Over the past two decades, in addition to my various works on Aztecs, Toltecs, and other Mesoamericans, I have also written on more general topics, such as human sacrifice throughout the Americas, as well as on the enigmatic problem of possible contacts between the Old World and the New before the voyages of Columbus. During this period, I made fairly prolonged visits to Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, journeys that inspired a growing interest in the achievements of the Andean peoples, in particular those of the all-conquering Incas. |
In this book I prefer to spare the reader a surfeit of those all-too obvious comparisons between Inca and Aztec. Nonetheless, it may be useful to stress at the outset the almost uncanny resemblances, as well as certain radical differences, between the history of the two peoples. In both instances the traditional sources tell of a humble group of migrants who had fairly recently established themselves in a notably fecund valley, though some authors, including myself, suspect that their arrival was not so recent as such sources tend to imply. By an extraordinary coincidence these two peoples, in a here-or-less contemporaneous process, set out to conquer vast empires, probably far vaster than any that might have preceded them in North and South America. Both then met their doom in the second and third decades of the fifteenth century at the hands of minuscule bands of Spanish invaders. |
One major difference confronts scholars who study the two peoples. Unlike the Incas, from the Aztecs and their predecessors we possess pictorial codices relating to many aspects of their past, as well as fairly numerous documents in the native Nahuatl, recorded in early post-Conquest times. For the Incas we tend to rely more exclusively on the Spanish chroniclers, who both in Mexico and Peru, offer a more Europeanized view of events. |
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