The Inca Empire or Inka Empire was centered in what is now Peru from 1438 to 1533. Over that period, the Inca used conquest and peaceful assimilation to incorporate to their empire a large portion of western South America, basically on the Andean mountain ranges. The Inca empire proved short-lived: by 1533, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, called a Sapa Inca, was killed on the orders of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, marking the beginning of Spanish rule.
The Incas created the vast and powerful Empire of the Pre-Columbian America. Their administrative, political and military center was located in Cusco. The Tahuantinsuyo reached its greatest extension at the beginning of XVI century. It dominated a territory that included from north to south, the actual territory of Ecuador and part of Colombia to the center of Chile and the north-west of Argentina, and from west to east, from Bolivia to the Amazonian forests. The Tahuantinsuyo was organized in "señoríos" (dominions) with a stratified society, in which the ruler was the Inca. It was also supported by an economy based on the collective property of the land. In fact, the Inca Empire was conceived like an ambitious and audacious civilizing project, based on a mythical thought, in which the harmony of the relationships between the human being, nature and Gods was truly essential.
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