The Spanish Conquest and the Fall of the Inca Empire

The Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire was a brief but exceptionally violent campaign, conducted between 1532 and 1572, in which a small number of Spanish soldiers, acting under the authority of the Spanish crown, dismantled the largest polity in the pre-Columbian Americas. The conquest is conventionally dated from the arrival of Francisco Pizarro’s expedition on the northern coast of the empire in 1532 to the execution of Túpac Amaru I, the last Sapa Inca of the Neo-Inca State, at Cusco on 24 September 1572. Its causes were a combination of Spanish military technology and ambition, Andean political fragmentation, the catastrophic impact of Eurasian epidemic disease, and the participation of indigenous allies who saw the Inca state as a relatively recent imperial imposition. The outcome was the incorporation of the Andes into the Spanish Empire, the destruction of the Andean ruling system, the death of perhaps eighty to ninety percent of the native population from disease and war, and the establishment of a colonial order whose consequences are still visible in modern Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Overview

The conquest is usually divided into four overlapping phases. The first was a series of Spanish expeditions down the Pacific coast, beginning with Pizarro’s reconnaissance in 1524 and culminating in his third voyage of 1531–1532, which brought roughly 168 men, 62 horses, and a small number of artillery pieces into the northern Andean highlands. The second phase was the political collapse of the Inca Empire itself, brought on by a civil war of succession between the half-brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa from 1529 to 1532, and by an epidemic of smallpox that reached the imperial court in 1526 and killed the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac and his designated heir Ninan Cuyochi. The third phase was the Spanish seizure of the Inca capital at Cusco on 15 November 1533 and the extension of Spanish control over the road network, which had been the administrative backbone of the Inca state. The fourth and longest phase was the establishment of the viceroyalty of Peru in 1542, the destruction of the Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba between 1536 and 1572, and the long process of demographic and cultural transformation that historians label the colonial aftermath.

Although contemporaries described the conquest as a victory of a few hundred Spaniards over millions of Andeans, the explanation is misleading on both counts. The Spanish forces never exceeded a few thousand men, but they fought in alliance with tens of thousands of indigenous auxiliaries drawn from groups such as the Cañari, the Chachapoya, and the Huancas, who had been subjects of the Inca and who had their own reasons for resenting Cusco. The Inca, in turn, were not passive victims but a state already in crisis, with disputed succession, epidemic mortality, and a deeply unpopular policy of forced resettlement imposed on recently conquered peoples. The combination of these factors explains why the conquest was at once exceptionally rapid and exceptionally destructive.

Background

The Inca Empire on the eve of conquest

By 1525 the Inca Empire, known to its subjects as Tawantinsuyu, was the most extensive state in the Americas. Its political core lay in the highland basin of Cusco, but at its maximum extent, under the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac (r. 1493–1527), it stretched from modern southern Colombia to central Chile, and from the eastern slopes of the Andes into the Amazon basin. The empire was administered through a highly organized road system, the Qhapaq Ñan, a set of trunk roads that linked Cusco to Quito in the north and to Tucumán and Chile in the south, and a decimal system of local administration in which groups of ten, fifty, one hundred, five hundred, and ten thousand households were overseen by officials appointed from Cusco. The population is estimated to have been between roughly six and fourteen million in 1520, with most modern estimates clustering around ten million.

The economic basis of the state was a system of labor extraction. Land was divided into three categories — the lands of the Sapa Inca, the lands of the Inti sun cult, and the lands of the common people — and a portion of the labor of every household was owed to the state in the form of the mit’a. The state redistributed food and textiles from state granaries and storehouses in years of poor harvest, and it ran a system of military colonies, the mitma, in which loyal subjects were resettled in recently conquered territories. The scale and the centralized character of this system made the Inca state unusually vulnerable to disruption at the center: a contested succession, a poor harvest, or an epidemic that reached the royal family could destabilize the entire system.

