The History of the Renaissance World (33 page)

26.1 Nazca lines: Spider.
Credit: © Charles and Josette Lenars / Corbis

26.2 Nazca lines: Dancing hands.
Credit: © Kevin Schafer / Corbis

No single explanation accounts for the Nazca lines. The archaeologist Maria Reiche, who first mapped out the figures in the 1940s, believed that the lines charted astronomical movements, but many of the lines can’t be associated with any known movement of the stars. Some of the drawings, but not all, seem to mark out underground water flow. Possibly the paths were used for sacred walking rituals, a practice carried on in later Andean cultures—but there is no way to know whether the rituals existed this early. The only certain conclusion is that the Nazca people carved themselves into the landscape of their home. In the words of the art historian George Kubler, the lines “inscribe human meaning upon the hostile wastes of nature.” The lines carry a story; we may never know what the meaning of the story is.
⁶

A little farther to the north, in slightly more hospitable surroundings, the Moche people constructed mud-brick buildings instead of desert patterns. In the northern valley that served as the center of a growing empire, the Moche built two gigantic hill complexes of temples, palaces, courtyards, administrative buildings, and cities of the dead: the Place of the Sun, the Huaca del Sol, and the Place of the Moon, the Huaca de la Luna. Their craftsmen produced 143 million adobe bricks for these buildings, each stamped with the symbol of its maker.
⁷

As the Moche conquered their way into the surrounding hills and valleys, they built a grid of wide, well-designed roads and put into place a sophisticated system of communication: relay runners traveled the roads, carrying messages marked with cryptic symbols on lima beans. At its height, the Place of the Sun and the Place of the Moon lorded it over fifteen thousand square miles of territory. Vast irrigation canals, some running nearly a hundred miles through the Moche state, provided the growing villages with water. Figurines and paintings preserve the likenesses of the Moche kings and noblemen, but we know no names.
⁸

By the twelfth century, both the Moche and the Nazca were long gone. The Nazca were brought low by a drought that probably dried up even the underground rivers of the Atacama Desert, at least for a time. The uninhabitable desert preserved the mysterious Nazca glyphs in the sand for centuries. In the rain shadow, no water fell to wash the lines away.

Farther to the north, the Moche suffered from the double blows of alternating drought and flood. The ruins in their valley reveal that crop-killing dryness alternated with torrential downpours caused by more and more frequent El Niño events: warm currents that raise the surface temperature along the coast and produce strong, disruptive thunderstorms. Floods and mudslides ravaged the Moche valley. Winds and tides drove coastal dunes farther and farther inland, spreading sterile sand across fertile fields.
⁹

At the height of the floods and storms, the Moche tried to appease whatever deities governed the sky and winds. Three children, sacrificed together, are buried in a ceremonial plaza at the Place of the Moon, at the edge of a drastic mudslide. More sacrificial victims, buried in at least two different ceremonies, lie above and beside them. But the bloodshed did not stop the violent weather, or halt the slow and eventual collapse of the Moche empire. The sands covered the cities on the outskirts. The irrigation canals, blocked by mud and cracked by earthquakes, were abandoned; and, like the Nazca, the Moche faded away.
¹⁰

The peoples who succeeded them, some time later, were known as the Chimu. They built their towns partly on top of Moche ruins and did not try to spread their empire over nearly as great an area. The smaller kingdom survived into the fifteenth century, long enough to leave an oral history behind it; later Spanish historians, recording the stories they had heard from the conquered Chimu, tell of a bearded man named Tacaynamo who arrived on the South American coast from the sea. He beached his balsa wood raft and settled in the old Moche land. His son and his grandson conquered more and more of the nearby river valleys and established a royal dynasty.
¹¹

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Chimu capital, Chan Chan, covered some nine square miles and was home to perhaps thirty thousand people. This was a fairly sparse population, for such a large city (the ancient Central American city of Teotihuacan had occupied about the same area and had over two hundred thousand inhabitants), and ruins suggest that Chan Chan was more a center for pilgrimage than an actual living city.
¹²

The Chimu were still flourishing when, right around the year 1200, an unimportant tribe called the Inca settled on their southern border. They began to build tiny scattered villages on the rocky sides of the central Andes. Even the most prosperous of these villages, known as Cuzco, was a shabby agricultural outpost, occupied by llama herders and farmers scratching out a living in cold high-altitude fields.
¹³

Later, the Inca would claim that their first king began to rule in Cuzco at this time. His name in legend was Manco Capac; he was the oldest of eight siblings who (in the way of mythical founders) “had no father or mother.” Instead, the eight brothers and sisters emerged from a hill covered with gold, and immediately embarked on conquest: “Let us seek out fertile lands,” they said to each other, “and where we find them, let us subjugate the people who are there, and take their lands, and wage war on all those who do not receive us as lords.”
¹⁴

The truth behind the story lies in the Inca will to conquer: they had taken the site of Cuzco away from its original inhabitants. The conquest had also been savage: Manco Capac and his family tore the unfortunate villagers into pieces, ate their hearts and lungs, ripped pregnant women open. The natives of the Cuzco valley, the stories conclude, “were utterly destroyed.”
¹⁵

For the next two centuries, the Inca would remain in the valley they had conquered. But the seizing of Cuzco was only the first act in their history. The second act would more than match the first for bloodshed.

*
See Bauer,
The History of the Medieval World
, pp. 574–582.

*
Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Andes, has an elevation of 22,841 feet. It is the second-highest mountain among the “Seven Summits,” the nickname for the highest elevations on the seven continents; among the Seven Summits, only Everest (29,029 feet) is higher. Over a hundred peaks in the Himalaya range are taller than Aconcagua, but the Andean mountain is the highest summit outside Asia.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Mongol School of Warfare

Between 1201 and 1215,
Genghis Khan learns how to fight the civilized world

S
INCE
1165, the Jin in the north of China and the Song in the south had kept a fragile peace. But now, a first whisper of unease came from the lands to the north.

Ranging across the flat northern grasslands known as steppes were a loosely related set of tribes known collectively as “Mongols.” They had already migrated southward from the
taiga
, the cold northern pine forests; according to their own chronicles, the thirteenth-century
The Secret History of the Mongols
, they had descended from the union of a forest doe with a predatory blue-grey wolf. Every Mongol tribe had its own
khan
to lead it, and the khans and tribes struggled with each other for power. But within each tribe, clans and their chiefs fought constantly among themselves for horses, wives, loot, and the chance to rise to leadership of the tribe.
¹

Temujin, son of the chief of the Borjigid clan, was born near the sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun in 1167;
The Secret History
says that the newborn was “clutching in his right hand a clot of blood the size of a knucklebone.” At the age of nine, he was betrothed to the ten-year-old daughter of a clan leader from another tribe, and was sent (as was traditional) to live with the bride’s family. Days later, his father died, and Temujin ran away from his prospective father-in-law and returned home.
²

This was the beginning of a fraught adolescence. Temujin and his family were driven from their home by another clan, the Taichi’ut, who hoped to gain the khanship of their tribe; the exiles spent the next years scrounging for food in the cold wastes of the Khentil mountain range. Temujin was later captured by the Taichi’ut clan chief and escaped, still wearing the wooden collar used to confine him. By the time he turned sixteen, he was an adult with fully fledged instincts for survival.
³

Now old enough to be considered the head of his clan, Temujin revisited the home of his betrothed bride, Borte, and insisted that her father honor the arrangement. He then approached the khan of the nearby Kerait tribe and negotiated an alliance. The khan, an experienced middle-aged soldier named Toghrul, had been a friend of Temujin’s dead father; but he was more impressed with the gifts Temujin brought than with the obligations of that old attachment.

Almost immediately, Temujin was forced to call on both of his new allies for help. Another three-tribe coalition, known collectively as the Merkit, invaded his camp while he was away and kidnapped Borte.

Kidnapping was the second most popular way for a Mongol to get a wife; Temujin’s own mother had been kidnapped, decades before, from a Merkit tribesman, and the raid was both revenge and an attempt to check Temjuin’s growing power. It backfired. Temujin, Toghrul, and Temujin’s childhood friend Jamuqa joined forces (perhaps ten thousand horsemen, converging on the Merkit camp) and wiped the Merkit out.
The Secret History
celebrates the victory with song:

. . . [W]e tore their livers to pieces.

We emptied their beds

And we exterminated their relatives;

The women of theirs who remained,

We surely took captive!

Thus we destroyed the Merkit people.
⁴

(Borte was rescued as well, an event that gets much less space in
The Secret History
than the victory in battle.)