Inca Civilization
In-depth guide

The Last Incas After the Conquest

The last Incas after the conquest refers to the long period of post-conquest indigenous resistance led from the cloud-forest refuge of Vilcabamba in the eastern Andes, and to the political descendants of the Inca dynasty who continued to use the title of Sapa Inca until 1572. The period begins with the coronation of the puppet emperor Manco Inca by the Spanish in 1534, his subsequent rebellion in 1535–1536, his retreat to the fortress-city of Vilcabamba, and the foundation of the so-called Neo-Inca State that survived under four more rulers — Sayri Túpac, Titu Cusi, Topa Inca, and Túpac Amaru I — until the Spanish conquest of Vilcabamba and the execution of the last Sapa Inca in 1572. The article on Manco Inca and the Neo-Inca State treats the foundation of the rump state in detail, while the article on Túpac Amaru I and the last stand at Vilcabamba describes the final years of independent Inca rule, and the article on Túpac Amaru II and indigenous resistance in colonial Peru traces the longer history of resistance into the late colonial period.

The last Incas did not rule a great empire, but they retained the legitimacy of the Inca dynasty and provided a continuing symbol of indigenous sovereignty. Their history is an essential part of the longer history of the Andes, and it cannot be told without reference to the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa that left the empire weakened on the eve of the Spanish arrival, the general history of the Inca civilization, and the broader history of the Spanish conquest of Peru. The full story of the Spanish campaigns in the highland empire is told in the account of the arrival of the Spanish and the conquest of Peru.

Manco Inca and the Foundation of the Neo-Inca State

Manco Inca (c. 1516–1544) was one of the many brothers and half-brothers of the dead emperors Huáscar and Atahualpa, and a son of Huayna Capac by a secondary wife. After the Spanish execution of Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1533, the Spanish commander Francisco Pizarro had initially installed a succession of puppet Sapa Incas in Cusco, including Túpac Huallpa and Manco Inca himself. Manco Inca was crowned as the second Spanish-backed Sapa Inca in 1534, in a ceremony intended to legitimize Spanish authority by tying it to the Inca dynasty. The puppet status of the new emperor was clear from the beginning: he was expected to rule as a tributary of the Spanish Crown, to hand over imperial gold and silver, and to provide mit’a labor for the conquerors’ projects. The article on Manco Inca and the Neo-Inca State examines the political background of the puppet regime.

The rebellion broke out in early 1535, when Manco Inca, reportedly stung by personal mistreatment at the hands of Pizarro’s brothers, withdrew from Cusco and began to assemble an army in the Andes. He received the support of a substantial part of the Inca nobility, including several of his brothers, and he was joined by considerable numbers of curacas (hereditary leaders) from the central highlands. In the second half of 1535, Manco Inca led a large Inca army back to Cusco and laid siege to the Spanish garrison, occupying the high ground around the city and cutting the roads. The siege was eventually lifted in early 1536, after Spanish counter-operations and the arrival of reinforcements from the coastal cities.

Unable to hold the open highlands against Spanish cavalry, Manco Inca withdrew with his followers into the rugged cloud forest east of the Andes, where he founded a new capital in the remote and heavily fortified region of Vilcabamba. The exact location of the capital has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, but the work of the explorer and historian Vincent Lee and the more recent discoveries of the Vilcabamba expedition have identified the site of Espíritu Pampa as the most likely location of the late Inca capital. The full account of the foundation, organization, and political program of the Neo-Inca State is set out in the article on Manco Inca and the Neo-Inca State. The political background of the Spanish regime in Cusco is described in the account of the conquest of Peru.

The Rulers of Vilcabamba

Manco Inca ruled the Neo-Inca State for roughly nine years, until his assassination in 1544 by a group of Spanish renegades who had joined his court. He was succeeded in turn by four of his sons, each of whom had to negotiate a difficult relationship with the Spanish authorities in Cusco, Lima, and the audiencia of the Andes. The political history of the state during these years is preserved in a combination of Spanish administrative records, the testimony of the Spanish priests who visited the court, and the small corpus of Inca-language documents produced in the Vilcabamba chancery.

Sayri Túpac (r. 1544–1560) was the first of the post-Manco rulers. He came to power as a child, under the regency of a succession of uncles and older half-brothers, and his reign was marked by long negotiations with the Spanish for an end to the state of war. The negotiations were complicated by the inability of the Spanish authorities to agree among themselves, and by the reluctance of Sayri Túpac’s own advisers to accept a settlement. The agreement was finally concluded in 1557: Sayri Túpac agreed to emerge from Vilcabamba, receive baptism as a Christian, and accept a large but limited estate in the **Sacred Valley](../../04-architecture-and-engineering/06-sacred-valley/_cluster.md) in exchange for renouncing his royal title and his sovereignty. He made his public entrance into Cusco in 1558, and he died in 1560, possibly of poisoning. The article on Túpac Amaru I and the last stand at Vilcabamba describes his reign in detail.

