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In 1609, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega published the first volume of his Royal Commentaries of the Incas in Lisbon. The second volume appeared posthumously in 1617. Over seventy years had elapsed since the Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro had first set eyes on the empire on the Incas. Although those who had seen the Incas govern were dead and gone, memories of them were very much alive, and Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries gave definitive shape to those memories for generations to come. Garcilaso was the son of a conquistador and a lady of royal Inca lineage. Writing in the Preface to the Royal Commentaries that his home was "the city of Cuzco, which was another Rome in that empire," 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. For it was the memory of the Roman conquest and government of Spain that helped these invaders to recognize the Incas as rulers of an empire and as exponents of a culture that was quite distinct from surrounding cultures. The roads that Inca rulers had built, the
"governors and judicial officers" whom they had installed
throughout their empire, and above all their "imperial seat,"
the city of Cuzco, located at the centre of the Inca road system,
resonanted with echoes of the Roman past. The first comparisons that Spanish historians drew between Rome and the Incas were sporadic and unsystematic. This changed when the soldier Pedro Cieza de León, who devoted most of his adult life to studying the Incas and their empire, asked himself why Inca government had worked so much better than did the Spanish government in Peru that he observed in his own day. Inca wars, Cieza thought, were just in the same sense that Roman wars had been just; like the Romans so the Incas tempered force with conciliation, and the Inca administrative system functioned with unfailing equity and justice. In effect, Cieza wrote, "the Inca lords adhered so closely to justice that they would not have omitted excacting punishment, even if it had been upon their own sons." The cultivated sixteenth century reader would here remember stories about the heroic severity of Rome's founding fathers: how, according to Sallust and Livy, military leaders would punish their sons for engaging the enemy contrary to orders, even when the engagement was successful; and how, according to Livy and Vergil, the first consul Brutus had executed his sons for conspiring against the young republic. What was 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 fibre of the Inca state. Inca imperialism was recongizable in Cieza's pages as a positive cultural, religious and political force because it was explicable by reference to Roman antecedents. As we know from the inventory of his library, 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 Peru was very different from what Cieza had observed. The activities of Spanish officials both at a central and a local level and the progress of evangelisation had conspired to create a society in which Inca governance was no longer a political reality. Instead, the Incas had become, as Garcilaso so movingly expressed it, a "memoria del bien perdido," a memory of the good that has been lost. Perhaps in coining this phrase, Garcilaso, now living in Spain, was grieving over his own lost childhood, and over his absence from the land of his maternal forebears. But for all his personal involvement in the story he told, Garcilaso wrote as a historian, as a careful researcher into the Andean past, and as a reader of the historians of classical antiquity whose works crowded the shelves of his library. These 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," where truth was 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. Rather, Polybius was explaining "how and thanks to what kind of constitution" Rome had arrived at world dominion, and he repeatedly emphasized the connection between the moral sobriety and severity of the Romans and their stunning success. Garcilaso pursued a similar theme. Where thus 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. Simultaneously, he described the practice 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 Inca decimal organization: the head of each group of ten, who was responsible for his group's material and moral well being, and simultaneously acted as judge for them, was a "decurion." 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. Take his explanation of the royal title Capac which had been borne by several Inca rulers:
How Octavian Caesar came by the title Augustus is recounted by the Suetonius, whose works Garcilaso owned. Like Garcilaso, so Suetonius had been interested in how a title enhanced the bearer's dignity, and in how it could do so only when it was appropriately bestowed.
An august place, or person or prophecy can be matched in Quechua by expressions such as the kapac huaci, palace, or kapac yahuarniyoc, a person of royal blood, or by the verb kapacchacuni, to ennoble oneself or someone else. The name Caesar Augustus was thus a direct analogue to the name of the Inca ruler Manco Capac, the legendary riginator of the Inca lineage, whom Garcilaso and others described as the son of the Sun and founder of the city of Cuzco. Much thought had been given by the ancient historians whom Garcilaso read to the question of the origins of human society. Whereas the Bible, like 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 civilisation. Livy thus described how Romulus founded Rome as a refuge for "an undifferentiated crowd of free men and slaves" 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 civilisation is similar. "There was a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals," he wrote,
In the Andes, so Garcilaso remembered having been told in his boyhood by one of his maternal uncles, things had been no different. "You should know," the uncle had said,
Much effort was expended by Garcilaso's contemporaries on the enterprise of understanding when that beginning had occurred for people living in Spain. Some historians were still interested in one of the medieval answers to this question, and argued that the origins of Spain, and also of the Spanish language, should be looked for in the period after the universal Flood, when a direct descendant of Noah had settled in the Peninsula. This theory of origins was also a theory of sovereignty, according to which Spain had been ruled, from time immemorial, by a succession of rulers whose position derived, in the last resort, from a divine mandate. Similar theories, which endeavoured to square the story of Noah with Andean and Inca legends of origin were proposed to explain the earliest history of Peru. Garcilaso swept all such efforts to one side by declaring, with his characteristic irony, that "I will not meddle in matters so profound, but will simply recount the historical fables that I heard from my people as a child." In the words of his maternal uncle:
While thus the chronology that Garcilaso's uncle proposed was absolutely incompatible with speculations about the doings of descendants of Noah in the Andes, it did converge with the the more sober views of Cieza de León and other respected authorities whom Garcilaso had consulted. Garcilaso's main interest, however, was not chronology, whether of oral traditions or of scientific historiography. Legendary and historical narratives in themselves, on the other hand, interested him profoundly. Here also, Roman historical writing, in particular Livy's history "from the foundation of the city," provided guidance and orientation. Livy began his story with the deeds of gods and founding heroes. Such an approach had its difficulties, as he explained in his preface:
Livy's work was famous in Spain. Little likelihood, therefore, that the voice of Livy would be overlooked in Garcilaso's description of his own historiographical programme. Having recounted the foundation stories of Cuzco, which, like Livy's narrative about the origin of Rome, abounded in divine and legendary figures, Garcilaso stated:
Like Livy, Garcilaso thus juxtaposed fabula and the true "memorials of historical events." Also, both historians contrasted the uncertain history of origins, where deeds of gods and heroes were interwoven with those of human beings, with the more reliable history of recent events. Finally, Livy and Garcilaso both brought the long distant past directly into the present. For it was the glory and grandeur of the present that warranted the study of legendary and shadowy origins. It was because of her present glory that, according to Livy, Rome was entitled to exalt her legendary origins, while according to Garcilaso, Inca origins, fabulous though they were, deserved attention in his own present because Spain had become the beneficiary of Inca imperial power.
