Atahualpa, whose name means “virile-sweet”, was a son of the emperor Huayna Cápac, the last of the Inca family to rule an undivided empire that extended from present-day southern Colombia through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, northwestern Argentina and northern Chile. Upon the death of Huayna Capac (ca. 1528) in Quito, this vast territory was divided between two of his sons: Huáscar, who won the imperial throne in the capital of Cusco to the south, and his half brother Atahualpa, which won the northern portion of the kingdom, with its center in the city of Quito.
The division led to civil war between the half brothers, reaching a peak in 1532 with the defeat and imprisonment of Huáscar. At that time, the Spanish entered Peru. Francisco Pizarro and some 180 men arrived at the base of Atahualpa, in Cajamarca, in November 1532.
The confrontation between the Spanish conqueror and the Inca, who had thousands of soldiers camped nearby, took place in the main square of the city. The Inca rejected the request of Pizarro’s emissary, the priest Valverde, to swear obedience to the King of Spain and recognize Christianity as the true religion, and threw the breviary that was offered to the ground. Pizarro ordered his strategically placed troops to attack the soldiers of Atahualpa; the Peruvians were defeated and the Inca captured by the Spanish.
The capture of the head of the monolithic Peruvian state was the key to the subsequent Spanish conquest of the Inca empire. Atahualpa He offered to buy his freedom by filling the large cell in which he was imprisoned with gold objects. The Spanish took the treasure and declared that Atahualpa he had honored his agreement. But they refused to release him from their “protective custody”, as Pizarro feared for safety in the face of the numerical inferiority of his Ispersian troops.
The Spanish accused Atahualpa of conspiring against them and, apparently, the fact, which he had successfully ordered from prison, the murder of Huáscar, gave Pizarro the excuse to lead Atahualpa to trial. The sentence of being burned to death was finally changed by the stick when the Inca agreed to accept Christianity and be baptized.
Atahualpa He was executed by means of the stick by the Spaniards, on July 26, 1533, leaving the empire without a leader and open to complete submission to the European invaders.