Garcilaso Inca de la Vega

An American Humanist, A Tribute to José Durand

José Anadón, José Anadón

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780268045531
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Sixteenth-century historian Garcilaso Inca de la Vega had a unique view of the ancient Inca Empire and the Americas. A Peruvian mestizo who emigrated to Spain, he was the first writer to envision Latin America as a multiethnic continent, and he advanced a humanist interpretation of New World history that continues to enrich our appreciation of that era.

Widely read and translated, Garcilaso is a key figure for understanding the development of mestizo culture in Latin America and his works have sparked many heated debates. This new collection of articles advances that discussion through contributions by twelve distinguished scholars who review central aspects of Garcilaso's life and work from the perspectives of history, linguistics, literary theory, and anthropology. These essays explore the complex intertextual threads which weave through Garcilaso's principal writings. Some examine the relationship of his work with the canon of European historiography, while others stress its link with Andean culture; still others focus on the puzzles presented by his use of self-representation.Many of the articles offer fresh readings of Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries and include not only textual analyses of key themes but also a reassessment of Inca political organization. Other contributions address his Florida of the Inca, focusing on such aspects as its discourse and dating. Together, all the essays demonstrate that Garcilaso scholarship continues to be receptive to new critical approaches.

Assembled as a tribute to José Durand, whose life-long study of Garcilaso renewed scholarly understanding of the historian's work, Garcilaso Inca de la Vega is a valuable collection for anyone interested in the history of North and South America or the rise of mestizo culture. It contributes significantly to current studies in multiculturalism as it renews our appreciation for one of its earliest proponents.

One

SABINE MACCORMACK

The Incas and Rome

WHEN GARCILASO DE LA VEGA WROTE in the preface to the Royal Commentaries that his home was “the city of Cuzco, which was another Rome in that Empire,”¹ he was drawing on a tradition that was by then well established in historical writing about the Incas. Rome had been present in the minds of the very first invaders while they made their way south from Panama. It was the memory of the Roman conquest and government of Spain that made the Incas recognizable as rulers of an empire and as exponents of a culture that was, as the Spanish invaders came to perceive it, in every sense distinct from surrounding cultures. Even though it took some years before the Spanish were able to explain precisely how the Incas differed from their neighbors, the existence of such a difference was noted from the very beginning. Miguel de Estete, a member of Francisco Pizarro’s invading force, wrote the following about his own first glimpse of the Incas at Tumbez:

From this settlement begins the peaceful dominion of the lords of Cuzco and the good land. For although the lords further back and the lord of Tumbala, who was a man of note, were subject to the Inca, it was not as peaceful as from here onward. For those lords only recognized the Incas and offered a certain tribute, but no more; from here onward, however, they were all very obedient vassals. (Estete 1924, 20)

Soon after, Estete noticed that in many other settlements there were “governors and judicial officers who had been installed by that great lord” Atahualpa (21), and who received their orders from the center of the empire in Cuzco:

This city of Cuzco was the head of all these kingdoms, where the rulers normally resided. Four roads converged there and formed a cross, coming from four subject kingdoms or provinces of considerable size, which were ruled by the Incas, and which were called Chinchasuyo, Collasuyo, Andisuyo and Condesuyo. These provinces rendered their tribute here in Cuzco, and in Cuzco was established the imperial seat. (48)

For sixteenth-century Europeans, the “imperial seat” par excellence was still Rome, the city which had ruled the world in classical antiquity. At the very time when the Spaniards in the Andes were learning about the roads of the Incas which all led to Cuzco, scholars in Europe were studying the roads that had once led to Rome. Printed editions of ancient itineraries helped to trace Roman roads on an imperial scale,² while in a more regional context, in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany, historians and antiquarians collected inscriptions from Roman milestones in order to understand the configuration of these lands at the time when they had been provinces of the Roman Empire. The very term “province” that Estete used to describe the four parts of the empire of the Incas had a Roman sound. As the lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias wrote in his dictionary of 1611,

Province. It is an extended territory, and in antiquity, in the time of the Romans, [the provinces] were the conquered regions outside Italy, provincia in Latin, that is to say, conquered and distant. They sent governors to these provinces, and because nowadays we call this an office, provincia (in Latin) signified an office. (Covarrubias 1994)

Some years after Estete wrote his memoir of the Spanish invasion of Perú, Pedro Cieza de León, who devoted most of his adult life to studying the Incas and their empire, likewise used Rome as a paradigm by which to explain the Incas. But for Cieza the comparison went beyond visible phenomena such as roads, government officials, and the capital city of Cuzco, because he wanted to understand why the Inca government had worked so much better than the Spanish government in the Perú that he observed in his own day. The Incas, Cieza thought, had been extraordinarily efficient and absolutely incorruptible. Their wars were just in the same sense that Roman wars had been just, and the Inca administrative system invariably worked perfectly. The Inca store-houses, for example, were always filled with all manner of supplies for war and peace:

