They were distinguished by many exclusive and very important privileges;
they wore a peculiar dress; spoke a dialect, if we may believe the
chronicler, peculiar to themselves; 54 and had the choicest portion of the
public domain assigned for their support. They lived, most of them, at
court, near the person of the prince, sharing in his counsels, dining at his
board, or supplied from his table. They alone were admissible to the great
offices in the priesthood. They were invested with the command of
armies, and of distant garrisons, were placed over the provinces, and, in
short, filled every station of high trust and emolument.55 Even the laws,
severe in their general tenor, seem not to have been framed with reference
to them; and the people, investing the whole order with a portion of the
sacred character which belonged to the sovereign, held that an Inca noble
was incapable of crime.56

The other order of nobility was the Curacas, the caciques of the
conquered nations, or their descendants. They were usually continued by
the government in their places, though they were required to visit the
capital occasionally, and to allow their sons to be educated there as the
pledges of their loyalty. It is not easy to define the nature or extent of
their privileges. They were possessed of more or less power, according to
the extent of their patrimony, and the number of their vassals. Their
authority was usually transmitted from father to son, though sometimes
the successor was chosen by the people.57 They did not occupy the
highest posts of state, or those nearest the person of the sovereign, like the
nobles of the blood. Their authority seems to have been usually local, and
always in subordination to the territorial jurisdiction of the great
provincial governors, who were taken from the Incas.58

It was the Inca nobility, indeed, who constituted the real strength.of the