The Creation of Inca History: Garcilaso De La Vega

“Having now related the lives of twelve Inca kings who created and governed the ancient Empire of Peru, from its beginnings till its end; having given ample description of their conquests, their generous actions, their government in peace and in war, and of the idolatry that they practiced in their ignorance of our holy religion, I have thus paid the debt that I owed to my country and to my maternal ancestors.” – Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales de los Incas, (1609).

Inca social status and cosmology changed irrevocably after their empire fell to the Spanish. Inca concerns living in the Spanish colonial empire can be deduced through close readings of sixteenth century sources. Both Spanish and Inca authors wrote within a specific political climate, and their writings tell of the relationships between Incas and the Spanish. Depictions of Inca rule for political purposes served individual authors own interests. Inca history in the sixteenth century was written by both its defenders and its detractors. As Julien writes in Reading Inca History, the Incas do have a history. In the form that has been passed down to modern times, this history was born in the sixteenth century as witnessed in the writings of Juan de Betanzos and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega moved to Spain at the age of 21 and never returned to his Peruvian homeland. When he wrote of the Inca empire in Comentarios Reales de los Incas, his call to knowledge still stemmed from his claim to being Inca. Prior to his manuscript, preciously little had been written about the Incas and this was the first author of Inca heritage. Because he “grew up Inca” Garcilaso accessed his childhood memories of the stories told by his elders and general first-hand knowledge as a cultural insider.

When writing Comentarios Reales de los Incas he carefully marketed his own authenticity and uniqueness as being a descendant of both Inca and Spanish elites as seen in the quote above. Born of Spanish aristocratic and royal Inca roots, Inca Garcilaso de las Vega was the son of Spanish conquistador Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas who served as corregidor of Cuzco and Isabel Suárez Chimpu Ocllo (also known as Palla Chimpu Ocllo), the daughter of Tupac Huallpa and granddaughter of Tupac Inca Yupanqui. Thus his manuscript claimed both cultural authenticity and political legitimization.

For Garcilaso a primary concern was the method by which he could present the Inca empire as civilized to a European audience. He must have well understood European culture after several decades of living in Spain. His text is firmly placed in the territory of defending the Inca status in the face of Spanish justification of the conquest. An interesting view presented by Garcilaso is that the Incas “prepared” the Indians for the arrival of the Spanish and Christianity. This justification again returns to issues of legitimate rule but also fits within European conceptions of a universal history and biblical progression. Garcilaso clearly was not in any means anti-colonialist or anti-Spanish. Instead he tried to justify the Incas as having held legitimate rule during their time and as a class of people within colonial society worthy of special recognition.

The Inca theater created by Garcilaso was built in response to Spanish attitudes exemplified in Sarmiento’s biting account of the tyranny of the Incas. Sarmiento divided the history of the Incas into three stages. The first was a utopian barbarism, a peaceful freedom where the Indians lived as a timid, innocent, naively ignorant people. The second stage was the invasive and tyrannical rule of the Incas, who roughly subordinated the local populations. The third stage was the arrival of the Spanish, who liberated the Indians from the yoke of the Incas and brought enlightenment. Sarmiento’s vision of the pre-Inca past was a deliberate falsification, his story of Inca rule possibly accurate but distorted to fit his political motivations, and his third stage of Spanish liberation is still being debated within a different set of assumptions.

Garcilaso recounts a conveniently altered story of the Incas. He presents the Incas as having been chosen by the “father” – the sun – to bring civilization to wild and barbaric peoples in the Andes. Whether this is an accurate parallel with Inca origin legends is doubtful. According to Garcilaso the Incas spread this “information” brought by the word of the father sun to all and “[t]the savages to whom they spoke these promising words marveled as much at what they saw as at what they heard” because the Incas were dressed in finery provided by the sun himself. (Garcilaso, p 45) Cuzco itself is represented by Garcilaso as having been built by the necessary tasks distributed by the first ruling Incas.

Although in historical reality highly unlikely, the story includes nothing about warfare as a means of initial submission of subject peoples in the Cuzco region. The benefits brought by the Incas spread through word of mouth to other groups in the region. He goes as far as explaining that the rule of the land which seemed barbaric to Sarmiento and other Spaniards of similar mindset served the purpose of an equitably distributed legal system that Inca subjects came to follow. Thus, although it was more than thirteen hundred leagues long, and comprised a great variety of peoples and tongues, ancient Peru, thanks to the uniformity of its legislation, was as simply governed as any home.” (Garcilaso, p 59) Garcilaso presents this story as told by an elder rather than by himself, emphasizing his own authenticity and placing the burden of proof onto those who should have known better even than himself.

The assumption was that a just and equitable polity must be Christian, which served to distort historical accounts. The big question that reigned in Spain during the sixteenth century was whether a nation can legitimately go to war in order to liberate a people from tyrannical rule. Thus Sarmiento’s wrote out of the perspective that the Incas were unnatural, tyrannical rulers who the Spanish justly overthrew and consequently freed the peoples of the Inca empire. This view was adopted by some Spaniards, including Viceroy Toledo. Another school of thought argued against the right of Spain to imperial rule. Garcilaso fed this neoplatonistic view from the very beginning of his text when he emphasizes the proto-Christianity of the Incas through their higher calling from the sun (metaphorically representing God).