When thus the Inca was lodged in his dwelling and the men of war had been accommodated, there was never lacking so much as one single item, however large or small, with which to supply them all. But if there occurred in the vicinity any kind of uproar or theft, the (offenders) were punished immediately and with great severity. In this matter, the Inca lords adhered so closely to justice that they would not have omitted exacting punishment, even if it had been upon their own sons. (Cieza de León 1986, 144)

The cultivated sixteenth-century reader would here remember stories about the heroic severity of Rome’s founding fathers: how, according to the historians Sallust and Livy, military leaders would punish their sons for engaging the enemy contrary to orders, even if the engagement had been successful; and how, according to Livy and Rome’s greatest poet, Vergil, the first consul Brutus had executed his sons for conspiring against the young Republic.³ At issue in Cieza’s view of the Incas was thus not merely Roman antecedents for Inca imperial road construction and urban architecture, an imperial iconography, as it were, but the moral fiber of the Inca state. Inca imperialism could be recognizable as a positive cultural, religious, and political force because it was explicable by reference to Roman antecedents. The central issue here was not whether the Romans were superior, for Cieza did not suggest this; for him, the crux of the matter was rather that empires were good, and therefore, the Inca Empire had been a good thing.

Not only Estete and Cieza, but also Francisco López de Gómara, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Agustín de Zárate, and even Juan de Betanzos compared aspects of Inca government, culture, and religion to Roman equivalents. The Inca Chosen Women of the Sun were likened to Roman Vestal Virgins, and in more general terms, the Inca religion was in some sense thought to resemble the religions of the gentiles of antiquity, in particular that of the Romans. In addition, Domingo de Santo Tomás, author of the first Quechua lexicon and grammar, thought that the language of the Incas was like Latin, and thus explained the grammatical and syntactical structures of Quechua by reference to Latin equivalents as described in Antonio Nebrija’s Introductiones latinae.⁴ These and other comparisons continued to be drawn throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, in 1575 the Augustinian friar Jerónimo Román published, in two heavy folio volumes, a treatise on the Republics of the World, the very title and arrangement of which articulate the thesis that cultures can be compared on the basis of their deities, sacrifices, temples, rites of marriage and burial, their methods of designating kings and nobles, their legal systems and manner of going to war, their pursuit of science and the liberal and mechanical arts, and finally, their calendars, mode of dress, and manner of celebrating festivals. Garcilaso cited Román’s work, and he also knew the more famous comparative treatise on the republics of the world by Giovanni Botero.⁵ At the same time, however, Garcilaso thought that “all comparisons are odious” (Garcilaso 1966/1, I, XIX, 51), since his primary interest was to write the history of the Incas and of the invasion and conquest of their empire by the Spanish. Yet, thoughts of Rome pervade his entire work.

As we know from the inventory of Garcilaso’s library, which was published by José Durand (1948, 239–264; 1949a, 166–170), Garcilaso owned copies of all the major historians of classical antiquity, including the ones to whom Cieza alluded. But by the time Garcilaso wrote his Royal Commentaries, at the end of the sixteenth century and during the first years of the seventeenth, the situation in Perú was very different from what Cieza had observed. The activities of Spanish officials both at central and local levels, the progress of evangelization, and the policy of resettlement that had affected all but the most remote Andean communities, had conspired to create a society in which the Incas had become a memory rather than a reality that loomed into the present from a recent but still tangible past. The Incas had become, as Garcilaso so movingly expressed it, a “memoria del bien perdido,” a memory of the good that has been lost (Garcilaso 1966/1, I, XV, 41). Perhaps it is true that in coining this memorable phrase, Garcilaso was grieving over his own lost childhood and over the life that he was not able to live in the land of his maternal forebears (Hernández 1993). What is not true—and this is what I hope to prove—is that Garcilaso wrote an imagined, fictionalized history of the Incas, a work in which the self-referential memory and imagination of the historian prevailed over the collective experience of a multitude of people.⁶ What speaks against such a view, although it has been frequently expressed, is not merely the demonstrable care with which Garcilaso treated the writings of earlier historians of the Incas, the effort he expended on collecting his own documentation, and his interest in problems of translation from Quechua into Spanish,⁷ but also his profound engagement with the historians of classical antiquity whose works crowded the shelves of his library (on Garcilaso’s use of Livy, see Pailler 1992, 207–235).

