The Inca Empire

The Inca Empire, known to its own people as Tawantinsuyu, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America, incorporating a large portion of western South America centered on the Andean Mountains between 1438 and 1533 through a mix of conquest and peaceful assimilation. Ruled from the capital Cusco by a divine absolute monarch called the Sapa Inca, it governed a vast, ethnically diverse territory through a network of roads, a relay messenger system and a labor tax called the mit'a rather than a market economy. The empire fell to Spanish conquistadors under Francisco Pizarro beginning in 1532, though the last independent Inca state held out until 1572.