Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

Works

• 1609Royal Commentaries of the Incas

  Inca history from Manco Capac to the Spanish conquest, told by a native speaker of Quechua who corrects the chroniclers word by word.

• 1617General History of Peru (Royal Commentaries, Part Two)

  The conquest and the civil wars among the Spaniards, up to the execution of Túpac Amaru in 1572 – published a year after the author’s death.

Position

Garcilaso wrote to correct the Spanish histories of Peru. As a native speaker of Quechua he argued that the chroniclers had misread the Incas because they misread their words, and many of his arguments rest on etymologies. In his account the Incas were lawgivers who led scattered peoples from a savage life to settled agriculture, roads, storehouses and the worship of the sun, and who already sensed an invisible highest god, Pachacamac. Inca rule thus appears as a preparation for the Gospel, as Rome had been in the Old World, and Cusco as “another Rome”. The second part narrates the conquest and the civil wars among Spaniards, defends the generation of the conquistadors, including his father, and is critical of the New Laws of 1542; Mercedes Serna reads it as opposed to the ideas of Bartolomé de las Casas. The Commentaries were translated into French in 1633 and English in 1688, and Enlightenment writers such as Françoise de Graffigny and Jean-François Marmontel used them as the picture of a just state outside Christendom. After the rebellion of Túpac Amaru II (1780–81) the Spanish Crown ordered copies to be withdrawn. In 1928 Mariátegui called him “the first Peruvian”. Historians have long questioned his reliability: he idealises the Incas, writes from the side of his mother’s Cusco lineage against Atahualpa, and denies that the Incas practised human sacrifice, which archaeology has since documented.

Life & context

He was born Gómez Suárez de Figueroa in Cusco on 12 April 1539, the illegitimate son of the conquistador Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega and Isabel Chimpu Ocllo, a granddaughter of the Inca ruler Túpac Yupanqui. He grew up between his father’s house and his mother’s Inca relatives, spoke Quechua as his first language and listened to their accounts of the Inca past. His father married a Spanish woman in 1549 and died in 1559; in 1560 the son left for Spain and never returned. In Madrid he asked the Crown in vain for a reward for his father’s services, partly because his father had sided with the rebel Gonzalo Pizarro at the battle of Huarina (1547). In Spain he took his father’s name and later added “Inca” to it. He served as a captain in the war against the Morisco uprising in the Alpujarras, then lived in Montilla and from 1591 in Córdoba, where he took minor orders. His first book was a Spanish translation of León Hebreo’s Neoplatonic Dialogues of Love (1590), followed by La Florida del Inca (1605) on Hernando de Soto’s expedition and the first part of the Royal Commentaries (Lisbon, 1609). He died in Córdoba on 23 April 1616; the second part, the General History of Peru, appeared in 1617.

Further main works

• Translation of León Hebreo, Dialogues of Love (La traduzion del Indio de los tres Dialogos de Amor, 1590)
• La Florida del Inca (1605)
• General History of Peru (Historia general del Perú, 1617)