The Last Days of the Incas (2006) by Kim MacQuarrie

Kim MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas (2006) is a riveting account of conquest and discovery. The book recounts the almost unimaginable story of how Francisco Pizarro subdued a native empire of some ten million people with just 168 conquistadors and a handful of horses. Equally fascinating is MacQuarrie’s chronicle of the twentieth-century rediscovery of the lost Inca cities of Machu Picchu and Vilcabamba by two largely untrained, yet determined, eccentrics.

There are numerous and often conflicting accounts of Pizarro’s campaign – nearly all written from the Spanish perspective and many recorded decades after the events. As MacQuarrie emphasizes, the story told in The Last Days of the Incas can only ever be considered an approximation of what truly happened.

What is beyond dispute, however, is that Francisco Pizarro – an illiterate, illegitimate, titleless adventurer who had spent three decades in the New World seeking fame and fortune – was already old for his era at fifty-four when he landed in what is now Peru in September 1532. With just 62 cavalrymen and 106 infantry, his small band of conquistadors crashed into the Inca Empire, “like a giant meteor, leaving remnants of that collision all over the continent,” as MacQuarrie memorably puts it.

MacQuarrie emphasizes that the conquistadors were less professional soldiers than armed entrepreneurs, operating on their own initiative rather than as emissaries of a distant king. In 1524, Francisco Pizarro and his partner Diego de Almagro created something resembling a “conquest startup” – the Company of the Levant – in hopes of replicating Hernán Cortés’s spectacular success against the Aztecs in Mexico. Their plan was to push south in search of a wealthy indigenous empire – one capable of levying taxes and extracting precious metals. The Company first encountered the fringes of the Inca Empire in 1528. By then, Pope Alexander VI had already deeded all lands 370 leagues (about 1,100 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands to Spain under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. From Pizarro’s perspective, this meant the inhabitants of Peru were already the subjects of Spain’s 24-year-old King Charles I; they just had not yet been informed. To remedy that, the crown required that a document known as the Requerimiento be read aloud – always in Spanish, which no native could understand – before any conquest commenced, declaring that God had created the world, that the Pope was his earthly representative, and that Spain had jurisdiction over their lands. In 1529, Charles granted Pizarro a royal license with exclusive rights to conquer and govern Peru. As MacQuarrie observes, this transformed the Company of the Levant into “the modern equivalent of a hot, new IPO.”

The Inca shared several striking similarities with the Spanish. First, they were a small ethnic minority – less than one percent of their ten-million-person empire – yet they exerted overwhelming political, economic, and military control over it. Second, they were relative newcomers, having consolidated power in the 11,300-foot Cuzco basin only between 1200 and 1400 AD. Third, their martial skill and organizational capacity far outstripped that of the surrounding tribes. And finally, as MacQuarrie notes, in the sixty years before the Spaniards arrived the Inca expanded with explosive force – “like a supernova in the heart of the Andes.” Their own Pizarro was Pachacuti, often described as the George Washington of the Inca Empire. Within a single lifetime, Pachacuti and his son, Tupac Inca, forged a 1,400-mile dominion stretching across much of modern Peru and Bolivia. Pachacuti named it Tawantinsuyu (“the four parts united”). The empire’s wealth rested on a labor tax: every male head of household between ages twenty-five and fifty owed up to three months of service annually, a burden MacQuarrie likens to a modern thirty-percent federal income tax. At any given moment, some two million men were working without pay for the state, generating staggering revenues and storehouses bursting with wares. In return, every Inca subject was guaranteed food, clothing, and shelter – a social contract no subsequent Peruvian government has managed to fulfill.

In Peru, European smallpox arrived before the Spaniards themselves. By the time Pizarro first heard the name of Huayna Capac, the third Inca emperor was already dead from the disease. His death ignited a bloody dynastic struggle for control of the empire. Pizarro and his small band of entrepreneurial raiders happened to arrive just as a brutal five-year civil war was drawing to a close. The victor was Atahualpa, Huayna Capac’s thirty-year-old son, who commanded an army in the north. He now stood as the sole ruler of a theocratic monarchy – “the equivalent of the king, the pope, and Jesus Christ all rolled into one,” as MacQuarrie puts it.

