War and a Semblance of Peace in the Inca Heartland

Inheritance of the qualities associated with being cinchecona was
expected, but these had, nonetheless, to be demonstrated.
Lucana was head of the Cañar mitimaes. Precisely for the Cañar region,
there is evidence for hereditary rulers. In the Historia Indica, the leader of the
Cañares was identified as Cañar Capac, or “the capac of the Cañares”
(Sarmiento de Gamboa 1906, chp. 44: 87). Sarmiento’s sources were Incas, so
here we are dealing with Inca understandings. The Incas themselves were
capac, that is, they recognized a hereditary status that passed through the
descendants of Manco Capac and a sister, who had emerged from the central
window at Tambotoco, eleven generations before the Spaniards arrived. Capac
status was not something the Incas had known they possessed all along: it
was revealed to them in several episodes by a solar deity connected with
warfare (Julien 2000a: 23-42). The Incas Sarmiento interviewed described the
leaders of a number of powerful prehispanic groups as capac. They were
obstacles to the Inca expansion, and the Cañar Capac was one of them. Diego
Lucana’s testimony, despite the use of the term cinchecona, accords well with
what Inca sources said about the Cañar region. What he tells us, however, is
not that cinchecona status was inherited, but that there was an expectation
that the qualities associated with it would transfer to the next generation.
These qualities still had to be demonstrated. This also appears to have been
the case with capac status.
The contrast between Diego Lucana’s testimony and that given by the
Huringuanca witnesses may reflect significant differences in local organization.
Toledo’s Informaciones were not the first place where the term behetría had
been used to describe the political organization of the Jauja valley before the
time of the Inca empire. Pedro de Cieza de León, who traveled through the
valley in 1548, described the division of the valley into three parcialidades
(subdivisions) by the Incas, but noted that the region had been characterized
by behetría before that. Cieza noted that the people of the Jauja valley were all
Guancas and had a common origin myth: they descended from ancestors who
emerged from a spring called Guaribilca. Perhaps he used the term behetría to
characterize the political organization of the valley because the Guancas had
not been united under one lord (1984, chp. 84: 242-43). When we consider
the testimony of the Huringuanca witnesses, only one said anything about the
effective size of political units. Alonso Pomaguala testified that “each
parcialidad had a cinchecona, and that in this valley of Jauja, up to the moiety
of the Ananguancas, the cincheconas took care of them” (f. 17v). He seems to
be indicating that, although there were divisions in the valley, the political
units were not necessarily small. He may also be telling us that there had
been an effective boundary between the territory that later became
Huringuanca and Ananguanca. Alonso Camo, also from Huringuanca,
confirms this impression: the towns near each other got along well; the
conflict was with towns that were “not so close”. These more distant people
would attack them to take their lands and their women (ff. 37-37v).
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