Most records of the early life of North America’s natives derive from archaeological excavations of mute objects and signs of human remains: bones, tools, weapons, marks of fenceposts in the soil, and art. Some wampum and pictographic texts have been preserved, and much information has been transmitted orally, but the oral tradition offers little information about the Indian nations that have disappeared leaving no one to pass on the spoken histories. We have no written records of these Indians that allow us to hear their own voices and explain to us their values, concepts, and beliefs. We can only piece together such cultural knowledge from the patches of information that we obtain from one source and the shreds of evidence from another.

We know much more about the Indians’ material contributions to the world through their physical remains: their crops of corn, beans, cotton, and tobacco; their technology of snowshoes, rubber balls, and fur parkas; and their architectural constructions of pueblos, graves, temple mounds, and kivas. Time and neglect muffled the true voices of these people. Without voices and words, their civilization remains a still life, a collection of bones and rocks scattered among mounds of deteriorating adobe, a culture that no longer speaks to us today.

The intellectual history of American Indians has become obscured, and is hidden in some strange places, but none is stranger than the powerful opening chapter of North American history buried in a crypt beneath the floor of the cathedral of Cuzco in Peru, in the southern hemisphere, thousands of miles from the United States. It is here that we find the earthly remains of the first person to write a synthetic and analytic history of any of the native peoples of what is now the United States.

Cuzco has a strange blend of traditional Indian and European cultures. Many of the Spanish colonial buildings rise up from the monumental stone walls of Inca masonry, giving the buildings a schizoid appearance: massive stone foundations topped with Spanish tiles on the roofs; wrought-iron balconies jutting from the sides; and traditional Mediterranean courtyards.

The city centers today on the ancient Inca plaza formerly called Huancaypata, but now rechristened as the Plaza de Armas. For the Incas this spot marked the center of the empire and the center of the universe—the Qusco, the navel of the world. The Spaniards ripped down the Inca temples and palaces around the square to erect their own cathedral, churches, and palaces. The church took possession of the northern side of the square, a place called Quishuarcancha that had been the site of the palace and temple of the Inca Viracocha. After pulling down the great temples and parts of the great fortress of Sacsahuaman, the conquistadors used the stones to build El Triunfo—a church in honor of the Spanish Christian triumph over the pagan Incas. The larger cathedral built next door adjoined the church of El Triunfo, eventually absorbing the smaller as a subsidiary of the grander cathedral.

The expanded cathedral complex combines odd elements of Spanish, Inca, and even African civilizations. The two-hundred-year-old bell named Angola Maria contains a ton of gold, silver, and bronze, and is said to have been named in honor of an African slave woman. When rung, the bell can be heard for twenty-five miles and is reputedly the largest in South America. Paintings and tablets throughout the structure attest to the hundreds of miracles performed there: altars miraculously saved from fires, believers suddenly cured of diseases, nonbelievers stuck down in the prime of life, and earthquakes miraculously stopped (or even averted entirely) by the statue of Our Lord of Earthquakes, which is paraded throughout the city each Good Friday.

Indian artists used European models that they combined with their own interpretations to produce some occasionally unusual juxtapositions in the cathedral. The angels in the pictures look like Spanish noblemen and carry guns, while the cherubs around them all have Indian faces. A large painting of the Last Supper looks at first like many of the European models, with Jesus dividing food and passing it around the table to his gathered disciples. Closer inspection reveals the foods to be an assortment of tropical American fruits grouped around the main dish of roasted guinea pig, a favorite Indian food in the Andes. Even the altar of El Triunfo supposedly sits on the exact spot where the life-size gold statute of Inca Viracocha stood, thus making it hard to know which god the poncho-clad natives worship when they kneel there.

With this amalgamation of American, European, and African cultures, it should not be surprising to find the remains of an Indian who played a vital role in recording the history of North America. The crypt holds the bones of a man little known today in the United States. He wrote the first history of Indian and European relations of North America, and he was proudly an Indian. He is the father of American history, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

He was born on April 12, 1539, to the Inca princess Chimpa Ocllo, a niece of the Inca Emperor Huayna Capac. Chimpa Ocllo had no legal husband; the baby’s father was Don Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega Vargas, one of the Spanish conquistadors who had no interest in marrying his Indian mistress. They gave the brown child the name Gómez Suàrez Figueroa, later changed to Garcilaso de la Vega in honor of another Spanish ancestor.

The future historian grew up amid the disintegration of the Inca empire and the deterioration of the ancient Andean civilization that had slowly evolved over thousands of years in the relative isolation and protection of its mountainous homeland. As the son of an Indian noblewoman and a relative of the surviving aristocrats of the Inca empire, the young man acquired a thorough education in the history and culture of his people. He learned to interpret the quipus—the knotted strings by which the Incas maintained all of their records. His first language was the Indian language of his mother, Quechua, which is still spoken today by approximately 5 million Indians in Eucador, Peru, and Bolivia.

During this time the mixed-breed boy also witnessed the consuming greed and constant infighting of the Spanish conquerors as they quarreled over the great riches of Peru and forced an endless succession of Indian slaves into the mines to extract more gold and silver. Several times his family had to flee intruders and battles in the incessant plotting, fighting, and shifting of alliances among the Spanish conquerors. Spanish cannons besieged and then bombarded his childhood home, and although he escaped, many of his relatives died around him in the ensuing battle.

Many of the Incas still held out against Spanish rule during this time, and the young Garcilaso de la Vega witnessed with his own eyes one of the rebel Inca emperors still reigning in all of his pomp and glory. Not until 1572 did the Spaniards crush the forces of Tupac Amaru, the last independent Inca emperor, and a relative of Garcilaso de la Vega’s mother. After capturing the emperor, the Spanish beheaded him and put his head on a spike in the central plaza of Cuzco.

By the time of that execution, young Garcilaso de la Vega had long since gone to Spain. Following the death of his father, this young mestizo followed the requests of his father’s will by sailing to Spain to acquire a proper European education, learning to master Spanish, Latin, Italian, and probably classical Greek. He also went with the mission of clearing his father’s reputation, which had been sullied by his joining the wrong side in the Peruvian civil war.

Apparently the young man threw himself into his own European enculturation with great zest, and disassociated himself from his Indian roots. As an exile living in Spain, he seemed to have been safely removed from the turmoil of Peru, but he had little chance to return. Under the Viceroy Toledo, Peru suffered a new round of persecutions in which the Spanish army exiled, imprisoned, or killed the surviving members of the Inca royal family. These persecutions spread to the mestizos, and at one point all the mixed-blood males of Cuzco were imprisoned as potential traitors because of their tainted Indian blood (Varner). Had Garcilaso de la Vega returned to Peru, he may well have been killed.

Despite the turmoil of his distant homeland, Garcilaso de la Vega chose as his first literary project a subject that had nothing whatever to do with the Indians of America. He chose to translate from Italian to Spanish a work of essentially Greek philosophy of love written by a Portuguese Jewish physician, Judah Abarbanel, who published under the name León Hebreo. Garcilaso translated Dialoghi d’Amore (Dialogues of Love), and published it in 1590, but in 1612 the church placed the book on the forbidden Index librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum and thus banned it. Even though the work achieved some popularity in Italian, it presented an unromantic and unerotic analysis of love very much in keeping with the technical ideas of Platonic philosophy. It consisted of a series of dialogues between Filon (Love) and Sofia (Wisdom) on the difference between desire (the feelings one has for something one does not possess) and love (the feelings one has for something one does possess).

The translation by Garcilaso de la Vega proved how well he, an Indian raised in America, had mastered the culture and languages of Europe. It demonstrated his grasp of the nuances of both Italian and Spanish and showed his ability to understand, analyze, and explain the intricacies of centuries of European philosophical thought. Garcilaso seems to have learned another important lesson from the author of Dialoghi d’Amore. Judah Abarbanel wrote at a time of great persecution of Jews and Arabs. His family had been expelled from Portugal and had sought refuge in Spain, only to see the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella order the expulsion of the Jews from their lands in 1492. Rather than hide his Jewish identity, Abarbanel proclaimed it loudly in selecting the nom de plume of León Hebréo, which meant “Hebrew Lion” and echoed the notion of the Lion of Judah (Varner).

Perhaps Garcilaso felt some identity with the plight of the Iberian Moors and Jews, since their plight paralleled in many ways that of the Incas and other Indian nations back in America. Since 1492 the Jews and Arabs had been forced to flee Spain or convert to Christianity, but even as Christians they faced great discrimination by a Spanish elite obsessed with racial purity. In his eager embrace of his father’s Spanish culture, Garcilaso had found Spanish society closed to him. The government rejected his pleas to rehabilitate the soiled reputation of his father, and most of his father’s relatives rejected the dark-skinned progeny of miscegenation. In Spain this descendent of Inca emperors was only a half-breed bastard, a person of mixed blood and therefore tainted with the suspicion of heresy among many other faults, sins, and crimes.

Despite the bitter climate of racial persecution, Garcilaso, apparently impressed by Abarbanel’s defiant proclamation of his Jewishness, decided to declare openly his own ethnic heritage. On the title page of his translation, Garcilaso proclaimed it in letters even larger than the title as “the translation of an Indian … Garcilaso Inga de la Vega.” It was by this name, usually spelled El Inca, that he chose to be known for the remainder of his life.

We know little of El Inca’s personal life, and can only speculate upon what motives drove him to the study and writing of history, but Garcilaso, like many other people as they mature, spent the second half of his life trying to recapture what he spent his youth escaping. His interest in Indian history apparently came after the death of his Indian mother, the execution of Emperor Tupac Amaru, and the ensuing persecution of the royal Incas and the mestizos.

El Inca began two major history projects that became the major works of his life and earned him the sobriquet of “Pliny of the New World.” One massive work detailed the history and culture of his own people and family, the Incas, but because of opposition from the Spanish bureaucracy, it had to be published in two volumes. The Royal Commentaries appeared in 1609 in Lisbon, Portugal, but the General History of Peru did not appear until 1616 in Córdoba, after his death earlier that year in the same city. Even though this fifteen hundred-page text comprised a single work, the Spanish authorities refused publication under the name Royal Commentaries because they rejected the use of royal for anyone or anything not directly associated with their own crown. For them the word royal certainly could not be applied to Indians of America. Thus the two parts of one work appeared in separate countries nearly a decade apart, under separate titles.

After recording the history of native South America, El Inca turned his attention to a corresponding volume on North America. At the time El Inca wrote, the Spaniards called everything north of Mexico by the name Florida. At that time, Florida had not been reduced to the southeastern pennisula for which we now use the name; it included everything from Cape Cod to California. El Inca began researching and writing his history by 1567, but it took him more than thirty years to finish it in 1599. The government did not finally give permission for publication of the book until 1605, which was ironically on the eve of the English settlement of the continent, just when Spain was about to lose effective control of the area. His book subsequently became known by the somewhat misleading yet mysterious title The Florida of the Inca.

El Inca knew from his own experiences in Peru that the culture and history of the peoples of North America could easily be lost in the European conquest, but he also recognized that the conquest, inevitable as it appeared, was going more slowly in the north than it had in Mexico or in his own homeland. He therefore set about meticulously gathering all the information about North America that he could find in Spanish documents.

At this time in Europe, history consisted of the study and commentary of ancient texts, but as a native who had seen the rapid decline of Inca civilization, El Inca understood the importance of eyewitnesses and oral accounts. Like a modern journalist or anthropologist, he interviewed men returning from campaigns and expeditions in North America to learn firsthand from them what they had seen, heard, and experienced on this new continent.

Until this time the most important Spanish foray into North America had been the expedition of Hernando De Soto, and most of El Inca’s book chronicles this trek with a summary of the prior, smaller expeditions. Several explorers had already published accounts of their personal adventures in North America, but El Inca did not give the account of merely one man. He combined a study of these published accounts with his own interviews of the survivors and, most important of all, with his own knowledge of America, of Indians, and of the Spanish conquest.

Like the Greek historian Herodotus writing about the ancient Mediterranean, El Inca sought to describe all the nations he could, but whereas Herodotus based much of his writing on his own travels, El Inca had to write without leaving Spain. Not wanting to present a history from only the official, Spanish view, he combined information from every perspective. After examining all the evidence, he presented his synthesized view of it, but he clearly informed the reader that this was the final perspective of only one man, an Indian.

Despite repeated literary genuflections to the authority of the Spanish crown and the Roman Catholic Church, El Inca wrote a book steeped in pride of Indian culture and civilization. On the title page itself, in addition to calling himself by his chosen Indian name, El Inca, he informed the reader that this history was written by a native of Cuzco. Repeatedly throughout the book he reminds the reader that his book was written by a native, an Indian, an “Antarctic Indian,” a mestizo, a son of the Incas, the offspring of Peru, a child of the Americas. At one point he insists that in addition to using some of the native words of North America, he also uses terms in his native Quechua to remind the reader that this book was written by a Peruvian Indian and not by a European scholar.

