168 Spaniards Captured the Inca Emperor in an Afternoon Because of Horses

Francisco Pizarro arrived at the highland Inca city of Cajamarca on November 15, 1532, with 168 men: 106 infantry, 62 cavalry, four small cannons, and twelve harquebuses. Atahualpa, the Inca emperor, was camped on a hillside outside town with what contemporary Spanish accounts put at tens of thousands of soldiers. The next afternoon, Atahualpa accepted Pizarro's invitation to a meeting and entered Cajamarca's central plaza with about 7,000 attendants — courtiers, nobles, and lightly armed bearers, but not his army.

Pizarro had hidden his men in the buildings around the square. After a brief, mistranslated exchange between a Dominican friar and the emperor over a Bible, the Spaniards fired the cannons into the crowd and rode out. Spanish accounts agree the Inca did not initially fight back. They had never seen horses, never heard gunfire, and never faced an opponent who used the bell-clad chest harnesses Pizarro's cavalry were wearing. The plaza emptied through one gate, killing each other in the crush. The Spanish hacked the bearers off Atahualpa's litter and pulled him down alive. By the end of the afternoon, perhaps 2,000 Inca were dead. The Spanish had lost one slave killed and one man wounded.

Pizarro held Atahualpa for nearly nine months and accepted a ransom that filled a room with gold and twice with silver. He executed the emperor anyway in July 1533. The conquest of an empire of perhaps ten million people followed.