Manco Inca Yupanqui

Biography

Another son of Huayna Capac, Manco welcomed Pizarro into Cuzco in 1533 as a liberator from Atahualpa's northern faction and accepted the crown the Spanish offered him. It took three years for him to understand what he had joined: his temples stripped, his sisters and wives seized, himself imprisoned and humiliated by Pizarro's brothers in his own capital. In 1536 he escaped on the pretext of a religious ceremony and raised the greatest indigenous rebellion of the century — an army of perhaps 100,000 that besieged Cuzco for ten months and nearly annihilated the Spanish in Peru. He learned to counter cavalry with boulder-strewn terrain and captured Spanish weapons, and he came within a hair of winning. Reinforcements from Panama and Chile broke the siege. He withdrew into the forested mountains at Vilcabamba and founded a neo-Inca state that outlasted him by nearly thirty years, raiding the Spanish road system from the jungle. He was murdered there in 1544 by Spanish refugees he had sheltered. The state he founded held out until 1572 — meaning the conquest that is usually said to have ended in 1533 actually took forty more years to finish.

Key Battles