El Inca never referred to the Indians of South or North America as savages or barbarians; he presented them respectfully in terms equal in honor to the Spaniards. The Indian leaders were nobles and gentlemen, and their nobility shone forth repeatedly. El Inca proclaims this equality of nobility on the title page with the inscription that this work is the history of “heroic Spanish and Indian cavaliers” (heroicos caballeros Españoles e Indios).

In one story after another about the Indians of North America, El Inca described the heroic nobility of even the lowliest Indian warrior. He wrote of an Indian farmer and his wife working in the fields when they were surprised by a squadron of Spaniards on horseback. Even though the man had time to flee, he took his wife to safety and then returned to fight singlehandedly against these strange men dressed in armor and riding on giant beasts.

He told of the Indians who ambushed another squadron of Spaniards, but when the Indians found that the squadron consisted of only seven soldiers, they permitted only seven of their number to fight to make it an even match. He told of the battle at Mauvila (Mobile) in Alabama, where all the Indians fought to the death rather than surrender. Then, when one wounded Indian warrior regained consciousness and saw that all were dead around him and only the Spanish survived, he quickly hanged himself with his bowstring before the Spanish could capture him.

El Inca showed that once the Spaniards were off their horses, the Indians always proved an even match for them. The Indians showed as much bravery and honor as the noblest of the Spanish. In some respects they outshone their captors, and El Inca took pains to show us the Indian perceptions of nobility by which they judged the Spanish. In this way El Inca serves as a mouthpiece that even now gives us some notion of what the native Americans of the sixteenth century thought and said.

El Inca quotes the Indian cacique Acuera’s assessment of the Spaniards when he told them that they “wander from place to place, gaining [their] livelihood by robbing, sacking, and murdering people who have given [them] no offense.” The Indian chief even knew how to enrage the Spanish nobles by reminding them that they were the mere servants of a distant king. Acuera concluded that “being so contemptible and as yet unable to rid yourselves of the stigma of servitude, you should never at any time expect friendship from me, for I could not use my friendship so basely.” The chief reminded the Spaniards that he himself was a free king in his own right, and as a free man he had no desire to become the subject of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. “Therefore, all of you should go away as quickly as you can if you do not want to perish at my hands.”

El Inca realized that his European readers might not believe that Indians could be so proud in the face of obvious European superiority. Knowing that some people would say “I exaggerate my praise of the race because I myself am an Indian,” he swore that he was understating it because “I lack sufficient words to present in their proper light the actual truths that are offered me in this history.” With characteristic modesty he accepts the responsibility because of his deficient education in Peru when it was filled with schools for training in arms and horesemanship but not in letters.

El Inca did not hesitate to portray the horrors of the conquest from both sides, but when dealing with what might appear to be savage Indian behavior, he offered a perspective from which to understand it. He denied that they ate humans: “They on the contrary abominate this practice.” El Inca turns the tables on the Europeans by explaining how horrified a group of Indians were when they found shipwrecked Spaniards who had eaten their comrades to stay alive. After denying that any Indians he had ever known were cannibals, he adds a note of scholarly caution: “It may be, however, that the Indians do eat human flesh in places where our men did not penetrate, for Florida [North America] is so broad and long that there is space enough within it for anything to happen.”

He did not hesitate to record Indian atrocities committed against the Europeans, as well as European atrocities against the Indians. He related the story of Chief Hirrihigua, near Tampa Bay in present-day Florida, who killed three Spaniards with arrows while making them run around the plaza of the village. He then ordered the torture of a fourth Spaniard, a young man named Juan Ortiz, whom the Indians tied to a grill in order to roast him over an open fire. When the chief’s wife and daughters pleaded for the life of the prisoner, the chief grudgingly relented and let him live.

El Inca does not shy away from presenting this cruelty, but he also offers the reader a context in which to judge it by explaining that the chief hated the Spaniards so desperately because they had cut off his nose and had thrown his own mother to the dogs to be disemboweled. “Outrage knows no forgiveness, and each time that Hirrihigua recalled that Spaniards had cast his mother to the dogs and permitted them to feed upon her body, and each time that he attempted to blow his nose and failed to find it, the Devil seized him with the thought of avenging himself on Juan Ortiz, as if that young man personally had deprived him of his nostrils.”

