Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, Part One (Texas Pan American Series)

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Description

Garcilaso de la Vega, the first native of the New World to attain importance as a creator in the Old, was once born in Cuzco in 1539, the illegitimate son of a Spanish cavalier and an Inca princess. Even supposing he was once educated as a gentleman of Spain and won crucial place in Spanish letters, Garcilaso was once fiercely proud of his Indian ancestry and wrote under the name EI Inca.

Royal Commentaries of the Incas is the account of the origin, growth, and destruction of the Inca empire, from its legendary birth until the death in 1572 of its last independent ruler. For the material in Part One of Royal Commentaries—the history of the Inca civilization prior to the arrival of the Spaniards—Garcilaso drew upon “what I regularly heard as a child from the lips of my mother and her brothers and uncles and other elders . . . [of] the origin of the Inca kings, their greatness, the grandeur of their empire, their deeds and conquests, their government in peace and war, and the laws they ordained so greatly to the benefit of their vassals.”

The conventionalized and formal history of an oral tradition, Royal Commentaries describes the gradual imposition of order and civilization upon a primitive and barbaric world. To this Garcilaso adds facts about the geography and the flora and fauna of the land; the folk practices, religion, and superstitions; the agricultural and the architectural and engineering achievements of the people; and plenty of other information drawn from his rich store of traditional knowledge, personal remark, or speculative philosophy.

Important though it is as history, Garcilaso’s classic is a lot more: it’s also a work of art. Its gracious and graceful style, skillfully translated by Harold V. Livermore, succeeds in bringing to life for the reader a genuine work of literature.

Part One covers the history of the Incas up to the arrival of the Spanish.

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