Titu Cusi (r. 1559–1571) succeeded Sayri Túpac, but refused to leave Vilcabamba or to accept the agreement of his brother. His reign was marked by a long series of inconclusive wars with the Spanish, by the writing of the Relación de la conquista del Perú y hechos del Inca Manco II — an important indigenous account of the conquest and the rebellion — and by the Spanish Dominican mission that came to Vilcabamba in 1568. Titu Cusi died in 1571, possibly of illness, possibly assassinated, and was succeeded by Topa Inca (r. 1571), who was murdered in turn within a year. The state by this time was reduced to a small court in a remote fortress, dependent on the support of the Antisuyu peoples of the eastern lowlands. The article on Túpac Amaru I and the last stand at Vilcabamba examines the final years of independent Inca rule.

The Fall of Vilcabamba and the End of Independent Inca Rule

Túpac Amaru I (r. 1571–1572) was the last Sapa Inca of the Neo-Inca State. He came to power as a young man, in circumstances that remain obscure, and his reign was marked by a renewed war with the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who had decided to bring the Neo-Inca State to a definitive end. In April 1572, a Spanish army under the command of Martín García de Loyola — a nephew of the Jesuit saint Ignatius of Loyola and a distant relative of the Inca royal family by marriage — invaded the Vilcabamba region. The campaign was supported by a long chain of Spanish and allied indigenous forces, and it was accompanied by the systematic destruction of the Inca maize fields and storehouses. The fall of the fortress of Vilcabamba in 1572 ended the state of war that had begun with Manco Inca’s rebellion almost forty years earlier.

Túpac Amaru I was captured, brought to Cusco, and beheaded in the main square on 24 September 1572. The Spanish hoped that the execution would put an end to the Inca dynasty, but it had the opposite effect. The young emperor became a martyr and a symbol, and his name and image were venerated in the highlands for centuries after his death. The article on Túpac Amaru I and the last stand at Vilcabamba describes the fall of the Neo-Inca State in detail, and the article on Túpac Amaru II and indigenous resistance in colonial Peru traces the long aftermath.

The execution of Túpac Amaru I did not end indigenous resistance in the Andes. Throughout the colonial period, communities in the highlands, the montaña, and the altiplano continued to resist Spanish rule, and the name of the last Inca was repeatedly taken up as a symbol. The most famous of these later movements was the rebellion of José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a curaca of the province of Tinta in what is now Cusco, who in 1780 proclaimed himself Túpac Amaru II in explicit imitation of the last Sapa Inca. The rebellion of Túpac Amaru II spread across the southern Andes before it was crushed in 1781, and its leader was executed in the same main square of Cusco where Túpac Amaru I had died almost two hundred and ten years before. The article on Túpac Amaru II and indigenous resistance in colonial Peru examines the movement and its long-term significance.

The Legacy of the Last Incas

The history of the last Incas is significant for several reasons. First, it shows that the conquest of the highland empire in 1532–1533 was not, in fact, the end of Inca history: a self-consciously Inca state survived in the eastern Andes for almost forty years after the Spanish seizure of Cusco. Second, the survival of the Neo-Inca State forced the Spanish Crown to recognize, in the long run, the existence of a large and restive indigenous population whose rights, however limited, had to be respected in some way. Third, the memory of the last Incas provided a continuing symbol of indigenous sovereignty, and the name of Túpac Amaru became a rallying point for resistance to Spanish rule in the late colonial period and beyond.

The legacy of the last Incas is also visible in the cultural and political life of modern Peru. The execution of Túpac Amaru I is still commemorated in Cusco, and the name of Túpac Amaru has been adopted by political movements, football clubs, and cultural associations across the Andean region. The article on the legacy of the conquest traces these continuities in greater detail, and the article on the mummies and ancestor veneration of the Inca explains the cultural background against which the memory of the last Sapa Incas was preserved.

The history of the last Incas closes one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of the Americas. The Sapa Inca dynasty that had ruled Tawantinsuyu for twelve generations survived in remote exile for almost forty years after the Spanish conquest, and its memory lived on in the highlands long after the execution of the last emperor. The story of the origins of the Inca, the rise of the empire, and the empire at its height is therefore incomplete without this final chapter.