Chapter 01 · c. 3000 BCE - c. 1000 CE
Caral and the Great Andean Civilisations
Long before the Inca, the deserts, valleys and highlands of Peru cradled some of the oldest and most sophisticated societies of the Americas, from the monumental city of Caral to the temple oracle of Chavin, the realistic potters of the Moche, the desert geoglyphs of Nazca and the expansionist Wari.
Among the river valleys of the central coast rose one of the earliest civilisations of the New World. The Sacred City of Caral-Supe, built on a desert terrace above the Supe valley, flourished roughly between 3000 and 1800 BCE, raising pyramidal mounds, sunken circular plazas and great staircases at about the same time as the first pyramids of Egypt. Part of the wider Norte Chico tradition, Caral shows no signs of fortifications or warfare and appears to have ordered its world through ceremony, trade and a shared religion rather than conquest, a society that developed in near-total isolation from any outside influence.
From around 900 BCE a powerful religious style radiated from the highland temple complex of Chavin de Huantar, where pilgrims came to consult an oracle and where a distinctive art of fanged deities and intertwined serpents spread across much of the central Andes, lending early cultural unity to the region. On the northern coast, between roughly 100 and 700 CE, the Moche built irrigation works, adobe pyramids and a brilliantly realistic ceramic art whose portrait vessels still seem to look back across the centuries. In the southern deserts the Nazca etched into the plain the vast lines and figures, of birds, monkeys and spiders, that can be read only from the air.
By about 600 CE a new kind of power emerged from the Ayacucho region, the Wari, who built an expansive state knit together by roads, planned administrative centres and terraced agriculture, anticipating in many ways the imperial methods later perfected by the Inca. These overlapping civilisations, coastal and highland, left behind monuments, technologies and forms of statecraft on which all later Andean history would build. They are honoured today in a constellation of World Heritage sites, from Caral and Chavin to the Nazca lines, that mark Peru as one of the cradles of human civilisation.
“The land held cities as old as the pyramids, and roads and oracles, long before the Inca were heard of.”
— On the antiquity of Andean civilisation
Turning points
- c. 3000-1800 BCEFormation
- c. 900 BCEReligion
- c. 100-700 CECulture & Ideas
- c. 600-1000 CEPolitics & Power
The Wari state
From the Ayacucho region the Wari build an expansive state with roads and planned centres, prefiguring the imperial methods later used by the Inca.
Chapter sources: Peru: History, Sacred City of Caral-Supe, Chavin (Archaeological Site), Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Pampas de Jumana
Chapter 02 · c. 1200 - 1532
The Inca Empire of Tawantinsuyu
From a small kingdom in the valley of Cusco, the Inca built within a few generations the largest empire of pre-Columbian America, Tawantinsuyu, the Realm of the Four Quarters, bound together by roads, terraces and a sun cult and crowned by the mountain sanctuary of Machu Picchu.
The Inca began as one of many peoples in the southern highlands, with their capital in the valley of Cusco, which tradition held had been settled by a founding dynasty in the centuries before their rise. Their transformation into an empire came in the fifteenth century under Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, who, according to the histories preserved after the conquest, repelled a dangerous invasion by the rival Chanca and then launched an era of sweeping expansion. He is credited with devising the imperial plan of Cusco itself, rebuilding it as a sacred capital, and with beginning the conquests that his son and grandson would carry to their fullest extent.
Within three generations the Inca dominion stretched from what is now Colombia and Ecuador south through Peru and Bolivia into Chile and Argentina, an empire they called Tawantinsuyu, the Realm of the Four Quarters, governed from Cusco. They held it together not through writing, which they did not possess, but through a remarkable apparatus of state: tens of thousands of kilometres of stone roads with way stations and rope bridges, vast storehouses, terraced fields climbing the mountainsides, the labour tribute known as the mita, and the knotted-cord quipu for keeping records. A divine emperor, the Sapa Inca, ruled as son of the sun at the apex of a closely ordered society.
