Huayna Capac

Huayna Capac was the last Sapa Inca to rule an undivided Tawantinsuyu, and the empire reached its greatest extent under him. He was the son of Túpac Inca Yupanqui and was born at Tumipampa in what is now Ecuador. He spent most of his reign campaigning, pushing the frontier south along the Chilean coast and north through Ecuador into southern Colombia, and he built a second centre of government at Quito that rivalled Cusco. He extended the road network, the storehouse system and the resettlement of populations that held the empire together without writing or wheeled transport. He never met a European. He did meet what they brought: an epidemic, almost certainly smallpox, moved down through the isthmus ahead of the Spanish and reached the Andes some years before Pizarro did. It killed him around 1527, along with his designated heir Ninan Cuyochi, and an unknown but enormous share of the population. The succession fell between two surviving sons, Huáscar in Cusco and Atahualpa in Quito, and the civil war between them was still being settled when Pizarro landed with fewer than two hundred men in 1532. That sequence - disease first, dynastic war second, invasion third - is the reason a force that size could take an empire of perhaps twelve million people. His mummy was venerated for years afterwards and was eventually seized and destroyed by the Spanish. Accounts of his death differ on where it happened and on whether he named a successor at all, which mattered enormously afterwards. Spanish chroniclers writing decades later had every reason to present the empire as already collapsing, and modern historians treat their versions with corresponding care.

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