title: Conquest of the Incas
author: John Doe
content_type: article
publication: Matt Lakeman
published: 2025-03-24T00:00:00
source_url: https://mattlakeman.org/2025/03/24/conquest-of-the-incas/
word_count: 25399
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go back to them until recently when I read Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of New Spain and then
by Kim MacQuarrie. My goal was to get a thorough understanding of the two major Spanish New World conquests and
The Last Days of the Incas*how*small Western military forces achieved such stunning successes over gargantuan native empires.
In the case of Hernan Cortes, about 400 Spanish soldiers (later increased to over 1,000) subjugated the Mexican Empire of about 6 million inhabitants. In the case of Francisco Pizarro, about 180 Spanish soldiers (eventually rising to over 1,000, but with rarely more than 500 ever concentrated in one place) conquered the Inca Empire of maybe 10 million inhabitants. In both cases, the Spanish invaders had almost no understanding of the local politics, geography, culture, religion, or people they were invading. In both cases, the expedition leaders deserve a ton of credit for extraordinary leadership and competence while leveraging a technological imbalance to achieve a staggering military force and diplomatic multiplier.
Since I already wrote about the Aztecs, this essay is primarily focused on Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas, which, as a reader, I found no less insane, exciting, ridiculous, and fascinating based on MacQuarrie’s fantastic The Last Days of the Incas. I want to present the most straightforward account of what happened and why with enough detail to get a sense of the difficulty and enormity of the conquest, but pared down enough to make the story digestible. I’ll also intersperse some of the most interesting points I learned from The Conquest of New Spain, which is translated from a first-hand account of one of the conquistadors present at the invasion of the Aztec Empire. At the end, I reflect a bit on why I find this stuff so interesting and can’t stop thinking about it.
The Incas
The Incas were/are an ethnic group based around Cusco, a city that sits at an elevation over 11,000 feet (3,300 meters) in what is today inland Peru. At the height of their power, a mere 100,000 ethnic Incas dominated an empire of 8-10 million inhabitants stretching from southern Colombia to northern Chile, from the edge of the Amazon rainforest, over the Andes, and to the Pacific coast. In the 16th century, Cusco’s population may have been as large as 200,000, making it comparable to Paris at the time. They called their country/nation/state/whatever you want to classify it: Tawantinsuyu.
When Francisco Pizarro first arrived at Incan land in 1528, the Incas had only expanded outside the Cusco valley for about 200 years, had only been a genuine empire for about 100 years, and had conquered most of its territory over about the last 60 years. Their expansion stopped not due to any failings on the Incas’ part, but because they had beaten every significant civilization in their vicinity, and all that was left on their borders were small villages and disorganized nomads in dense tropical jungles or sparse mountain ranges.
If there was a secret sauce that gave the Inca an edge over their neighbors, it was probably *organization*. Their civilization was based in fertile valleys nestled between some of the tallest mountain peaks in the Western hemisphere. They got good at terrace farming, roads, transport, communication, infrastructure, and other logistics that permitted the formation of larger armies than their competitors.
It helped that the Incan conquest modus operandi was relatively *indirect*. The standard procedure was to bribe, threaten, or fight rival city-states into submission, then decapitate or co-opt the leadership, and then install Incan governors while keeping much of the prior state apparatus intact. The Incas preferred to harness long-term productive yields from populations in new territory rather than indulging in plunder. In lieu of taxes, every able-bodied adult male in the Incan Empire was legally required to work for the state for three months per year, or at least send their wives or children in their stead. This mass of labor, which eventually reached into the millions, produced potatoes, meat (llama or alpaca mostly), wool (same), gold, and other goods for the state, as well as building its palaces and extensive road system. Seemingly much more so than the Aztecs and comparable civilizations, the Inca understood that their power was based in its people and their production.
There is a part early in Conquest of New Spain when Bernal Dias describes walking into a village and finding a pile of disemboweled native bodies that had been recently ritualistically sacrificed, and then Dias says that such sights were so common in so many villages that he is going to stop describing them, but that the reader should just assume that the Spanish always encountered such spectacles in every single Mesoamerican village or city they entered.
