The Spanish Conquest of Peru

The Spanish conquest of Peru was the military and political process by which Francisco Pizarro and a small force of Spanish soldiers, working in alliance with tens of thousands of indigenous auxiliaries, dismantled the Inca Empire between 1532 and 1535. The process is conventionally divided into three phases. The first phase was the seizure of the Sapa Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532, which destroyed the political authority of the Inca state in the northern Andes. The second phase was the conquest of Cusco in November 1533, in which Pizarro entered the royal capital of Tawantinsuyu with a small force and established Spanish control over the heart of the empire. The third phase was the defeat of the remaining Inca armies in 1533 and 1534, in which the surviving Inca generals — Quisquis, Chalcuchima, and others — were hunted down across the highlands. The conquest of Peru was not a single event but a series of engagements across a continent-sized polity, and the process was marked by the participation of indigenous auxiliaries, the collapse of the Andean political system, and the Spanish civil war of the 1530s between the Pizarro faction and the Almagro faction. The conquest of Cusco on 15 November 1533 is conventionally taken as the formal end of the Inca Empire.

Background

The state of the conquest in 1533

By the spring of 1533, when the ransom of Atahualpa had been delivered and the execution of Atahualpa had taken place, the Spanish controlled the northern highlands of Peru from a small number of garrisons. Pizarro was at Cajamarca with a force of about 500 Spanish soldiers and a much larger body of indigenous auxiliaries, drawn from groups such as the Cañari of southern Ecuador and the Chachapoya of the cloud forest, who had been incorporated into the Inca Empire only recently and who saw the Spanish as a means of throwing off Inca rule. The Spanish had the ransom gold and silver in their possession, enough to fund the further campaigns of conquest. The political authority of the Inca state in the north had been destroyed, but the surviving Inca generals in the south — Quisquis, Chalcuchima, and others — still commanded substantial armies, and the royal capital of Cusco was still held by forces loyal to the defeated faction of Huáscar.

Pizarro’s plan in 1533 was to consolidate the Spanish position in the north and to march south to Cusco. The plan was based on the assumption that the Spanish would be able to install a puppet Sapa Inca — they chose Manco Inca, a younger son of Huayna Capac — and that the installation would be accepted by the surviving Inca nobility. The assumption was correct in the short term, but it was undermined by the behavior of the Spanish themselves, who, in the months after the execution of Atahualpa, were visibly more interested in gold and silver than in political stability. The tensions between the Spanish and the puppet Sapa Inca would lead, in 1535, to the escape of Manco Inca from Cusco and to the establishment of the Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba.

The indigenous allies

The Spanish conquest of Peru was not a war between Spaniards and Inca; it was a war between Spaniards and one faction of the Inca, supported by a coalition of indigenous peoples who had been incorporated into the Inca Empire only recently and who had their own reasons for opposing Cusco. The most important of these allies were the Cañari of southern Ecuador, who had fought a long and unsuccessful war against the Inca and who provided several thousand warriors to the Spanish campaigns; the Chachapoya of the cloud forest of northern Peru, who had resisted Inca rule and who supplied a substantial body of warriors; the Huancas of the central highlands, who had been defeated by the Inca only in the 1460s; and the Huarochirí of the central coast, who had been incorporated into the empire only in the late fifteenth century. The Spanish also recruited auxiliary forces from among the peoples of the northern coast of Peru, including the people of Tumbes, who had been loyal to the Spanish since 1532.

The indigenous auxiliaries played a decisive role in the campaigns of 1533. They provided the labor of the long marches through the Andes, the porters and supply carriers, and the bulk of the fighting in the engagements against the Inca armies. The Spanish, who numbered only a few hundred in the campaigns of 1533, would have been unable to defeat the Inca armies without the indigenous auxiliaries. The indigenous auxiliaries also played a role in the Spanish civil war of the 1530s, in which the Cañari and other groups were aligned with the Pizarro faction.

