All events · The Medieval World

The Inca Mitma: State Resettlement across Tawantinsuyu

c. 1438–1532 · Americas

Displacement

Displaced

1 million

Highly uncertain. Colonial Spanish chroniclers who interviewed Inca administrators — Cieza de Leon, Garcilaso de la Vega, Cobo — describe the systematic transfer of whole communities, and modern anthropological and linguistic reconstruction, notably by John Murra and later scholars, suggests that something between a quarter and a third of the empire's population lived as mitmaqkuna. Because estimates of Tawantinsuyu's population itself range from about 6 million to 14 million, the resulting figure ranges from roughly 1.5 million to well over 4 million people over the course of a century; more conservative readings, treating the quarter-to-third claim as applying to specific provinces rather than the empire, give figures in the low hundreds of thousands. The central estimate here is deliberately rough. Archaeological confirmation exists for particular transfers, including the state maize estates of the Cochabamba valley settled with colonists drawn from dozens of highland groups, documented in a 1556 Spanish visita that lists their origins.

Share of the population affected

10%

of the population of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, on the eve of the Spanish invasion, 1520

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What happened

The Inca state used compulsory resettlement, mitma, as a routine instrument of rule: communities judged rebellious were moved far from their homelands and replaced by populations of proven loyalty, while colonists were planted to open new agricultural land, garrison frontiers or supply specialised crafts. Transferred groups, the mitmaqkuna, retained their dress and ethnic identity but owed labour and allegiance to the state and were registered in the census system recorded on khipu. The most fully documented case is the Cochabamba valley, converted into a state maize estate worked by colonists drawn from a long list of highland groups, itemised in a Spanish inspection of 1556. Craft specialists were also relocated wholesale, including metalworkers and weavers from the defeated Chimu kingdom brought to Cusco. The Spanish conquest inherited a landscape of displaced populations and layered its own reducciones on top of it — a system the atlas already covers. Mitma is probably the largest state-organised population transfer in the pre-Columbian Americas and its absence from the atlas was a substantial gap.

Parties

The Inca state uprooted conquered communities and moved them across the empire as mitmaqkuna colonists, replacing them with loyal populations

Disputed

The scale, which depends on unresolved estimates of Tawantinsuyu's total population and on whether the chroniclers' claim that a quarter to a third of subjects were mitmaqkuna described the empire as a whole or particular provinces.

The denominator

There is no census. Modern reconstructions work back from early colonial tribute counts, Andean archaeology and epidemic modelling, and differ by a factor of two: Cook's range for the Andes is roughly 4 to 15 million, with about 9 million his preferred figure, while Rowe's older reconstruction gave about 6 million and some settlement-based estimates reach 12-14 million. A figure of roughly 10 million for the empire in the 1520s sits in the middle of that literature and should be read as an order of magnitude.

The mitmaqkuna total accumulates across roughly a century of successive conquests, while the denominator is a single snapshot for the empire at its greatest extent, so the ratio understates how heavily particular conquered provinces were moved.

Where the baseline comes from

Inca Empire — Wikipediaopen-edited
Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

No death toll can be established and the system was not primarily lethal: mitmaqkuna were resettled as productive subjects with land and obligations rather than killed or enslaved. Chroniclers describe deaths in transit and from moving people between radically different altitudes and disease environments, but nothing was counted, and the catastrophic mortality of the sixteenth century belongs to the Spanish conquest entries.

Documented forms of violence

Forced Labour

Spanish colonial inspections such as the 1556 Cochabamba visita, which recorded the origins and labour obligations of resettled colonists, document the labour service required of mitmaqkuna.

Movements mapped

Aymara and other highland colonists resettled into the Cochabamba maize valleys
Chimu craftsmen from Chan Chan transferred to Cusco after the conquest of the north coast

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Peru, Bolivia

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.