The reign of Huayna Capac and the first smallpox epidemic

The Sapa Inca Huayna Capac had spent much of his reign on the northern frontier, campaigning in what is now Ecuador and southern Colombia. He had taken a northern princess, Pacha Duchicela, as a secondary wife, and by her had a son named Atahualpa, born in the city of Caranqui in modern Imbabura, Ecuador. By his principal wife, Cusi Huaco, he had a son named Ninan Cuyochi, who was understood to be the designated heir. Sometime between 1524 and 1527, an epidemic of smallpox — the first introduced to South America from the Caribbean — spread along the Qhapaq Ñan from the north. The disease is reported by Spanish and indigenous chroniclers to have killed Huayna Capac, his son Ninan Cuyochi, and a great many members of the imperial household. The Spanish priest and chronicler Miguel Cabello Balboa, drawing on indigenous testimony, claimed that Huayna Capac died in 1527 at the age of about fifty, and the date is generally accepted. The Inca had no word for smallpox and no effective response to the disease, and the mortality among the exposed population, which had no acquired immunity, is thought to have been very high.

The death of Huayna Capac, with no agreed heir, set off a civil war that would end only with the Spanish seizure of power in 1533.

The Inca civil war

Contestants and claims

The main contestants for the throne after 1527 were Huáscar, the son of Huayna Capac by a secondary wife named Rahua Ocllo, and Atahualpa, the son of Huayna Capac by the Caranqui princess Pacha Duchicela. Huáscar, who was the older of the two, was at the court in Cusco and was probably the intended successor; he appears to have been acclaimed Sapa Inca and to have been recognized as such in the southern provinces. Atahualpa, who was at the northern court in Quito with his father in the years before the latter’s death, controlled the armies that had fought the recent campaigns in the north, and commanded the loyalty of the northern generals, in particular the two famous generals Quisquis and Chalcuchima.

The substance of the dispute, beyond the personal claims of the two brothers, was the question of whether the imperial center was to remain in Cusco or to shift to Quito, and whether the recently conquered northern territories — Ecuador, the highlands of Colombia, the eastern lowlands — were to be governed as integral parts of the empire or as semi-independent appanages of the northern generals. The conflict was, in part, a struggle between an older southern aristocracy based in Cusco and a newer northern military elite, and it engaged deep political, regional, and ethnic divisions within the empire.

Course of the war

The civil war lasted from about 1529 to the spring of 1532. The first major engagement was fought at Ambato, in the northern highlands of present-day Ecuador, and the northern army under Quisquis and Chalcuchima won a decisive victory. The southern army, having been defeated, was pursued southward; a second major battle at Chimborazo ended in another northern victory. The southern army withdrew behind the Apurímac and prepared to defend the approaches to Cusco. A third battle, near Cusco itself, ended in the capture of Huáscar, who was taken prisoner and held in the temple of the sun at Coricancha. Atahualpa had himself acclaimed Sapa Inca at Quito in late 1531 or early 1532, and he established a court at Tomebamba (in modern Cuenca, Ecuador) and later at Cajamarca in the northern Peruvian highlands. He sent Chalcuchima south with a large army to consolidate the conquest of the south and to secure his brother.

The war had been extremely destructive. Both armies had used scorched-earth tactics in the populated valleys, and the highland population, already weakened by smallpox, was further reduced by famine and displacement. By the time the Spanish arrived, the empire was divided, the capital had been sacked, and the population of the central and southern highlands had suffered significant losses.

The Spanish arrive

The first two Pizarro expeditions, 1524–1528

The first Spanish reconnaissance of the South American Pacific coast was undertaken by Bartolomé Ruiz, a pilot serving under Pizarro, in 1526. Ruiz sailed south from Panama and crossed the equator, making the first recorded European contact with the people of Tumbes in the northern Peruvian coastal plain. The expedition confirmed the existence of a rich and densely settled polity in the south. A second expedition, organized by Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and the priest Hernando de Luque, sailed from Panama in 1526 and reached Tumbes in 1527, but the crew was badly reduced by disease and shipwreck, and only Pizarro and a small number of men returned.

A third expedition was authorized in 1528, and Pizarro sailed from Panama in early 1531 with about 180 men and a small number of horses. He landed at the bay of San Mateo in modern Ecuador, and over the next two years fought his way down the coast, taking possession of Tumbes in 1532 and pushing inland. The Spanish force was small, but it was well armed with steel swords, arquebuses, and a few light cannon, and its horses — animals that the Andean population had never seen — gave it a significant tactical advantage.