El Inca balances the story of one Indian chief’s anger by showing the kindness that Juan Ortiz received from the chief’s family and how ultimately Juan Ortiz escaped to find refuge with another Indian chief, who showed him a decade of kind and generous treatment to atone for the months of suffering under Hirrihigua. El Inca used the concept of cultural relativity in a way that presaged its development in twentieth-century anthropology. In defending the Indians, he demanded that they not be judged according to “arts and sciences” that they did not have, since “it seems ungenerous to judge our deeds and utterances strictly in accordance with the precepts of those subjects which we have not learned. We should be accepted as we are. “(Emphasis added.) He then asks the readers for goodwill and “to offer their favor most generously and approvingly to both my people and myself.”

El Inca shows less interest in the military exploits of the Spanish expedition than in the way of life of the Indians of North America. He describes their temple mounds and the severed heads around them, their ways of farming, treating skins, getting salt, trading goods, making canoes, clothing themselves, and fighting, and their moral code concerning marriage and adultery. Like the Roman writer Tacitus describing the ancient Germans, El Inca gave us the most thorough and important portraits that we have of traditional Indian life in both Peru and North America. Because he was raised in Peru, his account of his home country is much fuller and richer than the information he gleaned about the people of North America. Yet in recognizing his common blood with the Indians of North America, he works with the motivation to look behind exaggerated anecdotes, religious zealotry, and European ethnocentrism to see the North American natives as a fully human people with a fully developed culture.

The Florida of the Inca described the place that was to become the United States before that territory contained a single European settlement, but we see repeatedly throughout the book names that have now become commonplace and familiar to us. Indian towns such as Ocali, Tascaluza, and Mauvila still live on today as Ocala in Florida and Tuscaloosa and Mobile in Alabama. Even the name Alabama came from the Indians; it is the Alibamo mentioned frequently by El Inca Garcilaso. Without this rigorous use of native terminology, the nomenclature of the southeastern United States may have ended as Spanish as the western part of the country or as Anglicized as the northwestern seaboard.

El Inca seeks first to be informative and only then to be judgmental. Even in his judgment, he condemns no one. Unlike the Spanish cleric Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote a history of the West Indies that excoriated the Spanish for their cruelties toward the Indians, El Inca passes on the accounts of cruelty with no editorializing or moralizing.

The cold neutrality that El Inca often displays toward the Spanish conquistadors and their actions condemns them more than any editorializing he could have added. In a century when criticism of the government could easily have cost him his life, prudence dictated that El Inca stop short of open criticism. At times he posits explanations for Spanish actions, but even these seem to offer more condemnation. This shows most notably in his repeated mention of the failure of the Spanish to baptize the Indians, to save their souls or to further the interests of the Gospel, which they were supposedly spreading. Each time, El Inca assures the reader that the conquistadors had a primary obligation to conquer the land, and only then could they convert the people. He offers this explanation even for the Indian slaves and concubines kept by the Spaniards, and who obviously had already been conquered. One cannot help but wonder if he thought at these times about his own Indian mother, whom his Spanish father discarded when he tired of her.

Perhaps this identification with the suffering of his mother and her relatives served as an impetus for him to grapple with historical events from the perspective of women as well as men. The moral dimension of El Inca Garcilaso’s writing about the relationship of males to females showed an oddly modern bent after he related at length the punishment of women for adultery in the Americas. He then inquired into the punishment for men, but the men whom he asked did not know. From this he concluded that “in all nations such laws are rigorous in regard to women and favorable to men,” and he noted that such laws are always made by men. In the case of his own family, of course, those were Spanish men who made the laws and Indian women like his mother who suffered under the opprobrium of having a child out of wedlock.

El Inca Garcilaso seems at times to be questioning, through veiled references, the authority of the Spanish government and the horde of bureaucrats at whose hands he felt grossly mistreated. He often followed his stories with a maxim about good government and just sovereigns. He said, for example, that sovereigns should not pass laws so strict that they encourage disobedience and rebellion, a passage that some interpreters have taken to be a reference to the rebellion in the Spanish Netherlands. He wrote that “experience has taught us that no kingdom rebels against its sovereign because of his good treatment, but because of his harshness, cruelty, and tyranny as well as an excess of taxes” (Varner). Such a statement could as easily justify the rebellion of the Incas against the Spanish or the struggle of the Indians of North America. His words seem to presage the same arguments and language used more than two hundred years later by the North American colonists when they severed the bonds connecting them to King George III.

