Muisca rulers

Muisca rulers were so-called "aggrandizers", that is charismatic leaders at the head of various factions, who forged alliances and relations of subordination with various communities and ruled over the Muisca, a pre-hispanic indigenous group of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in the Eastern Andes. The Muisca communities did not have a unified political entity, but were ruled by several chiefdoms or cacicazgos, some of which formed confederations of chiefdoms. At the time of the Spanish invasion, four confederations were thriving in Muisca territory: Bogotá, Tunja, Duitama and Sogamoso. Additionally, there were independent chiefdoms in the north-west. The Chibcha-speaking Guane and Lache were also ruled by the confederation of Guanentá and the confederation of El Cocuy respectively.

Power was based simultaneously on prestige and authority, in the form of rules of succession and a degree of popular consent. Economically, chiefs (or caciques) are in permanent competition to show strengthen their legitimacy and power (and finance artisanery) by redistributing an accumulated surplus of goods. Chiefs had a distributing role as organizers of Muisca tamsas (erroneously translated as "tributes"), in receiving goods from their subjects and redistributing the accumulated products in exchange for labor.