Viceroyalty of Peru

The Viceroyalty of Peru was the main Spanish government in South America from 1542 to 1824. Governed from Lima, it originally included almost all of Spanish South America, and its silver mines made it one of the richest parts of the Spanish Empire.

After Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire in the 1530s, the conquistadors fought each other. Pizarro's partner Diego de Almagro was executed in 1538, and Almagro's supporters assassinated Pizarro in Lima in 1541. In 1542 the Spanish crown created the Viceroyalty of Peru and issued the New Laws, which limited the encomienda, grants of Indigenous labour, and tried to protect Indigenous people. The encomenderos revolted under Gonzalo Pizarro, who defeated and killed the first viceroy, Blasco Núñez Vela, in 1546, before being defeated and executed in 1548.

The fifth viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, from 1569 to 1581, organised the colony. He conducted a general inspection, resettled Indigenous people into new towns, reducciones, to make them easier to tax, convert and control, and reorganised the mita, a forced labour system adapted from the Incas, which required Indigenous communities to send men to work in the mines. In 1572 he captured and executed Túpac Amaru, the last ruler of the Inca state of Vilcabamba.

In 1545 Spaniards found a mountain of silver ore, the Cerro Rico, at Potosí, in today's Bolivia. Worked by mita labourers and enslaved Africans, using the mercury amalgamation process introduced in the 1570s, with mercury from the mines of Huancavelica, Potosí produced vast amounts of silver. By the early seventeenth century, Potosí had a population of perhaps 160,000, one of the largest cities in the world. Conditions in the mines and at Huancavelica were deadly. Spanish speakers still say "vale un Potosí", "it's worth a Potosí", for great wealth.

Lima, founded by Pizarro in 1535 as the City of Kings, became the viceroyalty's capital, with a cathedral, the University of San Marcos, founded in 1551, one of the oldest in the Americas, and an Inquisition tribunal. Lima's elite was wealthy, and religious life flourished; Saint Rose of Lima, who died in 1617, was the first saint of the Americas. An earthquake and tsunami destroyed much of Lima and its port, Callao, in 1746.

Indigenous culture survived and blended with Spanish. The mestizo writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish captain and an Inca princess, wrote the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, published in 1609. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala wrote a long illustrated letter to the king around 1615, describing Andean life and colonial abuses. The Cusco school of painting blended European and Andean styles. Quechua remained widely spoken.

As part of the Bourbon reforms, Spain divided the viceroyalty, creating the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717 and the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776, which took Upper Peru, with Potosí. In 1780 José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a kuraka, a local Indigenous leader, who took the name Túpac Amaru II, led a huge rebellion against colonial abuses; it was crushed, and he was executed in Cusco in 1781.

Peru was the stronghold of Spanish royalism in South America. José de San Martín landed in 1820 and declared Peru's independence in Lima on 28 July 1821. Simón Bolívar took over the campaign, and his general Antonio José de Sucre defeated the last major royalist army at Ayacucho on 9 December 1824. The last Spanish garrison, at Callao, surrendered in 1826.

Our maps show the Viceroyalty of Peru from 1600 to 1815. Its largest outline, about 5 million square kilometres on the 1715 map, stretches across today's Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia and Chile, before the creation of the new viceroyalties. Lima, Cusco and La Paz lie inside it throughout, Quito until 1783 and Bogotá on the 1715 map.