Francisco Pizarro Conquers the Inca Empire
Francisco Pizarro executed Atahualpa in July 1533 and entered Cuzco that November, completing the conquest of the largest empire in the Americas with fewer than two hundred men. The Inca had been captured at Cajamarca the previous November in an ambush in the town square. He then offered a ransom that has no parallel: one room filled once with gold and twice with silver, to the height of a raised hand. It was delivered over eight months, carried in from temples and palaces across the empire, and melted down. The Spanish share of the gold alone came to over eleven tonnes; a common foot soldier received roughly the equivalent of a lifetime's wages. Pizarro then had him tried on charges including idolatry, polygamy and the murder of his brother Huáscar. He was condemned to burn, which would have prevented mummification and, in Inca belief, an afterlife, and was garrotted instead after accepting baptism. The killing had no legal basis and Charles V wrote to say so. The empire's machinery kept working for the men who held it. Pizarro installed Huáscar's brother Manco Inca as a puppet, marched on Cuzco with Inca allies from the losing side of the civil war, and was received in some places as a liberator. Manco revolted in 1536 and besieged Cuzco for ten months. Pizarro founded Lima on the coast in 1535 and was murdered there in 1541 by the faction of his executed partner Diego de Almagro. A rump Inca state survived in the forest at Vilcabamba until 1572. Epidemic disease, which had preceded the Spaniards and killed the previous emperor, did far more than their weapons.
- Year: 1532 CE
- Category: Military