Of all the Inca's works the most famous is Machu Picchu, the mountain estate or sanctuary built in the fifteenth century on a high ridge above the Urubamba, with its giant walls, terraces and ramps seemingly cut from the living rock. Abandoned after the Spanish conquest and never reported by the conquerors, it remained unknown to the wider world until brought to international attention in 1911, and it stands today as the most significant surviving monument of Inca civilisation. The historic centre of Cusco and the sanctuary of Machu Picchu are together inscribed on the World Heritage list as the supreme legacy of the Andean world.
“Within three generations the Inca raised, from the valley of Cusco, the greatest empire the Americas had known.”
— On the rise of Tawantinsuyu
Turning points
- c. 1438 CEPolitics & Power
- c. 15th centuryCulture & Ideas
Building of Machu Picchu
The Inca raise the mountain sanctuary of Machu Picchu above the Urubamba, a masterpiece of stonework later recognised as a World Heritage site.
- c. 1471-1493Politics & Power
- c. 1529-1532War & Rupture
Inca civil war
A ruinous war of succession between the half-brothers Atahualpa and Huascar divides the empire just as the Spanish appear on its coasts.
See the data
Figures of the era
Pachacuti Inca Yupanquireigned c. 1438-1471
Inca emperor and empire-builder
Ninth Sapa Inca, who after defending Cusco from the Chanca launched the rapid conquests that created the empire of Tawantinsuyu and is credited with the rebuilding of Cusco as a sacred capital.
Atahualpac. 1502-1533
Last reigning Inca emperor
Won the civil war against his half-brother Huascar only to be captured by Francisco Pizarro at Cajamarca in 1532, held for an enormous ransom, and executed in 1533, an event that effectively ended the free Inca empire.
Chapter sources: Peru: History, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, Atahuallpa, City of Cuzco, Historic Sanctuary of Machu Picchu
Chapter 03 · 1532 - 1780
Conquest and the Viceroyalty of Peru
In 1532 a small Spanish force under Francisco Pizarro seized the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca, and within two years the empire had fallen; from the new capital at Lima, founded in 1535, Spain ruled the Viceroyalty of Peru, the richest of its American realms, sustained by the silver of Potosi and the forced labour of its Indigenous peoples.
When Francisco Pizarro landed on the Peruvian coast in 1532 with fewer than two hundred men, he found the Inca empire exhausted by civil war. At Cajamarca in November he lured the emperor Atahualpa into a meeting, massacred his unarmed escort and took him prisoner. Atahualpa filled a room with gold and silver in a vain bid for his freedom, but in August 1533 the Spanish executed him by strangulation. With the divine emperor dead and the Inca armies in retreat, Pizarro marched on Cusco, which he occupied late in 1533, and the great empire of Tawantinsuyu passed, in little more than a year, under Spanish control.
Rather than rule from the highland Inca capital, Pizarro founded a new city on the coast on 18 January 1535, the Ciudad de los Reyes, the City of Kings, soon known as Lima, whose port could keep open the lifeline to Spain. Lima became the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, established in the 1540s as the second of Spain's American viceroyalties, which at its height governed most of Spanish South America. For more than two centuries Peru was reckoned the most valuable possession of the Spanish crown in the Americas, its wealth flowing above all from silver.
That wealth came at a terrible human cost. The mountain of Potosi, in Upper Peru, became the richest silver source in the world, and its mines, together with the mercury workings of Huancavelica, were fed by the mita, an Inca labour levy turned by the Spanish into a brutal system of forced rotation that consumed Indigenous lives in their thousands. Epidemic disease, dispossession and exploitation caused a catastrophic fall in the native population, even as a new colonial society of Spaniards, mestizos, enslaved Africans and Andean peoples took shape, and Lima grew into the cultured and powerful heart of Spanish South America.
“With fewer than two hundred men, and an empire weakened by its own civil war, the Spanish seized in a year what the Inca had built in a century.”
— On the conquest of Peru
Turning points
- 16 Nov 1532War & Rupture
Capture of Atahualpa at Cajamarca
Francisco Pizarro's small force seizes the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca after massacring his escort, a decisive stroke in the conquest of Peru.
