Manco Inca and the Neo-Inca State of Vilcabamba
Manco Inca Yupanqui (c. 1516–1544) was a younger son of the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac and the half-brother of Huáscar and Atahualpa. Installed as a puppet emperor by the Spanish in 1533 after the execution of Atahualpa, he led the last great rebellion of the Inca against Spanish rule, the long siege of Cusco of 1535–1536, and the foundation of the Neo-Inca State centered on the remote Andean fortress of Vilcabamba in 1537. He ruled the rump Inca state from Vilcabamba until his assassination in 1544, and his successors — his son Sayri Túpac, another of his sons Titu Cusi, and his grandson Túpac Amaru I — maintained a continuing Inca sovereignty in the Vilcabamba region until 1572, when the Spanish finally captured the last independent Inca capital. The full story of the post-conquest resistance is treated in the article on the Vilcabamba resistance and the last Incas.
The principal sources for the life of Manco Inca are the chronicles of Pedro Cieza de León, Juan de Betanzos, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and Miguel Cabello de Balboa, supplemented by the testimony of his own son Titu Cusi in his Relación de la conquista del Perú y hechos del Inca Manco II (c. 1570). The Spanish chronicles are, on the whole, hostile to Manco Inca, but they preserve a coherent picture of his reign and of the foundation of the Neo-Inca State.
From Puppet Emperor to Rebel Leader
Manco Inca was brought to the Spanish camp after the execution of Atahualpa in 1533. The Spanish, who had captured Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca and were now preparing to march on Cusco, needed a legitimate Inca ruler to legitimize their conquest. They briefly installed a brother of Huáscar named Túpac Huallpa, who died within a few months under suspicious circumstances, and then turned to Manco Inca, who was crowned Sapa Inca in a Spanish-sponsored ceremony in 1534. Manco Inca was nominally the ruler of the empire, but the real power was in the hands of the Spanish, and the new emperor was effectively a prisoner in his own capital.
Manco Inca’s decision to rebel was the result of a sequence of abuses by the Spanish. The chroniclers record a long list of grievances, including the seizure of his sisters and concubines by Spanish officers, the killing of one of his wives by forces loyal to the Spanish, the demand that he surrender the gold and silver of the empire, and the personal humiliation he suffered at the hands of the Spanish commander Hernando Pizarro. The breaking point came in 1535, when the Spanish demanded that Manco Inca return a golden statue of his father Huayna Capac that had been hidden in a shrine near Cusco. The refusal of this demand is recorded in the chronicles as the immediate cause of the rebellion.
The Great Rebellion of 1535–1536
Manco Inca escaped from Cusco in early 1535 and fled to the jungle-fringes of the Andes, where he rallied the survivors of the Inca aristocracy and the peoples of the surrounding provinces. Within a few months, he had assembled a large army (the chronicles say 100,000 men, a clear exaggeration, but the operation was certainly on a substantial scale) and he began a methodical campaign against the Spanish, beginning with the siege of Cusco in 1536.
The siege of Cusco was the most serious military threat the Spanish faced in the conquest of Peru. The Inca army occupied the high ground around the city, including the fortress of Sacsayhuamán above the northern edge of the city, and cut off the Spanish supply lines. The chronicler Pedro Pizarro, a cousin of Francisco Pizarro who participated in the defense, records that the Spanish were reduced to eating horses and dogs and that several sorties were repulsed with heavy losses. The Inca army, with its slings, bows, and war-clubs, was unable to storm the Spanish positions in the city, but the Spanish were equally unable to break the siege.
The siege was eventually lifted in early 1536, when a Spanish relief force from the coast, led by Alonso de Alvarado, broke through the Inca lines. The Inca army withdrew from Cusco, and Manco Inca began a long retreat into the eastern Andes, pursued by Spanish forces. The Spanish at this point made a serious strategic error: instead of pursuing Manco Inca to a decisive battle, they accepted his offer to negotiate. The negotiations, held at the fortress of Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley, gave Manco Inca time to consolidate his forces and to withdraw further into the dense cloud forest east of the Andes.
The Foundation of the Neo-Inca State
In 1537, Manco Inca withdrew with his followers to the remote fortress-city of Vilcabamba (sometimes called Vilcabamba la Grande or Espíritu Pampa), located in the cloud forest east of Cusco near the upper tributaries of the Urubamba river. The site had been an Inca administrative center in pre-conquest times, and it was surrounded by dense jungle and steep mountains, making it nearly inaccessible to Spanish forces equipped only with the arms and horses of the early sixteenth century. Manco Inca rebuilt the city as the capital of a rump Inca state and began to reorganize the surrounding communities into a functioning polity.
The Neo-Inca State of Vilcabamba was small by the standards of the old empire, with a population of perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 people, but it possessed several of the key institutional features of the imperial Inca state. The ruler was still styled Sapa Inca and was treated as a sacred figure. The ayllu system continued to operate, and the mit’a labor draft was used to maintain the roads, terraces, and fortifications of the state. The panacas of the dead emperors continued to be venerated, and the state religion, including the cults of the Sun and the mountain apus, was maintained in its pre-conquest form. The Neo-Inca State thus preserved, on a reduced scale, the institutional and religious structure of the old empire.
The new state was also a focus of resistance for peoples across the Andes. Communities that had never been fully incorporated into the Inca state, especially in the eastern lowlands and the southern highlands, sent emissaries to Vilcabamba to seek alliance. Spanish-departed communities of yanaconas and mitayos fled to Vilcabamba to escape colonial labor drafts. The Spanish, who were already overextended in Peru, were unable to mount a serious campaign against the new state for several years, and the Neo-Inca State was able to consolidate itself during the late 1530s and early 1540s.
The Assassination of Manco Inca
The Spanish attempted on several occasions to negotiate with Manco Inca, and he was periodically tempted to come to terms. In 1544, however, a group of Spanish soldiers and disaffected Inca nobles who had taken refuge in Vilcabamba assassinated him. The motives for the assassination are not entirely clear: the chroniclers suggest that the conspirators hoped to win Spanish favor by killing the Inca, but the assassination may also have been related to internal disputes within the Neo-Inca State. Manco Inca was succeeded briefly by two of his sons, and then by his son Sayri Túpac, who was the most successful of the post-conquest Vilcabamba rulers and who negotiated a partial peace with the Spanish in 1557. Sayri Túpac was succeeded in 1560 by Titu Cusi, who maintained a more aggressive resistance, and who died in 1571, possibly of smallpox. The last ruler of the Neo-Inca State was Túpac Amaru I, who was captured by the Spanish in 1572 and executed in the same year.
The significance of Manco Inca in Andean history is difficult to overstate. He led the last major rebellion of the Inca against the Spanish, and he founded the last independent Inca state. The Neo-Inca State that he established at Vilcabamba survived for more than a generation after his death, and it provided a continuing symbol of indigenous sovereignty that would be invoked in later Andean rebellions, most famously in the great uprising of Túpac Amaru II in 1780–1781. The legacy of Manco Inca and the Neo-Inca State is treated in more detail in the articles on Túpac Amaru I and the last stand at Vilcabamba and on Túpac Amaru II and the Andean rebellion of 1780.