Francisco Pizarro

April 1531 · 500 total casualties

The unglamorous beginning of the fall of the Inca. Pizarro's timing was extraordinary: the Inca civil war between Atahualpa and Huáscar had just ended, leaving the empire exhausted, divided, and already swept by the smallpox that had run south from Mexico years ahead of any Spaniard — killing the emperor Huayna Capac and triggering the succession war in the first place.

November 16, 1532 · 5,000 total casualties

The most audacious ambush in the history of European expansion, and the decisive act of the conquest of Peru. In a hyper-centralised empire ruled through the person of the Sapa Inca, capturing him paralysed the state — armies in the field simply stopped, awaiting orders from a captive. Cajamarca is the standing case study in what steel, horses, and surprise could do against an empire of millions.

July 26, 1533 · 1 total casualties

The ransom melted down an empire's sacred art into ingots and made Pizarro's men some of the richest in Europe. The execution was condemned even in Spain, and it removed the last figure who could have negotiated for the Inca state. It also destroyed the fiction of a legitimate transfer of power: what followed was open conquest, and eventually forty years of Inca resistance from Vilcabamba.

November 15, 1533 · 1,000 total casualties

With Cuzco taken, Spain held the two greatest empires of the Americas. But this was a beginning as much as an end: Manco Inca rebelled in 1536 and besieged Cuzco, a neo-Inca state held out at Vilcabamba until 1572, and the conquistadors turned on each other in civil wars that killed Pizarro and Almagro both. Conquest was quick; control was not.