The Inca: Occupiers or Creators – Part III

Almost everything we know about the Inca, especially the pre-Spanish period of Inca power, we know from the writings of a few literate conquistadors and early chroniclers. Among them, and the one who wrote the most about the earlier Inca, was Garcilaso de la Vega, who was born illegitimately in 1539 to a 19-year-old Inca noblewoman, Princess Palla Chimpu Ocllo (later baptized as Isabel Suárez Chimpu Ocllo) and a Spanish captain and conquistador, Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas. Sebastián died in 1559 and Garcilaso in 1616.

Left: Garcilaso de la Vega; Center: Palla Chimpu Ocllo; Right: Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas

Garcilaso lived with his mother (who had been abandoned by his father for a young Spanish woman) for the first ten years of his life and learned to speak Quechua and Spanish. His mother was a daughter of Tupac Huallpa and a granddaughter of the powerful Inca Tupac Yupanqui, and he was brought up on the stories of the glory days of the Inca, which were first heard and then retold by “rememberers,” which kept the official histories.

As a native Quechua speaker born in Cuzco, Garcilaso wrote accounts of Inca life, history, and the conquest by the Spanish, which were published as the Comentarios Reales de los Incas. It is important to understand Garcilaso’s motivation in his writing. At the time he chronicled the Inca history, the conquerors were mistreating the indigenous Indians of the Andes with terrible abuse. In addition, Garcilaso himself was ridiculed for his “Inca” blood.

Garcilaso’s work: Commentary of the Royal Inca, not translated into English until 1961

At the time, marriage between the Spanish and native people of the Americas was not recognized in Spain, where Garcilaso tried to get recognition of this marriage so he could collect his father’s full payment for services rendered to the crown. Embittered by his illegitimacy in Spain and proud of his Inca heritage, Garcilaso took on the name "El Inca" (In this case, "Inca" was for the old ruling lineage group, not the general people).

In response, Garcilaso set about to prove the superiority of the Inca, tout their vast heritage, and embellish their accomplishments. He was aided in this effort by the older Quechua of Cuzco themselves who had always bragged about their own abilities and ridiculed all other tribes.

The Inca were expert at weaving stories around the past that centered on themselves rather than the earlier peoples the stories were about

In addition, the Inca once they became bent on conquest and power, created a genealogy that was more fiction than fact, including Inca rulers that dated back several generations and their fictitiously exaggerated achievements in order to create an Inca myth that would spread their fame throughout the Andes, intimidate and frighten their enemies, and aid in their overpowering and conquering other tribes.

Garcilaso eagerly embraced these stories, which included ridiculous beginnings of the Inca people rising out of Lake Titicaca in ancient times. They knew the ancient stories of the Flood, and bent its events to their own purposes, as they did ancient legends of the Peruvian beginnings. The result was an incredible set of accomplishments attributed to the Inca, a high level of culture, and a past that stretched back hundreds of years into the distant past.

Garcilaso wrote down the stories told him, embellishing even those exaggerated accounts, to increase the standing of his defeated heritage

To Garcilaso, this was the perfect retaliation for the abuses he had personally suffered, and the falsifying of an Inca background that made his mother’s people look far better than they were—but more importantly, showing her people not only to have built a vast empire, but constructed buildings, temples, palaces, and city complexes far beyond their capability. And who was around to correct such falsifications? Certainly, not the Spanish who knew nothing different, not the ancients who wanted to believe in their history to offset the embarrassment of being conquered by a handful of upstart and illiterate Spaniards, and certainly not any written records, for there were none.

While many scholars today question the accuracy of Garcilaso’s history, many others accept his account as the most complete and accurate available. But if you were to walk the streets of Lima and other major Peruvian cities and talk to the literate descendants of the local, indigenous people whose stories and retold memories date back into antiquity, you will hear a very different version. The problem is, that the Inca story is good for tourism, and those who make their living in this trade, have found that tourists love to hear such stories about the Inca—about this people who once ruled the Andean domain, who built magnificent buildings with a technology that can hardly be duplicated today. They want to know about the ruins they have paid to visit, about the people who built them and lived within them. So bigger than life stories are told, with no one able to counter them, and the Inca myth grew over the years until now almost everything that can be seen, especially around Cuzco, is attributed to the Inca.

It is simply not economically prudent for the tourism industry to tell you what many privately know and discuss—that the Inca were late comers in Peruvian history, and built few of the great tourist attractions that line the pockets of most Peruvians, one way or the other, for tourism is the national product, and drives almost every business in the Andean cities and villages.

However, the Inca did not build the many sites attributed to them, did not build the roads they claimed to have constructed and, in fact, where evidence can be seen, their repairs of ancient complexes shows a complete lack of building ability.

(See the next post, “The Inca: Occupiers or Creators – Part IV,” for examples and comparisons of ancient building abilities with that of the more recent Inca stonework efforts)