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A Three-Century Journey: The Lost Manuscript of the History of the Incas by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2021

Soledad Carmina González Díaz Open the ORCID record for Soledad Carmina González Díaz [Opens in a new window]
Soledad Carmina González Díaz*
Affiliation:
Centro de Estudios Históricos, Universidad Bernardo O'Higgins, Santiago, Chile horrorflorido@gmail.com
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Abstract

The History of the Incas is a chronicle written in Cusco, Peru, at the end of the sixteenth century, by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. It was never published in the colonial period and its only manuscript was lost for three hundred years. At the end of the nineteenth century, the manuscript was found in Göttingen, Prussia. This research note is about a missing manuscript and its unexpected discovery. Moreover, it is about the long and uncharted journey of the History in its multiple lives through Peru, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany.

Keywords

manuscriptsAndean chronicleshistory of booksPedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 467 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History

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Footnotes

This research note is the result of an extensive research project named “The History of the Incas by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa in the Perspective of Andean Studies: Toward a Reconstruction of its Textual History,” sponsored by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development, Chile (11160141). As this research exceeded the disciplinary field of Andean Studies, I have to thank those who helped me to look for the documentary traces that Sarmiento's manuscript left in different institutions, either with a brief conversation or with a continuous exchange of emails: Bärbel Mund from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and Patrizia Carmassi from Herzog August Bibliothek, in Germany; Ernst-Jan Munnik from Leiden University Library, in the Netherlands; José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero and Fernando Bouza Álvarez from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid; José Luis del Valle from Biblioteca del Real Sitio del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain; María José Illanes from the Biblioteca Patrimonial Recoleta Domínica, Chile; Merle Mandaat, Mariella Albrecht, José Salomon, Carol Chan and Erika Valdivieso; Geoffrey Parker from Ohio State University; Joaquín Zuleta from the Universidad de Los Andes, Chile; and Thomas Cummins from Harvard University. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of The Americas and the enthusiastic support of its editors and copyeditor. I am also grateful to Víctor Martínez, who design the map for the article. Together we made an infographic abstract for the article, available at the following link: https://www.vicdata.cl/infografia-perdido-encontrado-vicdata.html.

References

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11. The motto in Latin is stated at the top: Superbos gladio fideles premio;at the bottom, Maxima Tolleti Proregis gloria creuit, dum regni tenebras, lucida cura, fugat. Ite procul scioli, uobis non locus in istis, Rex indos noster, nam tenet innocue.

12. Sarmiento de Gamboa to the king, April 15, 1581(?), Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, España, E25, C40, 61.

13. In a long letter to the king on March 1, 1572, Toledo expresses his frustration: “there is no judge, mayor of court, or prosecutor, or royal treasure officer, or friar . . . who does not want to be governor . . . and if they have not been given part of the government where they can satisfy their ambition and their interest and one of their children, friends and relatives, nothing else is enough.” Duplicado del gobierno y justicia del año 72, Archivo General de Indias [hereafter AGI], Lima 28B, fol. 3r. Also published in Gobernantes del Perú. Cartas y papeles. Tomo IV, Roberto Levillier, ed. (Madrid: Imprenta Juan de Pueyo, 1924), 52.

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15. Francisco de Toledo to the Consejo de Indias, AGI, Lima 28B, fol. 148. Also published in Gobernantes del Perú. Cartas y papeles, Tomo III, Levillier, ed. (1921), 536–540.

16. Viceroy of Peru to the king, March 1, 1572, AGI, Lima 28B s/f. Also published in Gobernantes del Perú. Cartas y papeles, Tomo IV (1924), 317–320.

17. Viceroy Toledo to the king, AGI, Lima 28B, fol. 134(?). Also included (incomplete) in Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Colección de libros españoles raros o curiosos, Tomo XVI, (Madrid: Imprenta de Miguel Ginesta, 1882), 257– 259; and in Gobernantes del Perú. Cartas y papeles, Tomo III, Roberto Levillier, ed. (1921), 542–544.

18. José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, “La heráldica de Felipe II, príncipe, a través de las encuadernaciones de su librería rica,” Hidalguía 57:338 (2010): 144.

19. de Ayala, Felipe Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, Adorno, Rolena et al. , eds. (Denmark: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, 2004)Google Scholar, http://www5.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/es/frontpage.htm, accessed March 2, 2020. The error is on the frontispiece and on pages 373, 377, 412, 430, 515, 558, and 1085.

