Huáscar

King of the Inca Empire (r. 1525-1532)

• Born: c. 1495
• Birthplace: Cuzco, Inca Empire (now in Peru)
• Died: 1532
• Place of death: Cajamarca, Inca Empire (now in Peru)

Huáscar, the last ruler of the Incas, has the unenviable renown of losing the mightiest empire in pre-Columbian America.

Early Life

Few details of the birth, childhood, and youth of Tupac Cusi Huallpa, known as Huáscar (WAHS-kahr), survive. His father, Huayna Capac , was called the Inca, eleventh in his line. From 1493 to 1525, he ruled Tahuantinsuyu (four quarters), the empire that stretched from northern Chile to Ecuador’s border with Colombia. Huáscar’s mother, Ragua Ocllo, was Huayna Capac’s sister, as custom required for a queen, or qoya. Huáscar was born in the capital, Cuzco, on the eastern slopes of the Andesmountains in southern Peru about 1495.

Huayna Capac celebrated Huáscar’s weaning-and-hair-cutting ceremony, an initiation rite, by ordering craftspeople to fashion an immense golden chain. According to one account, the chain–huasca in the Incan language was seven hundred feet long and so heavy that two hundred men could not lift it. This extravagant gift is supposed to have inspired the name by which Huáscar is best known.

As a teenager, Huáscar remained behind in Cuzco when Huayna Capac left on extensive military campaigns, taking with him Huáscar’s two elder half brothers, Ninan Cuyochi and Atahualpa. Huayna Capac was especially fond of the latter and spent the last twelve years of his reign with Atahualpa in Quito (now the capital of Ecuador).

Life’s Work

Who was to succeed Huayna Capac appears to have been unsettled, as if the Inca could not make up his mind. Historical sources speak of Huáscar as if he were the heir, but his mother was Huayna Capac’s second oldest sister, and Ninan Cuyochi, the son of the Inca’s oldest sister, had the better claim. Furthermore, Atahualpa stood highest in his father’s affection and had been groomed by the Inca to be a leader, although he could not hold supreme power because his mother was not of royal blood.

When Huayna Capac fell ill from smallpox in 1525, he had a premonition of death. He dispatched advisers to prepare Ninan Cuyochi to assume power, but the eldest son himself was already dead of smallpox. Huayna Capac then named Huáscar the heir, although with an important provision. He made Huáscar promise to treat the region around Quito as a semiautonomous province to be ruled by Atahualpa as a viceroy. Huáscar readily agreed. When Huayna Capac died, Huáscar received the borla in the official coronation ceremony in Cuzco. The borla, the insignia of the Inca, was a headband with a fringe in front that hung down to the wearer’s eyebrows. With the assumption of power, Huáscar became a god in Incan religion, to be obeyed unquestioningly, on pain of death.

God or not, he was still subject to the intricate politics of the Cuzco court. Huayna Capac had left Huáscar with many half brothers, some loyal and some ambitious on their own behalf. The situation was ripe for intrigue, especially since Atahualpa commanded one-fifth of the realm from Quito, where the most experienced military officers lived and supported him. Moreover, an ancient division of Cuzco into Hanan and Hurin moieties had evolved into politically opposed factions; Huáscar was Hurin, while his mother and Atahualpa were Hanan. Huáscar could count on the loyalty of neither his capital nor his close kin.

Huáscar was aware of the dangers to his reign. He was far from stupid, but having been raised a royal heir in the narrow, elitist atmosphere of the Cuzco court, he was haughty, impulsive, and tactless. He may also have suffered from neuroses: Some contemporary sources call him “half mad” and argue that the ugliness of his short, swarthy physique proved that he was unfit to rule. Inexperience and willfulness, probably manipulated by the self-interested counsel of courtiers, soon made him disliked in the capital as arrogant and irresponsible. In any case, he quickly committed a series of major blunders.

