Huayna Capac

When Huayna Capac died around 1527, the Inca empire stood at its greatest extent, stretching along the Andes from southern Colombia to central Chile. A son of Tupac Inca Yupanqui and of the ruler's sister-wife Mama Ocllo — a union in the pattern the dynasty traced to its legendary founders — he was born about 1467, by several accounts at Tumipampa in what is now Ecuador, during his father's northern campaigns. He came to the throne around 1493 as a young man after a disputed succession in which his partisans prevailed over those of a half-brother, and he governed at first under the influence of senior kinsmen of the royal panacas, the descent corporations of previous rulers. As with all Inca chronology, these dates rest on colonial-era chronicles and are approximate.

Much of his long reign was spent away from Cuzco on the northern frontier. Years of hard campaigning extended and consolidated Inca rule in the Quito region and against the peoples of the equatorial highlands and coast, wars the chronicles describe as among the costliest the empire fought. Huayna Capac developed Tumipampa into a major northern capital, and his prolonged residence there, with an army and court increasingly rooted in the north, contributed to the regional division that would later split the realm. Elsewhere his administration continued the established machinery of roads, storehouses, censuses, and resettlement that his father and grandfather had built.

The end of the reign coincided with catastrophe. In the mid-1520s an epidemic — generally thought to have been smallpox or another Old World disease spreading overland ahead of the Europeans themselves — swept the Andes. Huayna Capac died of it around 1527, and his designated heir Ninan Cuyochi died at nearly the same time, leaving the succession unsettled.

The consequences ran through his many children. Huascar was recognized in Cuzco, while Atahualpa, based in the north with the veteran army, eventually contested his rule, and their civil war was reaching its end just as Francisco Pizarro landed. Two other sons shaped the conquest era: Manco Inca, who ruled first as a Spanish client and then as leader of the independent Vilcabamba state, and Paullu Inca, who allied with the Spaniards in Cuzco.