Battle of Cajamarca

On 16 November 1532, in the main square of Cajamarca in the northern Andes, a small Spanish force under Francisco Pizarro ambushed the retinue of the Inca ruler Atahualpa, killed thousands of his largely unarmed attendants and took him prisoner. Many scholars today prefer to call the event the Cajamarca massacre. The seizure of the Inca opened the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.

Atahualpa had just emerged victorious from the civil war against his half-brother Huáscar, whom his commanders had recently captured. He was camped above Cajamarca with nearly 80,000 seasoned troops and had little reason to fear the strangers, whom he had allowed to travel deep into his empire. According to the chronicles, he planned to capture a few Spaniards for their skills and kill the rest. Pizarro's party, about 180 strong in one account and listed elsewhere as 106 foot soldiers and 62 horsemen, reached the largely emptied town on Friday 15 November.

The Spaniards could neither attack the huge army on the heights nor safely retreat. That evening Pizarro proposed a stroke reminiscent of Hernán Cortés in Mexico: to seize the ruler himself. He hid his horsemen and infantry in the buildings and alleys around the empty square, and placed men with arquebuses and four small cannon in a stone building at its centre, ordering everyone to stay silent until the guns fired.

Late the next afternoon Atahualpa left his armed warriors in a meadow about half a mile outside the town and entered with a procession of more than seven thousand attendants, carrying little more than small ceremonial axes. He rode in a litter decorated with parrot feathers and silver, borne by eighty nobles. Finding no Spaniards in sight, he called out. The friar Vicente de Valverde then came forward with an interpreter, a cross and a prayer book, and demanded that the Inca accept Christianity and the rule of Charles V. The exchange quickly broke down amid poor translation. Spanish accounts disagree about exactly what started the fighting. The only Inca account, dictated decades later by Titu Cusi Yupanqui, says that the Spaniards poured away or ignored ceremonial drinks offered by Atahualpa, and that he angrily threatened them before they attacked.

At the signal, guns fired into the crowd and horsemen charged, the bells on their horses adding to the terror. The Spaniards cut at the litter bearers to bring Atahualpa down; other attendants threw themselves in the way and were killed. When a soldier tried to kill the Inca, Pizarro shielded him, recognising his value as a hostage, and was wounded in the hand. The main Inca army outside the town, unsettled by the loss of its ruler and many commanders at a stroke, fled in confusion and made no attempt to fight. Estimates commonly cited put the Inca dead at 2,000 to 3,000, with about 7,000 captured, while the Spaniards suffered almost no losses.

Atahualpa was held prisoner and later executed. His young wife Cuxirimay Ocllo, who stayed with him in captivity, was afterwards taken to Cuzco as Doña Angelina; she later married the interpreter Juan de Betanzos, whose Narratives of the Incas drew partly on interviews with Inca guards present at the capture. On the Spanish side, Francisco Xerez also wrote an account of the events.

Our 1530 map shows the Inca Empire shortly before the Spanish arrival, and the 1700 map shows Cajamarca within the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru.