The Arrival of the Spanish and the First Contacts with the Inca

The arrival of the Spanish in the northern reaches of the Inca Empire was the culmination of two decades of Pacific coastal exploration that began with Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s sighting of the South Sea in 1513 and continued through a series of Spanish reconnaissance voyages along the coast of what are now Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru between 1524 and 1532. The expeditions that brought Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and Hernando de Luque to the threshold of the Inca state in 1531–1532 were undertaken by a private company of soldiers, with limited royal backing, and were initially motivated by rumors of a rich kingdom to the south of Panama known to the Spanish by the name “Birú” or “Peru.” The first European contacts with the Inca — at Tumbes in 1527 and again in 1532 — were brief, ambiguous, and reported in contradictory fashion by Spanish and indigenous chroniclers. The arrival of the Spanish was decisive in the longer history of the Inca Empire, because it occurred at a moment when the empire had been destabilized by an epidemic of smallpox and by a civil war of succession between the half-brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa, and because the small Spanish force of 1532 was able to exploit that disequilibrium. The story of the arrival of the Spanish is the story of the first three Pizarro expeditions, the political background of the empresa that mounted them, and the encounter at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532, in which a few hundred Spanish soldiers, working with a small number of indigenous auxiliaries, seized the reigning Sapa Inca.

Background

The Pacific context, 1513–1524

The Spanish presence on the Pacific coast of South America in 1524 was a recent and fragile extension of the settlement at Panamá, founded in 1519 by Pedro Arias Dávila. The conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, conducted by Hernán Cortés, had alerted the Spanish to the existence of large, sedentary, and wealthy native states in the Americas, and the rumors of a comparable kingdom to the south had circulated since the voyage of Pascual de Andagoya in 1522. The crown’s interest in these southern ventures was limited: the Spanish crown was preoccupied with the European wars against France, with the administration of the Caribbean, and with the politics of the Holy Roman Empire under Charles V. The Pacific expeditions of 1524–1532 were therefore mounted as private ventures, with limited royal authorization and with costs shared by the three partners.

The pre-existing Spanish knowledge of the South American coast was thin. By 1524 the Spanish had visited the northern coast of present-day Colombia but had not yet sailed south of the equator. The first ship to cross the equator in the eastern Pacific was the caravel of Bartolomé Ruiz in 1526, which returned to Panamá with detailed reports of the densely settled coast of northern Peru. Ruiz reported that the people of Tumbes possessed large stone buildings, that they wore gold and silver ornaments, and that they lived under the rule of a single lord whose name was never quite understood. The reports formed the basis for the second and third Pizarro expeditions.

The partnership of Pizarro, Almagro, and Luque

The empresa that undertook the three southern voyages was a partnership of three men who had known each other in Panamá in the early 1520s. Francisco Pizarro, an illiterate but experienced soldier from Trujillo in Extremadura, had served in the conquest of Tierra Firme. Diego de Almagro, a similarly self-made soldier, brought some capital and a small number of recruits. Hernando de Luque, an ecclesiastic who held an appointment in Panamá, advanced money and obtained ecclesiastical sponsorship. The three signed a formal empresa in 1524, with Luque contributing two-thirds of the capital and Pizarro contributing the labor of the expedition.

A capitulación — a formal contract between the crown and the partners — was issued in 1529 by Queen Juana and her son Charles V, granting Pizarro the right to conquer and govern the lands south of a defined point on the Pacific coast, in exchange for a one-fifth share of the proceeds for the royal fifth, and giving Pizarro the title of governor and captain-general. Almagro received a subordinate grant and the title of adelantado; the resulting ambiguity in the boundary between the two jurisdictions would become a major source of conflict in the 1530s.

