Francisco Pizarro and His Expedition to Peru

Francisco Pizarro (c. 1478–1541) was an illiterate Spanish soldier from Trujillo in Extremadura who led the three Pacific expeditions of 1524–1532 that culminated in the overthrow of the Inca Empire and the conquest of Peru. Working in partnership with the soldier Diego de Almagro and the priest Hernando de Luque, Pizarro organized three successive voyages down the coast of present-day Ecuador and northern Peru, each funded as a private empresa and authorized by a series of royal capitulaciones. The third expedition, which set out from Panamá in January 1531 with about 168 men, 62 horses, and a small number of artillery pieces, reached Tumbes in 1532 and marched inland to Cajamarca, where, on 16 November 1532, Pizarro’s small force captured the Sapa Inca Atahualpa and set in motion the destruction of the largest polity in the pre-Columbian Americas. The expedition is one of the most consequential military undertakings of the early modern period, both for the speed with which it dismantled a continental state and for the disproportionate ratio of Spanish to Andean combatants that it employed.

Origins of the expedition

The Pacific context

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 rumors of a comparable kingdom to the south had circulated since the voyage of Pascual de Andagoya in 1522. The Spanish referred to this rumored kingdom by the name “Birú” or “Perú,” and the name was applied to the territory south of the Gulf of Guayaquil even before the Spanish had any direct contact with the Inca state. The first ship to cross the equator on the South American Pacific coast was the caravel of the pilot Bartolomé Ruiz in 1526, working in Pizarro’s service; Ruiz returned to Panamá with detailed reports of the densely settled coast of northern Peru, of the people of Tumbes, and of their gold and silver ornaments.

The Pizarro–Almagro–Luque empresa

The expedition was a joint undertaking of three men who had known each other in Panamá in the early 1520s. Pizarro, the youngest of the three and the leader of the field expeditions, had served in the conquest of Tierra Firme and had been a companion of Balboa. Diego de Almagro brought a small amount of capital and a number of recruits, and Hernando de Luque, an ecclesiastic who held an appointment in Panamá, advanced money and provided 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. The first two voyages, in 1524 and 1526, were joint undertakings of the partnership, and the costs were shared.

A formal capitulación — a contract between the Spanish crown and the partners — was issued on 26 July 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 and would lead, eventually, to a Spanish civil war.

The first two expeditions, 1524–1528

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, the heat of the equatorial lowlands was extreme, and the indigenous resistance on the coast of present-day Ecuador was stiff. The expedition made only limited progress down the coast. Almagro’s supply mission, in its turn, almost ended in disaster: his ship was damaged in a storm, the crew mutinied, and Almagro lost an eye in a skirmish at the hands of indigenous people. 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 from Tumbes and Esmeraldas 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 expedition, 1531–1532

Departure and the march to Tumbes

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

The Spanish landed first at the bay of San Mateo in modern Ecuador, where they clashed with local inhabitants, and from there pushed south down the coast. They founded a small settlement at Tangarara, in the Chira valley, and from there sent a small ship, with a crew of about twenty men, ahead to Tumbes. The advance party found the city in ruins, having been sacked in the course of the civil war, and the expedition as a whole had to fight its way down the coast against the local population. By the time the Spanish reached the northern Peruvian coast, they had lost about a third of their men but had gained useful intelligence on the political situation in the highlands.

The march inland 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, and the Spanish force was further reduced by the rigors of the journey. Pizarro 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, and he was aware that the small size of his own force made a direct engagement against these numbers extremely risky. He resolved to invite Atahualpa to meet him in the town of Cajamarca, on the pretext of a friendly parley, and to seize him there. The plan was carried out on 16 November 1532 in what is known as the Battle of Cajamarca, and the outcome was the capture of the Sapa Inca and the effective collapse of the northern Inca state.

The partnership and the legacy of the expedition

The Pizarro–Almagro conflict

The partnership between Pizarro and Almagro, formalized in the 1529 capitulación, was strained almost from the beginning by disagreements over the division of the spoils. The boundary between Pizarro’s and Almagro’s jurisdictions was not precisely defined, and as the Spanish learned that the Inca Empire extended much further south than they had initially thought — into modern Chile, Bolivia, and northwestern Argentina — the question of the boundary between the two 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 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, and the two Spanish factions met at the plain of Las Salinas, near Cusco, on 6 April 1538. The Pizarro faction won a decisive victory, and Almagro was 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 Pizarro–Almagro conflict was, in effect, a Spanish civil war fought out on Andean soil and with indigenous auxiliaries on both sides, and it illustrates the speed with which the Spanish conquest of Peru generated internal Spanish violence.

Pizarro’s death and the consolidation of the conquest

Francisco Pizarro was assassinated in his palace in Lima on 26 June 1541, at the age of about sixty-three. He left no legitimate heirs, and his estate passed to the Spanish crown. The conquest that he had initiated, however, was already irreversible. By the time of his death the Inca capital of Cusco had been in Spanish hands for eight years, the silver mines of Potosí had been discovered, and the foundations of the colonial economy had been laid. Pizarro’s expedition of 1531–1532 was the opening campaign of one of the most rapid and most destructive imperial transitions in world history, and its consequences — the incorporation of the Andes into the Spanish Empire, the demographic collapse of the indigenous population, and the long-term marginalization of the Andean peoples — are still visible in the political and economic structure of modern Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.