The Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire

Introduction

Few episodes in human history have unfolded with such speed, drama, and consequence as the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. In the space of roughly four decades — from the first tentative landings on the Pacific coast of South America in the 1520s to the final extinction of organized Inca resistance in the Andean jungles in 1572 — an empire that had taken a century to build, that encompassed millions of people, and that stretched from the sun-scorched deserts of the Atacama to the rain-soaked highlands of Ecuador, was dismantled, absorbed, and transformed beyond recognition. The forces that accomplished this were surprisingly small: a few hundred Spanish soldiers armed with steel, gunpowder, war horses, and an unshakeable conviction in the righteousness of their cause. Yet the conquest cannot be attributed to Spanish strength alone. Disease, political division within the Inca state, the psychology of divine kingship, and decades of civil war all conspired to weaken the greatest empire the Western Hemisphere had ever seen at precisely the moment when it needed to be strongest.

The story of the conquest is inseparable from the larger story of what the Inca Empire was and what it had achieved. Tawantinsuyu, the Quechua name for the realm meaning "The Four Regions Together," was in 1532 the largest empire on Earth in terms of territory in the Americas. Its people had built an administrative system of extraordinary sophistication without a writing system in the conventional sense, managing millions of subjects through an elaborate network of roads, relay runners, storehouses, and quipu — knotted-cord record-keeping devices. Its armies had extended Inca power across some of the most challenging terrain on the planet, and its agricultural engineers had carved the Andean slopes into terraced fields that could feed armies and feed cities. The Inca had constructed a civilization that, for all its differences from the European model, was in no meaningful sense inferior or primitive.

Yet within months of a single encounter at the town of Cajamarca in November 1532, the entire edifice began to collapse. The Sapa Inca Atahualpa was captured, held for ransom, and murdered. Within two years Spanish soldiers marched into the capital of Cusco. Within a decade a full colonial administration was in place. Within a generation the mita labor system was driving thousands of indigenous men into the silver mines of Potosi, where they would die in the dark. The demographic catastrophe that followed the conquest was one of the greatest in human history.

This article traces that story from the formation and height of the Inca Empire, through the political and biological crises that preceded the Spanish arrival, through the conquest itself, and finally through the colonial aftermath and the enduring legacy of these events in modern Peru and in the broader history of the world.

The Inca Empire at Its Height

The Inca Empire was the product of a relatively brief but extraordinary period of expansion. The Inca people, who called themselves the Quechua or sometimes simply "the people" in their own language, originated around the city of Cusco in the high Andes of what is now southern Peru. Early Inca history is partly mythologized: the founding ancestor Manco Capac is said to have emerged from the island of the sun in Lake Titicaca and led his people to Cusco, where they established the first dynasty. What can be said with more historical confidence is that through the early fourteenth century, the Inca were one of several competing chiefdoms in the Cusco basin, no more powerful or remarkable than their neighbors.