Francisco Pizarro and the Fall of the Inca Empire

Francisco Pizarro was born in Trujillo, Extremadura, around 1478, and after taking part in earlier expeditions across the Isthmus of Panama, carried out two exploratory voyages southward along the Pacific coast in search of the wealth rumored to belong to the Inca empire. In 1529 he obtained from Charles V the Capitulation of Toledo, naming him governor, captain general, and adelantado of the territories he might conquer, and in January 1531 he set out from Panama on his third and definitive expedition with only about 180 men and 37 horses — a force that succeeded in good part because it arrived just as the Inca Empire was gripped by a civil war of succession between Huáscar and Atahualpa that had badly weakened its unified capacity for resistance.