The first occurred when he summoned Atahualpa to Cuzco. Atahualpa, Ragua Ocllo, and others of the royal court were to accompany the corpse of Huayna Capac to the capital for interment. While there, Atahualpa was to pledge his loyalty to the new Inca, as the law required. Atahualpa accompanied the group for a while but then turned back, sending a trusted friend of his father to assure Huáscar of his loyalty. When the dead Inca’s entourage was near Cuzco, Huáscar learned that his half brother was still in Quito; he became enraged, interpreting Atahualpa’s absence as disrespect. Deeply suspicious, he overreacted. He arrested the whole group, confined his mother, and tortured and executed Atahualpa’s emissary.

If Atahualpa suspected that he was not safe in Huáscar’s hands, as seems likely, he now had clear reason for his distrust. Worse for Huáscar, he had turned his mother into a political opponent. When he sought to take his eldest sister as his qoya, he needed Ragua Ocllo’s formal permission. She refused it until he threatened her, hardening her enmity toward him.

Atahualpa sent another group of five noblemen to convey his loyalty to Huáscar. Before going to the Inca, however, the principal emissary visited Ragua Ocllo, who received him warmly. That meeting further inflamed Huáscar’s suspicions. He executed four of the group and sent the last back to Atahualpa with a summons.

Atahualpa had no intention of delivering himself into Huáscar’s power. With the support of his advisers, he gathered military forces, whereupon Huáscar declared Atahualpa to be a traitor. This was another blunder. Instead of coming to terms with his brother, Huáscar forced him into outright civil war.

Huáscar could not afford a civil war, politically or financially. Economics especially were a problem. Incan law devoted the income from areas conquered by previous rulers to supporting their households and the religious cults devoted to them. Each equal in size to Huáscar’s court, the courts of the dead Incas drained off most state revenues. To support himself, Huáscar had to conquer new territory of his own. His attempts to do so in the south met with little success. The richest prizes lay to the north, in Colombia, but Atahualpa blocked the way. Huáscar tried to remedy the problem with reform: He moved to disband the cults of the dead Inca. Fierce opposition from the Incan priesthood stymied him, and all he achieved was to make the priests into political opponents.

Huáscar dispatched an army, commanded by a loyal half brother, to destroy Atahualpa in Quito. Although Atahualpa had far fewer resources to support a war, he had better troops and officers. In fact, his two top generals, Quizquiz and Chalicuchima, are thought to have been the ablest military leaders produced by the Inca Empire. The rebel army that met the Incan forces in southern Ecuador was seasoned from many campaigns under Huayna Capac. Atahualpa’s generals won battle after battle, turned back the Incan army, and pushed it relentlessly toward Cuzco. Atahualpa followed well behind the main army, meeting with tribal leaders along the way and requiring them to swear allegiance to him. He ordered his troops to devastate the villages of those who refused.

Although Huáscar reinforced his army and changed commanders, Atahualpa’s troops pressed on until they stood near Cuzco itself. At this point, Huáscar took personal command. He succeeded in punishing the enemy during a protracted battle, but his military inexperience showed. He was lured into an ambush and captured by Chalicuchima. Huáscar’s army fell apart when it learned that he had been captured; soon afterward, Cuzco fell to Quizquiz with little resistance, almost certainly because the Hanan faction was happy to see Huáscar defeated.

On orders from Atahualpa, still well behind the army, Quizquiz massacred Huáscar’s family and followers before his eyes, and he was publicly humiliated. Atahualpa donned the borla and deported himself as the new Inca, but he could not truly be the Inca until he was officially crowned in Cuzco.

On his way there, he heard news that a band of bearded strangers was advancing into the Andes from the coast. The new arrivals were the conquistador Francisco Pizarro and an army of fewer than two hundred Spaniards. Curious, Atahualpa turned aside to meet them in Cajamarca. He had heard of the Spaniards and, with tens of thousands of warriors around him, he intended to capture them. Pizarro tricked Atahualpa and captured him first. Still vastly outnumbered, the Spaniards held on to Atahualpa and bargained for a ransom. Fearing that Pizarro might use Huáscar to further weaken his bargaining power, Atahualpa secretly ordered Huáscar killed. The twelfth and last anointed Inca was put to death near or in Cajamarca, where Atahualpa was held prisoner. Pizarro killed him a few months later.