Pizarro encountered Atahualpa roughly six hundred miles north of Cuzco, where the newly crowned emperor was marching to claim his throne. Confident in his recent victory, Atahualpa had little fear of the ragged band of pale foreigners; he reportedly intended to capture them and make them his eunuchs. The Spaniards, however, aimed to capture and manipulate him, much as Cortés had done with Montezuma in Mexico a decade earlier. At Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, Pizarro’s men staged what MacQuarrie calls “a new benchmark for terror in the New World,” unleashing a campaign of shock and awe that slaughtered as many as seven thousand natives without the loss of a single Spaniard. “In less than two hours,” MacQuarrie writes, “the Inca Empire had been beheaded.” By the 1530s, this was already “standard conquest procedure” for the Spanish.

“In exchange for prolonging Atahualpa’s life,” the author writes, “Pizarro wanted power and absolute control.” And he quickly secured it. A handful of Spaniards now controlled the Inca nobility, who in turn ruled over ten million subjects. MacQuarrie is blunt about the enterprise: “Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement.” With his triumphal march on Cuzco abandoned, Atahualpa turned his efforts toward buying his freedom. He believed the bearded foreigners were nothing more than marauders who would depart once satisfied with their plunder. To that end, he promised to strip Cuzco of its gold and silver, filling a room to the ceiling if only Pizarro would spare his life. What he failed to grasp, MacQuarrie notes, was that unlike the Inca – who had no monetary system – the Spanish valued gold and silver not just as ornaments but as a fungible medium of exchange. In the 1530s, half a pound of gold equaled a year’s wages for a sailor, and four pounds could purchase a caravel.

The ransom poured in at an astonishing pace – between three and six hundred pounds of gold a day. In 1533 Pizarro dispatched three men to Cuzco to oversee the plunder, which included prying seven hundred golden plates from the walls of the empire’s holiest shrines. Three months later, they returned with 178 loads of treasure, carried by more than a thousand porters. Not long after, Pizarro’s longtime partner Diego Almagro arrived with 153 reinforcements (known as Almagritas) and fifty fresh horses. His arrival dashed Atahualpa’s hopes that the Spaniards would leave, while also sowing resentment among the newcomers, who had missed the vast spoils claimed by the original “Men of Cajamarca,” the legendary founders of Spanish Peru. Almagro himself fared poorly: he received nothing more than the title of mayor of Tumbes, while Pizarro was named Captain-General of Peru. As MacQuarrie observes, “Pizarro would never consider his squat, one-eyed partner his equal.”

Between March and July 1533, the Spaniards fed twenty tons of sacred Inca gold and silver into furnaces, reducing the empire’s artistic and holy treasures to standard bars of specie. “Atahualpa’s captors had just won the richest lottery in the world,” MacQuarrie observes. Each cavalryman received 180 pounds of silver and 90 pounds of gold – enough to equal nearly two centuries of an average worker’s wages. Pizarro, unsurprisingly, awarded himself seven times that share. Even the distant king of Spain claimed his portion, the “royal fifth,” amounting to 5,200 pounds of silver and 2,600 pounds of gold.

Rumors soon spread that Atahualpa was secretly in contact with the outside world and that a massive Inca army was marching to rescue him. Though false, the whispers were enough: on July 16, 1533, the Spaniards executed him before the truth was known. With the emperor gone, the Inca Empire was suddenly headless – paralyzed and unable to expel a small band of foreign parasites who had burrowed deep into its body politic.