20. Original: Barbarici fasces contremunt stegma Philippi, cui Tagus et Ganges servit et Antipodes.

21. Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, La Araucana, (Madrid: Pierres Cosin, 1578), Part 2, Canto 24, 124.

22. The king to Francisco de Toledo [two letters: “Relación de dos cartas que escribe a Su Majestad don Francisco de Toledo, su virrey del Peru, del Cusco” and “A su majestad del virrey del Perú], March 1, 1572, AGI, Lima 28B s/f.

23. F. J. Sánchez Cantón, ed. Inventarios reales. Bienes muebles que pertenecieron a Felipe II, Vol. 2 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1956–1959), 252.

24. Don Francisco de Toledo to the Council of the Indies, March 1, 1572, AGI, Lima 28B, fol. 7r. Also included in Colección de libros españoles raros, Jiménez de la Espada, ed., 244–245.

25. Gobernantes del Perú. Cartas y papeles, siglo XVI, Tomo V, Roberto Levillier, ed. (1924), 310–313.

26. Felipe Ruan, “Prudent Deferment: Cosmographer-Chronicler Juan López de Velasco and the Historiography of the Indies,” The Americas 74:1 (January 2017): 27–55.

27. Ruan, “Prudent Deferment,” 29.

28. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, 1088.

29. Ordenanzas reales del Consejo de las Indias (Madrid: Casa de Francisco Sánchez, 1585), 21 (v)

30. Ordenanzas reales del Consejo de las Indias (1585), 22

31. Margarita Gómez and Isabel González, “El archivo secreto del Consejo de Indias y sus fondos bibliográficos,” Historia. Instituciones. Documentos 19 (1992): 191.

32. Mauricio Nieto, Las máquinas del imperio y el reino de Dios (Bogotá: Editorial Kimpres, Ediciones Uniandes, 2013), 46.

33. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo to the Consejo de Indias, suplicando que los despachos que envía sean leídos en el Consejo (pleading that the Council reads the dispatches he sends), March 25, 1571, in Gobernantes del Perú. Cartas y papeles, Tomo III, Roberto Levillier, ed. (1921), 441– 446. See also Jeremy Mumford, Vertical Empire, 76.

34. Kathryn Burns: Into the Archive, Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 12.

35. Bibliotheca selecta del Conde-duque de Sanlúcar, gran chanciller, de materias hebreas, griegas, arábigas, latinas, castellanas, francesas, tudescas, italianas, lemosinas, portuguesas, Real Biblioteca, Madrid. Ms. 02_II_1781_B. 1627 (copy from 1744 by Lucas de Alaejos).

36. Antonio León Pinelo, Epítome de la Biblioteca Oriental i Occidental, Náutica i Geográfica (Madrid: Juan González, 1629), 103.

37. Fernando Bouza, El libro y el cetro. La biblioteca de Felipe IV en la Torre Alta del Alcázar de Madrid (Salamanca: Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, 2005).

38. Rudolf Beer, “Die Handschriftenschenkung Philipp II. An den Escorial. Vom Jahre 1576,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 23:6 (1903): 1–125.

39. Catalog of Medieval Latin manuscripts of Göttingen State and University Library [hereafter SUB]. Thanks to this research, the manuscript binding is now available online at http://diglib.hab.de/mss/ed000207/start.htm?image=00001, accessed April 23, 2021.

40. José Luis Checa Cremades, La encuadernación renacentista en la biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial (Madrid: Ollero & Ramos Editores, 1998), 90, 122.

41. Hannie Van Goinga, “Books on the move: public book auctions in the Dutch Republic 1711–1805 mainly in Amsterdam, Groningen, The Hague and Leiden,” Quarendo 35:1–2 (2005): 91–92.

42. Paul G. Hoftijzer, “The Dutch Republic, Centre of the European Book Trade in the 17th Century,” European History Online, published by the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz (2015), http://www.ieg-ego.eu/hoftijzerp-2015-en, accessed March 2, 2020.

43. Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Magna Commoditas: Leiden University's Great Asset (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012).