The political context of the Spanish arrival

The Spanish arrived in 1532 in the middle of the civil war, and the timing was decisive. Atahualpa, who had won the civil war in 1532, was encamped with an army of perhaps 50,000 men at Cajamarca in the northern Peruvian highlands, preparing to descend on Cusco. The Spanish, who had been told by indigenous informants of the civil war and of the death of Huayna Capac from a disease that “covered the body with pustules,” correctly understood that they faced a divided enemy. They were also able to call on the support of groups that had been incorporated into the Inca empire only recently and resentfully, in particular the Cañari of southern Ecuador and the Chachapoya of the cloud forest.

Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro

The partnership and the capitulación

The Spanish enterprise against Peru was the joint work of three men: Francisco Pizarro, an illiterate but experienced soldier from Trujillo in Extremadura; Diego de Almagro, a similarly self-made soldier who had been Pizarro’s partner since the early 1520s; and Hernando de Luque, a priest who held an ecclesiastical appointment in Panama. The three had formed an empresa — a private company for the conquest and settlement of new lands — in the 1520s, and the costs of the two earlier expeditions had been shared. In 1529, the Spanish crown, in the person of Queen Juana and her son Charles V, issued a capitulación — a formal contract — with Pizarro, granting him the right to conquer and govern the lands south of a certain point on the Pacific coast in exchange for a one-fifth share of the proceeds. Almagro received a lesser grant, and the rivalry between the two for precedence would become one of the principal causes of the Spanish civil war of the 1530s.

Pizarro’s third expedition landed in 1531, and over the next year he consolidated his base at Tumbes, sent emissaries inland to gather intelligence, and prepared to move into the highlands. The Spanish were not unaware of the epidemic that had preceded them, and they used the news to frighten the Andean population.

The march to Cajamarca

In September 1532, after receiving news of Atahualpa’s presence at Cajamarca, Pizarro divided his force. A small body of men, under Sebastián de Benalcázar, was left to hold Tumbes; the main body, of perhaps 168 men with 62 cavalry and a small number of arquebusiers among them, marched inland across the Andes to the highland city of Cajamarca. The march took about two months. The Spanish had been told by indigenous intermediaries that Atahualpa was encamped in the open on a plain outside the city with an army of perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 men. They were aware that the small size of their own force made a direct engagement against these numbers extremely risky. They resolved to invite Atahualpa to meet them in the town of Cajamarca, on the pretext of a friendly parley, and to seize him there.

The capture of Atahualpa at Cajamarca

The meeting at the baths

The meeting at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532 was the central event of the entire conquest. Pizarro sent an embassy, led by Hernando de Soto, to the Inca camp on the plain. The Spanish envoy found Atahualpa in a small village called the Baths of Pultumarca, surrounded by a large court. Atahualpa, who had been briefed about the Spanish by his scouts, was contemptuous of the small number of them and refused to come to the Spanish quarters. He agreed, however, to visit Cajamarca the following day, on the understanding that the meeting would be unarmed.

Pizarro, who had been informed by his scouts of the small Inca force that would accompany Atahualpa, arranged his men in three bodies of infantry in the buildings of the main square of Cajamarca, with the cavalry in reserve. The plan was to provoke a confrontation in the square and to use the surprise, the horses, and the firearms to seize Atahualpa.

The seizure

Atahualpa entered Cajamarca at dusk on 16 November 1532 in a sedan chair, accompanied by perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 retainers, most of whom were unarmed. The rest of the army, perhaps 30,000 men, remained encamped outside the town. The Spanish chaplain, Father Vicente de Valverde, advanced toward the Inca carrying a breviary and a crucifix, and through the interpreter Felipillo read aloud the Requerimiento, the standard Spanish document requiring non-Christians to acknowledge the authority of the Pope and the Spanish king. The text, drafted in 1513, was designed to provide a legal pretext for conquest; the symbolic gesture of handing him the breviary was understood, and Atahualpa rejected it.

A scuffle broke out, and Pizarro, who had been watching for a signal, gave the order to attack. The Spanish infantry, armed with steel swords, pikes, and a few arquebuses, charged the Inca retainers in the square; the cavalry, which had been held back, charged out of a side street. The Inca force, which was unprepared for cavalry and lacked effective weapons against steel, broke almost at once. By the Spanish accounts, several thousand Inca were killed in the square and in the immediate pursuit, and Atahualpa himself was seized and held prisoner in a house in the town.

