In November 1533, Francisco Pizarro rode triumphantly into Cuzco, the royal capital of the Inca empire, and took stock of its storied treasures. With just 180 hardened soldiers of fortune at his command, the cunning Spanish conquistador had ambushed— and then executed by strangulation— the emperor Atahuallpa, prompting the royal Inca army of 30,000 to retreat. Pizarro, a former foundling and swineherd, could scarcely believe the booty that awaited him. Some of his men had already pried loose golden plaques from the temple of the sun and filled their saddle packs with silver statues. They had stripped golden masks and staffs from the mummified bodies of Inca sovereigns and eyed the vast estates they would soon claim for their own. But Pizarro and his plundering band of adventurers ignored perhaps the greatest treasure of all: the rare and luxurious fabrics that were the foundation of Inca wealth.
The Inca were cloth makers, the likes of whom Europe had never known. Inca weavers made bridges from cords, wove roofs from fibers, and counted their wealth not in scribbles on a page but in patterns of knots on woolen strands. And they wove a woolen fabric from the fleece of the alpaca, a small, slender member of the camel family, that was so soft and alluring it was prized above almost all else in the highland empire centered in what is now Peru. Among the people of the Andes, cloth was currency. Inca emperors rewarded the loyalty of their nobles with gifts of soft fabric made by expert weavers. They gave away stacks of fine woolen textiles to assuage the pride of defeated lords. They paid their armies in silky smooth material. For an emperor intent on glory, as most Inca emperors were, cloth making was a major enterprise of state. The imperial textile warehouses were so precious that Inca armies deliberately set them afire when retreating from battle, depriving their enemies of that which made them strong.
Pizarro and his comrades had crossed an ocean in quest of glittering gold and silver, not fabric. And the viceroys who succeeded Pizarro were similarly oblivious. In the chaos and devastation that followed the Spanish conquest, the soft seductive cloth coveted by Inca royalty disappeared with the Inca themselves. Meanwhile, all across remote Andean valleys, once prosperous villages fell into a poverty that has endured for five centuries.
