From one Andean valley to the largest empire the Americas had ever known — in under a century. Then 168 strangers walked into the mountains and ended it.
Around 1200, the Inca were a small chiefdom in the Cusco valley — one mountain tribe among many. A little over a century later they ruled Tahuantinsuyu, the Land of the Four Quarters: ten million people from Ecuador to Chile, bound by 40,000 kilometers of stone road. No empire in history grew so fast. None fell so suddenly.