See the data - 29 Aug 1533War & Rupture
Execution of Atahualpa
After paying a vast ransom in gold and silver, Atahualpa is executed by the Spanish; with the emperor dead, Pizarro advances on Cusco, taken later that year.
See the data - 18 Jan 1535Formation
- 1542 CEColonisation
Viceroyalty of Peru established
Spain creates the Viceroyalty of Peru, second of its American viceroyalties, governing most of Spanish South America from Lima for nearly three centuries.
See the data - 1545 CEEconomy & Trade
The silver of Potosi
The opening of the great silver mountain of Potosi makes Peru the crown's richest American realm, worked through the forced-labour mita that consumes Indigenous lives.
See the data
Figures of the era
Francisco Pizarroc. 1475-1541
Spanish conquistador
Leader of the expedition that conquered the Inca empire, captor of Atahualpa at Cajamarca and founder of Lima in 1535. He was assassinated in Lima in 1541 amid feuds among the conquerors.
Chapter sources: Peru: History, Francisco Pizarro, Battle of Cajamarca (1532), Atahuallpa, Viceroyalty of Peru
Chapter 04 · 1780 - 1826
Rebellion and Independence
The great Indigenous revolt of Tupac Amaru II in 1780 shook the viceroyalty to its foundations; a generation later the wars of South American independence reached Peru, where San Martin proclaimed freedom in 1821 and the campaigns of Bolivar and Sucre sealed it at Junin and Ayacucho in 1824.
In 1780 the deepening grievances of the Andean peoples, ground down by tribute, forced labour and abusive officials, erupted in the largest rebellion the Spanish empire in America had yet faced. Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, a cacique who claimed descent from the last Inca and took the name Tupac Amaru II, seized and executed a hated corregidor and raised tens of thousands of followers across the southern highlands, his wife Micaela Bastidas among the leaders. The rising was crushed, and in 1781 Tupac Amaru II was captured and put to a brutal death in Cusco, but the memory of his revolt endured as a touchstone of Andean and later national resistance.
Peru, as the bastion of Spanish power and the seat of a conservative colonial elite, was among the last parts of the continent to move toward independence, and its liberation came largely from outside. Jose de San Martin, having freed Argentina and Chile, landed on the Peruvian coast and entered Lima, where on 28 July 1821 he proclaimed the independence of Peru and assumed authority as Protector. But Spanish armies still held the interior, and San Martin lacked the strength to defeat them. In 1822 he met Simon Bolivar at Guayaquil, and, the two liberators differing over the political future of Peru, San Martin withdrew and left the field to Bolivar.
Bolivar took command of the struggle, and with his lieutenant Antonio Jose de Sucre he brought the war to its climax in the highlands. At Junin in August 1824 the patriots won an important cavalry victory, and on 9 December 1824, on the plateau of Ayacucho, Sucre destroyed the main royalist army and captured the viceroy, breaking Spanish power in South America for good. The victory secured the independence not only of Peru but of the surrounding republics, and in 1825 Upper Peru separated to become the new nation of Bolivia, named in Bolivar's honour.
“On the plateau of Ayacucho the last great royalist army was broken, and with it Spain's three centuries of power in South America.”
— On the Battle of Ayacucho, 9 December 1824
Turning points
- Nov 1780War & Rupture
Revolt of Tupac Amaru II
Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, taking the name Tupac Amaru II, leads a vast Indigenous uprising against Spanish rule across the southern Andes.
See the data - 18 May 1781War & Rupture
Execution of Tupac Amaru II
Captured by the Spanish, Tupac Amaru II is forced to witness the deaths of his family and is then executed at Cusco; the rebellion is suppressed but remembered.
See the data - 28 July 1821Independence
Independence proclaimed by San Martin
Having entered Lima, Jose de San Martin proclaims the independence of Peru and becomes its Protector, though Spanish armies still hold the highlands.