El Inca did not write a glorification of the Indians of North America, nor did he write about a golden age of noble savages. He seems far too pragmatic a person to have merely longed for a return to some romantic past. The Inca empire had ended, and he knew that the independent lives of the people of North America would also soon end. His history always seemed to look toward the future and what would become of these people. El Inca followed an agenda of practical prudence, and he saw only one hope for the Indians of the Americas. The crown and its soldiers had proven their dedication to greed, no matter what the cost to the Indians, and he knew that the Indians would find no salvation in them. The only hope he saw for Indian people was through the Christian church.

As he grew older, he apparently became more disillusioned with Europeans, but he recognized that European culture had some positive things to offer the Americas, and he wanted a future that combined the best of the Old World with the best of the New. For him, Christianity appeared to be the only part of European civilization that was superior to the Indian world. He claimed that only by adopting Christianity had his mother made herself any more noble than she already was by virtue of her Indian blood and Inca heritage. He also recognized the importance of writing as an Old World art, and claimed that if ancient Cuzco had developed writing, it would have been a more magnificent city than Rome itself.

When El Inca Garcilaso wrote, many people still saw the Indians as animals, little more than the monkeys and chimpanzees from Africa. When he started his work on Florida, the Spanish court was still considering the question “What is an Indian?” That question was posed in a royal order of the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V on April 16, 1550; the same order suspended further exploration of America until the matter could be settled (Horgan). The issue was far more than an intellectual debate, for its answer would determine how the Indians must be treated. The conquistadors and the newly emerging class of European landowners in America favored the argument of Aristotle that some humans are “natural slaves.” If their perception prevailed, then the subhuman Indians could be enslaved at will by the Spanish without regard for their souls.

On the other side were men, mostly clerics, who claimed that the Indians were fully human, capable of becoming Christians, and therefore could not be made into slaves. Instead they could be educated in schools, and could become priests and citizens. This was a position that had earlier been advocated by Queen Isabella, and also by Pope Paul II in his papal bull Sublimis Deus.

The debate raged on through the remainder of Charles V’s reign and into that of his son, Philip II. In 1573 a new set of rules and orders for the Americas ended the debate granting the notion of Indian humanity, in principle. In fact, the authorities had reached something of an implicit compromise whereby the Church could proselytize among the Indians and have their souls, but the landowners kept the bodies during life in this world.

El Inca Garcilaso embarked on his books on the Americas in the midst of this debate. In advocating their Christianization, he took a firm stand on the side of the humanity of the Indians. He was trying to persuade his readers that the Indians possessed as much capacity for reason, love, understanding, and religion as did the Europeans. He took pains to show how eagerly some of the Indians sought the Christian faith even when the Spaniards refused to share it with them. By saying that they were fully human and capable of being Christians, El Inca Garcilaso was calling for Spain and the Church to treat Indians justly.

If the Indians could prove themselves capable of accepting Christianity, they should be able to master the other knowledge of the Europeans as well. “The natives of Florida have a great ability for these things, for without any instruction other than that of their natural intelligence, they have said and done such good things …”

Because El Inca lived as a dark-skinned half-breed in sixteenth-century Spain, where such people were often marked as Arabs, Jews, and religious noncomformists, El Inca Garcilaso probably wanted to avoid attracting attention to himself as a possible nonbeliever. He always stressed his Catholic piety. On January 1, 1567, about the time that Garcilaso began work on his history of North America, King Philip II issued a proclamation against the Moriscos, the nominally Christianized Arabs who had stayed in Spain. He forbade their speaking Arabic or using Arab names, wearing Arab dress, or engaging in celebrations or any display of their own culture. They even had to refrain from their traditional baths and circumcising their sons, and the proclamation ordered that they surrender all arms. When the Moriscos rebelled, a bloody war flared for a year.

El Inca Garcilaso wrote before the development of the modern division of labor between historians, journalists, moralists, geographers, propagandists, anthropologists, and storytellers. He contributed to the development of all these disciplines, but he should not be judged by the standards of any single one against the others. He wrote from a definite point of view, yet he tried to make sure that all the facts were accurate. He wrote about the past, but in doing so he tried to shape a better future, a future in which Indians would be fully human, and the accomplishments of Indian civilization would be acknowledged and not lost in the European onslaught.

On April 21, 1782, a century and a half after El Inca’s death, the Spanish king Charles III inadvertently paid one of the greatest compliments one can pay a dead writer. The king banned the works of El Inca in America because they were inflaming the Indians (Castanien).