The Incas also did human sacrifices, but nowhere near to the same extent. MacQuarrie mentions it a few times but there were no piles of mutilated bodies in every town. However, the Incas seemed particularly fond of *child sacrifices* through a practice called capacocha. Like the Aztecs, the Incan leaders demanded periodic tributes from each region of the empire, though giving up a child to be sacrificed was considered a great honor.
I don’t have a great sense of the technological differences between the Incas and the Aztecs, but for a few points of comparison:
The Incas had better infrastructure, most notably their road system which ran at lengths estimated between 14,000 miles and 37,000 miles, snaking through the aforementioned mountain ranges, rainforests, deserts, etc. The Inca government developed a crazy messenger system where runners trained at high altitudes ran relays to deliver messages across the empire at the maximal speed of human beings on foot. There was also the
qullqa*system of warehouses that stored the surplus wealth of the Incan government. MacQuarrie describes endless piles of gold and cloth and food stacked in these buildings. - Unfortunately, one of the reasons the Incas had to stack their wealth in buildings was because they had no monetary system. The Aztecs hadn’t quite figured out a centralized currency, but a few common goods like cocoa beans emerged as de facto currencies in their marketplaces. It’s almost kind of more impressive that the Incan empire of maybe 10 million people got by on the barter system.
Likewise, the Incas were behind the Aztecs when it came to writing. The latter hadn’t developed a formal writing system, let alone an alphabet, but they had a pictographic language and
paperto put it on. The Inca had no writing system nor paper; they relied on*quipus*, or “knotted cords,” that they tied in certain ways to record numbers, which at least permitted some basic accounting.
Metallurgy was a slight edge for the Incas. Neither civilization had iron, both had copper, but the Incas used it more widely than the Aztecs. Most notably, the Incas incorporated bronze (a copper alloy) in their weaponry, though to a relatively small extent, like bronze-tipped spears. The Aztecs only used copper for civilian purposes and stuck mostly to the extremely sharp but brittle obsidian for their weaponry.
I’m not sure who had the edge in engineering. No city in the Western hemisphere coming close to the size and sophistication of Tenochtitlan, but the Incas managed to carve, lift, and transport colossal stones to the top of mountains to build Machu Pichu and other sites.
The Incas were ahead in animal husbandry with domesticated llamas and alpacas used for meat, clothing, and material transport (though, sadly, llamas are not big enough to be purposefully ridden). The Aztecs had domesticated turkeys, ducks, and dogs, but there were no tamable large mammals nearby.
While it’s more subjective, I’d also give a slight edge to the Incas in terms of government organization. The Mexican Empire was basically a city-state (Tenochtitlan) with two junior allies (Tetzcoco and Tlacopan) forcing a cluster of nearby city-states to pay tribute. The Incan Empire, while decentralized by contemporary European standards, had a more integrated national government with Incan elites deployed across the lands to oversee territories as governors.
The Incan Empire peaked during the reign of Huayna Capac (who is well-known as objectively the best leader in Civilization IV) due to his combination of Financial and Industrious traits). Huayna Capac ascended to the throne at age 5 in 1493, at which point the Incan Empire’s borders had almost reached their peak. Throughout his 34 year reign, Huayna Capac was mostly focused on consolidating gains into a lasting legacy, which is no small feat for 100,000 Incas trying to control a territory larger than modern Mexico. His successful efforts in formalizing the Incan government structure and improving the empire’s infrastructure made Huayna Capac a legendary figure during his time and afterward, sort of analogous to Caesar Augustus in ancient Rome.
Little did the Inca know that the end of Huayna Capac’s reign was the beginning of the end of the Inca Empire. In 1528, Francisco Pizarro discovered the Incas while on an expeditionary sailing venture south from Panama. Some of his men briefly went ashore at the city of Tumbes in northern Peru where they learned that the Incan Empire was a thing and that it was ruled by the mighty Huayna Capac. Pizzaro’s expedition then turned around and went back to Panama so Pizarro could prepare a proper invasion expedition and ask the King of Spain for permission to do so. Weeks later, Huayna Capac died of smallpox, which originated in Spanish settlements along the north coast of South America and tore its way north-to-south. The total estimated death toll in the Incan Empire was around 200,000.