What the Spaniards needed now was a puppet ruler. Their first choice, Tupac Huallpa, the eldest surviving son of Huayna Capac, was installed but died of illness within two months. Next, they turned to an obscure royal teenager: Manco Inca, a surviving son of Huayna Capac from the Cuzco faction that Atahualpa had nearly exterminated. Backing Manco allowed the Spaniards to pose as liberators to the people of Cuzco. “Suddenly,” MacQuarrie writes, “he found himself plucked from obscurity and placed alongside the Spaniards at the very pinnacle of power.” In Pizarro’s bid for control, he had inadvertently elevated the man who would become the Incas’ greatest guerrilla leader and the enduring symbol of resistance to Spanish rule.

The Spanish completed the 600-mile march from Cajamarca to Cuzco in just three months, losing only six men along the way. In March 1534, Pizarro distributed the treasure seized from Cuzco: less gold than Atahualpa’s ransom had yielded, but four times as much silver. With the division complete, the Company of the Levant – by any measure a spectacular financial success – was formally dissolved. In its place, the Spaniards proclaimed the Kingdom of New Castile. Pizarro was named governor, and those willing to remain in Peru were offered the chance to become aristocrats and feudal lords through grants of encomiendas – the right to tax and control the local peasantry within defined territories. Eighty-eight men accepted.

According to MacQuarrie, after Cuzco’s capture Pizarro intended to spend the rest of his life quietly administering his vast seven-hundred-mile empire. He no longer needed his former partner, Diego de Almagro, whose talents had lain in organizing and financing conquests. But King Charles complicated matters by dividing New Castile in two – Pizarro taking the north (Peru), Almagro the south (Toledo) – without fixing the boundary. If Cuzco were deemed to fall in Almagro’s share, the eighty-eight encomiendas Pizarro had granted could be revoked. The unresolved question of “to whom Cuzco belonged” deepened an already volatile climate. In the meantime, the Spaniards in Cuzco, including two of Pizarro’s unruly younger half-brothers, antagonized the local nobility by abusing the natives and even taking the wives of Inca lords. The rupture between Pizarro and Almagro, already simmering, would soon erupt into disaster for nearly all involved, including the indigenous population.

By late 1535, Manco Inca and Villac Umu, the empire’s high priest, took the first decisive steps toward open rebellion. Their insurgency began with attacks on small, isolated groups of Spaniards. In just the first three months of this guerrilla campaign, they killed thirty Spaniards – more than had fallen in the previous three years of conquest and open battle combined. After barely two years as a puppet ruler, Manco Inca formally declared war on the invaders: the false viracochas, who, despite their seemingly invincible reputation, were men, not gods.

The Spaniards were stunned by the sheer scale of the uprising. Fewer than one hundred conquistadors, reinforced by perhaps five hundred native allies, were quickly besieged within Cuzco. In what MacQuarrie calls a “stupendous feat of logistical organization,” Manco Inca marshaled more than 200,000 diverse, polyglot warriors against the small, isolated Spanish garrison. His plan was to drive them into the heart of the city and annihilate them. The Spaniards, in contrast, aimed merely to survive until reinforcements arrived, buying time with periodic cavalry sorties that slaughtered hundreds of Inca warriors at a time. In the struggle, Juan Pizarro became the first of the five brothers to fall defending their fragile dominion.

By 1536, just four years after arriving in the Inca Empire, Pizarro could muster no more than six hundred Spanish conquistadors in his desperate fight for survival – outnumbered nearly 10,000 to one by native forces. Spanish control extended only to scattered pockets of the empire, and even these relied precariously on their faltering alliance with Manco Inca. Without their puppet emperor, the conquistadors quickly lost command of vital lines of communication. Pizarro and his brothers, along with Almagro and his men, found themselves in an information blackout. By the summer of 1535, Spanish fortunes had collapsed: their forces were dispersed across vast distances, cut off entirely from one another, while the Inca learned to neutralize the once-invincible cavalry by trapping them in narrow passes and bombarding them from above with boulders.

