Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was born on the 12th of April 1539 in Cuzco, Peru, at one of the most turbulent crossroads in the history of the Western Hemisphere. His father was a Spanish conquistador. His mother was a princess of the Inca royal line, a granddaughter of Huayna Capac, one of the greatest rulers the Inca empire ever produced. He entered the world with two names, two languages, two worlds pulling at him from opposite directions.

  He left Peru at twenty-one and never returned. He settled in Spain, learned Latin, fought the Moors, and eventually did something no one born in the Americas had done before: he wrote works that entered the western literary canon. His histories of the Inca people became widely read across Europe, celebrated and debated in equal measure. His most famous book was later banned by a Spanish king who feared it would inspire revolution, and that fear, it turned out, was not unfounded.

  How did a man born of conquest become the first American-born author in the western canon? What did he choose to tell, and what did he choose to leave out? And why did a book published in Lisbon in 1609 terrify the colonial government more than a century and a half later?

• 2. Two Worlds, One Childhood

  ›

  Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, as he was first named, spent his earliest years in a household shaped by loss and divided loyalty. His father, the Spanish captain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas, abandoned his mother and married a Spanish noblewoman, doña Luisa Martel, who was only four years older than Gómez himself. Gómez remained with his mother, Palla Chimpu Ocllo, and her Inca family.

  His first language was Quechua. He picked up Spanish in early boyhood, and by the time he was old enough for formal schooling, he was placed under Juan de Cuéllar, a canon of the Cathedral of Cusco. The other boys in that classroom included the sons of Francisco and Gonzalo Pizarro. Gómez also learned to read quipus, the knotted-cord recording system used by the Inca, and he became skilled at interpreting them.

  At fifteen, in 1554, when his father was appointed corregidor and justicia mayor of Cusco, Gómez served as his secretary, watching the machinery of conquest operate at close range. He also remembered meeting his cousin, the Inca Sayri Tupac, son of Manco Inca, with whom he shared a ritual drink of chicha from a silver qero. That meeting across the fracture line of empire was something he carried for the rest of his life. When his father died in 1559, Gómez inherited money, changed direction, and boarded a ship for Spain.

• 3. Arriving in Spain

  ›

  Suárez de Figueroa reached Spain in 1561 while fighting in his home country still continued under the conquest. He may have studied Latin in Seville under Pedro Sánchez de Herrera before traveling to Montilla, where his father's brother, Alonso de Vargas, became his protector and helped him find his footing.

  He traveled to Madrid to petition the Crown for official recognition as his father's legitimate son. The recognition mattered enormously: it was a question of legal status, social standing, and survival in Spanish society. He was granted the right to take the name Garcilaso de la Vega, the name by which history would know him. He also came to be called "El Inca," a title that acknowledged the other half of who he was.

  Spanish final victory over resistance in Peru did not come until 1572. Garcilaso stayed in Spain partly because returning would have placed him in physical danger; his royal Inca lineage made him a potential figurehead for those who still fought the conquest. The distance that once felt like exile gradually became the condition that made his writing possible. He had left one world behind, but he had not forgotten it, and Spain gave him both the education and the distance to write about it.

• 4. Soldier and Scholar

  ›

  In 1570, Garcilaso de la Vega entered Spanish military service and fought in the Alpujarras against the Moors following the Morisco Revolt. His service earned him the rank of captain. It was not a symbolic appointment: he fought on behalf of the same Crown that had conquered his mother's people.

  His education in Spain was informal but genuinely broad. He read widely, absorbed European literary traditions, and developed the capacity to write history in ways that went beyond simple chronicle. His own description of his perspective was frank: his maternal family were the ruling Inca, and he had learned about daily Inca life directly from them as a child in Cusco. That firsthand knowledge was irreplaceable. No European scholar possessed it. No Inca survivor had the tools of European letters to express it.