Incan succession was similar to Mexican (Aztec) succession. Both governments were monarchies, but both the formal and informal rules around which son inherited the throne were a lot more *fluid* than in Europe where by that point, most states had primogeniture, or a system where the oldest son inherits most or all of his father’s titles.
In the Inca Empire, it was more complicated. The Incan Emperor, like all Incan men, could have multiple wives and concubines, all of whom might produce heirs. But the first wife was given special status and only her children were considered to be of full royal blood. Thus it was from her children that the emperor was expected to choose a son to succeed him. However, the legitimacy of a given heir was more of a *sliding scale*. The son of the first wife chosen by the Emperor had the most legitimacy, but every other son of the first wife also had some legitimacy, and every son of every other wife and concubine also had some, albeit less, legitimacy.
So, what ultimately decided the matter of succession? As with the Aztecs and Ottomans, it came down to warfare and intrigue. The most ambitious heirs were expected to form alliances with weaker sons and then fight each other in civil wars or murder each other covertly until there was one viable heir left. According to MacQuarrie, “the difference between European and Inca versions of monarchy… was that among the Incas bloody dynastic struggles were expected.” They saw it as a meritocratic process for finding the best heir.
(Incidentally, brother-sister marriage was illegal throughout the Incan Empire but was considered a divine practice for the Incan Emperor, so a lot of the heirs involved in these struggles were inbred.)
On his deathbed, Huayna Capac designated his oldest son, Ninan Cuyochi, as his heir to a group of leading nobles. Huayna Capac succumbed to smallpox, the nobles went to Ninan Cuyochi, and found he was also dead from smallpox. Fortunately, Huayna Capac had designated a second heir, Huascar, though he didn’t seem like the smartest choice. MacQuarrie says he “had little interest in military affairs, drank to excess, commonly slept with married women, and was known to murder their husbands if they complained.” Also, his mother was his aunt.
A pretender immediately rose up in the form of another son, Atahualpa, who had accompanied his father on numerous military campaigns and took a liking not just to warfare, but command. He was known to be severe and haughty even by Incan noble standards. He launched his insurrection from Quito in the poorer north and controlled less territory than Huascar, but had more of the military and the senior command staff on his side. The lackadaisical Huascar set himself up in the capital of Cusco and launched his armies north to capture or kill Atahualpa, thus starting another Incan succession war.
Fighting lasted for four years with Atahualpa gaining the upper hand, pushing his armies south while eliminating pockets of pro-Huascar resistance, and finally cornering Huascar in Cusco in 1532. Huascar was killed and the civil war ended only a month or two after the second arrival of Francisco Pizarro and the Spanish expedition.
The Spanish
In 1478, Francisco Pizarro was born in the city of Trujillo, in the region of Extremadura, which was the poorest part of Spain (and it still has the lowest GDP per capita on the Spanish mainland). His father was a low-tier noble and his mother was an unmarried commoner, making Pizarro a bastard. Like most of his future expedition members, he received little-to-no education and was a life-long illiterate.
At Pizarro’s age 15, Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from the Americas. Generations later, many of the early settlers of Jamestown and other colonies in North America were the second sons of nobility and noble bastards who grew up close to wealth but knew they would never have their cut of it due to their circumstances at birth. Likewise, hundreds of similarly-positioned Spaniards found the New World frontier to be a high-risk, high-reward shot at glory and wealth. At age 24, Pizarro was one of the “impoverished, illiterate, and title-less” adventurers who signed up for an expedition to the Caribbean in the name of the Spanish King.
Pizarro spent the next *25 years* adventuring throughout Central America in an impressive display of avoiding death by disease or violence. At first, he bounced around as a man-at-arms for any expedition that would take him, and he cut his teeth killing/enslaving natives on Caribbean islands and the South American coastline. His first claim to fame was being part of Vasco Nunez de Balboa’s 1513 expedition which discovered the Pacific Ocean by crossing Panama on-foot. He then established himself as a member of the governor’s administration in Panama, later participated in a coup to overthrow the governor, and then leveraged his elevated post to organize further excursions mostly into South America.