According to tradition, Romulus was a son of Mars, and was divinized at death: or rather, after performing many great deeds, he disappeared in a thunderstorm, leading his followers to believe that he had become divine. Livy recounted these matters with all possible brevity and concluded with one single explanatory statement that enabled him to avoid expressing a personal view of his own: "Such were the deeds performed at home and abroad while Romulus was king, and none were incompatible with the belief that he was of divine origin and was divinized after death." Garcilaso evidently had this passage in mind when he wrote, in his summary of the career of Manco Capac that
The Incas, Garcilaso wrote, had "fabulously declared that they were descended from the Sun." The question was not whether the story as such was true or credible. "What I can conjecture," Garcilaso wrote,
That the Incas did good to all they encountered, whether in war or peace, is a theme that pervades Garcilaso's Comentarios from beginning to end. In this sense, the story of Inca origins was infinitely replicated in Inca history. But just as the replication of the Roman myth of origins in Roman history documented both the positive and the negative dimensions of that myth, so with the Incas. The Incas made conquests, according to Garcilaso, in order to enhance their glory. Concurrently, they also did good to people: but not everyone was a willing and grateful recipient of their benificence. To be conquered by the Incas, as Garcilaso
described it, amounted to exchanging liberty for material benefits
and for the numerous other advantages that the Incas bestowed
on their vassals, above all peace and order. Similar characteristics
had been attributed to Inca governance by Cieza,
So far from describing an Inca utopia, an ideal polity without foundation in reality, Garcilaso insisted that the Inca empire had been a political society in which persuasion and benevolence inevitably went hand in hand with duress. On the one hand, simple persuasion, the promise of a better, more peaceful way of life, could not convince without the authority that the Incas claimed from their fabulous, invented solar ancestry. And on the other hand, the exercize of that authority, resulting in imperial expansion, which most of Garcilaso's contemporaries would regard as advantageous and laudable, entailed the negative dimension of preventing men of courage and high spirit from participating in political life. Such, at any rate, were the lessons of Roman history. Conversely, therefore, the very existence of these tensions and contradictions within the Inca polity put the lie to those of Garcilaso's contemporaries who wished to assert that the Incas had run no more than a tyranny of barbarians, a state that did not merit the attention of serious students of political institutions. Much effort was expended in the course of the sixteenth century on ascertaining who were the truly uncivilized people, the real barbarians: was it Amerindians who for one reason or another lacked some decisive characteristic of civilized society? Or was it, as Las Casas would have it, the Spanish, whose destructive advance throughout the Americas seemed to know of no limits? Garcilaso had little interest in such questions of definition, and instead viewed the issue historically. In their day, the Greeks and the Romans had described everyone other than themselves as barbarians, and this included the Spanish. Nonetheless, Spain did in due course produce her own great men, including the conquerors of the Americas. As viewed by Garcilaso, Spain, formerly a barbarian land, had become the home of empire. Peru on the other hand, formerly ruled by her Incas, "Caesars in felicity and valour," had fallen victim to the "invincible Castilians, conquerors of both worlds." The two parts of the Royal Comentaries thus describe two grand cycles of development juxtaposing and contrasting the histories of Peru and Spain. The theme is reminiscent of the theory of historical cycles which Polybius deployed in order to contrast and juxtapose the Roman and Carthaginian constitutions, tracing the ascent of the former and the decline of the latter. Garcilaso the historian recorded, and to a certain extent explained the operation of this grand constellation of forces, while also commenting on the grief of his maternal kinsmen, the survivors of the catastrophe of conquest. Grief was entailed in the very telling of the story of this empire which "was destroyed sooner than it could be known." Indeed, such a story could only be told in tragic terms. As the aged Inca nobleman who first instructed the young Garcilaso about the history and institutions of the Inca empire expressed it:
This personal, human dimension that pervades
Garcilaso's writing endows his narrative with drama and immediacy.
