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I had prefaced my quick trip to Peru with a biography of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and on my way back from Peru I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of his history of the Incas.
Reading a book I’d already had the presumption to summarise and write about was interesting. There were no grand surprises, but I did find that de la Vega’s history of the Incas was not exactly the book I had expected it to be.
De la Vega was born to an Inca princess in Cusco. That makes him a part of the Cusco bloodline. For most of Inca history there had been only one bloodline, but the eleventh Inca emperor, Huaina Capac, had split this line in two, by dividing his lands between two of his many sons. After Capac’s death the sons, Atahualpa of Quito and Huascar of Cusco had fought each other for control of the empire, and in doing so had weakened the empire enough that a ragtag band of Spanish mercenaries could conquer it all in a few short years.
Atahualpa had won the civil war but had been killed by the Spaniards. His kingdom in Quito had been razed to ashes. Huascar had also been killed (by Atahualpa’s men) but Cusco had escaped complete destruction, and so the last remnants of the Incas were those of Huascar’s court, who considered Atahualpa a bastard and a traitor. This was de la Vega’s heritage. The stories taught to him by uncles and other nobles who had witnessed the fall of Cusco, first to Quito and then to Spain, were loaded with hatred for Atahualpa.
In these stories Atahualpa stormed Cusco in a single act of treachery, and set to work butchering the nobles of Cusco. By contrast, the wikipedia-style histories that I had previously read suggested that Huascar, something of a brat of a crown-prince, had made war on his father’s favourite, Atahualpa. Atahualpa had won the war largely due to the experience of his father’s troops, who had been fighting on the frontiers of the empire for decades.
It is almost impossible to tell where the truth lies, and this is the dominant thing I felt while reading de la Vega’s histories. The Incas left no written records (the nearest thing they had was a sophisticated systems of knots tied in pieces of cord, but this was largely used in mathematical capacities), and the Spanish records are far from accurate, bearing the heavy hand of Spaniards trying to justify their greedy, cruel actions, as well as the biases of the translators and allies they recruited or conscripted along the way.
What we know of the Incas, then, is a history written by its losers, by the remnants of an empire that rose and fell with incredible speed, an empire that, as it approached its last days, was filled with melancholy omens and portents of impending doom. The sense of hopelessness and despair that overtook the empire has seeped into its history.
What does come through quite clearly is the consuming greed of the conquistadors, and their disregard for human life and dignity. De la Vega finds justification for the conquest in its bringing of Catholicism to the Americas. He was a man of the church and for him no other justification was needed; it balances his history by finding the positive and negative in all involved.
If however, the bringing of Christianity – and this particularly vitriolic and remorseless branch of Christianity – to the Americas is not taken as an unquestionably good thing, then there is really no justification left for the actions of the conquistadors. The Inca empire was, to me, an in bred family of despots ruling with a heavy hand over their conquered territories, but they were no worse than the corrupt, bloodthirsty empire that overtook them. Their religion was in some respects monotheistic, and according to de la Vega, was moving away from worship of the sun and other objects and towards more metaphysical speculation. If the God of Europe really wanted to be worshipped by the Incas, it seems like he was taking steps to achieve this, without the need for gunpowder, smallpox or the other tools of conquest.
Having read de la Vega’s histories I know more about how the Inca’s built roads and bridges, and celebrated festivals and so on, but more than anything I feel like I’ve caught a glimpse of the protean, unstable nature of history, and of everything that we take, or pass off, as concrete fact.
My ninetieth day in Bolivia will mark the halfway point of my time there. It will also signify that I need to get out; to briefly cross the border – any border – so I can start the baroque 30 days + 30 days + 30 days Bolivian visa process again.
I find myself reluctant to leave Bolivia and Sucre, even for a short time. There is much to be done here and I have only begun to do it. It doesn’t feel like the time to be travelling. And yet, in my three months in Bolivia I’ve seen a grand total of three towns. So the time has come to expand my horizons; I’m off to Lake Titicaca, straddling the Bolivia/Peru border. And I’m going to drop by La Paz too, where I hear there is amazing Lebanese food.