Significance

With the last Inca, Huáscar, dead, as well as his rival, Atahualpa, the Inca armies fell into disarray, and the Spanish were able to conquer the Inca Empire, even though it was vastly superior in numbers of fighters and resources. Pizarro’s astonishing success reveals several weaknesses in the Inca state.

First, succession of power from one Inca to the next was unfixed. The dying Inca, in fact, was responsible for naming his heir, who could be any of his pure-blood sons. Huayna Capac almost guaranteed trouble when he was indecisive about an heir and then apportioned part of his realm to a favorite not in line to succeed, Atahualpa.

Second, the Inca state relied precariously on one man, the Inca. Tahuantinsuyu had been blessed with a series of talented military leaders and administrators who held power firmly and expanded the empire’s territories, but the state did not fare well without a dynamic Inca. The Inca Empire was vulnerable to the political intrigue among ambitious lieutenants that arises around a leader’s incompetence.

Third, the Incas’ own mythology worked against them. Although Huayna Capac, Atahualpa, and Huáscar knew about the invasion of South and Central America by white strangers, they thought it possible that these strangers were gods whose arrival had been prophesied. This uncertainty may have kept Huayna Capac from ensuring that the Spaniards could not threaten him.

Because they brought with them new diseases that were lethal to the Incas, the Spaniards may well have triumphed anyway. Smallpox, which was particularly virulent, reached the Incas even before Pizarro did, and it decimated the nobility and army. The civil war between Huáscar and Atahualpa, which by some estimates killed as many as 100,000 warriors, further crippled the Incas and prepared the way for the Spanish victory.

Bibliography

Betanzos, Juan de. Narrative of the Incas. Translated by Ronald Hamilton and Dana Buchanan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. An example of the kind of contemporary source on which historians depend. Married to a royal Inca, Betanzos finished this somewhat slanted history in 1557.

Brundage, Burr Cartwright. Empire of the Inca. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Brundage relates, in a convoluted prose style, the rise of the Inca state, the careers of its twelve emperors, its social and religious organization, and its conquest by the Spanish.

D’Altroy, Terence N. The Incas. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Study of the Inca Empire from its beginnings to its fall. Reconsiders the social, political, and economic structure of the empire in the light of recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, index.

Davies, Nigel. The Incas. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995. A close analysis of the Spanish sources of Inca history, the archaeological evidence, and scholars’ interpretations of both. Davies argues that little is known with certainty about the Inca rulers.

Hemmings, John. The Conquest of the Incas. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. This captivating, richly detailed book chronicles the conquest of the Inca Empire by Spaniards. The opening chapters describe Pizarro’s encounter with Atahualpa and the fate of Huáscar.

Hyams, Edward, and George Ordish. The Last of the Incas. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. A provocative review of the rise and fall of the Incas that insists the empire was socialistic and the Inca skill for government was inherited. Hyams and Ordish find the Incas more benevolent than do other historians.

McIntyre, Loren. The Incredible Incas and Their Timeless Land. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1975. Relates basic Inca history vividly and describes the society and its physical environment. Many lovely color drawings and photographs complement the text.

Malpass, Michael A. Daily Life in the Inca Empire. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Written for complete newcomers to pre-Columbian history, the text carefully defines Inca terms and anthropological concepts as it describes Inca culture and history. With illustrations and a handy glossary.

Stirling, Stuart. The Last Conquistador: Mansio Serra de Lequizamón and the Conquest of the Incas. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 1999. Study of one of Pizarro’s top lieutenants and his role in the conquest of the Incas. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, index.