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Hey, wait a minute! the reader may be saying. This family story makes such terrific melodrama that it seems reasonable to wonder whether it actually happened. After all, every known written account of the Inka was set down after the conquest, a century or more after Pachakuti’s rise. And these differ from each other, sometimes dramatically, reflecting the authors’ biases and ignorance, and their informants’ manipulation of history to cast a flattering light on their family lines. For these reasons, some scholars dismiss the chronicles entirely. Others note that both the Inka and the Spaniards had long traditions of record-keeping. By and large the chroniclers seem to have been conscious of their roles as witnesses and tried to live up to them. Their versions of events broadly agree with each other. As a result, most scholars judiciously use the colonial accounts, as I try to do here.

After taking the reins of state, Pachakuti spent the next twenty-five years expanding the empire from central highland Peru to Lake Titicaca and beyond. His methods were subtler and more economical with direct force than one might expect, as exemplified by the slow takeover of the coastal valley of Chincha. In about 1450 Pachakuti dispatched an army to Chincha under Qhapaq Yupanki (Ka-pok Yu-panki, meaning roughly “Munificent Honored One”), a kind of adopted brother. Marching into the valley with thousands of troops, Qhapaq Yupanki informed the fearful local gentry that he wanted nothing from Chincha whatsoever. “He said that he was the son of the Sun,” according to the report of two Spanish priests who investigated the valley’s history in the 1550s. “And that he had come for their good and for everyone’s and that he did not want their silver nor their gold nor their daughters.” Far from taking the land by force, in fact, the Inka general would give them “all that he was carrying.” And he practically buried the Chincha leadership under piles of valuables. In return for his generosity, the general asked only for a little appreciation, preferably in the form of a large house from which the Inka could operate, and a staff of servants to cook, clean, and make the things needed by the outpost. And when Qhapaq Yupanki left, he asked Chincha to keep expressing its gratitude by sending craftspeople and goods to Qosqo.

A decade later Pachakuti sent out another army to the valley, this one led by his son and heir, Thupa Inka Yupanki (“Royal Honored Inka”). Thupa Inka closeted himself with the local leadership and laid out many inspired ideas for the valley’s betterment, all of which were gratefully endorsed. Following the Inka template, the local leaders drafted the entire populace into service, dividing households by sex and age into cohorts, each with its own leader who reported to the leader of the next larger group. “Everything was in order for the people to know who was in control,” the Spanish priests wrote. Thupa Inka delegated tasks to the mobilized population: hewing roads to link Chincha to other areas controlled by the Inka, building a new palace for the Inka, and tending the fields set aside for the Inka. Thupa Inka apparently left the area in charge of his brother, who continued managing its gratitude.

The next visit came from Pachakuti’s grandson, probably in the 1490s. With him came escalating demands for land and service—the veneer of reciprocity was fading. By that point the Chincha had little alternative but to submit. They were surrounded by Inka satrapies; their economy was enmeshed with the imperial machinery; they had hundreds or thousands of people doing the empire’s bidding. The Chincha elite, afraid to take on the Inka army, always chose compliance over valor, and were rewarded with plum positions in the colonial government. But their domain had ceased to exist as an independent entity.

In 1976 Edward N. Luttwak, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., published a short, provocative book about imperial Rome