In 1532, the fifty-four-year-old Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro led a force of 167 men, including his four brothers, to the shores of Peru. Unbeknownst to the Spaniards, the Inca rulers of Peru had just fought a bloody civil war in which the emperor Atahualpa had defeated his brother Huascar. Pizarro and his men soon clashed with Atahualpa and a huge force of Inca warriors at the Battle of Cajamarca. Despite being outnumbered by more than two hundred to one, the Spaniards prevailed -- due largely to their horses, their steel armor and swords, and their tactic of surprise. They captured and imprisoned Atahualpa. Although the Inca emperor paid an enormous ransom in gold, the Spaniards executed him anyway. The following year, the Spaniards seized the Inca capital of Cuzco, completing their conquest of the largest native empire the New World has ever known. Peru was now a Spanish colony, and the conquistadors were wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. But the Incas did not submit willingly. A young Inca emperor, the brother of Atahualpa, soon led a massive rebellion against the Spaniards, inflicting heavy casualties and nearly wiping out the conquerors. Eventually, however, Pizarro and his men forced the emperor to abandon the Andes and flee to the Amazon. There, he established a hidden capital, called Vilcabamba. Although the Incas fought a deadly, thirty-six-year-long guerrilla war, the Spanish ultimately captured the last Inca emperor and vanquished the native resistance. Kim MacQuarrie lived in Peru for five years and became fascinated by the Incas and the history of the Spanish conquest. Drawing on both native and Spanish chronicles, he vividly describes the dramatic story of the conquest, with all its savagery and suspense. MacQuarrie also relates the story of the modern search for Vilcabamba, of how Machu Picchu was discovered, and of how a trio of colorful American explorers only recently discovered the lost Inca capital of Vilcabamba, hidden for centuries in the Amazon. This authoritative, exciting history is among the most powerful and important accounts of the culture of the South American Indians and the Spanish Conquest.

Description of Inca life by the famous 16th century Spanish explorer, author, historian, astronomer and scientist.

In the sixteenth century, Spanish conquerors came to the New World in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. Instead, they encountered inexplicable phenomena that have puzzled scholars and historians ever since: massive stone edifices constructed in the Earth's most inaccessible regions . . . great monuments forged with impossible skill and unknown tools . . . intricate carvings describing events and places half a world away. Who were the bearded "gods of the golden wand" who had brought civilization to the Americas millennia before Columbus? Who were the giants whose sculpted stone heads in Mesoamerica still mystify to this day? In this remarkably researched fourth volume of The Earth Chronicles, author and explorer Zecharia Sitchin uncovers the long-hidden secrets of the lost New World civilizations of the Olmecs, Aztecs, Mayas and Incas, and links the conquistadors' quest for El Dorado to the extraterrestrials who searched there for gold long before.

This revised edition includes newly discovered sites. New photos and maps with full-color illustrations of real life scences from National Geographic Magazine.

A special illustrated edition of Hiram Bingham's classic work captures all the magnificence and mystery of the amazing sites he uncovered. In the earliest days of the 20th century, Bingham ventured into the wild and then unknown country of the Eastern Peruvian Andes. In 1911, he came upon the fabulous Inca city that ultimately made him famous: Machu Picchu. And his achievement did not end there, because in the space of one short season he went on to discover two more lost cities: Vitcos, where the last of the Emperors was assassinated, and another settlement buried deep below the cloud-forest of the jungle.

The definitive history of the fall of the Incan empire   Praised as the finest account of the end of Incan empire since W. H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru, this monumental explanation of the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion removes the Incas from the realm of legend and describes their battles against forces led by conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Drawing upon rediscovered sources and a first-hand knowledge of the Incan terrain, Hemming vividly describes post-conquest Peru and the Incan resistance to fully integrating into Spanish society. With maps, line drawings, and twenty-four pages of photography, The Conquest of the Incas is an intimately researched and evocative history of one of the world's most fascinating civilizations that refutes many misconceptions about how the Incas were defeated.