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By Root 1998 0

of the answer was first stated firmly by Henry Dobyns. During his extracurricular reading about Peru, he came across a passage by Pedro Cieza de León, the Spanish traveler who observed three roads between the same two cities. Entranced by the first exhibition of Inka booty in Spain, Cieza de León had crossed the Atlantic as a teenager and spent fifteen years in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, traveling, fighting, and taking notes for what would become a massive, three-volume survey of the region. Only the first part was printed in his lifetime, but by the twentieth century historians had found and published most of the rest. Dobyns learned something from Cieza de León that was not mentioned in Prescott’s history, in the Smithsonian’s official Handbook of South American Indians, or in any of the then-standard descriptions of Tawantinsuyu. According to Cieza de León, Wayna Qhapaq, Atawallpa’s father, died when “a great plague of smallpox broke out [in 1524 or 1525], so severe that more than 200,000 died of it, for it spread to all parts of the kingdom.”

Smallpox not only killed Wayna Qhapaq, it killed his son and designated heir—and his brother, uncle, and sister-wife. The main generals and much of the officer corps died, wrote the Inka chronicler Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, “all their faces covered with scabs.” So did the two regents left in Qosqo by Wayna Qhapaq to administer the empire. After the dying Wayna Qhapaq locked himself away so that nobody could see his pustulous face, Salcamayhua reported, he was visited by a terrifying midnight vision. Surrounding him in his dream were “millions upon millions of men.” The Inka asked who they were. “Souls of the lost,” the multitude told him. All of them “would die from the pestilence,” each and every one.

The story is probably apocryphal, but its import isn’t. Smallpox has an incubation period of about twelve days, during which time sufferers, who may not know they are sick, can infect anyone they meet. With its fine roads and great population movements, Tawantinsuyu was perfectly positioned for a major epidemic. Smallpox radiated throughout the empire like ink spreading through tissue paper. Millions of people simultaneously experienced its symptoms: high fever, vomiting, severe pain, oozing blisters everywhere on the body. Unable to number the losses, the Jesuit Martín de Murúa said only that the toll was “infinite thousands.”

The smallpox virus is thought to have evolved from a cattle virus that causes cowpox; a now-extinct equine virus responsible for horsepox; or, perhaps most likely, the camelpox virus, which affects camels, as the name suggests. People who survive the disease become immune to it. In Europe, the virus was such a constant presence that most adults were immune. Because the Western Hemisphere had no cows, horses, or camels, smallpox had no chance to evolve there. Indians had never been exposed to it—they were “virgin soil,” in epidemiological jargon.

Virgin-soil death rates for smallpox are hard to establish because for the last century most potential research subjects have been vaccinated. But a study in the early 1960s of seven thousand unvaccinated smallpox cases in southern India found that the disease killed 43 percent of its victims. Noting the extreme vulnerability of Andean populations—they would not even have known to quarantine victims, as Europeans had—Dobyns hypothesized that the empire’s population “may well have been halved during this epidemic.” In about three years, that is, as many as one out of two people in Tawantinsuyu died.

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations.