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By Root 1955 0

terribly novel. Add to this the shock of observing humans somehow astride their backs like half-bestial nightmare figures and it is possible to imagine the dismay provoked by Pizarro’s cavalry. Not only did Inka infantrymen have to overcome their initial stupefaction, their leaders had to reinvent their military tactics while in the midst of an invasion. Mounted troops were able to move at rates never encountered in Tawantinsuyu. “Even when the Indians had posted pickets,” Hemming observed, “the Spanish cavalry could ride past them faster than the sentries could run back to warn of danger.” In clash after clash, “the dreaded horses proved invincible.” But horses are not inherently unbeatable; the Inka simply did not discover quickly enough where they had an advantage: on their roads.

The conquistadors disparaged steep Inka highways because they had been designed for sure-footed llamas rather than horses. But they were beautifully made—this road, photographed in the 1990 s, had lasted more than five hundred years without maintenance.

European-style roads, constructed with horses and cars in mind, view flatness as a virtue; to go up a steep hill, they use switchbacks to make the route as horizontal as possible. Inka roads, by contrast, were built for llamas. Llamas prefer the coolness of high altitudes and, unlike horses, readily go up and down steps. As a result, Inka roads eschewed valley bottoms and used long stone stairways to climb up steep hills directly—brutal on horses’ hooves, as the conquistadors often complained. Traversing the foothills to Cajamarca, Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Hernando lamented that the route, a perfectly good Inka highway, was “so bad” that the Spanish “could not use horses on the roads, not even with skill.” Instead the conquistadors had to dismount and lead their reluctant animals through the steps. At that point they were vulnerable. Late in the day, Inka soldiers learned to wait above and roll boulders on their foes, killing some of the animals and frightening others into running away. Men left behind could be picked off at leisure. Multiple ambushes cost the lives of many Spanish troops and animals.

To be sure, horses confer an advantage on flat ground. But even on the plains the Inka could have won. Foot soldiers have often drubbed mounted troops. At the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the outnumbered, outarmored Athenian infantry destroyed the cavalry of the Persian emperor Darius I. More than six thousand Persians died; the Greeks lost fewer than two hundred men. So dire had the situation initially appeared that before the fight Athens sent a messenger to Sparta, its hated rival, to beg for aid. In the original marathon, the courier ran more than a hundred miles in two days to deliver his message. But by the time the Spartan reinforcements arrived, there was nothing to see but dead Persians.

The Inka losses were not foreordained. Their military was hampered by the cult of personality around its deified generals, which meant both that leaders were not easily replaced when they were killed or captured and that innovation in the lower ranks was not encouraged. And the army never learned to bunch its troops into tight formations, as the Greeks did at Marathon, forming human masses that can literally stand up to cavalry. Nonetheless, by the time of the siege of Qosqo the Inka had developed an effective anti-cavalry tactic: bolas. The Inka bola consisted of three stones tied to lengths of llama tendon. Soldiers threw them, stones a-whirl, at charging horses. The weapons wrapped themselves around the animals’ legs and brought them down to be killed by volleys of sling missiles. Had the bolas come in massed, coordinated onslaughts instead of being wielded by individual soldiers as they thought opportune, Pizarro might well have met his match.

If not technology or the horse, what defeated the Inka? As I said, some of the blame should be heaped on the overly centralized Inka command structure, a problem that has plagued armies throughout time. But another, much larger part