All events · Conquest and the Slave Trades

The Spanish Conquest of Peru and the End of Tawantinsuyu

1532–1572 · Americas

Displacement Territory Seized Mass Killing

What happened

Francisco Pizarro's small force arrived during a war of succession between Atahualpa and Huáscar and in November 1532 seized Atahualpa at Cajamarca, killing much of his entourage; he was ransomed and then executed in 1533. Cusco was taken the same year, and after the failed siege of 1536-37 and decades of civil war among the conquerors, the rump Inca state at Vilcabamba was destroyed and Túpac Amaru executed in 1572. Epidemics preceded the Spaniards: smallpox is generally held to have reached the Andes around 1524-27, killing the Inca Huayna Capac and precipitating the succession war. The demographic decline that followed was severe but is documented only through colonial tribute inspections, which count taxable adults rather than people, and the pre-conquest baseline is disputed between roughly three and fourteen million. What the conquest added to disease was the seizure of land and herds, the encomienda, and from 1569 the systematic resettlement and labour drafts described separately.

Parties

Pizarro's expedition seized and executed the Inca Atahualpa, took Cusco and destroyed the Inca state, and Spanish rule was consolidated by the execution of the last Inca at Vilcabamba in 1572

Disputed

The population of the Inca realm at contact, and how much of the subsequent decline is attributable to epidemics that arrived before the Spaniards themselves, are both disputed.

The denominator

There is no census. Reconstructions rest on early colonial tribute lists and visitas: John Rowe's back-projection gives about 6 million, Noble David Cook's Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru 1520-1620 offers a range of roughly 4 to 14 million with a working figure near 9 million, and some ecological reconstructions go higher still. The 9 million used here is a mid-point of Cook's range and should be read as an order of magnitude.

Most Andean population loss over the sixteenth century came from introduced epidemic disease rather than from the conquest campaigns, so a ratio against this baseline attributes to the invasion deaths with several causes.

Where the baseline comes from

Inca Empireopen-edited
Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americasopen-edited

On the death toll

No defensible total for the conquest period alone. Deaths at Cajamarca and in the sieges and civil wars ran to thousands and are described in Spanish and mestizo chronicles without reliable counts; the far larger mortality came from epidemics beginning before 1532 and continuing through the sixteenth century, and cannot be separated from the wider collapse treated in its own entry.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingForced LabourDestruction of PropertyCultural Destruction

The killing of Atahualpa's unarmed entourage at Cajamarca, the sack of Cusco, punitive campaigns during the risings of 1536-37 and the extirpation of Andean shrines are recorded in the accounts of the conquistadors themselves and in the indigenous and mestizo chronicles of Guaman Poma and Garcilaso de la Vega.