The first and second Pizarro expeditions

The 1524 reconnaissance

The first Pizarro reconnaissance of the South American coast set out from Panamá in November 1524, with about eighty men in two ships. Pizarro’s instructions were to follow the coast southward, while Almagro returned to Panamá for supplies. The expedition was beset by hardship: Pizarro’s men suffered from hunger and disease, and the expedition made only limited progress down the coast of present-day Ecuador. Almagro’s supply mission was, in its turn, almost a disaster: the ship was damaged, the crew mutinied, and Almagro lost an eye in a skirmish. The expedition returned to Panamá in 1525 without having made contact with the Inca state. The 1524 voyage nevertheless established that the coast of present-day Ecuador and northern Peru was densely settled and that the people possessed gold and silver.

The 1526 voyage and the discovery of Tumbes

The second expedition, organized by the three partners in 1526, was a more substantial affair, with two ships and about 160 men, and a third ship under the pilot Bartolomé Ruiz to scout ahead. Ruiz crossed the equator and reached the port of Tumbes in modern northern Peru. Ruiz’s diary, the only direct European documentation of the first European contact with the people of the Inca Empire, recorded that the people of Tumbes possessed large stone buildings, that they wore gold and silver ornaments, and that they informed him, by signs, of a great kingdom to the south. Ruiz took on board two indigenous boys to act as interpreters, and his report, when the expedition returned to Panamá in 1527, was the first concrete evidence of the wealth of the Inca Empire. Pizarro’s main body reached the bay of San Mateo in modern Ecuador but did not reach Tumbes, and the expedition returned to Panamá in 1528, having lost about two-thirds of its men.

The third Pizarro expedition, 1531–1532

Departure and the march to Tumbes

The third Pizarro expedition sailed from Panamá in early 1531 with about 180 men, 37 horses, and a small number of artillery pieces. Pizarro had been informed by indigenous intermediaries of the civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa and of the epidemic that had killed the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac. He also knew that the people of the northern coast of Peru were divided in their loyalty between the two factions, and Pizarro used this knowledge, when he reached Tumbes in 1532, to make alliances with the local leaders who were opposed to Atahualpa.

Tumbes, which had been a populous and important provincial capital at the time of Ruiz’s 1526 visit, was now, on Pizarro’s arrival in 1532, partially destroyed. The first major battle of the civil war had been fought near the city, and the local population had suffered the loss of an important oracular shrine. Pizarro rebuilt a small fort and a chapel and used Tumbes as a base for the inland march. The landfall at Tumbes in 1532 is conventionally taken as the beginning of the Spanish conquest of Peru in its formal sense.

The march into the Andes

Pizarro remained at Tumbes for several months, gathering intelligence and dispatching small reconnaissance missions to the interior. The information he received was consistent: the Sapa Inca Atahualpa was encamped at the highland city of Cajamarca, in the northern Peruvian highlands, with an army of perhaps 30,000 to 80,000 men, preparing to descend on Cusco. Pizarro, who had been instructed by the partners of the empresa to be cautious, was nonetheless convinced that the political disequilibrium offered a unique opportunity.

In September 1532 Pizarro divided his force. A small detachment, under Sebastián de Benalcázar, was left to hold Tumbes. The main body, of about 168 men — with 62 of them mounted as cavalry and a small number of arquebusiers among the rest — marched inland along the spine of the Andes toward Cajamarca. The march took about two months, and the men suffered from cold, altitude sickness, and the scarcity of food. The Spanish were also met, at several points, by Inca emissaries sent by Atahualpa, who attempted to determine the intentions of the strangers.

The encounter at Cajamarca

The embassy of Hernando de Soto

When Pizarro reached the plain of Cajamarca in November 1532, he sent a small embassy, under Hernando de Soto, to the Inca camp. The embassy was instructed to make a show of friendship and to invite Atahualpa to meet Pizarro in the town of Cajamarca. The embassy reached the Inca camp on 14 November and was received by Atahualpa in a small village called the Baths of Pultumarca. The Spanish chroniclers record that Atahualpa received the embassy with studied courtesy, that he was contemptuous of the small number of the Spanish, and that he asked the Spaniards pointed questions about their intentions. Atahualpa refused to visit the Spanish quarters in Cajamarca but agreed to visit the town the following day, in a litter, accompanied by his retinue.

