The Fall of the Inca Empire — Tawantinsuyu broken after its emperor was seized and killed

The Inca Empire — Tawantinsuyu, “the four parts together,” the largest state in the pre-Columbian Americas — was broken in 1533 when a small Spanish expedition under Francisco Pizarro seized its ruler, the Sapa Inca Atahualpa, at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532, extracted an immense ransom in gold and silver, and then executed him. The capital, Cuzco, was occupied a year later, on 15 November 1533. The empire that fell ruled some ten to sixteen million people across roughly two million square kilometres of the Andes, from southern Colombia to central Chile, governed by a road system of some 40,000 kilometres and a bureaucracy without writing.

The conquest was not the feat of a handful of Spaniards overawing a docile people. Two catastrophes had struck the Andean world before Pizarro’s 168 men ever reached the highlands. The first was epidemic disease: smallpox, introduced to the Americas by Europeans, swept south ahead of any European traveller and killed the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac around 1528, together with his designated heir. The second flowed from the first — a ruinous civil war of succession between two of Huayna Capac’s sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, the “war of the two brothers,” which had torn the empire apart and ended only months before the Spanish arrived.

Pizarro exploited both. He landed in a state still bleeding from civil war, its institutions concentrated in the sacred person of an emperor, and he struck at that person directly. Atahualpa, fresh from victory over his brother and camped at Cajamarca with an army that may have numbered in the tens of thousands, agreed to meet the strangers; in a coordinated ambush the Spanish slaughtered thousands of unarmed retainers and took the Sapa Inca alive. With the emperor a hostage, the machinery of a centralized empire could be turned by the hand that held him.

The other decisive element was Andean, not European. The Inca had built their empire by conquest within living memory, and many of the peoples they ruled — among them the Cañari, the Huanca, the Chachapoya, and the Chanka — resented Cuzco and joined the invaders in their tens of thousands, supplying the manpower without which 168 foreigners could have done nothing. The fall of the Inca Empire was an Andean civil catastrophe that Spain harnessed; it should be understood, and remembered, from the side of the peoples who lived it.