Pizarro Conquers Inca Empire

In 1532, the Spanish adventurer Francisco Pizarro and a force of roughly 170 to 200 men captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca, in the northern Andes. The ambush began the Spanish conquest of Tawantinsuyu, an empire of perhaps several million people stretching along the Andes from modern Ecuador to Chile. Its fall transferred enormous wealth, especially silver, to Spain and ended the largest indigenous state in the Americas.

The Inca Empire had grown rapidly in the fifteenth century, held together by roads, storehouses, tribute labor, and a powerful administrative system. But it was vulnerable at the moment of contact. Smallpox and other Old World diseases, probably spreading ahead of the Spaniards from earlier contacts in Panama and Colombia, appear to have killed many people, including the emperor Huayna Capac, around the 1520s. His death helped trigger a civil war between his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa. Atahualpa had just won that war when Pizarro arrived. Pizarro, who had won royal permission for the venture after earlier expeditions along the Pacific coast, brought horses, steel weapons, and a few firearms.

At Cajamarca, Atahualpa agreed to meet the Spaniards, arriving with a large, mostly unarmed retinue. After a tense exchange involving a Dominican friar and a religious demand that the emperor accept Christianity and Spanish authority, Pizarro's men attacked. Cannon and gunfire, cavalry charges, and panic led to the slaughter of many Inca attendants, and Atahualpa was seized. Accounts come mainly from Spanish participants, so details and numbers should be treated with caution.

Atahualpa offered to fill a large room with gold and twice over with silver in exchange for his release. The ransom was delivered, and the metal was melted down, but the Spaniards put him on trial and executed him in 1533. Pizarro then marched on Cusco, the Inca capital, aided by Spanish reinforcements and by indigenous groups resentful of Inca rule or caught up in the civil war.

Conquest did not end resistance. Manco Inca, installed as a puppet ruler, rebelled in 1536 and besieged Cusco before retreating to the mountains of Vilcabamba, where an Inca successor state lasted until 1572. Meanwhile, the Spaniards fought among themselves, and Pizarro was assassinated in 1541 by rivals.

The consequences were long and severe. Disease, forced labor, and upheaval devastated Andean populations, while the Spanish Crown built a colonial system based on silver mining, notably at Potosí. Yet Quechua language, textile traditions, farming practices, and communal institutions endured, and they remain central to Andean life today.