In February 1537, nine months into the siege of Cuzco, the sixty-one-year-old conquistador Diego Almagro returned empty-handed from his grueling expedition through present-day Chile and Argentina. The lands of New Toledo granted to him had proved barren of riches. Arriving just in time to confront his rival’s forces at Cuzco, he immediately recognized an opportunity to seize the heart of the Inca Empire from his former partner. No one had yet determined whether Cuzco lay within the kingdom granted to Pizarro or that granted to Almagro; each simply claimed it as his own. Rather than rushing to relieve his besieged fellow Spaniards, Almagro opened negotiations with Manco Inca – who trusted neither faction but understood he could not resist them united. Almagro then marched into Cuzco and, as MacQuarrie describes it, “crossing a personal Rubicon of sorts,” placed Pizarro’s brothers, Hernando and Gonzalo, in chains.

Manco Inca, meanwhile, fled with the mummified remains of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather to Antisuyu, the eastern quarter of his empire. From there, he retreated to Vilcabamba, a jungle stronghold more than one hundred miles from Cuzco and nearly six thousand feet lower in elevation. For the next three decades, Vilcabamba served as the capital of the diminished but defiant Free Inca State, leading resistance against a Spanish presence that still numbered fewer than two thousand men, six years after Atahualpa’s capture and execution. Manco Inca emerged as a highly effective guerrilla leader, ambushing Spanish supply convoys along the Inca highways and hurling boulders down narrow defiles to crush cavalry – conducting a methodical campaign of terror and attrition. A half-dozen disgruntled Almagristas even taught Manco Inca and his forces the ways of Western warfare, including how to wield captured Spanish firearms and ride horses. As MacQuarrie notes, modern counter-insurgency doctrine recommends ten to twenty soldiers per thousand inhabitants, suggesting that the Spanish would have needed between 50,000 and 100,000 troops to pacify the sprawling 2,500-mile-long Inca Empire.

Meanwhile, Pizarro dispatched a sizable force to rescue his brothers and strike at his former partner. After months of fruitless negotiations, the long-dreaded Spanish civil war in the New World finally erupted. “The Pizarros,” MacQuarrie observes, “were the last people on earth to either forget or forgive.” Hernando Pizarro – foolishly released by Almagro in hopes of brokering peace – soon commanded more than eight hundred Spaniards, supported by several thousand native auxiliaries. Almagro, by contrast, could muster barely five hundred, reinforced only by the backing of the new puppet emperor, Paullu Inca, and his men.

When it became clear that Almagro’s outnumbered force was collapsing in what came to be known as the Battle of Las Salinas, Paullu Inca and his warriors defected to Pizarro’s side, turning on their former allies with clubs. “The indubitable message” of Inca tradition and their recent experience with the bearded invader, MacQuarrie says, “was winner take all.” Pizarro’s army lost just nine men, while Almagro’s suffered 120. Two months later, Hernando Pizarro ordered the execution of Diego Almagro, co-founder of the Company of the Levant, founding father of Spanish Peru, and official governor of the Kingdom of New Toledo. There would be a lot of explaining to do back in Madrid. Three years after Almagro’s death, his supporters assassinated Francisco Pizarro in Lima in 1541.

In 1548, Gonzalo Pizarro, one of the last surviving Pizarro brothers and a man whom the author describes as displaying an “unequivocal lust for power,” led 1,500 heavily armed compatriots into battle against the Spanish royal army at the Battle of Jaquijahuana—and was annihilated. Some sixteen years after first arriving in the New World, the last of the four Pizarro brothers to die in Peru had fallen (the fifth, Hernando, languished in a Spanish prison for his murder of Almagro). Francisco had ruled Peru for eight years; Gonzalo for less than four. By the time of Manco Inca’s death, the Spanish population in Peru had grown to five thousand, supported by more than three thousand African slaves. By 1560, those numbers had doubled: ten thousand Spaniards and five thousand Africans. As under the Inca, “the entire colonial superstructure was predicated upon a foundation of endlessly toiling native workers.” In effect, they had exchanged one master for another.

The Achilles’ heel of Inca warfare, MacQuarrie notes, was that their godlike military commander occupied the apex of the attacking force, serving simultaneously as rallying point and command center. If he were killed – which often proved relatively easy for the nearly invincible Spanish cavalry – the entire native army would quickly collapse psychologically. Every Inca engagement, therefore, resembled the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, or the Australians at Gallipoli.