The works of Garcilaso de la Vega had been very popular in Peru, and in 1780, at the same time the English settlers in North America rose in revolt against Great Britain, the Incas revolted against Spanish rule in Peru. The leader of the revolt was José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a descendent of the royal Inca family and thus an indirect descendent of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Condorcanqui had been affected by the works of El Inca Garcilaso and had used his books as a source of inspirational knowledge about the culture and history of his ancestors. He chose to fight under the name of Tupac Amaru II, his ancestor who had been the last Inca emperor and had resisted the Spanish during the lifetime of Garcilaso de la Vega.

At the end of the three bloody years of fighting, the Spanish army crushed the independence movement with great cruelty. Before executing Condorcanqui, the Spanish colonial authorities tortured him and cut out his tongue. They forced him to witness the torture and mutilation of his own wife and relatives before they were garrotted. On May 18, 1781, in the presence of his screaming ten-year-old son, the Spanish tied Condorcanqui to four horses and tried to quarter him. Failing in this, the authorities chopped off his head and put it on a pike in the square of Cuzco, as they had done to the first Tupac Amaru. The son was then sent to a life in prison in Cadiz—his only crime being that he was a descendent of the royal Incas (Varner).

The following year, on April 21, 1782, the king issued the proclamation that banned the “history of the Inca Garcilaso where those natives have learned many harmful things.” The magistrates were ordered to seek out in complete secrecy all copies of his books, without arousing the suspicion of the native population. The same proclamation forbade the Indians of the Andes to call themselves Incas. In order to break their bond with their glorious history, the Incas were to be called simply Indians or peasants. They were forbidden to perform their ceremonies and dramas, to wear their native clothes, or to possess any pictures or documents concerning their Indian history that might serve “to preserve the memory of their ancient pagan customs” (Varner)

Despite the great popularity of El Inca Garcilaso among the Indians and whites of Latin America, his work on North America found only a meager audience in North America. Parts of it were translated, but not until 1951 did Americans have available the first full edition of his history of Florida, translated into English directly from the Spanish of El Inca Garcilaso by Jeanette Varner and John Grier Varner. With great vision and some risk, the University of Texas Press chose it as the first book it would publish. In part, this must have been because it dealt with Texas (in addition to other areas of the southern United States), and it combined Indian and Hispanic themes that continue to be important in the culture of Texas. In his writing, El Inca Garcilaso rather prophetically referred to the area that was to become Texas as the “Land of the Herdsmen.”

El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega died in April 1616, in the city of Cordoba near the ancient mosque that the Spaniards had turned into a cathedral. On April 24 he was buried in an ornate chapel dedicated to the Blessed Souls of Purgatory within the cathedral of Córdoba. Thus he joined the numerous other Christians already buried there, as well as the Muslims buried before the Christians. He left behind a small household including one illegitimate son who became a priest.

Because he was not Spanish, El Inca Garcilaso’s body was not destined to remain forever in distant Spain, buried in that amalgam of Arab and European architecture. In the twentieth century, Spain’s new king, Juan Carlos, returned the body to Cuzco, the American homeland where El Inca was born and reared, back to the city of his mother and his royal Inca family, back to the city of which he himself had been the greatest chronicler. It seems only just that, buried in the oldest church in Cuzco, he is buried on the site of the temple of Inca Viracocha, one of the most sacred of Inca sites. His body now lies beneath the floor in the Inca foundations of the church, only a short distance from where tradition says the gold statue of Viracocha stood. Thus, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega rests eternally in the navel of the universe.

The career of El Inca Garcilaso marks a unique juncture in world history because he was the greatest intellectual link forged between the minds of the Europeans and the American Indians. He helped to interpret the Indian culture to the world. He also helped lay the groundwork for the modern discipline of history by separating the role of historian as synthesizer and commentator from the roles of archivists, epigraphers, and paleographers who decipher and categorize old texts.

The modern historian Arnold Toynbee points out that although El Inca Garcilaso could not protect the New World from the shattering shock of the Old, he did perform an important role as intermediary between, and interpreter of, the New World to the Old. In this regard, Toynbee notes that El Inca Garcilaso follows an ancient intellectual tradition. ‘The Babylonian civilization was interpreted to the Greeks by Berossus, the Egyptian by Manetho, the Jewish by Philo and by Josephus. This is the distinguished company to which Garcilaso belongs.”