The historians whose ideas and themes resonate in Garcilaso’s writing—Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, and from the post-Roman period, Isidore of Seville—wrote to reveal, in Cicero’s famous phrase, “the light of truth” (Cicero 1976, 2.9.36), where truth is inseparable from the moral dimensions that may be discerned in human action and in historical processes. When, for example, Polybius explained to his Greek readers the functioning of Roman military organization, his theme was not merely how one might organize an army, although this aspect of his work attracted a good deal of practically motivated interest from Garcilaso’s contemporaries (Momigliano 1975, 79–98). He was rather explaining “how and thanks to what kind of constitution” Rome had arrived at world dominion (Walbank 1972, 130 ff.), and he repeatedly emphasized the connection between the moral sobriety and severity of the Romans and their stunning success. Garcilaso pursued a similar theme. Thus, where Polybius had commented on the speedy and efficacious quality of Roman military justice, Garcilaso drew attention to these same features in the judicial system of the Incas.⁸ Simultaneously, he described the dispensation of justice among the Incas as being embedded in the very ordering of society. To drive home the point, Garcilaso chose Roman terminology when explaining the decimal organization of Inca society. According to Polybius and others, the smallest unit in the Roman cavalry, a group of ten, was headed by a decurion. The councillors of Roman municipalities were likewise described as decuriones, as were the officials of Roman professional and religious associations. This was therefore the term that Garcilaso chose in his description of the Inca decimal organization: the head of each group of ten, who was responsible for his group’s material and moral well-being, and who simultaneously acted as judge for them, was a “decurion.”⁹

On several occasions, Garcilaso commented on the titles of Inca rulers. Here also, he used Roman antecedents in order to articulate Inca thought and government, while at the same time discussing dimensions of Inca political culture that were not so readily translatable. The third Inca ruler was Lloque Yupanqui.

His proper name was Lloque, which is to say left-handed. The neglect of his tutors in raising him, which produced his left-handedness, led to this name. The name Yupanqui was given to him for his virtues and deeds. In order to show some of the ways of speaking which the Indians of Perú followed in their general language, it should be noted that this expression yupanqui is a verb, second person singular future perfect indicative, to wit “you shall have told.” In this verb, thus simply stated, they enclose and express all the good things that can be told of a prince, as if to say, you shall tell his great deeds, his excellent virtues, clemency, piety and gentleness.¹⁰

As viewed by Garcilaso, the title Yupanqui, “you shall have told,” enshrined a twofold content: on the one hand, it denoted the deeds and virtues of an exemplary Inca ruler, while on the other it indicated the task of the quipucamayos, “remembrancers,” and the amautas, “philosophers and wise men,” who recounted these deeds and virtues in the form of “traditions” and “historical narratives” for all to learn and remember.¹¹ Garcilaso repeatedly commented on the economy and elegance of the Quechua language, which did not always lend itself to readily intelligible translations into Spanish, the title Yupanqui being one of his several examples.¹² By contrast, the royal title Capac, which had been borne by several Inca rulers, could be translated more straight-forwardly because here Garcilaso was able to cite a directly applicable Roman antecedent:

“Capac” means rich, not in possessions, but in all the virtues that a good king can have. The Indians did not speak in this way about anyone, however great a lord he might have been, but only about their kings, so as not to make common property of the dignity that they attributed to their Incas. For this they held to be sacrilege. It would seem that these names resemble the name of Augustus, which the Romans gave to Octavian Caesar for his virtues. For when such a name is given to an individual who is not an emperor or great king, it loses all the majesty contained in it.¹³

How Octavian Caesar came by the title Augustus is recounted by the imperial biographer Suetonius, whose works Garcilaso owned. Like Garcilaso, Suetonius had been interested in how a title enhanced the bearer’s dignity, and in how it could do this only when it was appropriately bestowed:

Some people thought that [Octavian] ought to be called Romulus, for being also a founder of the city, but the idea prevailed that he should rather be called Augustus, this being both a new and also a more noble title, because holy places and places in which something is consecrated by the ritual of the augurs are called “august,” from the increase in dignity … as Ennius shows when he writes: “After glorious Rome was raised by august augury.” (Suetonius 1989, 2.7.2)

An august place, or person or prophecy can be matched in Quechua by expressions such as the kapac huaci or “palace,” a kapac yahuarniyoc or “person of royal blood,” and by the verb kapacchacuni, “to make oneself different or noble” or “to raise someone as noble” (González Holguín 1952, 134–135; for chacu, p. 91). The name Caesar Augustus was thus a direct analogue to the name of the Inca ruler Manco Capac, the originator of the Inca lineage, whom Garcilaso and others described as the son of the Sun and founder of the city of Cuzco.¹⁴

Much thought had been given by the ancient historians, whose works Garcilaso owned, to the question of the origins of human society. Whereas the Bible, as well as the Greek poet Hesiod, had posited a golden age in the past, from which all subsequent human development was a falling away, historians often thought of an evolution in the opposite direction, from primitive savagery to civilization. Livy thus described how Romulus had founded Rome as a refuge for “an undifferentiated crowd of free men and slaves” (Livy 1988, 1.8.6) whom he invited to gather in his city, and how he then forged an ordered society from such unpromising beginnings. Cicero had a more idealized view of the origins of society, although in outline, the development from social disorder to civilization is similar. “There was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals,” he wrote,

and they survived on wild plants. They did nothing by the reason of their minds, but acted mostly by strength of body. No order of religious worship or of human obligation was as yet observed, no one had seen legi...