The seizure of the Sapa Inca

Pizarro, who had been informed by his scouts of the small size of the 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 meeting at Cajamarca on 16 November 1532 is the central event of the entire conquest, and the plan is conventionally described as an ambush. Atahualpa entered the town at dusk, in a litter carried by eighty lords, accompanied by perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 retainers, most of whom were unarmed. The Spanish chaplain Vicente de Valverde advanced toward the Inca carrying a breviary and a crucifix and read aloud the Requerimiento, the standard Spanish document requiring non-Christians to acknowledge the authority of the Pope and the Spanish king. Atahualpa rejected the document, and a scuffle broke out.

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. 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 seizure of the Sapa Inca effectively destroyed the authority of the Inca state, and the Battle of Cajamarca is conventionally taken as the moment at which the conquest was decided.

Why the Spanish were able to conquer the Inca

Military asymmetry

The question of why the Spanish were able to conquer the Inca has been the subject of an extensive historical literature. The conventional answer, popularized in the nineteenth century by writers such as William Prescott, emphasized the military asymmetry between the two sides: the Spanish possessed steel swords, plate armor, firearms, and cavalry, and the Inca possessed none of these. The Andean population had no indigenous tradition of cavalry warfare, and the horse — which had been extinct in the Americas since the late Pleistocene — was unknown and was regarded by many indigenous observers as a single creature, a centaur-like being, with the man and the horse forming a single body. The psychological effect of the horse was considerable in the first encounters.

The military explanation is real but partial. By 1532 the Inca had been fighting a civil war of succession for three years and had been affected by an epidemic of smallpox that had killed the previous Sapa Inca and a large portion of the population. The Inca, in other words, were already weakened. The Spanish, who numbered about 180 men, were vastly outnumbered at Cajamarca, and the accounts of the battle make clear that the surprise of the ambush, the use of the cavalry in a confined space, and the fact that the Inca were unprepared for the weapons of the Spanish were as important as the weapons themselves.

Political disequilibrium

The political disequilibrium of the Inca state in 1532 was, perhaps, more important than the military asymmetry. The Sapa Inca Huayna Capac had died of smallpox in 1527, and the succession had been disputed between his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa. The civil war had been extremely destructive, and the population of the central and southern highlands had been reduced by famine, displacement, and disease. The empire was divided, and the Spanish were able to recruit indigenous auxiliaries — the Cañari of southern Ecuador, the Chachapoya of the cloud forest, the Huancas of the central highlands — who had been incorporated into the empire only recently and who saw the Spanish as a means of throwing off Inca rule.

The Spanish also benefited from the role of disease. The epidemic of smallpox that had reached the imperial court in 1526 and 1527 had killed a large portion of the population in the highlands, including the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac. The demographic collapse of the Andean population that began in the 1520s and continued into the seventeenth century is now understood to have been a central feature of the conquest.

Significance and aftermath

The arrival of the Spanish in 1532 was the beginning of the end of the Inca Empire as an independent political entity. The seizure of Atahualpa at Cajamarca, the execution of Atahualpa in July 1533, the conquest of Cusco in November 1533, and the Spanish conquest of Peru that followed all took place within four years of the arrival at Tumbes. The capture and execution of Atahualpa destroyed the legitimacy of the surviving Inca dynasty in the north, and the fall of Cusco destroyed the political and symbolic center of the empire. The Neo-Inca State at Vilcabamba that Manco Inca established in 1537 survived for another thirty-five years, but it was a rump state in a remote region of the eastern Andes.

The arrival of the Spanish also initiated the demographic catastrophe that would reduce the Andean population from perhaps ten or twelve million in 1520 to perhaps 600,000 in 1620. The first smallpox epidemic had reached the highlands before the Spanish arrived, but the subsequent epidemics of measles, influenza, typhus, and diphtheria caused mortality on a scale without precedent in the pre-Columbian Americas.