By all accounts, Pizarro was highly competent and quite good at conquistadoring. MacQuarrie describes him as “brave, firm, ambitious, cunningly diplomatic,” and “as brutal as the situation requires.” He was also “quiet, taciturn,” and generally “did very little talking but was strong on action.” However, he was good at making speeches when one was called for, including both in battle and diplomatically. Physically, he was “tall, sinewy, athletic, with hollow cheeks and a thin beard,” and he resembled Don Quixote (though the story was not written until after his death). Pizarro was a very good fighter, but a mediocre horseman, and so, unlike most elite conquistadors, he preferred fighting on foot.
And yet, for all his talents, after 25 years of conquistadoring, Pizarro had never quite hit it big, though he had done alright for himself. He had to be considered at least one of the best conquistadors in in the New World after so many successful ventures. He had collected enough wealth through wages and looting minor native settlements to deck himself out in armor and modern weapons. But he wanted more. He wanted to conquer some big native state, loot it for all it was worth, and then set himself up as a dynastic governor to milk for the rest of his life.
MacQuarrie describes the conquest of the Mexican Empire by Hernan Cortes as almost provoking an existential crisis in Pizarro. Cortes was another poor, illiterate (though legitimate) low-tier noble from Extremadura, and he was even a second cousin once removed from Pizarro. After only 15 years in the New World, Cortes had accomplished by far the most successful conquistador expedition in Mexico, rendering himself absurdly wealthy, absurdly glorious, and a Crown-approved governor of a gargantuan piece of land at *age 34*. By that point, Pizarro was already 43 and had never reached those heights.
With his already sizeable ambitions further inflamed, Pizarro launched his own expedition corporation called the Company of the Levant to find and make a Mexico-sized conquest. His business partner was another key player in the Incan conquest: Diego de Almagro, another illiterate bastard of low nobility, but with an even more “sketchy” past.
Early in his life, Almagro was abandoned by his mother, then taken in by his noble father, who gave him up to his brother (Almagro’s uncle), who horribly abused him in medieval ways, like chaining him up in a cage. Almagro ran away from home at age 15 and went back to his mother, but she refused to take him in, so he spent the rest of his adolescence on the streets as an orphan. At some point, he moved to Toledo, stabbed someone, fled justice to Seville, and then hopped on a ship to the New World at *age 39*. He spent a decade conquistadoring around Panama and Colombia, and like Pizarro, found decent but not Cortes-tier successes.
Almagro was ugly, short, fat, and conceited, but courageous and generous to his men. During one of his expeditions, he lost an eye and subsequently always wore an eyepatch. When Pizarro and Almagro joined forces in 1524, the former was a spry 46 and the latter was a sputtering 49. But they each served their roles: Pizarro was the frontman with more military experience and skill who would lead things on the ground, while Almagro was the planning, logistics, and business guy who would get everything set up.
In 1524, the Company of the Levant made its first expedition, a little scouting trip south from Panama along the Colombian coast with 84 men to chase rumors of a gigantic native kingdom. The expedition soon stalled out due to poor planning and bad weather.
In 1526, they launched a second expedition in the same direction with two ships and over 160 men. They messed around the Colombian coast for awhile and eventually reached Ecuador where they once again ran out of supplies. The expedition split with Almagro taking the lion’s share of men back to Panama, and Pizarro going on with the only 13 men who volunteered to stay with him. It took almost two years for them to finally reach Tumbes, a coastal Incan city with the architecture, city planning, and wealth to indicate that it was worth conquering. Cortes and his men exchanged gifts with the locals and were even (voluntarily) given some boys/servants/slaves who would be raised as translators. Pizarro then returned to Panama with a plan.
Pizarro would go all the way back to Spain for the first time in 25+ years to meet with the King and ask for a royal license to conquer this Incan Empire and become its governor. Meanwhile, Almagro would hang back in Panama and organize the next expedition, which would be larger, better equipped, better supplied, and cost way more than the previous expeditions.