The Battle of Cajamarca is a striking example of the asymmetry of early modern European military technology. The Spanish were outnumbered, but their horses, their steel weapons, and their armor gave them a decisive advantage in a confined space against an enemy that had no indigenous tradition of cavalry warfare. The encounter, in which perhaps 180 Spanish soldiers defeated an army perhaps twenty or thirty times as large, is one of the most cited cases in the literature on European expansion, and the question of why the Spanish were able to conquer the Inca has been the subject of an extensive historical literature.

The ransom and death of Atahualpa

The ransom room

Atahualpa, held prisoner in a large house in Cajamarca, understood quickly that the Spanish valued gold and silver. He offered Pizarro a ransom: he would fill a room about 22 feet long by 17 feet wide with gold, and would fill a second room twice over with silver, in exchange for his release. The offer was accepted, and a line was drawn on the wall of the room at the agreed height. The ransom — known to the Spanish as the rescate de Atahualpa — was gathered from the temples and royal storehouses of the northern empire, and the gold was melted down into ingots and counted. By some reckonings, the total reached about 6 tonnes of gold and 12 tonnes of silver.

The delivery of the ransom took about six months, and during that time Atahualpa remained in effect a hostage. He ordered the death of his brother Huáscar, who had been held prisoner in the south, on the grounds that he feared that the Spanish would restore Huáscar to the throne in his place. The order was carried out in 1533, and the last legitimate male heir of the senior Cusco line was dead.

The trial and execution

In the spring of 1533 the Spanish began to fear that Atahualpa was organizing an attack on them, and they resolved to put him on trial. The charges included polygamy, the murder of Huáscar, the worship of false gods, and the practice of incest — the last of which is mentioned in the Spanish accounts but was almost certainly invented. The trial was conducted by a Spanish court, in Spanish, with the interpreter Felipillo, who had no Quechua, providing a barely adequate translation.

The execution of Atahualpa took place at Cajamarca on 26 July 1533. At the last moment, after he had accepted baptism into the Christian faith, the sentence was commuted from burning to strangulation, on the grounds that baptized persons could not be burned. Atahualpa was given a Christian burial in the small church at Cajamarca. The execution was a political act as much as a judicial one, and it removed the last remaining authority in the northern empire.

The conquest of Cusco

The march to the capital

After the execution of Atahualpa, Pizarro advanced south with his small force, leaving a garrison at Cajamarca and at other strategic points on the road. The army included Spanish infantry and cavalry and a large body of Cañari and Chachapoya auxiliaries, who had been brought up to fight the Inca. The march from Cajamarca to Cusco, along the spine of the Andes, took several months and was marked by a series of engagements against Inca forces loyal to the now-dead Atahualpa. The most important of these was the battle on the plain of Quipaipán, near the city of Vilcashuamán, in which the Spanish defeated a large Inca army under the general Quisquis.

The conquest of Cusco was completed on 15 November 1533, when Pizarro entered the city with a small force. The Inca defense had been weakened by the earlier defeat at Quipaipán, and the city fell with relatively little fighting. The Spanish installed a younger son of Huayna Capac, Manco Inca Yupanqui, as a puppet Sapa Inca, and the royal capital of Tawantinsuyu was formally transferred to the new order. The Spanish were deeply impressed by the city’s goldwork, the Coricancha, the Sacsayhuamán citadel, and the elaborate architecture of the Inca, and they began almost at once to strip the temples and palaces of their gold. The first sack of Cusco is estimated to have yielded more gold than the ransom of Atahualpa.

The defeat of the Inca armies

The defeat of the Inca armies in 1533 was not a single event but a series of engagements across a continent-sized polity. The Spanish fought the remaining Inca generals — Quisquis, Chalcuchima, and others — across the highlands for more than a year after the fall of Cusco. Chalcuchima was captured in 1533 and was tried and burned at Cusco. Quisquis withdrew to the south and was eventually killed by his own men or in a fight with Spanish-allied forces. By 1535 the Andean heartland was, in effect, under Spanish military occupation.