Garcilaso explains that Manco Capac’s claim to be a son of the father sun was a device invented in order to call to himself the following of the simplistic barbarians as a tool for bringing them a more civilized world. The debate over legitimate government was over by the end of the sixteenth century, but a notable lasting effect was the inability of Spaniard to take Indians as formal slaves since this would immediately negate any statement of Spanish liberation. The residents of the former Inca empire were vassals of the crown, the basic premise that enabled Inca culture to continue evolving partially independently even under Spanish rule.

Spanish conceptions of bringing just rule are fed by Garcilaso through multiple references to the cruelty of Atahuallpa, the last reigning Inca lord executed by the Spanish during their conquest of the Inca empire. If The Royal Commentaries possess the dream-like quality of a Renaissance fable, reminiscent of Utopia or The City of the Sun, the General History is filled with all the clamour of arms and human passion of the chronicles of Froissart and Commines.” (Brading, p 9) Whether his distortions are fully self-realized or simply common Inca convention by Garcilaso’s time is uncertain, but through his efforts they were certainly affirmed. In a sense, all the Inca lords were just and good with the exception of this Atahuallpa who stole the throne from his father.

While Sarmiento argued that the Inca claim to rule their empire was based solely on military might, Garcilaso placed them firmly in a realm of bringing civilization and divinity to pre-Inca barbarian groups. In doing so, he did not deny or argue against Spanish rule. Inca civilization was an intermediary stage preparing the so-called barbarians for the enlightenment that the Spanish brought with them. Garcilaso’s powerful rhetorical device was to present Manco Capac as bringing good government, culture, and other virtuous qualities to savages. The argument is parallel to that of Sarmiento, except here the Incas replace the Spanish in the presentation of a legitimate claim to Inca rule using a method digestible to European readers.

To reach this conclusion, Garcilaso indirectly but fundamentally Christianized Inca religious practices in accordance with Thomas Aquina’s classic view that “…sacred doctrine also uses human reason. It does so not to prove the faith – for that would detract from the merit of faith – but to clarify some of its implications. Therefore, since grace protects nature rather than erasing it, natural reason should serve faith just as the natural inclination of the will obeys love. … Thus sacred doctrine appeals to the authority of philosophers in those areas where they were able to arrive at the truth through natural reason.” So for example, young men of royal blood went through a schooling or initiation process to become huaracu (equated with European knights).

“Every day, one of the captains or teachers in this school … taught them everything in the way of moral philosophy that a people who believe themselves to be of divine essence, descended from heaven, can have attained to.” (Garcilaso, p 227) The basic assumption of Garcilaso was that both the Inca and the Spanish were good, but that other Indians were bad. Through exercise of reason the Incas practiced a natural religion that was evidence of the function of God within their empire. Garcilaso lists evidence of the generosity of Inca culture (proof of the function of God’s divine light) as witnessed in the distribution of communal food, the Inca storage systems that spread food and other necessities to ensure everyone sustainability, and deliberately applied labor service in favor of other forms of taxation.

On another level, he also argues against the Spanish king in favor of the conquistadors because his father was one of them. Of the first Spaniards to arrive at the Inca doorstep, he writes: “Nothing discouraged them, nothing repelled them, nothing exhausted them. Neither hunger, nor danger, nor wounds, nor sickness, nor bad days and even worse nights, could keep them from pushing constantly forward, over land and sea, in search of the unheard-of feats that, for all time, have left a halo of glory around their names. (p 364)”

Garcilaso’s second text General History of Peru is directed at glorifying the conquistadors, comparing them even to the glory of Alexander the Great and Caesar at great expense of factual information and obvious analytical distortion. The conquistadors were the land-owning encomendero elite, who struggled after the Spanish crown changed its policy of colonial government to favor bureaucracy instead of the earlier system of plantation-style land management. At the same time, Garcilaso was a mestizo (mixed descendant of a Spaniard and Inca) and witnessed this growing marginalized group who neither inherited their Spanish father’s lands nor the continuing higher social status of Inca society. His political alignment was obviously with the conquistadors.

The distortion of Garcilaso’s viewpoint is to favor the Incas as a series of philosopher-kings holding legitimate rule. Garcilaso’s purpose with Comentarios Reales de los Incas was not to write an accurate history of the Incas, but to defend and justify their rule. This would be especially important to someone descending from the old Inca elite because he still held a higher status level within Spanish society and had reason to continue encouraging the Spanish crown to provide special allowances such as exemption from tribute.

In rewriting Inca history to suit his own ends, Garcilaso was careful not to write anything directly offensive to Spain. He claimed to translate Inca society for the Spanish in order to dispel wrongful information. To a highly legalistic, Catholic society the manuscript presented the Incas on familiar, European territory of law, order, and religion so that the Inca empire could be read as a “civilized nation.” Spanish conquest and rule was simply a natural progression in Garcilaso’s history of the Incas.

REFERENCES:

Betanzos, Juan de. 1576. Narrative of the Incas. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Julien, Catherine. 2000. Reading Inca History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Vega, Garcilaso de la. 1609. Royal Commentaries of the Incas, and General History of Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994, c1966.

Brading, D.A. The Incas and the Renaissance: The Royal Commentaries of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Journal of Latin America Studies 18, p 1-23.

Covey, R. Alan. Chronology, Succession and Sovereignty: The Politics of Inka Historiography and Its Modern Interpretation. Society for Comparative Study of Society and History (2006) p 169-199.

MacCormack, Sabine. History, Historical Record, and Ceremonial Action: Incas and Spaniards in Cuzco. Society for Comparative Study of Society and History (2001) p 329-363.