See the data - 6 Aug 1824War & Rupture
Battle of Junin
Bolivar's forces win a cavalry battle at Junin, opening the way to the final campaign against the royalists in the Peruvian sierra.
See the data - 9 Dec 1824Independence
Battle of Ayacucho
Antonio Jose de Sucre defeats the main royalist army and captures the viceroy at Ayacucho, sealing the independence of Peru and the new South American republics.
See the data
Figures of the era
Tupac Amaru IIc. 1740-1781
Leader of the Indigenous revolt
Cacique and self-proclaimed descendant of the last Inca who led the great Andean rebellion of 1780 against Spanish abuses. Captured and brutally executed at Cusco in 1781, he became an enduring symbol of resistance.
Jose de San Martin1778-1850
Liberator and Protector of Peru
Argentine general who, after liberating the south, entered Lima and proclaimed Peruvian independence in 1821, then withdrew in favour of Bolivar after their meeting at Guayaquil.
Simon Bolivar1783-1830
Liberator of South America
Venezuelan soldier and statesman who took over the Peruvian campaign and, with his lieutenant Sucre, secured independence at Junin and Ayacucho in 1824; Bolivia is named for him.
Chapter sources: Peru: History, Tupac Amaru II, Peru: Achievement of independence, Jose de San Martin, Simon Bolivar, Battle of Ayacucho
Chapter 05 · 1826 - 1948
The Young Republic and the War of the Pacific
Independent Peru struggled through decades of caudillo rule and a brief, deceptive prosperity built on guano, before the catastrophic War of the Pacific against Chile cost it the nitrate-rich south; reconstruction and the rise of mass politics, above all the Aprista movement, shaped the early twentieth century.
The first decades of the republic were marked by political instability, as rival military strongmen, the caudillos, contended for power and a short-lived confederation with Bolivia rose and fell. From the 1840s, however, Peru enjoyed an extraordinary windfall: the guano deposits on its coastal islands, prized as fertiliser in Europe, brought a flood of revenue to the state under leaders such as Ramon Castilla, who used part of it to abolish slavery and Indigenous tribute. The boom proved fragile and badly managed, leaving the country indebted rather than transformed when the deposits and the easy money ran out.
Disaster came with the War of the Pacific. In 1879 a dispute over the nitrate-rich Atacama drew Peru, bound by alliance to Bolivia, into war with Chile. Chilean naval victories opened the sea, a Chilean army invaded, and in January 1881 it occupied Lima. After further resistance in the highlands, Peru was forced to accept the Treaty of Ancon in 1883, surrendering the province of Tarapaca and leaving the provinces of Tacna and Arica under Chilean control, a national trauma whose territorial and emotional scars lasted for generations and whose final settlement came only in 1929.
Recovery was slow. A period known as the Aristocratic Republic restored civilian, oligarchic rule around the turn of the century, and from 1919 the modernising but increasingly authoritarian president Augusto Leguia governed for eleven years, expanding public works and a new constitution before falling in the world slump of 1930. Out of the era's social tensions emerged the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, the Aprista movement founded by Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, which called for social reform, Indigenous dignity and resistance to foreign economic domination, and which, repeatedly persecuted and banned, became one of the defining mass forces of twentieth-century Peruvian politics.
“The guano that briefly made Peru rich left it indebted, and the war that followed cost it the south.”
— On the nineteenth-century republic
Turning points
- c. 1840s-1870sEconomy & Trade
The guano boom
Exports of coastal guano as fertiliser bring the Peruvian state a vast but poorly managed windfall, funding reforms including the abolition of slavery in 1854.
See the data - 1879-1883War & Rupture
War of the Pacific
Allied with Bolivia, Peru fights Chile over the nitrate-rich Atacama; Chilean forces occupy Lima in 1881 and Peru is defeated.
See the data - 20 Oct 1883Politics & Power
Treaty of Ancon
Peru cedes Tarapaca to Chile and loses control of Tacna and Arica, a humiliating settlement whose final terms were not fixed until 1929.
- 1919-1930Politics & Power
The Leguia era
Augusto Leguia governs Peru for eleven increasingly authoritarian years, promoting public works and a new constitution before falling in the Depression.