The Spanish civil war

The Pizarro–Almagro conflict

Even as the Inca empire was being dismantled, the Spanish themselves fell into a violent dispute. The partnership between Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro had been regulated by the 1529 capitulación, which gave Pizarro the governorship of the lands south of a certain line and Almagro the right to conquer further south, beyond what was then the limit of the Inca empire. As the Spanish learned that the empire extended much further south than they had initially thought — into modern Chile — the question of the boundary between Pizarro’s and Almagro’s jurisdictions became acute.

In 1535, Pizarro founded the city of Lima on the Pacific coast as the new capital of the Spanish holdings, and the following year Almagro, with a force of perhaps 500 Spanish soldiers and a large indigenous auxiliary force, set out to conquer Chile. The expedition, led by the Spanish captain Diego de Almagro, was unsuccessful: the indigenous resistance in Chile was fierce, the climate was hostile, and the expedition returned to Peru in 1537 without having made a permanent conquest. By that time the young puppet Sapa Inca, Manco Inca, had escaped from Cusco and had begun a general rebellion in the highlands.

The dispute between Pizarro and Almagro came to a head in 1538. The two Spanish factions, augmented by their respective indigenous allies, met at the plain of Las Salinas, near Cusco, on 6 April 1538. The Pizarro faction, under the command of Hernando Pizarro and Sebastián de Benalcázar, won a decisive victory. Almagro was captured, tried, and executed by strangulation in July 1538. A son of Almagro, also named Diego, was recognized as the leader of the almagrista faction, and in 1541 he led a group of his followers into the house of Francisco Pizarro in Lima and killed him in a hand-to-hand struggle. The civil war continued for several more years, and the Spanish crown, in the form of the newly created viceroyalty of Peru, had to intervene to settle it.

Disease and the demographic collapse

Smallpox, measles, and the other epidemics

The demographic collapse of the Andean population is the single most important fact about the conquest and its aftermath. The population of the Inca empire in 1520 has been estimated at ten to twelve million; by 1620, after a century of European rule, the indigenous population of the central Andes had fallen to perhaps 600,000. The proximate cause was the introduction, by the Spanish, of a series of Eurasian epidemic diseases against which the Andean population had no acquired immunity. The most important of these were smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, and diphtheria. A second important cause was the social disruption caused by war, displacement, and the destruction of the Inca system of redistribution.

The first of the great epidemics was the smallpox epidemic of 1524–1527, which spread from the Caribbean coast into the interior of the Andes along the Qhapaq Ñan. The epidemic killed Huayna Capac and his son Ninan Cuyochi, and the chroniclers report that it killed a large proportion of the population in the highlands of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The mortality from this first wave of disease is unknown but is generally believed to have been substantial, perhaps a third of the affected populations.

A second major epidemic, also of smallpox, reached Peru in 1529 or 1530, and a third, of measles, arrived in 1531 or 1532. A series of further epidemics — of influenza in 1558, of measles in 1589, of smallpox in 1585 and again in 1595, of typhus in 1585, and of diphtheria in 1614 — followed over the next century. The historian Noble David Cook has estimated that the total indigenous population of central Peru fell from about 9.5 million in 1520 to about 1.3 million in 1620, a loss of about 86 percent, and the figures for Bolivia and Ecuador are of similar magnitude. The role of European disease in the Andes is now understood to have been central to the conquest, both as a direct cause of mortality and as a destabilizing factor in Inca politics.

Indirect effects on Inca society

The demographic collapse had consequences for the Andean political system. The Inca had relied on a complex structure of labor extraction, in which the mit’a obligation was distributed across a large population. The disappearance of perhaps nine-tenths of the population by the early seventeenth century meant that the colonial authorities, although they inherited the mit’a system and adapted it to their own purposes as the colonial mita, had to do so with a much smaller labor pool. The collapse also had consequences for the Inca religion, since the mummification of the royal dead, the agricultural calendar, and the temple-based rituals all required a substantial body of full-time religious specialists. The Spanish suppression of the Inti cult in the 1570s effectively dismantled the indigenous state religion in the highlands within two generations of the conquest.

The Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba

Manco Inca and the highland rebellion

Although the Spanish had installed Manco Inca as a puppet Sapa Inca in 1533, the relationship deteriorated rapidly. The Spanish demanded gold and silver, took possession of the aqllawasi — the houses of the chosen women — and treated the young Inca with increasing contempt. In 1535 Manco Inca escaped from Cusco and withdrew to the highland fortress of Ollantaytambo, in the Sacred Valley northeast of the former capital. From there he organized a general rebellion against the Spanish, which by 1536 had put the Spanish garrisons in Cusco, Lima, and the central highlands under serious threat. The siege of Cusco in 1536, in which Manco Inca’s forces succeeded in cutting the Spanish off from the surrounding countryside, is one of the most serious defeats the Spanish suffered in the Americas, and it was lifted only by the arrival of a relief force under the Spanish captain Alonso de Alvarado. The Spanish counterattack pushed Manco Inca from Ollantaytambo in 1537, and he withdrew with a small retinue into the remote forest region of Vilcabamba, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, where he established what historians call the Neo-Inca State.

The Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba was a small polity, perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 people, in a remote and difficult country. It was ruled by Manco Inca from 1537 until his assassination by a group of Spanish-allied indigenous in 1544, and then by his son Sayri Túpac, by another son Titu Cusi, and by a third son, Túpac Amaru I. From Vilcabamba, the Inca launched raids into the highland provinces, and the Spanish were unable to suppress them for more than thirty years. The persistence of the Neo-Inca State served as a focus for indigenous resistance and a reminder of the legitimacy of the pre-conquest order.

The last Sapa Incas

Sayri Túpac and the agreement of 1557

The second ruler of Vilcabamba was Sayri Túpac, who succeeded to the throne in 1544. In 1557, after some years of negotiations, Sayri Túpac agreed to leave Vilcabamba, to be baptized as a Christian, and to accept an encomienda in the highland province of Yucay, north of Cusco. In exchange, the Spanish recognized his claim to the Inca title, although not to political power, and he was married to a Spanish woman, María Beatriz Coya. The agreement was a personal one: Sayri Túpac abandoned the war but did not formally surrender the legitimacy of the Inca order. He died in 1560, in circumstances that are unclear, and was succeeded in Vilcabamba by his younger brother Titu Cusi.

Titu Cusi, who had been raised in Vilcabamba and had not been baptized, resumed the war against the Spanish and rejected the agreement of his brother. The Spanish, distracted by the silver discoveries at Potosí and the consolidation of the colonial regime, did not press a campaign into Vilcabamba during the 1560s. Titu Cusi died in 1571, and his death was followed by a brief succession dispute. The new ruler was a younger brother of Titu Cusi, who took the dynastic name Túpac Amaru I. The new Sapa Inca was about twenty years old and lacked the political experience of his older brothers.

The trial and execution of Túpac Amaru I

The Vilcabamba campaign of 1572

The accession of Túpac Amaru I coincided with a change in the policy of the Spanish crown. The fifth viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, had been appointed in 1569, and he resolved to put an end to the Neo-Inca State once and for all. The viceroy assembled a force of about 250 Spanish soldiers and a large number of indigenous auxiliaries, and in April 1572 he sent it into the Vilcabamba region under the command of Martín García de Loyola. The campaign took several months, and the Spanish occupied the towns of Vilcabamba and captured the Inca court in late June 1572. Túpac Amaru, who had been betrayed by some of his own retainers, was taken prisoner and was brought to Cusco in chains.

The trial of Túpac Amaru I took place in Cusco in September 1572. The Inca was charged with rebellion, with the murder of Spanish and indigenous allies, and with the practice of polygamy. He was found guilty and was sentenced to death. The execution took place in the main square of Cusco on 24 September 1572. Túpac Amaru was beheaded in front of a large crowd, and his head was displayed on a pike at the entrance to the city. The death of the last Sapa Inca brought the Inca dynasty to a formal end. The Spanish confiscated the estates of the Inca nobility in the Yucay valley, and the descendants of the Inca became a small landholding class within the colonial system.