Both men succeeded. Pizarro was hailed as a celebrity as he presented his tales and gifts (including a llama) to the Spanish court. King Charles I, having recently absorbed the incalculable riches of Mexico, was happy to grant a conquest license to another ambitious Spaniard. The only catch was that Pizarro was on his own with financing, which was to be expected. Notably, it was Pizarro specifically who was granted the governorship of Peru, while Almagro was officially given no title besides the Mayor of Tumbes. Before heading back to the New World, Pizarro picked up a bunch of eager adventurers for the expedition, including three half-brothers aged 29, 18, and 17, who would serve as lieutenants.
In 1532, the four Pizarros set sail from Panama with a total of 168 soldiers, with 62 cavalry (wielding 12-foot lances), about a dozen harquebuses (big, clumsy guns, more primitive than a musket), and four cannons. Individual soldiers were promised a cut of the loot based on their rank which was based on their experience and the quality of equipment they brought (cavalry at the top, basic foot soldiers at the bottom, harquebuses and crossbowmen in the middle). The army was led by the 54 year old Francisco Pizarro while the 57 year old Almagro stayed back in Panama to raise a second wave of soldiers.
Pizarro’s initial army was not an organized military unit, but rather a band of adventurers thrown together, so both the weaponry and armor was haphazard. All soldiers were equipped with at least iron chainmail, though most had at least some plate covering, often cuirasses that covered the torso. Helmets were also universal, though they usually left the bottom of the face uncovered. The horses usually had thick padded cotton to serve as an effective defense, though there was some cavalry plate armor as well. Also, pretty much all infantry had shields as a first-line of defense before the armor.
(Shout out to the forums on myarmory.com, a delightful holdover from pre-Reddit days when enthusiasts gather to discuss their nerdy hobby. I read through a ton of threads on conquistador weaponry and armor.)
A few of these conquistadors had been professional soldiers or mercenaries back in Europe, a few more had been on other expeditions in the New World, but most were poor, ambitious men of varying normal professions (ex. sailors, merchants, blacksmiths, masons, etc.) basically buying a lottery ticket for their own cut of the fame and fortune of a successful New World conquest. Many of these soldiers had bought their equipment on credit from crafty New World merchants. In addition, there were a handful of camp followers, including a priest, some African slaves, some female Muslim slaves, and some of the aforementioned merchants who continued selling goods on credit while on campaign.
Beachhead
After leaving Panama, Francisco Pizarro’s expedition skipped the usual messing around in Colombia and Ecuador, and went straight to Tumbes, the coastal Inca city, But to his surprise, Pizarro found it in ruins. Many of the very-well-made-for-a-native-city buildings were burned down and bodies littered the streets. Pizarro soon learned from a surviving local through his now teenaged translators that Huayna Capac was dead, the Incan Empire was in a winding down civil war, Tumbes had sided with Huascar, and Atahualpa had punished the town for it.
This was a disappointing start to the venture. Pizarro, had… I guess not *read*, but somehow absorbed the many first- and second-hand writings of Cortes’s Aztec conquest, and planned to use it as a playbook for his Inca conquest. Cortes had arrived at the edge of the Mexican Empire, allied himself with Aztec rivals and vassals through war and diplomacy, and made his way to the capital city of Tenochtitlan with their military support and literal geographic guidance. But that general strategy wasn’t really viable so far in Peru. All the people Pizarro thought he could use to get to the center of the Incan Empire were either killed by civil war or smallpox.
So Pizarro pivoted. First he set up a little settlement, San Miguel de Piura, and garrisoned it with 50 men. Then he collected some incoming reinforcements from Panama (but still no Almagro), bringing his soldier count up to 168. Then Pizarro raided a few towns, captured some locals to use as slaves, and tortured some others to learn about the Incan Empire and how to get to its capital of Cusco. After perceiving that one village chiefs was lying to him, Pizarro ordered a bunch of natives to be burned to death as a warning to the others.
(It’s worth noting that despite Cortes’s reputation for brutality, he doesn’t do anything this brutal until about six months into his expedition when there’s a local revolt against his rule and he orders his men to cut a bunch of prisoners’ hands off.)
