The Inca King Who Almost Took His Empire Back

In November 1533, four months after the execution of his half-brother Atahualpa, an eighteen-year-old Inca prince named Manco Yupanqui was installed as the new emperor of the Inca Empire by Francisco Pizarro. The decision was deliberate Spanish policy: a young, plausibly legitimate Inca successor — preferably one whose family had been substantially damaged by the recent civil war between Atahualpa and the other half-brother Huáscar — would provide political legitimacy for Spanish administrative occupation of the Andean territories while the Spanish themselves established themselves in the conquered cities. Manco was the surviving son of the late emperor Huayna Capac by a different (and politically subordinate) mother. He had spent the previous two years hiding in the mountains north of Cuzco, where he had not personally fought either side of the civil war. He was politically convenient.

The Spanish entered Cuzco on 15 November 1533 with Manco at the head of the procession. He was formally crowned in the central plaza in the Inca royal ceremony. He spent the next two and a half years as a substantially decorative figurehead while the Pizarro brothers methodically dismantled the institutional structure of the Inca administrative state, distributed land grants and Indigenous labor obligations (encomiendas) to the conquering Spaniards, and progressively impoverished and humiliated the Inca royal household. By early 1536 Manco’s surviving wives had been raped, his treasury had been seized, his sacred objects had been confiscated, and he had personally been intermittently imprisoned by Hernando Pizarro (the most volatile of the Pizarro brothers) for refusing to produce additional hidden gold.

The escape

Manco escaped from Cuzco on the morning of 18 April 1536 under the pretext of conducting a religious ceremony at the holy site of Yucay, fifty kilometres northwest of the city. Hernando Pizarro granted permission. Manco took with him approximately 200 personal retainers and a substantial portion of the surviving Inca religious materials. He did not return.

The Pizarros’ first reaction was to send messengers to retrieve him. The messengers were killed. The second reaction — once it became clear that Manco was raising an army — was to consider a punitive expedition. They could not. They had insufficient forces and the political-territorial situation was about to deteriorate: a series of synchronized Indigenous uprisings across the central and northern Andes (organized through the chasqui runner network that had previously supported the imperial Inca administration) had cut Spanish communications between Cuzco and the coast.

Manco’s army assembled at the Yucay valley over the following six weeks. The conservative modern estimate puts the peak strength at approximately 100,000 men, drawn from the principal Inca-allied military traditions of the central Andes; the contemporary Spanish estimates run as high as 400,000. The army was disciplined Inca regular infantry supplemented by approximately 400 captured Spanish horses (with Inca riders who had been taught the basics of Spanish cavalry technique by captured Spanish prisoners), a number of captured firearms, and a stockpile of bows-and-slings supplies that had been quietly assembled during the previous winter.

The siege

The army moved on Cuzco in early May 1536. The Spanish garrison was approximately 190 men, with approximately 80 horses, under the command of Hernando Pizarro. Manco’s army surrounded the city, occupied the heights of Sacsayhuamán (the great Inca fortress immediately above Cuzco), and progressively burned the Spanish-occupied buildings in the central plaza by shooting flaming arrows from the surrounding peaks. By late May the Spanish were confined to the central palace complex and the cathedral; the rest of the city was in Inca hands.

The siege lasted approximately eleven months. The single decisive engagement was the Spanish recapture of Sacsayhuamán on 14 May 1536, conducted by a force of fifty Spanish horsemen under Juan Pizarro (the youngest Pizarro brother). Juan was killed in the assault — struck on the head by a stone hurled from the upper towers. The Sacsayhuamán recapture eliminated Manco’s tactical advantage over the city but did not end the siege; Manco simply withdrew his main forces to the Yucay valley and continued the blockade of Spanish supply routes through the surrounding mountains.

The political-strategic problem for Manco was the southern half of the Inca army, under the command of his ally Quizo Yupanqui, which was simultaneously besieging the Spanish at Lima. The Lima siege failed in September 1536 — partly because the coastal terrain was unfavorable to Inca infantry tactics, partly because the Spanish coastal garrison had been reinforced by sea from Panama. Quizo was killed in the fighting. The Spanish coastal forces could now move north into the Andes.

A second Spanish relief force under Diego de Almagro — Pizarro’s senior partner-rival, returning north from a failed expedition into Chile — arrived in the Andes in early 1537. Almagro’s force of approximately 500 well-armed Spaniards was decisive. Manco lifted the siege of Cuzco on or about 8 April 1537, withdrew his army northwest to the fortress complex at Ollantaytambo, and progressively retreated into the increasingly inaccessible eastern jungles of the Vilcabambá region.

Vilcabambá

The Neo-Inca State of Vilcabambá that Manco established between 1538 and 1539 was a functional rump Inca polity. It controlled approximately 30,000 square kilometres of jungle and montane forest east of the main Andean spine, with approximately 200,000 inhabitants. Its capital was the previously-secondary Inca city of Vilcabambá La Vieja — known to Manco’s family as Espíritu Pampa, located in the Urubamba river basin at approximately 1,500 metres elevation. The site was impossible to reach by any major route except a hard three-day mountain trail from the Cuzco side.

Manco governed Vilcabambá for the next seven years under a strict Inca religious-political restoration. He restored the worship of the sun, rebuilt the Inca administrative system in miniature, and continued sustained low-intensity warfare against Spanish settlements in the surrounding regions. He had three sons — Sayri Tupac, Titu Cusi, and Tupac Amaru — who would in turn become emperors of the Vilcabambá state.

In 1544 Manco was murdered by a group of Spanish renegades — former followers of Diego de Almagro, fleeing south after Almagro’s execution by Pizarro — to whom Manco had offered sanctuary at Vilcabambá. The Spaniards killed him during a game of bolos (Spanish lawn bowls) by stabbing him in the back. They were themselves immediately killed by Manco’s Indigenous retainers. Manco was approximately 29 years old. His son Sayri Tupac succeeded him at age five, with regents from his father’s senior household.

The end

The Neo-Inca state survived for another twenty-eight years. Sayri Tupac eventually accepted Spanish terms of submission in 1557, was baptized, and lived in Spanish-administered comfort at Yucay until his death in 1561. His half-brother Titu Cusi then assumed the Vilcabambá throne and resumed the political-military resistance. Titu Cusi died of pneumonia in 1571. The third brother Tupac Amaru — the youngest, the most religiously conservative, the least politically flexible — became the last reigning Inca emperor.

The fourth Spanish viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, organized a final military expedition against Vilcabambá in 1572. The campaign destroyed the rump Inca polity in approximately four months. Tupac Amaru was captured trying to flee eastward into the jungles, brought to Cuzco, baptized, and executed by beheading in the central plaza on 24 September 1572. He was 27.

The political-administrative tradition that had begun with the legendary first Sapa Inca Manco Cápac approximately three hundred years earlier was over. Manco Inca Yupanqui — installed as Spanish puppet, escaped, nearly retook the empire by force, and founded the rump state that would carry the Inca royal line for another thirty-six years — had been the closest the Inca civilization came to actual political restoration after the Spanish conquest. He had not quite succeeded. The boy who had been brought into Cuzco at the head of Pizarro’s victory procession in November 1533 had spent the rest of his life trying to undo what that procession had begun.