The march to Cusco

The route and the engagements

Pizarro’s army, of about 500 Spanish soldiers and several thousand indigenous auxiliaries, left Cajamarca in the summer of 1533 and marched south along the spine of the Andes toward Cusco. The march took several months, and the army was engaged in a series of battles against Inca forces loyal to the now-dead Atahualpa. The most important of these was the battle on the plain of Quipaipán, near the city of Vilcashuamán, in which the Spanish and their indigenous allies defeated a large Inca army under the general Quisquis. The battle is conventionally taken as the decisive engagement of the defeat of the Inca armies in 1533, and it is one of the most fully documented in the chronicles. The Spanish chroniclers record that several thousand Inca were killed, and that Quisquis withdrew to the south with the remains of his army.

The march from Cajamarca to Cusco, along the spine of the Andes, took the Spanish through some of the most difficult terrain in the world. The road rose from sea level to over 4,000 meters in the high passes of the Andes, and the men suffered from cold, altitude sickness, and the scarcity of food. Pizarro refused to negotiate seriously with the surviving Inca nobility and pressed on.

The siege of Cusco

The conquest of Cusco was completed on 15 November 1533, when Pizarro entered the city with a small force. The Inca defense had been weakened by the earlier defeat at Quipaipán, and the city fell with relatively little fighting. The Spanish installed Manco Inca Yupanqui, a younger son of Huayna Capac, as a puppet Sapa Inca, and the royal capital of Tawantinsuyu was formally transferred to the new order. The Spanish were deeply impressed by the city’s goldwork, the Coricancha, the fortress of Sacsayhuamán, and the elaborate architecture of the Inca, and they began almost at once to strip the temples and palaces of their gold. The first sack of Cusco is estimated to have yielded more gold than the ransom of Atahualpa.

The conquest of Cusco was, in symbolic terms, the most important event of the entire Spanish conquest. Cusco had been the political and religious capital of the Inca Empire for about two centuries, and the fall of the city was understood, by both the Spanish and the indigenous peoples of the Andes, as the fall of the Inca state. The Spanish were nonetheless astonished by what they found. The chronicles of the chroniclers, especially those of Pedro Sancho and of the anonymous Relación de la conquista del Perú y hechos del Inca Manco II, describe the city in terms of wonder, and the descriptions were widely read in Spain and contributed to the popular image of Peru as a land of gold.

The defeat of the Inca armies

Quisquis and Chalcuchima

The defeat of the Inca armies in 1533 was not a single event but a series of engagements across the highlands of Peru. The Spanish fought the surviving Inca generals across the highlands for more than a year after the fall of Cusco. The campaigns required the Spanish to operate at high altitude, in difficult terrain, and against an enemy that still possessed the loyalty of substantial portions of the highland population. The Spanish, despite their small numbers, were able to defeat the Inca armies by using the same techniques that had worked at Cajamarca: surprise attacks in confined spaces, the use of cavalry, and the exploitation of divisions among the indigenous peoples.

The two most important Inca generals were Quisquis and Chalcuchima, both of whom had been the principal commanders of the northern armies in the civil war of succession. Quisquis, who had been the principal general of the northern army, withdrew to the south after the defeat at Quipaipán and was eventually killed in 1535, by his own men or in a fight with Spanish-allied forces. Chalcuchima, who had been the principal general of the southern campaign of the civil war, was captured by the Spanish in 1533 and was tried and burned at Cusco. The deaths of Quisquis and Chalcuchima effectively ended the organized military resistance of the Inca state, and the Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba, established in 1537, was a rump state, restricted to a remote region of the eastern Andes.

The collapse of the Inca political system

The defeat of the Inca armies in 1533 was followed by the collapse of the Inca political system. The decimal system of administration, the Qhapaq Ñan road network, the system of mit’a labor extraction, the system of mitma military colonies, and the state religion of the Inti sun cult all depended on the existence of a centralized political authority in Cusco. With the conquest of Cusco in 1533 and the death of the surviving Inca generals, the system lost its center. The Spanish, who inherited the fragments, were able to adapt the mit’a system to their own purposes as the colonial mita, but they were unable to reconstruct the political system as a whole.

