Atahualpa is meanwhile resting near Cajamarca, in…
November 1532 CE
He had known of the arrival of foreign invaders for several months; it is not clear why he did not order their obliteration before they could penetrate into the heart of the empire.
After a march of almost two months, Pizarro arrives in Cajamarca and summons Atahualpa from the nearby thermal baths known today as the Banos del Inca.
Reluctantly, accompanied by several thousands of his best troops, Atahualpa goes to Cajamarca's central plaza, where he is met, not by the conquistadors, but by their chaplain, Fray Vicente de Valverde, who calls upon the Inca emperor to submit to the representatives of the Spanish crown and the Christian god.
Atahualpa replies disparagingly, and, upon his throwing a Christian prayer book to the ground in contempt, concealed Spanish soldiers open fire, killing thousands of Atahualpa's defenders and taking the Inca emperor captive.
This slaughter, called "the decisive battle" of the conquest of Peru by historian Hubert Herring, takes place on November 16, 1532.
A panic-stricken Atahualpa, fearing that Pizarro might be planning to depose him in favor of his rival brother, summons Huascar, at this time imprisoned in Cuzco, to Cajamarca, then orders him to be executed along with hundreds of Huascar's nearest of kin.
It serves the Spaniards' purposes to allow Atahualpa the freedom, from his cell, to command his forces.
Thus continues the rapid annihilation, through a vicious civil war that now overlaps with the Spanish conquest, of the army and leadership of one of the great polities of modern history.
Pizarro is not planning to depose Atahualpa, of course, but to execute him.
First, however, he has Atahualpa fill his cell, once with gold, then twice with silver (estimated at four thousand eight hundred and fifty kilograms of gold and nine thousand seven hundred kilograms of silver), supposedly as ransom for his release.
Instead the Spaniards garrotte Atahualpa on August 29, 1533, following a mock trial at which he is convicted of every charge that Pizarro can invent for the occasion.
Having deprived the Inca empire of leadership, Pizarro and another conquistador, Hernando de Soto, move south to Cuzco, the heart of Tawantinsuyu, which they capture in November 1533; they then lead their men in an orgy of looting, pillaging, and torture in search of more precious metals.
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