The colonial aftermath

The new colonial order

The destruction of the Neo-Inca State and the execution of Túpac Amaru I completed the Spanish conquest in its formal sense. The colonial regime that took shape in the following decades was a complex hybrid of Spanish and Andean institutions. The Spanish crown, through the viceroy and the Audiencia of Lima, exercised direct political authority. The economy was reorganized around the silver mines of Potosí and Cerro de Pasco, the mercury mines of Huancavelica, and the highland estates of Spanish and creole landowners. The indigenous population was concentrated into formal reductions, or planned towns, and was required to attend mass and to pay tribute to the Spanish crown and to the local encomendero. The mit’a, the Inca system of labor extraction, was adapted to Spanish purposes: the colonial mita was a rotating labor draft that supplied the silver mines of Potosí with some 13,000 workers a year, at a mortality rate that has been estimated at between a quarter and a half over the period of service.

The religious conversion of the Andean population was carried out by the regular orders, especially the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Jesuits, in the half-century after 1533. The extirpation of idolatry campaigns of the 1560s and 1570s attempted to suppress the indigenous religion and to replace it with Christianity, with mixed success. The Spanish language gradually spread in the cities and in the mestizo population, but Quechua and Aymara survived in the highlands, and a substantial body of the indigenous social and cultural life was preserved within the new colonial order.

The mita was the most important institution of the colonial economy. Drafted annually from a rotating pool of male Indians aged eighteen to fifty, the mita sent a quota of laborers to the mines of Potosí, the largest single source of silver in the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Spanish crown also introduced the encomienda, a grant of labor and tribute to individual Spanish settlers, but the abuses of the encomienda were limited by the New Laws of 1542 and by the spread of the repartimiento and the mita. The colonial economy in the Andes was, in effect, an extractive system that used indigenous labor to produce precious metals and agricultural exports for the Spanish market.

The legacy of the conquest

The demographic legacy

The most obvious legacy of the conquest is the demographic transformation of the Andes. The catastrophic population loss of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had consequences for almost every aspect of Andean life. The collapse of the labor force meant that the state-organizing capacity of the Inca state was gone, and the colonial economy was forced to reorganize itself around a much smaller population. The collapse also had consequences for the indigenous languages: the disappearance of many of the smaller languages of the central Andes has been attributed to the population collapse, and the spread of Quechua and Aymara over a much larger area was, in part, a consequence of that disappearance.

The conquest also left a deep mark on the Andean cultural and religious life. The Spanish imposed Catholicism on the indigenous population, and the Catholic Church became the principal institutional form through which the Andean population was integrated into the colonial system. The indigenous religion, including the cult of the Inti and the worship of the huacas — the local sacred sites — was suppressed but not destroyed, and a syncretic form of Andean Catholicism, in which the saints of the Catholic calendar were assimilated to local sacred figures, took root. The change in religion was the most lasting institutional change brought about by the conquest, and it remains a fundamental feature of the Andean cultural landscape.

The Inca heritage in the modern world is most visible in the surviving architecture — the citadel of Machu Picchu, the fortress of Sacsayhuamán, the Qhapaq Ñan itself, the many thousands of terraces and irrigation works that are still in use — and in the survival of Quechua and Aymara as major languages. The Inca past is also an active element of modern political identity, and the names of the Inca kings, the Inca capital, and the Andean landscape are constantly invoked in modern political and cultural debates.

The economic structure established in the sixteenth century — an extractive system oriented to the production of silver for the world market — was the foundation of the Andean colonial economy for three hundred years. The political structure — a centralized Spanish colonial state with a viceroy in Lima — survived into the early nineteenth century, when the wars of independence dissolved it. The inequalities of the colonial period, in particular the concentration of land in the hands of a small Spanish and creole elite, were inherited by the post-independence states, and the marginalization of the indigenous population in the new republics has deep roots in the colonial period. The legacy of the conquest, in short, is not just a matter of past events but a continuing condition of Andean political and economic life.

The memory of the conquest has been contested since the sixteenth century. The earliest Spanish chroniclers, such as Francisco de Xerez and Pedro Sancho, presented the conquest as a triumph of Christianity over paganism. The indigenous chroniclers, especially those associated with the El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, presented the conquest as a catastrophe and the Spanish as rapacious and cruel. The post-independence states of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador have at different times presented the conquest as a founding event, as a trauma to be overcome, or as a useful lesson in the dangers of foreign rule. In modern Peru, the figure of Túpac Amaru II — a descendant of the Inca royal family who led a major rebellion in 1780–1781 — has been claimed as a national hero, and the memory of the conquest continues to shape the political life of the Andean countries.