After a few weeks of meandering terror tactics, Pizarro received an emissary from the pretender Emperor Atahualpa. By this point, he was pretty much the real Emperor, as one of his armies was marching on a nearly defenseless Cusco to finally depose and murder Emperor Huascar at the end of the four-year civil war. Through the impressive Incan runner messaging system, Emperor Atahualpa had been receiving reports of bizarre foreigners, noted for their massive beasts, shiny armor, paleness, and especially their beards, which apparently didn’t exist in Peru. He was also amazed by reports that the Spaniards didn’t need to sleep (probably a misunderstanding of Spanish sentry-posting at night), could eat gold and silver, used silver weapons (because they didn’t know what iron was), and that they spent much of their time talking to symbols on flat things (ie. reading).
Emperor Atahualpa had also heard that they had been torturing and murdering his subjects for seemingly no reason. According to MacQuarrie, Emperor Atahualpa sent his emissary to the Spanish to invite them to meet him at his encampment near the city of Cajamarca, where the emperor would get to see these strange foreigners, then probably kidnap, enslave, and castrate them. Then they could be a cool little court exhibit when he took up the throne in Cusco.
Things were now looking up for Pizarro. It had taken Cortes seven months to meet Emperor Montezuma, but Pizarro was invited to meet the Incan Emperor within the first few weeks of his expedition. All he had to do was march about 200 miles inland while ascending 9,000 feet (2,750 meters) into a land he knew absolutely nothing about.
When Pizarro and his 167 soldiers reached Cajamarca, they found an army of somewhere between *30,000 *and *80,000* Incas camped outside the city in an endless sea of tents. MacQuarrie describes it as a genuine “oh shit” moment for the conquistadors. They may have heard the stories of Cortes’s army beating native forces 100X+ larger, but actually seeing armies that big brought them face-to-face with reality. They really could just get overwhelmed and slaughtered at first contact. This giant empire of maybe 10 million people actually could kill/torture/enslave them all. The only thing standing between the Spaniards and annihilation or agony was about 168 of each other.
With Emperor Atahualpa and his army camped outside the city, Pizarro maneuvered his men into the city center and set up a base of operations. The Spaniards were impressed by the quality of the stone buildings and used them for shelter instead of their tents. Soon after, Pizarro decided to make contact with the Incan Emperor, and so he deployed one of his top cavalry lieutenants, future famed conquistador and first European to cross the Mississippi River Hernando De Soto along with one of the teenaged translators. Then, for some reason, 15 minutes after sending de Soto, Pizarro also sent his oldest brother, Hernando Pizarro, after them.
MacQuarrie calls De Soto a “wise choice” for serving as Pizarro’s diplomat since he was probably the second-most experienced conquistador in the group. But MacQuarrie also describes De Soto as “brash and impudent, having killed countless natives in hand-to-hand combat,” so I’m not sure about that. The Incas had no horses and had never seen an animals that big in their entire empire’s history, so of course De Soto proceeded to gallop through the Inca camp shouting for directions to find the Emperor at bewildered Incan warriors.
When he found the Emperor set up in a courtyard, de Soto charged up to him so quickly and with such a sudden stop that the Emperor’s clothes fluttered in a gust of air. In a scene that sounds so cool that it beggars belief, Emperor Atahualpa neither flinched nor looked up from the ground in a display of stoic awesomeness. Incan nobility were expected to be extraordinarily condescending and haughty towards subordinates, and Atahualpa was considered to be S-tier in this trait.
De Soto then went into a lengthy speech to the Emperor about how there were two emperors ruling the civilized world: the Holy Roman Emperor, who was also the Spanish King, and the Pope, who was god’s chief agent on earth. In 1493, the Pope assigned all land west of the Tordesillas meridian to Spain, and therefore the Incan Empire was Spanish territory, and so Emperor Atahualpa and his nobles should pledge their fealty to King Charles and convert to Christianity. This was all transmitted by a teenager with a shaky grasp of Spanish and who had barely spoken his native Incan language in four years, so I like to imagine that it went down like a newly immigrated ESL foreigner trying to explain the plot of sci-fi space opera to a geriatric.
