Inca benevolence

Once Covey gets out of Spain he does better. I like that he discussed Spain's School-Of-Experience in overseas administration from the Canaries to the Caribbean, which Carballo didn't. Anyway here I'd discuss the Inca administration. Covey has no illusions about that.

Previous books I've read (or skimmed) about the Inca take the Cuzco ruling caste's word for it. The whole Four-In-One Sector - Tawantin-Suyú - lived under a single peace with the Inca taking responsibility for everyone's welfare. You can see how 1970s progressives loved this account. They weren't above "teaching" it even to children. Covey doesn't address the myth... directly. But he is clear that to the extent Cuzco was a Socialist Utopia, this was on the backs of millions of subjects from conquered nations.

And the Inca's subjects didn't like it, any more than the Tlatoani's subjects liked it in Mesoamerica. There wasn't the flowerwar tourney system, and human-sacrifices weren't being done for the gods themselves. The Andes got, instead, vicious war and reprisal. Then there came a civil war; Atahuallpa was fighting Huascar at the same time Pizarro was making his first probes south of the Colombian jungles. Pizarro's sustained invasion coincided when Atahuallpa was sending his brother-in-law against Cuzco itself.

Atahuallpa, based in the north, was not of the north. He was a Cuzcian himself. So to consolidate his base, he'd reconquered a lot of it. Pizarro was invading cities which, in several places, had recently been invaded by Incas, at least twice. They all told tale of Atahuallpa's egregious cruelty. These colonial subjects didn't side with Pizarro outright - yet - as the Mesoamericans did with Cortes; but they did "play their cards close". They helped Pizarro meet with Atahuallpa to see what might happen.

Pizarro was cruel and rapacious too, much more so than was Cortes. But by then, the northern provinces (suyú) were used to that.

The one people who remembered better of Inca rule was the Quechua / Aymara base in the central highland suyú. Cuzco was indeed relieved when they heard Atahuallpa was not ever going to enter the city to enact (more of) his vengeance; at the same time, Cuzcians were not about to submit to an alien from another world. Covey here sketches out that, eventually, Pizarro and the Cuzcians agreed to install Manco as Inca. Meanwhile other Spaniards were busily pulling the north into the Caribbean economy but that's another story.