At the same time, Garcilaso did not invent this method of composing
a work of history. Instead, the sorrow that his Incas felt when
remembering their empire was an experience they shared with the
survivors of other catastrophes that had been described by the
historians of classical antiquity whom Garcilaso had read. Polybius,
in particular, discussed repeatedly when, and to what extent,
a historian could permit himself to write in dramatic and even
in tragic terms. The destruction of the royal house of Macedonia,
the fall of Carthage, and the disasters and misfortunes suffered
by the Greeks, in calling for the human engagement and interest
of the reader, provided the very substance of what was useful
and instructive in the study of history. In declaring that Cuzco
was "another Rome in that empire," Garcilaso informed
his readers not merely that the Inca empire could in diverse
respects be understood by reference to the empire of the Romans,
but also defined this empire as a political society whose destinies
merited the attention of cultivated and thoughtful men. |
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Index of Topics |
The
Incas and Rome
The European "imperial seat" par excellence
was still Rome, and at the very time when 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 the ground, while historians and antiquarians
in Spain, Italy, France and Germany 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," which Spaniards used
to describe the regions of the Inca empire, reminded contemporaries
of Roman provincial administration.
Then the Sun sent
the Inca Manco Capac and his consort to "call together and
attract these people and teach them." The first Inca couple
thus "talked to people ... and drew them out of the bestial
life they were leading and showed them how to live like human
beings." Clothing, house construction, the creation of settlements,
the framing of laws and rules of worship, and the distribution
of occupations followed, so that an ordered political society
came into existence, just as had happened when Cicero's orator
and lawgiver had persuaded primeval savages to come together
in that very first dawn of human societies, and when later Romulus
had gathered people into his new city of Rome.
If in one sense,
legends were simply legends, then the historian's task was the
relatively straightforward one of sorting legends from other,
more accurate records, which was what Livy and Garcilaso both
did. What remained to be understood was why anyone might actually
have believed, for example, that Manco Capac really was a child
of the Sun. Various eteological explanations had been attempted
by earlier historians. According to one of them, Manco Capac
who wanted to be king deceived the simple Indians by dressing
in a golden tunic, wearing large golden ear spools and proclaiming
that he was a child of the Sun. Viewed in this light, the story
of Manco Capac showed how fiction became fact by means of simple
fraud, and there were those who extended this method of interpretation
to the Inca myth of origin in its entirity. Not surprisingly,
Garcilaso found such a view of his mother's people unacceptable,
but at this level of interpretation, the simple maneuvre of separating
fabula from history was not quite sufficient. Here also, Garcilaso
turned to Livy.
There were thus
many ways in which Cuzco was indeed "another Rome in that
empire." But Garcilaso did more than simply transpose Roman
fabula as recorded by Livy into Inca fabula as recorded by himself,
more also than explain the credibility of Inca fabula in light
of Roman antecedents. The point is that he did not write an Inca
utopia, but instead, endeavoured to portray the Inca empire as
a political society, with its lights as well as its shadows.
In this sense also, Garcilaso's Incas resembled the Romans. Several
authors of the late republic and the Augustan period whom Garcilaso
had read understood the Roman myth of origins as a paradigm of
more recent Roman history. The ideals of joining together diverse
peoples into one society and of fighting only just wars that
were, according to Cicero and Livy, enunciated by Romulus, lived
on in subsequent Roman experience; but so did the fratricidal
passion for power, regni cupido, that led Romulus to kill his
brother Remus. The power of fabulae that were told of a remote
and nebulous Roman past was thus all too real in the present,
this being an issue that Garcilaso understood well.
while readers
of Polybius and Livy would also recognize the theme as a familiar
one. For Garcilaso, however, this was not the whole story, as
witness his account of the lord Hancohuallu, whom Inca Viracocha
had taken prisoner had then restored to his former status. But
Hancohuallu's "proud and generous soul could not tolerate
being an inferior and a vassal to someone else after he had been
absolute lord of so many subjects, whom his fathers and grandfathers
and forebears had conquered." He therefore "preferred
to obtain his freedom, abandoning all he possessed, rather than
enjoying yet greater honours but without freedom," and fled
far beyond the frontiers of the Inca empire. Hancohuallo's prolonged
inner conflict about chosing liberty in preference to honourable
vassalage and his resolution of this conflict, evoke the figure
of Cato Uticensis, who in the face of an analogous choice committed
suicide. Garcilaso noted that Hancohuallo's flight caused the
Inca "much pain and sorrow," and he "would have
liked to have prevented it." Similarly, according to Plutarch,
whose works Garcilaso had in his library, the news of Cato's
death elicited from Julius Caesar the remark: "Oh Cato,
I envy your death, for you envied me sparing your life."
In the verdict of posterity, however, Caesar's well known clemency
was no substitute for freedom. So it was that the Inca Viracocha
had no choice but to console himself over the flight of his unwilling
subject, and