Following the execution of Emperor Atahualpa earlier that year, Francisco Pizarro's small Spanish force entered Cusco, the golden heart of the Inca Empire high in the Andes. The city's vast temples and palaces, some sheathed in gold, fell under Spanish control, marking a decisive stage in the collapse of Andean civilization's political center.
Cusco was no ordinary city—it was the sacred navel of an empire stretching thousands of miles along the Andes, its central temple, the Coricancha, once covered in sheets of gold representing the sun god Inti. When Spanish soldiers arrived, chroniclers described their astonishment at gold and silver ornamentation on a scale that dwarfed anything they had seen in Europe.
Pizarro had already captured and ransomed, then executed, the Inca emperor Atahualpa months earlier in Cajamarca, decapitating the empire's leadership. The march into Cusco itself met little organized resistance, as the empire was still reeling from a recent civil war between Atahualpa and his brother Huáscar, which had fatally weakened Inca unity.
The Spanish quickly began looting and repurposing the city's temples, building churches atop Inca foundations—a physical layering of conquest still visible in Cusco's architecture today. The fall of the capital did not end Andean resistance, which flared for decades in remote highland strongholds, but it symbolically closed the era of independent Inca rule.