 25,000 miles of roads. Agriculture was aided by sprinkling a natural fertilizer, guano – bird faeces – on the fields that grew maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes and tomatoes.