Inca resistance continued in diminished form under the emperor Titu Cusi and later his younger brother Tupac Amaru, whose reign lasted just sixteen months. He belatedly agreed to convert to Christianity, but it was too late. In 1572, the Spanish attacked and destroyed the Inca stronghold of Vilcabamba, “driving a stake into the heart of the final Inca resistance.” On September 24, 1574 – thirty-six years after Manco Inca had launched his great rebellion – the Inca were no more.

The story of the twentieth-century rediscovery of key Inca cities is nearly as astonishing as the tale of the Inca’s defeat. The two great explorers of lost Inca cities – Hiram Bingham (1875–1956) and Gene Savoy (1927–2007) – were largely self-taught adventurers, lacking formal training in archaeology or surveying (although Bingham was a professor of modern Latin American history at Yale). In 1911, Bingham reached Vilcabamba (“Sacred Plain” in Quechua), but misidentified the site as Espíritu Pampa, which he dismissed as a minor and unimpressive ruin. To him, it seemed too plain to have been the fabled refuge of the last Inca emperors. By contrast, the grandeur of his great discovery, Machu Picchu – later determined to have been built between 1450 and 1470 as a kind of citadel and royal retreat for the emperor Pachacuti – fit more closely with the lost city he expected to find.

Machu Picchu, however, was scarcely mentioned by the conquistadors, suggesting that by 1534 it was already largely abandoned as the Inca systems of taxation, forced labor, and leisure unraveled. It is unlikely any Spaniard of the sixteenth century ever set foot there. Nevertheless, in 1948, eight years before his death, Bingham published Lost City of the Incas, insisting that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba – a misidentification that shaped scholarly consensus for much of the twentieth century.

Only sixteen days after finding Machu Picchu, Bingham also discovered Vitcos, the city where Manco Inca was murdered and his son, Titu Cusi, later captured by the Spanish – a find that historian MacQuarrie calls “a far more important discovery.” Soon afterward, he located the ancient shrine of Chuquipalta. Taken together, these were among the most significant archaeological revelations of the modern era. In April 1913, National Geographic devoted an entire issue to Bingham’s discoveries, cementing their fame worldwide.
Gene Savoy was more than an amateur explorer – he was also a flamboyant eccentric with movie-star good looks and no higher education of any sort. He came to believe that his three-year-old son, Jamil, who tragically died in a Peruvian avalanche, was the second coming of Christ, and that he himself had been chosen by God as His messenger on earth. Out of these convictions he founded the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent, in Reno, Nevada – a self-styled new branch of Christianity with Savoy as its head bishop. Among his more unorthodox teachings was the belief that the sun was divine and that immortality could be attained by gazing directly into it. He set out his theology in his 1976 book Jamil: The Child Christ.
Savoy’s alarming beliefs did not overshadow his contributions as an explorer. In 1964, he demonstrated that the ruins Bingham had dismissed in 1911 as a scattering of minor buildings were, in fact, only a fragment of a vast city spanning more than five hundred acres – many times larger than Machu Picchu. It was an important administrative center of the diminished Inca Empire and base for guerilla operations against the Spanish. Savoy would later attempt to claim credit for further explorations and discoveries in and around Vilcabamba.

In closing, The Last Days of the Incas is an incredible read. MacQuarrie is sympathetic to Francisco Pizarro, describing him as an “unpretentious man of simple interests,” the illegitimate son of a distinguished cavalry captain from Extremadura who, from the perspective of his time and place, went out in the world and “made good.” The indomitable conquistador “preferred plebeian to aristocratic company,” the author notes, enjoying cards and gambling with the common soldiers in his unit. “Military leader, strategist, diplomat, CEO, terrorist, and hostage taker, Pizarro was also a sincerely devout Christian.” Meanwhile, he says, Manco Inca, the one great Inca resistance leader, “ultimately made a single fatal error: trusting the Spaniards not once but twice.”