What happened at the Battle of Cajamarca?
On 16 November 1532 fewer than two hundred Spanish conquistadors under Francisco Pizarro ambushed the Inca emperor Atahualpa in the square of Cajamarca, in the highlands of northern Peru. In about half an hour they killed thousands of his unarmed followers and took him alive, setting the Spanish conquest of Peru in motion.2
On 16 November 1532, in the highland town of Cajamarca, a small band of Spanish adventurers under Francisco Pizarro ambushed the Inca emperor Atahualpa in the middle of his own realm, with an army of tens of thousands camped a league away. In a brief, violent assault they killed thousands of his followers and took the emperor himself alive.3
Who won the Battle of Cajamarca and why?
The Spaniards won. Atahualpa, victorious in a civil war and sure the strangers were few and frightened, walked into a prepared trap with an escort that carried almost no weapons. Gunfire, trumpets and charging horses, none of which his people had faced, caused a panic, and the capture of the emperor left his army without orders.4
An empire after a civil war
The Inca Empire Pizarro entered stretched along the Andes from Quito to Cuzco and beyond, but it had just torn itself apart. When the emperor Huayna Capac died, his sons Huáscar and Atahualpa fought for the throne. Atahualpa's generals defeated Huáscar's armies, took the capital, Cuzco, and made Huáscar a prisoner; the news reached Atahualpa in the northern highlands while the Spaniards were on their way inland.5
Pizarro was on his third voyage to Peru. In 1532 he founded the town of San Miguel near the coast, left settlers there and set out for the interior. Prescott counts 177 men, 67 of them horsemen, at a muster five days out; after nine men turned back to San Miguel, Pizarro's secretary Francisco de Xerez counted 62 horsemen and 102 foot soldiers, 164 in all, with about twenty crossbowmen and a few small guns.6
The march to Cajamarca
On the road Atahualpa's envoys came and went with gifts and messages of welcome, and Pizarro answered with friendly words and kept marching. Xerez records that the Spaniards entered Cajamarca on Friday, 15 November 1532, at the hour of vespers. The town had been left empty for them; Atahualpa was camped a league away at the hot springs, his tents covering the plain.7
That evening Pizarro sent Hernando de Soto and his own brother Hernando Pizarro with a few horsemen to the camp. They found Atahualpa seated among his lords, and he agreed to come to Cajamarca the next day to meet the governor. The envoys rode back impressed by the size of his army and its order.8
Two commanders, two decisions
Pizarro decided to seize the emperor. He hid his men in the long halls around Cajamarca's great square, whose many wide doors let horsemen ride straight out; Xerez describes three squadrons of horse, Pedro Pizarro two, under Hernando Pizarro and Hernando de Soto. Pedro de Candia took a small piece of artillery and a few men with trumpets to a little fort on the square. When the signal came, the guns would fire, the trumpets sound, and everyone charge at once. Atahualpa was to be taken alive.9
The Spaniards were frightened. Pizarro went from hall to hall telling them to make fortresses of their hearts, for there were five hundred Indians to every Christian. Pedro Pizarro, who was there, heard that many men wet themselves in sheer terror, and the horses' harness was hung with bells to make more noise when they charged.10
Atahualpa made the opposite choice. He spent most of the day in his camp and moved only in the late afternoon, leaving his armed troops behind. Hernando Pizarro says he brought five or six thousand men without weapons, except small darts and slings hidden under their tunics. His spies had told him that the Spaniards were cowering in their halls, and he later said his captains had told him to think lightly of them.11
Steel against slings
The two sides were mismatched in kind as well as in number. The Spaniards had steel swords and armor, horses, a few small guns and crossbows: Xerez gives twenty crossbowmen, and Prescott counts only three arquebusiers in the whole company besides them. Inca warriors fought with slings, which Xerez describes as the first line of their armies, with clubs and axes behind, and wore quilted cotton jackets; the escort that came into the square carried only small slings and darts hidden under their tunics, by Hernando Pizarro's account.12
The trap in the square
The procession filled the square shortly before sunset. In front came men sweeping the road and squadrons singing and dancing in checkered liveries; then Atahualpa in a litter covered with plumes and plates of gold and silver, carried high by his lords, with the lord of Chincha in a second litter behind him. No Spaniard was in sight.13
Pizarro sent forward the Dominican friar Vicente de Valverde with an interpreter. Valverde told Atahualpa that he came to teach the things of God and held out his book. Atahualpa took it, could not open it at first, then threw it to the ground and said he would not move until everything the Spaniards had taken on the road was returned.14
Valverde went back to Pizarro, and Pizarro gave the signal. Candia's gun fired, the trumpets sounded and the horsemen burst out of the halls with the cry of Santiago, bells ringing on their harness. The crowd broke in terror; so many people pressed against the wall of the square that a long stretch of it fell, and the horsemen rode down those who fled across the plain.15
Seizing the emperor
Pizarro, with a few men on foot, made for the litter and seized Atahualpa by the arm, but could not pull him down from such a height. The Spaniards killed the bearers, and others stepped in at once to hold the litter up. A Spaniard lunged at Atahualpa with a knife; Pizarro stopped the blow and was cut on the hand. Seven or eight men then pushed the litter over, and Atahualpa was dragged out and taken to Pizarro's quarters under guard. The lord of Chincha was killed in his litter.16
That evening Pizarro had his prisoner dressed in fresh clothes, sat him at his own table and gave him a bed in the room where he himself slept, with guards watching him day and night. Atahualpa, Xerez reports, said that his captains had deceived him by making light of the Spaniards.17
How many Incas did the Spanish kill at Cajamarca?