In preparation for the forthcoming crossing into Peru, here is a short article that doesn’t even mention Bolivia or Sucre, but does talk about a guy who gave his name to a street, a district, and a sporting complex here. I’ve been writing articles about anyone and anything, building a database of information for Condortrekkers to use for promotional and training, and for other generally erudite purposes. Here is the first of many that will be pasted into this blog…
Given that he spent more than fifty years of his life living in Europe, it is remarkable that ‘El Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega is so widely regarded and esteemed in South America. Given his lifelong struggle for legitimacy and recognition, and the symbolic relevance of this struggle today, it isn’t so surprising at all that all over the Americas, and particularly in the Andean lands of the Incas, you can find streets and districts, universities and stadiums dedicated to him.
The question of legitimacy hung over de la Vega’s life from the time of his birth in Cusco in 1539. The firstborn son of a somewhat nefarious conquistador and an Inca princess made concubine, he was one of the first Peruvian mestizos, and received an education that included his father’s native tongue of Castillian and his mother’s, Quechua.
Despite his mother’s royal lineage, she was later married off to a commoner so his father could marry a Spanish woman. In spite of this seeming abandonment, his father’s will later provided sufficient funds for de la Vega to complete his education in Europe. At the age of 21 he set sail for Spain. He would never see his homeland again.
There was a great deal of strife in the new Spanish colonnies of the 16th century. When de la Vega arrived in Spain he found that his noble heritage counted for nothing, as mixed marriages were not recognised in Spain. His father’s swashbuckling reputation did nothing to advance his cause either. Proud of all of his heritage, de la Vega fought futilely to rehabilitate his father’s name and reputation, even as he took on the nickname ‘El Inca’. Although he received the rank of captain during his short military career, he remained an outsider, living with relatives in Andalucia and never gaining proper acceptance at the court.
In 1572 de la Vega inherited money from these relatives, and finally had the means to return to Peru. By this time, however, the rebellion and execution of Tupac Amaru made it dangerous for anyone of royal Inca heritage to be seen in Peru.
Caught between two unaccepting worlds, de la Vega turned his attention to literature and study. In this field he could express his defiance of the institutions around him, translating for instance a Renaissance Italian work that was partially banned by the Inquisition. His translation was also banned.
De la Vega’s most famous writings were La Florida del Inca and Comentarios Reales de los Incas. The first of these was an epic tale of conquistadores in what is today the south-east of the USA. In it the conquistadores are portrayed as grand and heroic figures, while the indigenous people are portrayed as noble pagans, like the ancient Greeks and Romans.
In his two-volume Comentarios – his best known work – de la Vega laid out the history of the Incas before and after Spanish conquest. His sources were accounts sent from Peru and memories of the tales told to him while growing up in Peru. His account of the Inca empire spoke of a well-run, civilised and efficient state, again similar to Rome. The great weakness of the empire, he wrote, was that it wasn’t Christian, and for the bringing of Christianity to the new world he praised the Spanish. Still, in spite of these two noble peoples, something had gone profoundly wrong, and de la Vega’s account of colonial Peru did not shy away from this glaring reality.
To rectify the profound problems of the Spanish colonies, de la Vega argued, a new approach was needed that recognised the language and culture of both the Spanish and indigenous people. The colonies needed to be ruled by people sympathetic to both groups (such as de la Vega). Against the prevailing attitudes of the time, he wrote of the need for integration and understanding, ideas centuries ahead of their time.
These ideas were to little avail, though, and Comentarios was officially banned, not to be re-printed until the 19th century. De la Vega spent the remainder of his life petitioning for royal recognition, and for the publication of his writings.
De la Vega died in Spain in 1616, largely unappreciated, but destined to become one of the heroes of the Latin America struggle for legitimacy and recognition in the post-colonial world.
(I wrote up another article after reading the Comentarios Reales. You can read it here.)