The collapse of the Inca political system was also accompanied by the demographic collapse of the Andean population, which began in the 1520s with the first smallpox epidemic and continued into the seventeenth century. The demographic collapse and the political collapse reinforced each other: the disappearance of the population made it impossible to maintain the Inca administrative system, and the collapse of the administrative system accelerated the demographic collapse by disrupting the redistribution of food and the maintenance of irrigation works.

The Spanish civil war

The Pizarro–Almagro conflict

Even as the Inca Empire was being dismantled, the Spanish themselves fell into a violent dispute. The partnership between Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro had been regulated by the 1529 capitulación, which gave Pizarro the governorship of the lands south of a certain line and Almagro the right to conquer further south, beyond what was then the limit of the Inca Empire. As the Spanish learned that the empire extended much further south than they had initially thought — into modern Chile — the question of the boundary between Pizarro’s and Almagro’s jurisdictions became acute. The Spanish civil war in Peru of the 1530s was the result.

The dispute came to a head in 1535. Pizarro founded the city of Lima on the Pacific coast as the new capital of the Spanish holdings, and the following year Almagro, with a force of perhaps 500 Spanish soldiers and a large indigenous auxiliary force, set out to conquer Chile. The expedition was unsuccessful: the indigenous resistance in Chile was fierce, the climate was hostile, and the expedition returned to Peru in 1537 without having made a permanent conquest. By that time the young puppet Sapa Inca, Manco Inca, had escaped from Cusco and had begun a general rebellion in the highlands.

The battle of Las Salinas

The dispute between Pizarro and Almagro came to a head in 1538. The two Spanish factions, augmented by their respective indigenous allies, met at the plain of Las Salinas, near Cusco, on 6 April 1538. The Pizarro faction, under the command of Hernando Pizarro and Sebastián de Benalcázar, won a decisive victory. Almagro was captured, tried, and executed by strangulation in July 1538. A son of Almagro, also named Diego, was recognized as the leader of the almagrista faction, and in 1541 he led a group of his followers into the house of Francisco Pizarro in Lima and killed him in a hand-to-hand struggle. The civil war continued for several more years, and the Spanish crown, in the form of the newly created viceroyalty of Peru, had to intervene to settle it.

The Spanish civil war had consequences for the conquest of Peru. The war distracted the Spanish from the campaigns against the Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba, and the siege of Cusco in 1536 by the forces of Manco Inca succeeded in part because the Spanish were divided. The war also established the personal authority of Francisco Pizarro over Peru and led to the execution of Almagro, and the resulting factional alignment shaped the politics of the Spanish colonial regime for the next two decades.

Significance

The end of the Inca Empire

The conquest of Cusco in 1533 is conventionally taken as the formal end of the Inca Empire. The fall of the royal capital of Tawantinsuyu destroyed the symbolic center of the empire, and the defeat of the Inca armies in 1533 and 1534 destroyed the organized military resistance. The Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba that Manco Inca established in 1537 survived for another thirty-five years, but it was a rump state, restricted to a remote region of the eastern Andes. The conquest of Peru, in other words, did not end the war in 1533, but it ended the Inca Empire as it had existed before 1532.

The conquest of Peru also established the framework of the Spanish colonial regime in the Andes. The installation of Manco Inca as a puppet Sapa Inca was a temporary expedient, and the escape of Manco Inca from Cusco in 1535 and the establishment of the Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba were the consequences. The foundation of Lima in 1535 was the basis of the Spanish colonial capital on the Pacific coast, and the foundation of the viceroyalty of Peru in 1542 was the basis of the Spanish colonial regime. The conquest of Peru, in short, was the political and military process by which the Andes were incorporated into the Spanish Empire.

The colonial economy

The conquest of Peru also established the basis of the colonial economy. The silver mines of Potosí, in modern Bolivia, were discovered in 1545, and the silver mines of Cerro de Pasco, in the central highlands of Peru, were discovered in 1630. The mines required a large labor force, supplied by the colonial mita, a rotating labor draft that sent some 13,000 workers a year to Potosí. The mines produced silver on a scale that made Peru one of the most important sources of precious metal in the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The economy lasted, in its essential features, for three hundred years, until the wars of independence of the early nineteenth century.