What Spanish Rule Actually Meant for the Peruvians — Encomiendas, the Last Inca, and Two Centuries of Resistance
The Peruvian population under Spanish rule numbered around eight million. Within a century, workers in the Potosi mines had fallen from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred. In coastal valleys the indigenous population had effectively disappeared. This is the story of what the colonial system built on top of the Inca Empire, and why it took until 1781 for the most serious resistance to appear.
By BookOfWorldHistory·June 8, 2026·History·8 min read · 1,544 words
Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/peruvians-under-spanish-rule-encomienda-tupac-amaru-rebellion-1781
The Peruvian population under Spanish rule numbered around eight million. Within a century, workers in the Potosi mines had fallen from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred. In coastal valleys the indigenous population had effectively disappeared. This is the story of what the colonial system built on top of the Inca Empire, and why it took until 1781 for the most serious resistance to appear.
The Peruvian population after the conquest numbered around eight million people. Within a century, workers in the Potosi silver mines had fallen from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred. In non-mining districts, the indigenous population had been reduced to roughly one-tenth of what it had been. In the warm coastal valleys, the native people had effectively died out and been replaced by enslaved Africans brought from across the Atlantic.
Those numbers are the central fact of Spanish rule in Peru, and any account that begins with the benefits the Spanish brought — Roman law, Catholic missions, European cattle and wheat — has to reckon with them first. The encomienda system that governed Indian labor wasn't an aberration or an excess of particularly cruel individuals. It was the legal structure of colonial governance, designed and administered from Madrid and enforced for two and a half centuries.
The Encomienda System — What Vassalage Actually Meant
The legal structure of Spanish rule in Peru rested on encomiendas — assignments of Indian communities to particular Spanish colonists. In theory the encomiendero was responsible for the spiritual instruction of the Indians under his care. In practice the encomienda was forced labor that differed from chattel slavery mainly in that the crown retained nominal ownership of the Indians rather than permitting them to be bought and sold outright as individuals. The actual assignment of Indian workers was called a repartimiento. The encomiendero held it as property — it could be sold with his estate or passed to his heirs.
Don Francisco de Toledo, who arrived as viceroy in 1569, formalized what became the basis of the colonial system for the next two centuries. His Libro de Tasas — Book of Rules — imposed a poll tax on every male Indian between eighteen and fifty. One-seventh of the Indian population could be required to work for their Spanish masters and could be engaged out to anyone requiring their labor. Those near mines were compelled to furnish mine labor, and a man once assigned to mine work could not expect to return to normal life afterward.
In practice the system was considerably worse than the written rules. Kidnapping was reduced to a routine. Hundreds of Peruvians were hunted down for farms, factories, and mines. All the adult men of a village might be seized and sent to the mines, leaving only women and children behind to work the fields. A royal decree of 1584 attempted to secure for mine workers regular hours of rest and some time to breathe fresh air on the surface of the earth. The fact that a government felt the need to issue that particular decree communicates something about conditions underground.
The New Laws of 1542, promoted partly through the writing and lobbying of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, tried to end this. They abolished the personal services of the Indians and forbade the sale or inheritance of encomiendas. The colonial settlers resisted so violently that the viceroy sent to enforce them was killed in battle. A royal decree in October 1545 revoked the most threatening provisions. The Spanish colonists celebrated. The Indians did not.
The encomienda system assigned Indian communities to Spanish colonists theoretically for religious instruction, but in practice for forced labor. Potosi mine workers fell from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred in a century under conditions that a 1584 royal decree tried to address by guaranteeing workers occasional access to fresh air.
Sayri Tupac and the Last Shadow of the Incariate
Manco Capac Yupanqui, who had established the Inca resistance at Vilcabamba after the fall of Cuzco, died in 1558. His son Sayri Tupac had continued there with what remained of his people, maintaining a diminished but symbolically important independence in the mountain defiles north of Cuzco. The viceroy eventually persuaded him to come to Lima and formally submit — accepting a pension and estates in the Yucay valley in exchange for signing documents acknowledging Spanish authority.
The story of his signing was recorded and has stayed in the accounts ever since. Sayri Tupac lifted the golden fringe of the tablecloth in front of him and said that all this cloth and its fringe had once been his, and now they were giving him a thread of it for his sustenance and that of his entire house. He fell into a deep melancholy afterward and died within two years.
His brother Titu Cusi Yupanqui continued using the Inca title in Vilcabamba and reached a working arrangement with the Spanish authorities, requesting that missionaries be sent to him. A friar arrived. Almost immediately Titu Cusi fell sick and died. His people, believing the friar responsible, killed him. A boy named Tupac Amaru was then proclaimed Inca.
