Colonial and Early Republican Period

Religion has long been a prominent element in Peruvian society, often acting as a unifying agent between the country’s diverse peoples. The Inca Empire (1438-1533 CE) established a system of pilgrimages that passed through the lands they conquered, making local sacred sites objects of shared worship. After the Spanish conquest of the Inca in 1533, the vast mineral wealth of the central Andes placed Peru at the epicenter of the Spanish colonial enterprise in South America and influenced the efforts of the Catholic Church to secure its dominant position in the Americas. After an initial phase of native resistance, a combination of intense missionary work and repression was successful in establishing Catholicism as the hegemonic faith in the region. However, this was frequently accomplished by merely putting a Catholic façade over preexisting native beliefs, thus producing a vibrant syncretistic tradition. By the end of the first century of colonial rule, the Church had secured for itself vast land and wealth. The subsequent two centuries were marked by a gradual decline of Peruvian fortunes; economic stagnation, exhaustion of silver mines, and re-structuring of the Empire diminished the importance of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The local elites, however, maintained a strongly conservative outlook, which led them to be passive recipients of independence from the hands of Argentine and Colombian liberators in 1824. During the decades following independence, Peru was wracked by a series of conflicts between liberal and conservative caudillos, though the ideological differences between these two camps were less developed than elsewhere in Latin America.