  He also had two sons by relationships with different servants. One son, born in 1570, may have died very young. A second son, Diego de Vargas, was born in 1590 and survived long enough to help his father copy the Royal Commentaries by hand. Diego outlived his father until at least 1651. There is also a more speculative connection: it is possible that Garcilaso's eldest son was Lope de Vega, an admiral who commanded a ship in Álvaro de Mendaña's 1595 expedition to the Solomon Islands, and who was lost at sea when his vessel parted from Mendaña's fleet in fog.

• 5. La Florida del Inca

  ›

  Garcilaso published his first major work, La Florida del Inca, in Lisbon in 1605. It narrated Hernando de Soto's expedition through Florida, drawing both on the expedition's own records and on information Garcilaso gathered over many years. The book became popular, and it translated into English nearly three and a half centuries after its initial publication, in 1951.

  The book holds two arguments in uncomfortable tension. On one side, Garcilaso defended the legitimacy of Spanish sovereignty over conquered territories and the extension of Catholic jurisdiction. On the other, he insisted on the dignity, courage, and rationality of the Native Americans the expedition encountered. Both arguments appear in the same pages.

  Historians have not been gentle with the work as a factual record. Jerald T. Milanich and Charles M. Hudson warned against relying on Garcilaso, pointing to serious problems with the sequence of events and the locations of towns in his narrative. They noted that some historians regard La Florida as more a work of literature than a work of history. George Lankford characterized it as a collection of legend narratives, drawn from a heavily retold oral tradition among survivors of De Soto's expedition. Whether that makes the book less valuable or simply differently valuable remained a question scholars continued to argue long after Garcilaso's death.

• 6. Comentarios Reales

  ›

  Comentarios Reales de los Incas, published in Lisbon in 1609, became Garcilaso's most enduring work and the one that secured his place in literary history. Its foundation was the stories and oral histories his Inca relatives told him during his childhood in Cusco. He also drew on the remnants of a history written by Blas Valera, most of which had been destroyed when English forces sacked Cádiz in 1596.

  The Comentarios appeared in two volumes. The first focused primarily on Inca life and culture. The second, about the conquest of Peru, came out posthumously in 1617, a year after his death. A London publisher brought out the first English translation in 1685, in a version translated by Sir Paul Rycaut and titled The Royal Commentaries of Peru.

  Garcilaso portrayed the Inca as benevolent rulers who governed a society where everyone was fed and content before the Spanish arrived. He did not address the human sacrifices now understood to have been part of Inca religious practice. Whether that silence was deliberate, intended to present his ancestors favorably to a European audience, or simply a gap in his own knowledge after decades away from Peru, remains an open question.

  His mother's descent from Inca royalty, specifically from the powerful Tupac Yupanqui, gave him an insider's view that no European writer could claim. That authority made the Comentarios both celebrated and feared. Charles III of Spain banned the work from being published in the Quechua language in Lima or distributed there in the 1780s, when the uprising led by Tupac Amaru II was gaining force. The king called the book's content "dangerous." The book was not printed again in the Americas until 1918, though copies circulated quietly in secret for over a century.

• 7. Legacy and Honors

  ›

  Garcilaso died in Córdoba on the 23rd of April 1616, though existing documents are imprecise enough that his death may have occurred up to two days earlier. He was seventy-seven years old, and he left behind a body of work that outlasted every prohibition placed on it.

  His name is carried today by institutions in the country he left as a young man. The main stadium in Cusco, Estadio Garcilaso de la Vega, bears his name. The Regional Historical Museum of Cusco, housed in his former home, is called the Casa del Inka Garcilaso de la Vega. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega University in Lima was named in his honor in 1965.

  Beyond Peru, a statue dedicated to him was erected in Rome in 1967, near Villa Borghese. A second statue, dated 1973, stands in the Plaza República del Perú in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Comentarios reached new English-language readers when it was translated and published in the United States as The Incas in 1961, and again as Royal Commentaries of the Incas in 1965. The work that Charles III once judged too dangerous to circulate in Quechua in Lima now sits in university libraries across the world, still shaping how historians read the Inca past.