The Execution of Tupac Amaru
Viceroy Toledo used the friar's death as his pretext. Tupac Amaru and others were brought to Cuzco, tried for murder, and sentenced to death. By almost any measure Tupac Amaru was innocent — he had not ordered the killing and was barely beyond childhood. Toledo's intent was not justice. It was the permanent elimination of whatever symbolic authority the Inca title still carried.
What happened at the execution was not what Toledo had planned. The scaffold was erected in the great square at Cuzco. The surrounding hills and open spaces were covered with people. When the boy raised his right arm, the crowd fell completely silent. He spoke a few words of calm resignation. The Spanish soldiers could not bring themselves to carry out the sentence. The Bishop of Cuzco, the heads of the monasteries, and a deputation threw themselves on their knees before the Viceroy and begged that the youth be sent to Spain for the King's own judgment.
Toledo sent the chief executioner anyway. The sentence was carried out while the cathedral bell tolled and the crowd responded with what the accounts describe as deafening expressions of horror and grief. That night a Spanish soldier looked out his window and saw thousands of Indians prostrate before the head, which had been placed on a pike beside the scaffold. Toledo ordered it taken down and given to the body. The Bishop performed the funeral rites himself.
The executions had their intended effect. Without any living figure carrying the old authority to rally around, and with traditional Indian ceremonial rites now formally banned, organized resistance collapsed. Every effort was made to remove whatever might remind the Indians of what they had been before.
Tupac Amaru's execution in Cuzco's great square in 1572 was meant to extinguish the Inca title's symbolic authority permanently. The crowd's response — thousands prostrating before his head on its pike that night — showed how completely Toledo had misjudged the symbol he was trying to destroy.
What the Colonial Period Gave Europe
The colonial period in Peru is not entirely a story of extraction and destruction, though those dominate it. The Peruvians gave Europe several things that transformed it in ways that had nothing to do with silver.
The potato — already developed from its wild state over centuries of indigenous cultivation — was introduced to Europe through the Spanish trade system in the late 16th century. It was slow to be adopted but eventually became one of the most consequential food crops in European agricultural history, feeding populations that nothing else could sustain in northern European soils.
Quinine came from the bark of the cinchona tree and the story of its discovery in the 17th century has a specific shape: the wife of one of the viceroys, the Countess of Chinchon, fell ill with a stubborn malarial fever and the physicians of Lima could not cure her. A Jesuit missionary had received from an Indian some fragments of a bark said to be effective against fever. The vice-queen was dosed with it in the Indian manner. The fever broke quickly. She recovered. Linnaeus the botanist later named the tree genus after the viceroy — cinchona. The active compound, quinine, became the most effective treatment for malaria for the next two centuries and made tropical exploration and colonization by European powers possible in ways that nothing previous had.
There was also cassava, ipecacuanha, and other medicinal plants. The transfer was not equitable — nothing about the colonial relationship was — but it was real.
The New Inca of 1781
For more than two centuries after the execution of the young Tupac Amaru, the Peruvians kept alive a tradition. The last Inca had not truly died — he had retreated to another kingdom beyond the mountains, from which he would return in his own time to drive out the oppressors. It's the kind of belief that surfaces repeatedly in occupied peoples: the German legend of Frederick Barbarossa sleeping in the mountain, waiting for Germany's moment of need, runs along similar lines.
In 1781 the tradition found active expression. A mestizo named Condorcanqui, who claimed descent in some manner from the family of Huayna Capac, proclaimed himself the returned Tupac Amaru — child of the Sun and Inca of Peru. He raised an army from Indian communities and advanced on Cuzco, declaring his intention to erase the memory of the white men and restore the Incariate in the City of the Sun.
The rebellion lasted two years. It was extensive enough to reach the walls of Cuzco and sustained enough to require serious military effort to suppress. When it was finally put down, Condorcanqui and his entire family were executed with the deliberate brutality the Spanish colonial system reserved for challenges to its authority.
As Condorcanqui was led through the streets of Cuzco to the place of execution, the accounts say the Indians along the route prostrated themselves before him in the dust — the last public gesture toward someone they had been taught across many generations to recognize as the returned child of the Sun. Within forty years of that scene, Peru would be an independent republic. The world those people had been waiting to see restored was gone, but the world that had replaced it was about to change too.
In 1781, a mestizo named Condorcanqui proclaimed himself the returned Tupac Amaru and advanced on Cuzco at the head of a large army — the most serious indigenous challenge to Spanish authority since Manco Capac Yupanqui's siege in 1536. The rebellion lasted two years before being crushed.