An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru (original) (raw)

Review/Reseña Exploding Official Accounts of the Spanish Conquest of Peru

2010

This important book will fundamentally change how scholars look at proto-colonial Peru. It offers new ways of reading the relevant documents and new insights into all of the important events between 1532 and 1549. Lamana's basic goal is to interrupt the "narcotic effect" of traditional histories that exclude everything but Spanish military victories from their frame. Subordinated details such as books that were expected to talk, predatory horses, and Inca military campaigns that attacked only on nights of the waxing moon open up alternative contending logics during the Spanish invasion. Whereas many scholars have demonstrated the ongoing

The Quito Manuscript: An Inca History Preserved by Fernando de Montesinos

The Quito Manuscript: An Inca History Preserved by Fernando de Montesinos. By Sabine Hyland (New Haven, CT: Peabody Museum, Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 2007). Reviewed by Thomas Whigham, Professor of History, University of Georgia. In Ethnohistory, 56:2, Spring 2009; pp. 349 – 351. The term “conquest”, as applied to the early Spanish experience in the New World, suggests a precipitous event in which native empires yielded to European interlopers after a sharp, decisive struggle. In fact, the elaboration of a new colonial regime in the Americas took many years to accomplish, and because it was erected upon the ruins of complex Indian civilizations – with their own histories and traditions – it necessarily proved incomplete and artificial. Many elements of the old order regularly percolated through from the bottom rungs of society. These filled the conquered peoples with a sense of identity that, if it was not loudly proclaimed, nonetheless always asserted itself. The colonial masters, for their part, felt safe in the assumption that history is written by the winners; they thus felt comfortable in dispensing with all native superstitions, stories and accounts of past heroes. Such blather, they felt was retrograde and childlike at best, sacrilegious at worst, and in any case worthy only of suppression. Because the Spaniards took this duty seriously, the Indian “voice” usually speaks to us from the past only in highly modified form, except in a very few cases. This, just perhaps, is one of them. In the early 1640s, the Spanish priest Fernando de Montesinos assembled the five-volume Memorias antiguas i nuevas del Pirú, a magisterial study of all the things that he had seen and learned while on a fifteen-year sojourn in the Andean provinces. The work was encyclopedic. It included extensive information on Peruvian flora and fauna, the region’s mineral wealth, and the history of Pizarro’s victory over the Inca Atahuallpa a century before. Montesinos had hoped that when the manuscript was published, its Spanish readers would respond enthusiastically to his intricate descriptions of a curious land and particularly to his principal thesis: that Peru bore an uncanny, and perhaps not coincidental, resemblance to the Old Testament Ophir. Unfortunately for the priest, he found no patron to finance the publication of his work, which, after his death in 1653, made its way unnoticed into the extensive collections of the Real Academia in Madrid. There it lingered unmolested and unnoticed until the nineteenth century, when scholars who were looking for other materials chanced upon it by accident. Ironically for Montesinos, his entire work has yet to be published even today. His contention about a “Spanish Ophir” never found any support from modern Andeanists, who tend to find his anti-Indian diatribes both distasteful and ill-informed. Yet, Book 2 of the work nonetheless excited considerable interest. No wonder – it contained a remarkable set of Incan myths and histories that were known from no other account. Because these stories contradicted the standard Cuzco-based version of Incan origins, they tended to be rejected by many historians, who pointed out the sloppiness and imprecision in Montesinos’s text, which was derived from an earlier anonymous chronicler associated with the diocese of Quito. As Sabine Hyland points out in this new edition, the “Quito Manuscript” deserves to be taken seriously. Textually, it seems quite distinct from the other four volumes, which are marked by a turgid, overly-polished prose, obviously of Montesinos’s own authorship. This work, by contrast, has a more regular style, set within a unified poetical structure, similar in tone to Biblical genealogies. Its author, almost certainly, was an Indian whose original language was Quechua, for certain terms and syntactical structures make this case strongly. The Quito Manuscript is striking on several levels. It contains an extensive pre-Incaic king list that covers many centuries of political authority in Peru before the advent of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo. No matter that some of the personages it mentions are clearly mythic, the work merits attention as an indigenous response to Spanish colonialism in the years just after the conquest. Its author rejects the slander that the early kings were morally corrupt idolaters and portrays them instead as thoughtful and just rulers, honorable predecessors of the Incas, who themselves acted with greater decency and wisdom than the Spaniards. These early peoples had a writing system all their own, he insists, and this fact (questionable though it may be) placed them on par with modern Christians. The Quito Manuscript is also noteworthy for its frank discussion of sexual themes – homoeroticism, pederasty, and the “love magic” that women used to turn the men of an earlier epoch away from their bestial inclinations. These topics clearly show how the interpretation of the anonymous author reflected Christian teachings, but they are not entirely overwhelmed by them. One can sense the Andean realities – the pride – just beneath the surface. Hyland intends that we accord the Quito Manuscript a just portion of recognition. That seems an easy enough assignment, but I would likewise wish to praise the specific role she played in the process. Not only has she saved for posterity an important source on early Peru, she has effected its rescue with all the deftness of a Sherlock Holmes. She has carefully examined the various early editions, and discovered exactly where error or bowdlerization crept into them. She has made similar examinations of the extant manuscript versions. Perhaps most interesting of all, she has pondered the question of exactly who wrote the book and how it must have fallen into Montesinos’s hands in the first place. As a piece of bibliographic research, this is a very impressive study, hard to put down.