Emperor Atahualpa continued staring at the ground and not acknowledging the presence of the Spaniards. This continued awkwardly until the arrival of Hernando Pizarro, who was somehow an even worse choice for a diplomat. Not that he didn’t have his virtues: he was strong, an excellent fighter, extremely brave, and would later prove himself as an incredible military leader. But he also had a reputation for being an extraordinarily arrogant asshole, to the point where even after successfully leading men through harrowing military endeavors and saving many of their lives, they still hated his guts. MacQuarrie gives him the unenviable title of the “least popular of the Pizarro brothers.”
When Hernando Pizarro introduced himself, Emperor Atahualpa finally looked up. He asked Hernando why the Spaniards had been burning Incan subjects alive. Hernando replied with some legalistic arguments for self-defense and then accused one of the native chiefs they had burned to death of being a “scoundrel.”
They stood around awkwardly a bit more, and then De Soto, the allegedly superior diplomat, noticed that Emperor Atahualpa seemed to be purposefully avoiding looking at their horses despite how mind-blowing they must have been. So De Soto decided to get his attention by making his horse rear back on its hind legs and stomp on the ground with a great snort. Amazingly, Atahualpa didn’t budge nor look at the horse, but a bunch of his royal bodyguards freaked out and ran away. Later that day, they would all be put to death by the Emperor for cowardice.
(There are many cinematic moments in Last Days of the Incas, but this whole negotiation feels the most like something written for a movie.)
A few more words were exchanged, and Hernando Pizarro invited the Emperor to meet Francisco Pizarro in Cajamarca the next day. Emperor Atahualpa assented, but after the Spaniards left, he told his advisors that the meeting had solidified his plan to capture and castrate the Spaniards, and also to capture and breed some horses.
Hernando Pizarro, De Soto, and the translator got back to camp and reported to Francisco Pizzaro that their diplomatic mission had… not gone great. The oldest Pizarro and his lieutenants then spent a harrowing night trying to figure out what the fuck to do. They thought the Emperor might come to visit them as requested, but more likely he would just attack and kill/capture them all. The Spaniards considered slipping out in the night to head back to the coast for reinforcements and a better opportunity to fight, but they worried they’d be attacked on the retreat, plus it would be cowardly.
Finally, they figured their best shot at fame, glory, and now most importantly, survival, was to bring out the old Cortes playbook and try to capture the Incan Emperor. Maybe Pizarro could negotiate with the Emperor to get access to the capital like Cortes had done. Or maybe the Emperor really would be dumb enough to visit them in Cajamarca and they could launch an ambush.
Granted, while outnumbered by something like 59,832 soldiers, the Spaniards were aware that their odds were not great. But still, they did their best to prepare themselves for battle. At their disposal, the 168 Spaniards had 62 horses, 4 canons, and “fewer than a dozen harquebuses.” They were in a decent defensive position in the city center where they could form chokepoints on narrow roads and use stone houses for cover. But still… they were not super optimistic that their technological and geographic advantages could overcome their 20-40X manpower disadvantage. Many Spaniards assumed they would soon die and spent the night praying to the Christian god.
The entire Incan army left their camp, marched to Cajamarca and then… stopped. It was almost sundown and Incan armies didn’t march or fight at night. Pizarro and the Spanish didn’t know about this tactically suboptimal stratagem, and couldn’t figure out what the Emperor was doing. Setting up for battle? Plotting something? Psyching the Spanish out?
Having no better ideas, Pizarro took a low-risk long-shot tactic by deploying an emissary to reiterate the invitation to the Incan Emperor to visit Pizarro. A Spanish guy ran outside Cajamarca with the translator, yelled the invitation to the Incan army, and then ran back into town to avoid being killed.
Surprisingly, a portion of the Incan army then started marching toward the town center. The Spaniards couldn’t believe that had worked, so they hastened to re-set their ambush by leaving a few men, including Pizarro, out in the open in the town center, while everyone else stuffed themselves and their 62 horses into stone buildings with their few harquebuses and cannons pointed at the ready.
Emperor Atahualpa came into the town center at the head of a 5,000-6,000 man army contingent riding atop a litter carried by some of the most elite nobles of the Empire, the equivalent of princes and dukes. The town center was now extremely crowded, especially since there were only two entrances/exits on the Incan side. According to one Reddit poster, the entire Incan army was *unarmed* as some sort of show of strength, but MacQuarrie never says anything about this.