Sapa Inca

The Sapa Inca, a Quechua title meaning the only Inca or unique Inca, ruled the Inca state as its supreme political and religious authority, understood within Inca religion as a direct descendant of Inti, the sun god, and therefore as sacred in his own person. This claimed descent legitimated Inca rule over the many distinct peoples the empire, called Tawantinsuyu, the Four Regions, came to incorporate through conquest and alliance across the Andes, and the Sapa Inca's mummified predecessors were preserved and ceremonially attended after death, continuing to hold land and participate symbolically in state affairs, a distinctive Andean practice with few direct parallels among the other monarchies in this record.

Inca tradition traced the dynasty's founding to Manco Capac, a legendary first Sapa Inca said to have emerged, in differing versions of the myth, from either Lake Titicaca or a cave at Pacaritambo, sent by Inti to found a civilized society. Historians place the actual emergence of an Inca state in the Cuzco valley around the thirteenth century CE, with rapid imperial expansion beginning under Pachacuti in the mid fifteenth century, transforming a regional polity into the largest empire pre-Columbian South America produced.

Sapa Inca succession did not follow strict primogeniture; a reigning Inca typically selected a successor from among his sons, weighing personal capability alongside the status of the candidate's mother, ideally the Coya, the Sapa Inca's principal wife who was, in the empire's later ideology, also frequently his own sister. Because the choice was not automatic, succession could produce serious conflict among royal brothers, most consequentially the civil war between Huascar and Atahualpa in the years immediately before the Spanish arrival, a war that had already fractured the empire's unity and military strength when Francisco Pizarro's expedition landed in 1532.

Atahualpa, having just defeated Huascar, was captured by Pizarro at Cajamarca later that year; the Spanish accepted an enormous ransom in gold and silver for his release and then executed him regardless in 1533, formally ending independent Inca rule at Cuzco. Resistance continued for decades under a rival line of Sapa Incas at Vilcabamba, a remote jungle refuge state, until Spanish forces captured and executed the last of them, Tupac Amaru, in 1572, an event generally treated as the final end of the Inca imperial office, though the Sapa Inca title and Inca noble lineages continued to carry social significance in colonial Peru for generations afterward.