De la voz a la escritura: La "Relacion" de Titu Cusi (1570)

Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 1993

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Writing History to Reform the Empire: Religious Chroniclers in Seventeenth-Century Peru

2011

This dissertation analyzes the historical and political significance of the religious historical discourse produced in the viceroyalty of Peru between 1600 and 1682. The goal of this discourse was to respond to the fiscal pressure of the Spanish Crown on the religious Orders. Accused of being a burden to the Royal Treasury and slowing the development of colonial economy, religious scholars belonging to the four main religious Orders (Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans) based in the city of Los Reyes (Lima), created a historiographical discourse aimed at defending the missionary, historical and political achievements of their corporations. Seventeenth-century religious historiography blended the medieval religious chronicle, the Counter-reformation sermon, the Renaissance ars historica and the early modern political literature (the memorial or arbitrio), to create a unique creole version of history and colonial Catholic statecraft: the chronicle-memorial. While pushing for institutional claims of the colonial corporate Church, religious chroniclers, through the revision of colonial history, advanced the politic and economic agenda of the Peruvian benemérito elites. Thus, this work goes from the text to the social and political context that produced such historical discourse. It also tracks the efforts of the first class of Peruvian historians and political thinkers from Lima to Madrid and Rome in order to build their careers and connect with an imperial Republic of Letters. 3.3. Other Augustinian Frontiers: War, Rebel Indians and Dutch Pirates in the Works of Fray Baltasar de Campuzano (1646), Fray Bernardo de Torres (1657), Miguel de Aguirre (1647) and Fray Gaspar de Villarroel (1651) 3.3.1. The Missionary Monarchy of Fray Baltasar de Campuzano 3.3.2. Augustinian Hearts in the Frontier of Bernardo de Torres 3.3.3. Fighting Infidels and Heretics: Chile in the work of Fray Miguel de Aguirre 3.3.4. Creole Savant in the Colonial Fringe: The Voice of Fray Gaspar de Villarroel (1651) Chapter 4 4. Franciscan Family 4.1. Franciscan Beneméritos 4.2. From Hagiography to Family History: Fray Diego de Córdova and the Canonization of Francis Solano 4.2.1. Maturity works of the Franciscan Chronicler 4.3. The Creole Agenda of Fray Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova 4.3.1. The Memorial de las Historias del Nuevo Mundo Pirú (1630) 4.3.2. The Prophecy of Ezekiel: Salinas's Memorial of 1639 4.3.3. Creole Takeover of the Franciscan Province: Salinas's Memorial of 1641 in Context 4.3.4. Fray Buenaventura's last years and last work. The 1646 Memorial iii Chapter 5 5. Jesuit Revisionism 5.1. Building Jesuit Reformism. Early Memoriales and the Indian Question 5.2. Giovanni Anello Oliva, an Italian Missionary in the Andes 5.2.1. Las Casas reinterpreted. Oliva's Critique of the Spanish Conquest 5.2.2. Jesuit Martyrdoms 5.2.3. The Final Years of a Jesuit Chronicler 5.3. Bernabé Cobo and a Landscape for Political Virtue 5. 3.1. The Glory of the Spanish República 5. 4. Jesuit Coda: The Chronicle of Jacinto Barrasa Chapter 6 6. Dominican Journey: From Las Casas to Saint Rose of Lima 6.1. The Memorial of Fray Miguel de Monsalve against the Corregimientos (1604) 6.2. Limenian Nepote: Fray Cipriano de Medina y Vega. 6.3. The Memorial of Fray Antonio González de Acuña and the Dominican Creole Agenda (1659) 6.4. Limenian Upstart: Fray Juan Meléndez 6.4.1. Dominican Hagiographies 6.4.2. Las Casas Disowned: Tesoros Verdaderos de las Indias (1681-1682) iv Conclusions: The Waning of the Age of Chronicles and Memoriales 472 Bibliography 485 v List of Illustrations 1. The Virgin of Copacabana saves the life of an Indian Miner. 131 2. Martyrdom of Fray Diego Ortiz in Vilcabamba in 1571. 161 3. Saint Augustine offering the Order's heart to Peru. 182 4. Francis Solano as Patron Saint of the City of Los Reyes. 217 5. Francis Solano converting Indians in Tucumán. 6. Censured folio in Giovanni Anello Oliva's manuscript (Lima, 1630). 324