About 2,000, according to Pizarro's own secretary, Francisco de Xerez, who wrote that two thousand lay dead in the square and on the plain, besides the wounded. Prescott reports that a descendant of the Incas raised the figure to 10,000, and judged that the truth lay somewhere between. No Spaniard was killed: Xerez writes that no Indian raised his arms against them, and Hernando Pizarro that the Indians were beaten without danger to any Christian.18
Xerez's number is a rough tally, not a count. The dead around Atahualpa's litter were so many, he admits, that no account was taken of them. They included the litter bearers, the lords and councilors carried in other litters, and the local chief of Cajamarca. The killing was quick: by his account the fighting lasted only about half an hour, because the sun had already set when it began, and Prescott too gives a little more than half an hour.19
Xerez's figure for the host that came out with Atahualpa, 30,000 men and by some veterans' reckoning over 40,000, is far above the five or six thousand that Hernando Pizarro reported for the escort that entered the square, and is best read as a guess about the whole army.20
The one Spanish wound on record is telling. Pizarro was cut while shielding Atahualpa from his own men; Hernando Pizarro and Pedro Pizarro both say the blow came from a Spaniard's knife. The conquistadors needed the emperor alive.21
The morning after: why the Inca army never struck back
That night the Spanish horsemen chased the fugitives as far as the place where Atahualpa's armed troops were posted, and met no resistance. Next morning Pizarro sent a captain with thirty horsemen to scour the plain and break the Indians' weapons, while prisoners were made to carry the dead out of the square.22
The camp yielded gold and silver plate, cloth and herds of llamas. The two eyewitnesses disagree about the haul: Xerez lists 80,000 pesos, 7,000 marks of silver and fourteen emeralds, while Hernando Pizarro reports 40,000 castellanos and four or five thousand marks of silver. Some Spaniards urged that the captured soldiers be killed or have their hands cut off. Pizarro refused, kept those the Spaniards wanted as servants and sent the rest home to their provinces.23
A ransom and an empire lost
Atahualpa offered gold for his freedom: enough to fill a room to a white line as high as a man could reach, and silver twice over, within two months. Xerez gives the room as twenty-two feet by seventeen, Hernando Pizarro as seventeen or eighteen feet wide and thirty-five long. Over the following months gold and silver poured into Cajamarca from all over the empire.24
The treasure was melted down and shared out in 1533. The official list of the partition shows that most horsemen received 8,880 pesos of gold and 362 marks of silver each and foot soldiers about half as much, 4,440 pesos and some 180 marks, with far larger shares for Pizarro, his brothers and Hernando de Soto. Prescott gives the same figures from the same list.25
The captive emperor still ruled through his captains. When Huáscar, held prisoner by them, boasted that he would give the Spaniards more gold than his brother, Atahualpa had him killed. In 1533 Pizarro and his officers, alarmed by rumors of an Inca army gathering to free him, condemned Atahualpa to death. He accepted baptism at the stake to escape burning and was strangled in the square of Cajamarca instead.26
From Cajamarca to Cuzco
Pizarro did not stay alone for long. In December 1532 word came that ships had reached the coast with about 150 Spaniards and 84 horses, most of them under Pizarro's partner Diego de Almagro, who joined him at Cajamarca. After Atahualpa's death the Spaniards marched south along the royal road, fighting several actions against the emperor's generals; Chalcuchima, the most famous of them, was put to death near Cuzco. On 15 November 1533, a year to the day after they had first ridden into Cajamarca, they entered the Inca capital.27
With their emperor first captive and then dead, and their empire already split by civil war, the Inca could not organize effective resistance in time. Cajamarca shows how a handful of men, exploiting shock, surprise and new weapons, could bring down a great state in a single evening, where Cortés in Mexico had needed the long siege of Tenochtitlan.28
Test yourself on Cajamarca in the early modern battles quiz, or play today's Battle of the Day.
