Francisco Pizarro

Armed with this evidence and the memory of the warm, silver-adorned welcome they finally received at the northern Inca outpost of Tumbes, Pizarro realized he could no longer rely on the fickle governors of Panama, who viewed his expeditions as a wasteful drain on colonial manpower. In the spring of 1528, he sailed to Spain to appeal directly to the crown. King Charles V was captivated by the illiterate captain and the gold and silver trinkets he displayed. In July 1529, at Toledo, the Crown executed the famous capitulación, naming Pizarro governor, captain-general, and viceroy of the newly designated province of New Castile for two hundred leagues down the Pacific coast. Almagro and Luque were left in secondary, far less lucrative positions—a seed of deep, poisonous resentment that would eventually tear the conquest apart.

When Pizarro returned to Panama and finally sailed south in January 1531 on his third and decisive expedition, he commanded just three ships, one hundred and eighty men, and twenty-seven horses. It was a ludicrously small force with which to invade an empire of millions. But Pizarro possessed a weapon more potent than steel or gunpowder: political timing. As his small band marched inland from their newly founded base at San Miguel de Piura, they discovered that the Inca Empire was bleeding to death from a savage civil war. The death of the previous emperor had triggered a war of succession between two brothers, Huáscar and Atahualpa. Atahualpa had just emerged victorious, his armies occupying the historic capital of Cuzco, when reports reached him of strange, bearded men riding giant beasts moving up the steep Andean passes.

The climax came in November 1532 in the high-altitude mountain plaza of Cajamarca. Atahualpa, confident in his divine status and surrounded by an army of thousands, agreed to meet the small Spanish contingent. Pizarro, drawing directly from the playbook Cortés had used in Mexico, hid his cavalry and artillery in the dark recesses of the stone buildings surrounding the square. When Atahualpa entered the plaza on a golden litter, flanked by thousands of unarmed retainers, a Spanish priest approached him with a Bible, demanding his submission to the Christian God and the Spanish King. Atahualpa threw the book to the ground in disdain. In an instant, Pizarro unleashed his trap. The roar of small cannons and the terrifying, thunderous charge of armored horses threw the tightly packed crowd into a panic. The Spanish slaughtered thousands of unarmed attendants in a matter of hours without losing a single soldier. Pizarro himself rushed through the melee to drag Atahualpa from his litter, capturing him alive.

Held hostage in his own empire, Atahualpa quickly realized what his captors valued above all else. He offered to fill a large room with gold as high as his hand could reach, and twice over with silver, in exchange for his freedom. For months, llamas arrived from the farthest corners of the Andes, laden with the treasures of temples and palaces—golden sun disks, delicate statues, and heavy vessels—only to be melted down into crude bullion bars. Yet despite receiving the vast ransom, Pizarro had no intention of releasing a sovereign who could instantly rally an army of millions. In July 1533, after staging a mock trial charging the emperor with treason and other crimes, Pizarro had Atahualpa executed by garroting. By November of that year, the Spanish rode into the imperial capital of Cuzco, completing the formal collapse of the Inca state and cementing Spanish rule over the Andes.

The conquest brought Pizarro unimaginable wealth and the title of Marquis, but it did not bring him peace. The unequal distribution of the spoils of Cajamarca had permanently fractured his partnership with Diego de Almagro. Though Almagro had helped defeat the final, desperate Inca rebellion that attempted to recapture Cuzco in 1536–1537, the tension over the exact geographical boundaries of their respective governorships erupted into an outright civil war between the conquistadors. In 1538, Pizarro’s forces defeated Almagro's faction in battle, and Almagro was subsequently executed. The bitterness, however, survived him. On June 26, 1541, a group of Almagro’s heavily armed supporters stormed Pizarro’s palace in Lima, the coastal city he had founded to replace Cuzco as the capital of Peru. Though now an old man in his sixties, Pizarro fought savagely, killing several of his attackers before he was run through the throat. As he fell to the tiled floor, he drew a cross in his own blood on the ground, kissed it, and died. He left behind a vast, conquered territory that would soon become the silver engine of the Spanish Empire, reshaping global economics and cementing a new colonial order across South America.