Pizarro Meets Atahualpa at Cajamarca
A force of 168 Spaniards ambushes an army of 80,000 in the main square of a highland town, and wins in an afternoon
Quick facts
- Spanish force
- 168 men, 62 cavalry
- Inca force present
- About 80,000
- Inca dead
- About 7,000
- Spanish dead
- None recorded
What happened
Francisco Pizarro, an aging Spanish adventurer on his third expedition down the Pacific coast, arrived at the highland town of Cajamarca with a force of 168 men, including 62 cavalry, after a slow advance up from the coast in which his troops had already noted the well-built roads and storehouses of a clearly wealthy civilization. On Friday 15 November 1532 Pizarro sent word requesting a meeting with Atahualpa, who was resting at nearby hot springs after his recent victory over Huascar; confident in his 80,000-strong army, Atahualpa made the Spanish wait until the next day. On 16 November the two sides met formally in the town square with brief speeches and a shared drink while Atahualpa's retinue watched Spanish horsemanship. Both sides left intending to strike first. The next morning Pizarro used the maze-like layout of Cajamarca's buildings to position his men in ambush; when Atahualpa's procession entered the square, Spanish cannon fired, followed by a mounted charge. In the resulting battle, matching firearms, cannon, and steel armor against spears, slings, and clubs, about 7,000 Inca were killed against no recorded Spanish losses, and Atahualpa was struck on the head and taken alive.
Why it matters
Cajamarca showed how a small, well-armed force could defeat an army many times its size by exploiting the political vacuum left by the civil war and by capturing the ruler rather than trying to conquer Inca territory outright, a strategy Pizarro's cousin Hernan Cortes had used against the Aztec a decade earlier. The battle also gave the Spanish their first direct evidence of how completely the Inca state's authority depended on the person of the Sapa Inca, since Atahualpa continued issuing orders and being obeyed even after his capture.
How we know
The meeting, ambush, and casualty figures are described consistently across World History Encyclopedia's biographical and narrative accounts, both derived from the Spanish eyewitness chronicles of the conquest, the earliest and most detailed layer of written evidence for any single event in Inca history.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Pizarro & the Fall of the Inca Empire · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Library of Congress, Exploring the Early Americas. Pizarro and the Incas · Primary source (author-declared)loc.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Age of Exploration → · See the wider Spanish conquest of the Americas, including Cortes and the fall of the Aztec Empire a decade earlier.