64 pages • 2 hours read
Charles C. Mann1491
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: "In The Land of Four Corners"
Chapter 3 describes the breadth and size of the Inca Empire and its zenith, before narrating the circumstances of its fall to the Spanish conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, and his forces. The author emphasizes the size of the Inca Empire compared to its contemporaries—Imperial Russia, the Sahel, the Ming Dynasty—and the variety of climates and terrain, from rainforest jungles to desert plains and mountain terraces. A significant portion of the chapter is given to the prior rulers of the Inca Empire, including Pachakuti Inca, and TopaInca Yupanki. It is their military gains and publics that make the Empire as massive—and vulnerable—as it is when the conquistadors arrive. Eventually, a civil war between half-brothers Huaskar and Atawallpa, each vying to be ruler, would embroil the entire Empire.
Pizarro invades the Inca Empire in the midst of this civil war, ransoming and executing Atawallpa, who had not long before ordered the execution of Huaskar. Although this was only the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, the power vacuum in an over-centralized Inca Empire would prove beneficial for the Spaniards. However, in addition to this, Mann posits that the fall of the Inca Empire was accelerated by the spread of diseases—particularly smallpox—prior to the arrival of Pizarro and his conquistadors. This, coupled with author's description of the highly-centralized, precarious nature of the Inca Empire, makes Pizarro's conquest more understandable.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Chapter 3 focuses on a single massive state—the Inca Empire. The author argues that much like the complicated system of tribal alliances and resentments in North America, two factors made even large empires vulnerable to European incursion. The first of these is disease. Even before Pizarro captured Atawallpa, and even before the Spanish landed in Peru, disease ravaged the already-fractured Inca Empire. The empire, highly-centralized and interconnected by roads, became highly susceptible to plague. The timeline of pandemic, however, creates a problem: the incidence of plague occurs before the arrival of the conquistadors. To address this, Mann shows how Old-World diseases such as smallpox were able to migrate over long distances, despite a lack of direct encounters between natives and Europeans.
In addition to the known factors of disease and European technical skill, this chapter poses the additional argument that the large size and centralization of empires such as the Inca empire actually proved to be a liability—not only from their capacity to spread disease, but from both their predilection towards succession crises and civil wars. It was the latter of these that put Francisco Pizarro in the perfect position to conquer what was, at the time, the largest empire in the world.
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