Measuring the New World by Neil Safier;

Author:Neil Safier;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 46. The “Resumen historico del origen, y succession de los Incas, y demas soberanos del Perù” was published as part of the Relación histórica del viage a la América meridional (1748), and was designed not only to recount the history of the Inca empire but also to legitimate the “other sovereigns of Peru,” the Spanish kings. The Incas are pictured in this frontispiece alongside their later “successors,” and are portrayed as noble precursors to Spanish rule. The sole exception is Atahuallpa, who is shown holding his axe horizontally (unlike the other Incas, who hold their arms upright) as he gazes upward with envy at his half-brother Huascar. The Spaniards portrayed Atahuallpa’s usurpation of his brother’s rule as treacherous, which further legitimated Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru. Ferdinand VI, recently installed on the Spanish throne, is at the center of the image. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, R.I.

The source for Ulloa’s account was Garcilaso de la Vega’s Primera parte de los Comentarios reales (1609), a text that set out to revise the earliest accounts of the Inca empire and was also, ironically for Ulloa’s purposes, a subtle critique of Spanish colonial administration in the New World. Born in Cuzco, the cultural and political center of the vanquished Inca empire, Garcilaso (1539–1616) became the most renowned and respected author of Incan history in the seventeenth century. Despite having left the Andes at the age of twenty-one to take up residence in Spain, he boastfully asserted in his account that he was the only person capable of reproducing “clearly and distinctively . . . what existed in that [Incan] republic prior to the Spaniards’ [arrival].”2 Garcilaso “the Inca” (used to distinguish him from the homonymous poet of the Spanish Golden Age, to whom he was in fact related) offered a utopian portrayal of the Incas that emphasized the sophisticated system of political and military control that had emerged under their rule. As a mestizo—in this case, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Incan “princess of the Sun”—Garcilaso had sought to record the traditions of his Andean ancestors for a Spanish audience.3 His text chronicling Inca expansion began with the mythic birth of two “children of the sun” on the shores of Lake Titicaca and moved through the peaks and valleys of the Andean cordillera, as the numerous followers of the Incas brought an ever-growing number of disparate tribes and peoples under their dominion. Most importantly, the Comentarios reales described the extraordinary economic and agricultural structures put into place by Garcilaso’s Andean forebears: an imperial organization that provided amply for its citizens while safeguarding their political rights under a prosperous and enlightened hereditary monarchy.

But the seventeenth-century mestizo would never have imagined the extent to which the “true meaning” (verdadero sentido) of his account was to change language, form, and content in the editions and translations that followed, nor how it might be appropriated for ends far different from what he or his contemporaries had intended.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.