Who ruled Cusco?

Cusco lies in a high valley of the southern Peruvian Andes, about 3,400 metres above sea level, where several streams join among fertile basins suited to maize and potatoes. It was the capital of the Inca Empire, the largest state of the pre-Columbian Americas, and the Incas regarded it as the centre of their world, from which roads ran out to the four quarters of their realm. After the Spanish conquest it became a colonial city built directly on top of Inca stone walls, a combination that still defines it.

People farmed the valley long before the Incas. The Wari culture built a large administrative centre at Pikillacta, just south-east of the city, in the second half of the first millennium CE, and the local Killke culture occupied the site of Cusco from about 900 to 1200. Inca tradition said the city was founded by Manco Cápac, who came from Lake Titicaca with his sister and wife Mama Ocllo, but for its first centuries the Inca state was only one of several small powers in the region.

That changed under Pachacuti, who according to the usual chronology came to power around 1438 after defeating the rival Chanka. He and his son Topa Inca Yupanqui built the Inca Empire into a state reaching from present-day Ecuador to central Chile, and Pachacuti is credited with rebuilding Cusco as an imperial capital. Palaces of the ruling lineages, built of finely fitted stone, lined its central plazas. The Coricancha, the temple of the Sun, was covered in gold sheeting, and the massive walls of Sacsayhuamán rose on the hill above. Nobles from conquered provinces were required to live in the city for part of the year.

In the late 1520s a war of succession between the brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa split the empire. Atahualpa's generals took Cusco, but in 1532 he was captured by Francisco Pizarro and executed the next year. The Spaniards entered Cusco in November 1533, stripped its temples of gold and formally refounded it as a Spanish city in March 1534. In 1536 their puppet emperor Manco Inca rebelled and besieged the city for months, but the Spaniards and their Indigenous allies held out, a key moment in the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.

Under the Viceroyalty of Peru, Lima on the coast became the capital, but Cusco remained the main city of the southern highlands. Churches and convents were raised on Inca foundations: the Dominican monastery of Santo Domingo stands on the Coricancha, and the cathedral on the site of an Inca palace. A severe earthquake in 1650 brought down many colonial buildings while the Inca walls beneath largely survived, and the city was rebuilt in an elaborate Baroque style, with its own school of religious painting. In 1780 Túpac Amaru II, a descendant of Inca rulers, led a great uprising against colonial abuses. He was captured and executed in Cusco's main square in May 1781.

After independence in the 1820s Cusco was a remote regional capital of Peru. Interest in its past grew after the American explorer Hiram Bingham publicised the nearby ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911. Another earthquake in 1950 damaged much of the colonial city and exposed further Inca masonry. Cusco was declared a World Heritage Site in 1983, and its population of several hundred thousand now depends heavily on tourism, while many residents speak Quechua, the language of the Incas.