The Lamanites After Cumorah – Part II

Continuing with the plight of the Lamanites after their victory over the Nephites at Cumorah, and the extensive civil war that followed and both its duration and consequences.    Before continuing, perhaps a word or two about Fernando de Montesinos might be in order, since it is his records (Ancient memories, histories and policies of Peru, and Annals of Peru, 1498-1642) we rely on to some extent in this post, mostly because it is one of the earliest and most likely accurate from what was told by the surviving Inca after the Conquest, and spent much time in Peru, travelling throughout the region from north to south, west to east.
    It is interesting that Montesinos was the only early Spanish historian who made an attempt to connect Peru with Biblical locations and give its earliest inhabitants a Semitic background, including a list of 93 pre-Inca kings. It seems most likely that Montesinos drew some of his material from an earlier history by Blas Valera, History of the Incas, now lost).

The works of Valera (left), that is what survived the sacking of Cadiz by the English in 1596, were delivered to Garcilaso de la Vega in 1600, who mentions it as the source of his Royal Inca Commentraies, which narrated a “golden age” before the arrival of the Spaniards and Christianity.
    With that in mind, let us return to the rise of the Inca at the conclusion of the thousand years of Lamanite civil wars and their aftermath. As stated in the previous post, the Quechua people, who would later become known as the Inca, began to coalesce in the area of Cuzco around 1400 A.D., with Sapa Inca, Viracocha (King or Ruler Viracocha, later expanded to mean “the Great Inca,” and Emperor), but in 1400 the Quechua in Cuzco was a simple chiefdom, over which Viracocha ruled. This role became hereditary and Viracocha’s oldest son, Urco, who was next in line, is said to have fled Cuzco along with the king, Viracocha, and another brother at the advice of Viracocha’s aids, when the Chanka threatened their attack.
    This was at the end of Viracocha’s reign, and the Chanka, who had already defeated several Quechua-speaking tribes, saw their opportunity and launched an invasion of Cuzco in 1438. The old and stunned Inca and the Cuzco Nobles decided that resistance was futile, and fled to a fortress at Calca with his heir, prince Urcu. But two other of his sons, Roca and Cusi Inca Yupanqui took the command of Cuzco together with the old veteran generals Vicaquirao and Apu Mayta, determined to offer a fight. The armies met outside Cuzco, and according to the Inca legends, sacred stones called pururaucas came to life as warriors and helped them in the bitter struggle.

The Chankas, confident in victory, had brought the effigy of their tribal God, which was conquered by the Incas on the battlefield. That caused havoc among the Chankas, who fell back in order to regroup. Cusi Yupanqui followed them, and stormed their camp, pushing them back across the border. He now gathered his vassals, and defeated the Chankas in the subsequent battles.
    Having defeated the Chanka with his surprise strategy (he had ordered that large bounders around the valley to be covered in battle dress so they looked like warriors which caused some confusion within the Chanka ranks), Cusi Yupanqui was named king, or Sapa Inca, and took the name Pachacuti Yupanqui, which meant “he who overturns space and time," and Yupanki meant "with honor,” or “he who honorably saved the kingdom” as opposed to his father and elder brother who had dishonorably fled for safety elsewhere.
    It cannot be claimed with any certainty that these early Inca were Lamanite or Lamanite descendants; however, both occupied the area that was once known as the City of Nephi during Nephite times, and the City of Lehi-Nephi during Lamanite occupation. That the region was filled with constant warfare and civil unrest, with each tribe aligned against another, that at the time of the Chanka, the bitter enemy of the Quechua, centuries of such fighting  had been going on, with first one tribe gaining supremacy and control, such as the Paracas, Huari, Nazca, Chimu, etc., then another. It was a world of unrest, fear, and minimal alignments.
    In fact, when the Chanka threatened to attack, the Quechua asked for assistance from the other cultures in the Cuzco Valley, but none agreed to help, each waiting to see who won before they thought to be of assistance.
    When Pachacuti successfully defended the homeland against the Chanka, he did so with a small peasant band of warriors—later, this peasant band would be replaced by an army with professional officers, chosen during the Warachikuy festival during which candidates had to undergo various tests of physical skill such as racing, marksmanship, simulated combat and battle drill.

These growing Inca battalions contained permanent staff (generals and officers) and non-permanent personalel composed of drafted hatun runas (comman men). Eventually, they would be known as the Tawantinsuyu or Inca State, which in less than 100 years spanned the distance of northern Ecuador to central Chile, and consisted of 12 million inhabitants from more than 100 different ethnic groups at its peak, just before the Spanish arrived just over a century after their emergence as a distinct people.
    Earlier, where Viracocha’s raids were simply for looting purposes, when Pachacuti came to power, his raids were mainly to demonstrate his power rather than conquest. In fact, his attempts at control within the Cuzco Valley met with success as he built up a ferocious reputation of his army and a false Inca history to convince other cultures of the area that they would be far better off joining the Inca than being conquered by them.
    His first efforts were more to show this power and for conquest, but soon recognized the value of creating a true Empire. His conquests then turned into occupational efforts where he gained control and rule over those he subjected or joined him, and by 1471, just 33 years after his defeat of the Chanka, he had expanded his rule and control throughout the Cuzco Valley and the areas round about. During this time, to solidify his power, Pachacuti had his two brothers killed, and two of his own sons.

The rise of the Inca saw them using religion as a tool of reign, as most aboriginal cultures have done. This invariably led to the canonization of the current rulers as “gods,” a trait even the Romans adopted, and the Inca were no different. The king of the Quechua took on the name The Inca, meaning “the Supreme Ruler,” and later the term was applied to the Royal Family, and in modern times, by historians the name became used for the people in general.
    Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui ascended the throne after the 1438 battle, probably in 1440, and with him followed a new era in Quechua history—not only due to his expansive politic and civic planning, but also because he truly was the first Inca ruler, separate from the pantheon of rulers and historical family lineage the Inca later created for themselves in order to intimidate their enemies and surrounding cultures, and as modern scholars claim, Pachacuti is regarded as the first ruler of the Incas whose reign can be confirmed by historical material.
    No matter how one looks at these events, the warring history of the Andean region in South America is filled with the internal civil wars initially of which Moroni spoke, until it deteriorated into tribe against tribe where everyone was an enemy not of your own family, or extended family. This lasted, with one group after another claiming some significant over the centuries until the Inca finally rose to conquer nearly every tribe and culture from Ecuador to Chile and from the Pacific coast to the jungle.

This certainly tends to match the picture Moroni gives us of what he saw following Cumorah, “And behold also, the Lamanites are at war one with another; and the whole face of this land is one continual round of murder and bloodshed; and no one knoweth the end of the war (Mormon 8:8); and also “For behold, their wars are exceedingly fierce among themselves; and because of their hatred they put to death every Nephite that will not deny the Christ” (Moroni 1:2).
    One might ask, as several have inquired of us over the years of this blog, why the evil and unrighteous Lamanites were allowed to annihilate the Nephites. But as we have been told, the Lord uses the unrighteous to punish the unrighteous, and obviously, though history does not tell us this directly, the Lamanites never had any peace after that, as the chroniclers have suggested, and the poem above demonstrates.