The last Inca emperor was hunted down deep in the Amazon forest
For three decades after the Spanish conquest, a small Inca kingdom held out in the forests of Vilcabamba. In 1572 a new viceroy declared war, the city fell empty, and forty soldiers chased its young ruler, Túpac Amaru, down rivers and jungle trails until a campfire gave him away.
Túpac Amaru was born on 14 April 1545. His name joins the Quechua words for royal or shining and for snake, or a serpent-like being from Andean myth. After the Spanish conquered Peru in the 1530s, Manco Inca Yupanqui founded the Neo-Inca State in Vilcabamba, an inaccessible corner of the Upper Amazon northeast of Cusco, in 1540. His son Sayri Túpac later accepted Spanish rule and moved to Cuzco, and his brother Titu Cusi led the holdout kingdom after him.
When two Spanish envoys, unaware that Titu Cusi had died, were killed at the border by an Inca captain, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo used the breach of ambassadorial law to justify conquest, declaring war on 14 April 1572. The lightly armed Inca forces attacked repeatedly but were driven back, and on 24 June the Spanish entered a deserted Vilcabamba. Túpac Amaru had fled west into the lowland forest with roughly 100 followers, who split into smaller bands.
A hand-picked squad under Martín García Óñez de Loyola followed the Masahuay river for 170 miles, questioned local peoples, and learned the emperor was slowed by his wife, who was close to giving birth. After a march of fifty miles they spotted a fire around nine at night and captured the couple. On 21 September the prisoners entered Cuzco, along with royal mummies and a gold statue called Punchao, which the Spanish destroyed.
Convicted of murdering priests in Vilcabamba, he was sentenced to death even as clerics reportedly begged on their knees for a trial in Spain. He was executed on 24 September 1572 before a crowd of 10,000 to 15,000 in Cuzco's main square. The conquest that began with the killing of Atahualpa ended with his nephew's death, and dozens of royal relatives, including a three-year-old son, were exiled. Rebel José Gabriel Condorcanqui later took his name, and the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur was named in turn after that rebel.
Source: Túpac Amaru