- 1924 CEPolitics & Power
Founding of the Aprista movement
Victor Raul Haya de la Torre founds the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), a mass movement for social reform that shapes Peruvian politics for decades.
Figures of the era
Victor Raul Haya de la Torre1895-1979
Founder of the Aprista movement
Intellectual and politician who founded APRA in 1924, championing social reform, Indigenous dignity and Latin American unity. Repeatedly persecuted and barred from the presidency, he remained a central figure of Peruvian politics for half a century.
Chapter sources: Peru: History, War of the Pacific
Chapter 06 · 1948 - present
Reform, the Shining Path, and Modern Peru
After mid-century dictatorships and a radical military reform government, Peru returned to democracy only to be plunged into a brutal internal armed conflict with the Maoist Shining Path; the violence was largely contained in the 1990s, but the new century has brought economic growth alongside chronic corruption and a cascade of presidential crises.
The mid-twentieth century brought alternating civilian governments and military rule. The most far-reaching was the leftist military regime of General Juan Velasco Alvarado, who seized power in 1968 and launched a sweeping programme of agrarian reform that broke up the great estates, nationalised industries and asserted Peruvian control over its resources, before being eased out in the mid-1970s. Civilian democracy was restored in 1980, but in the same year, in the impoverished highlands of Ayacucho, a Maoist faction calling itself Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, led by the former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman, launched an armed insurrection against the Peruvian state.
There followed two decades of internal armed conflict, the deadliest in the country's republican history. The Shining Path waged a campaign of extreme violence in the countryside and the cities, and the security forces responded with their own brutal repression, the peasant communities of the Andes caught between them. After Guzman's capture in Lima in 1992 the insurgency was broken, though the conflict ran on at lower intensity. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reporting in 2003, estimated that close to 69,000 people had been killed or disappeared between 1980 and 2000, attributing the largest share of deaths to the Shining Path while also documenting grave abuses by the state, and it called for justice and reparations.
The defeat of the insurgency came under the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori, who stabilised the economy, dissolved Congress in a 1992 self-coup, and was ultimately forced from power and later imprisoned for corruption and human-rights crimes. The new century brought sustained economic growth and a deepening of democracy, but also a relentless succession of corruption scandals that ensnared nearly every recent president. Political instability has become chronic: Pedro Castillo was impeached and detained in December 2022 after attempting to dissolve Congress, his successor Dina Boluarte was removed amid a security crisis in 2025, and further changes of president followed, even as Peru remains a constitutional democracy wrestling with the legacies of inequality, corruption and its violent recent past.
“The Commission set the dead and disappeared at close to sixty-nine thousand, a toll borne above all by the poor of the Andes.”
— On the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's estimate
Turning points
- 1968-1975Politics & Power
Velasco and the military reforms
General Juan Velasco Alvarado leads a leftist military government that enacts sweeping agrarian reform and nationalisations before being eased from power.
- 1980 CEWar & Rupture
Shining Path launches its insurgency
As civilian democracy is restored, the Maoist Shining Path under Abimael Guzman begins an armed insurrection in the Ayacucho highlands, opening two decades of internal conflict.
See the data - 12 Sept 1992War & Rupture
Capture of Abimael Guzman
Police capture the Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman in Lima; he is sentenced to life imprisonment and the insurgency is broken.
See the data - 28 Aug 2003Politics & Power
- 7 Dec 2022Politics & Power
Figures of the era
Abimael Guzman1934-2021
Founder of the Shining Path
Former philosophy professor who founded the Maoist Shining Path and led its violent insurgency from 1980. Captured in 1992 and imprisoned for life, he died in custody in 2021.
Alberto Fujimori1938-2024
President of Peru
President from 1990, who defeated the Shining Path and tamed hyperinflation but ruled with growing authoritarianism, staging a self-coup in 1992. He was later convicted of corruption and human-rights crimes.
Chapter sources: Peru: History, Shining Path, Abimael Guzman, Peru: Government and society