Francisco Pizarro González was, at the time of the Inca conquest, a man in his mid-fifties, illiterate, illegitimate by birth, and an experienced Spanish military adventurer. He had been in the Americas since 1502, had participated in the early Caribbean campaigns under Nicolás de Ovando and the Panama expeditions under Pedrarias Dávila, and had been Balboa's second-in-command on the Pacific coast in 1513. He had made two earlier expeditions south along the Pacific coast of South America (1524-1525, 1526-1528) in search of a wealthy state his Panama informants had described — the "Birú" or "Pirú" — but had returned without finding it. His third expedition, organised on the basis of a royal capitulation he had obtained directly from the Emperor Charles V at Toledo in July 1529, left Panama with about 180 men, twenty-seven horses, and a few small artillery pieces in January 1531.
The expedition reached the Inca-controlled coast at Tumbes in spring 1532. Tumbes had been a flourishing Inca administrative centre on Pizarro's previous reconnaissance in 1528; in 1532 it was largely abandoned, having been ravaged by smallpox and the civil war. Pizarro founded a new Spanish settlement at San Miguel de Piura (the first Spanish city in South America, founded in July 1532) on the coast and then, in late September, set out from Piura with about 168 men (62 cavalry and 106 infantry) to find the Inca ruler. They marched inland through the western Andes, climbing about 2,800 metres in altitude, and arrived at Cajamarca on the afternoon of the 15th of November 1532. Atahualpa was camped, with a substantial military force, at thermal baths a few kilometres outside the town.
The meeting
Pizarro sent a small delegation to Atahualpa's camp the same evening, inviting him to a meeting in the central plaza of Cajamarca the next day. Atahualpa accepted. The Spanish account (preserved principally in the chronicles of Pedro Pizarro, Francisco's young cousin, who was present, and Francisco de Xerez, the expedition's official secretary) describes the negotiations as a Spanish reconnaissance: the friar Vicente de Valverde was sent to test Atahualpa's reaction to Christian preaching; the Spaniards observed the layout of Atahualpa's camp and the deployment of his bodyguard. The Inca account, reconstructed from indigenous sources by later chroniclers (Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Juan de Betanzos, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala), describes Atahualpa as treating the visit as a curiosity rather than a strategic threat — the Spaniards were a small force, in unfamiliar terrain, with no apparent capacity to threaten the imperial army of perhaps 80,000 men camped around the town.
The meeting on the afternoon of Saturday the 16th of November 1532 was, in retrospect, the decisive event of the conquest of South America. Atahualpa entered the central plaza of Cajamarca in a litter of state, surrounded by a guard of several thousand men (mostly unarmed, in ceremonial dress, as was appropriate for a meeting with foreign ambassadors). Pizarro's cavalry and infantry, hidden in the buildings around the plaza, watched the approach. The friar Valverde came forward with an interpreter (Felipillo, a young Inca-area native taken by Pizarro on the previous expedition and trained in Spanish), presented Atahualpa with a Bible and a Christian explanation of submission to the Spanish king and the Pope, and asked the Sapa Inca to accept Christian baptism and Spanish overlordship. Atahualpa, by all accounts, examined the Bible, found it unimpressive, threw it on the ground, and refused. (The dropping of the Bible was the trigger the Spaniards had been waiting for.) Pizarro gave the signal. The Spanish cavalry charged the plaza from the hidden positions; the infantry opened fire with the artillery and arquebuses. The Inca bodyguard, unarmed and entirely unprepared for the assault, was destroyed in less than two hours. Atahualpa was captured personally by Pizarro. Several thousand Inca died in the plaza or in the flight afterwards. No Spaniards were killed; one was injured.
The disparity in the casualty figures has been variously explained. The principal factors: the Spanish had complete tactical surprise; the Inca force was largely unarmed (the principal Inca military weapons — the slings, the macanas, the spears — were not carried by the ceremonial bodyguard at a diplomatic meeting); the Spanish had horses, which the Inca had never seen, and which produced extraordinary panic in the close-order formations of the unarmed bodyguard; the Spanish had steel armour and weapons against bronze, copper, and obsidian; the Spanish had crossbows and arquebuses at close range; and the Spanish were a tight-knit professional military force, while the Inca bodyguard was a ceremonial assembly. The asymmetry was, in this particular tactical situation, extreme. It would not have been repeatable in a more typical military encounter.
The ransom
With Atahualpa in captivity, Pizarro held the political centre of the empire. The Sapa Inca, treated as a living deity by his subjects, could not be coerced by the Inca administrative system. The orders that came from his captivity were, in his subjects' understanding, the orders of the Sapa Inca and were obeyed. Pizarro used his prisoner to extract a substantial ransom: Atahualpa offered to fill the room in which he was held (a chamber approximately 6.7 metres long by 5.2 wide and 2.4 high in the so-called Cuarto del Rescate, the Ransom Room, still standing in central Cajamarca) once with gold and twice with silver, in exchange for his release. The offer was accepted. The Inca administration began to send the demanded metals from across the empire — gold sun discs from the Coricancha in Cuzco, gold service vessels from the royal residences, silver objects from across the empire. The collection took eight months and produced about 5,500 kilograms of gold and 11,000 kilograms of silver — the largest single ransom in the documented history of the world.
While the ransom was being collected, Pizarro continued to negotiate. Atahualpa, in captivity, also continued to direct affairs. His instructions to his commanders to execute Huáscar (who had been held prisoner by Atahualpa's generals at Jauja since his capture earlier in 1532) were carried out. Huáscar was murdered, on Atahualpa's orders, in mid-1533. The Inca civil war was, in this sense, resolved with the captive Atahualpa as the winner.
The Spanish, on receiving the full ransom, did not release Atahualpa. After divisions among the senior Spanish officers about what to do with him, he was tried in a hasty Spanish military court on charges of having ordered the death of his brother, of being a usurper, of having conspired against Pizarro, and of practising idolatry. He was sentenced to death by burning. He accepted Christian baptism (taking the name Francisco, after Pizarro) in exchange for commutation to garrotte. He was strangled on the 26th of July 1533 in the central square of Cajamarca. He was about thirty-three.
The fall of Cuzco
Pizarro, now in control of the political centre of the empire, marched south toward Cuzco with his expedition (now reinforced by Hernando de Soto's contingent that had recently arrived from Panama, and an additional force under Diego de Almagro, Pizarro's partner). The Spanish entry into Cuzco on the 15th of November 1533 — exactly a year after their arrival at Cajamarca — was largely peaceful, with Atahualpa's generals Quizquiz and Chalcuchimac having withdrawn rather than defend the city. Pizarro installed a new puppet Sapa Inca — Manco Inca Yupanqui, a son of Huayna Capac through a different mother, brought up at Cuzco and considered acceptable to the Cuzco-based panaqas — as a Spanish-controlled successor.
The Inca puppet ruler, the resistance state at Vilcabamba, and the long colonial aftermath are the subjects of the next chapters. But the substantive moment of conquest — the moment at which the empire ceased to function as a unitary state under its own ruling lineage — was the capture and execution of Atahualpa. The conquest was, after that point, a sequence of mopping-up operations, civil wars among the Spaniards, and political negotiations rather than a contest between empires. The Inca state, in the form that had existed before November 1532, was over.
"There will be more gold than there is iron in Vizcaya, more silver than there is copper in Toledo, and more spice than there is pepper in Lisbon." — Francisco Pizarro to his men, on the eve of the Cajamarca expedition, 1531
End of Chapter VII