Encyclopedia of the Incas

down with an illness that at first made him delirious, followed by an eruption of
scabies and what appeared to be leprosy (sarna y lepra), and he died within four
days. Soldier Pedro de Cieza de León’s account, based on years of experience
in the northern Andes and on the oral sources he consulted, composed a
multivolume chronicle of the conquest of Peru. He wrote that the Quito area,
following the completion of the Inca conquest of the north, was afflicted by a
“great pestilence of viruelas (smallpox), so contagious that more than 200,000
died of it” (Cieza 1959 [1553]). When his symptoms appeared, the Inca Huayna
Capac ordered sacrifices in all realms for his health, but efforts were in vain.
Although it is difficult to date Huayna Capac’s death precisely, most observers
and later historians believe it was sometime in 1524 or 1525. Certainly the
impact was great on the Inca Empire. Huayna Capac’s conquest of the
northernmost reaches of the empire had just ended, but there was much native
opposition to Inca domination. In Cuzco there was internal division and strife
that was typical during transfers of authority following the death of the ruler (see
Wars, Dynastic). We also know that many of Huayna Capac’s relatives and
children, including his designated heir, and many others in Tahuantinsuyu
succumbed to sickness about the same time the ruler perished. The process of the
preparation of his corpse and the ceremonial transfer of his mummified remains
from the north to Cuzco led to new centers of infection. For the next half decade
leading up to the Spanish arrival, there was a costly and deadly battle for
leadership of the realm. The victory of Atahualpa over Huascar almost coincided
with Pizarro’s march from the Peruvian coast to Cajamarca. Such conditions of
internal civil war, with a large toll in lives and disruption of the subsistence
economy, were the perfect setting for a decline in nutrition with a simultaneous
weakening of the human body’s resistance to any type of pathogenic infection.
The initial introductions of first smallpox, and then measles in pandemic form
were followed by subsequent introductions. Some were localized in nature,
others pandemic. By the end of the sixteenth century epidemics fell into a more
endemic pattern, although the two combined in a 1585–1591 pandemic to
produce very high mortality. Other foreign pathogens were introduced before the
end of the century. Typhus was probably the earliest in 1546, although it may
have been plague. It was virtually impossible to distinguish between the two by
their symptoms in their hemorrhagic forms. Based on demographic evidence
taken from periodic native population counts and parish death and birth records,
the cumulative impact of Old World diseases on the peoples of the Andean world