44. Berkvens-Stevelinck, Magna Commoditas, 85.

45. Pars Major Bibliothecae Gronovianae, Sive Catalogus Librorum, Exquisitissimorum Rarissimorumque Bibliothecae Viri Celeberrimi ac Eruditissimi Abrahami Gronovii (Lugduni Batavorum: Haak Et Socios, 1776); Bibliothecae Gronovianae pars reliqua et præstantissima, sive catalogus librorum (Lugduni Batavorum: Haak Et Socios, 1785).

46. Hannie Van Goinga, “The long life of the book: public book auctions in Leiden 1725–1805 and the second hand book trade,” Quarendo 24:4 (1994): 243.

47. Auction catalogues of the Abraham Gronovius library: 1776, 3,741 items; 1785: 2,044 items. These counts do not include some packages and correspondence.

48. “in quo recensentur Veteres Codices Manuscripti optimi Auctorum Graecorum et Latinorum et caeteri circiter Octoginta, multi Scriptores antiqui inediti e Veteribus Codicibus manuscriptis descripti, quamplurimae Eruditorum Epistolae Autographae, Lucubrationes ineditae variorum Virorum Doctorum, sed praecipue Ioannes Fredericus, Jacobus, Laurentius Theodorus et Abraham Gronovius, Auctores Graeci et Latini, uti etiam alii Scriptores impressi cum Collationibus et Emendationibus manuscriptis, imprimis modo dictorum Virorum, necnon nonnulli Libri impressi sine annotationibus manuscriptis,” Bibliothecae Gronovianae pars reliqua (1785), front page.

49. Bibliothecae Gronovianae pars reliqua (1785), 8.

50. The six books in Spanish are Descripcion breve del Monasterio de San Lorenzo el real del Escorial; Varias antiguedades de España, Africa y otras provincias; Ilustracion de la poética de Aristoteles; Historia eclesiástica del sismo del reino de Inglaterra; Las iglesias de Roma con todas las reliquias; and Relaciones de Pedro Teixeira de los Reyes de Persia. These are in Pars Major Bibliothecae Gronovianae (1776), pages 17, 56, 69, 94, and 111, respectively. There is one book in French, Remarques du voyage en Espagne fait de Mr. de la Platte fils, listed in Bibliothecae Gronovianae pars reliqua, page 34. The three books in Dutch are De Spaansche Heidin, Schat der Duitsche en Spaansche, and Grammatica der Spaansche Tale; these are listed in Pars Major Bibliothecae Gronovianae, on pages 60, 61, and 120.

51. Jacobus Gronovius, Dagverhaal eener Reis naar Spanje en Italien, 1672 en 1673. Leiden University Library, Special Collections, LTK 859-1.

52. Jacobus Gronovius, Dagverhaal eener, sheet inserted before page 22.

53. Catalogue of Medieval Latin manuscripts of SUB Göttingen, http://diglib.hab.de/mss/ed000207/start.htm?image=00001.

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56. Peter Miller, History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture since 1500 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 97–122.

57. Jefcoate, “Christian Gottlob Heyne,” 112–113.

58. Bibliothecae Gronovianae pars reliqua et præstantissima.

59. Prices of books purchased from Abraham Gronovius's library, SUB Göttingen, Bibl.-Arch. A 20 c (1785)

60. Laurent van Santen to Christian Gottlob Heyne, December 1786, SUB Göttingen, Bibl.-Arch. A 20 c (1785)

61. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Arjun Appadurai, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18–63.

62. Gerd-J. Bötte, “The University Library at Gottingen as Germany's National Library for the Eighteenth Century: Christian Gottlob Heyne's Contemporary Acquisitions Strategy and the Sammlung Deutscher Drucke 1701–1800 on the Threshold of the Millennium,” Library History 15 (1999): 14.

63. Henry Tantaleán, Una historia de la arqueología peruana, (Peru: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos/Universidad San Francisco de Quito, 2016), 27–47.

64. Three examples of these documents are the letter written by Viceroy Toledo introducing Sarmiento's manuscript and the paños to the Council of Indies, already mentioned; Sarmiento's account of the second trip to Magellan Strait from 1590. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Sumaria relación, Joaquín Zuleta, ed. (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2015), 139–140; and a letter from Sarmiento to the king (April 15, 1581?), Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, España, E25, C40, 61.

65. Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, Tres relaciones de antigüedades peruanas (Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de M. Tello, 1879), xxiii.

66. Fidel Rädle, “Wilhelm Meyer, Professor der Klassischen Philologie 1886–1917,” in Die Klassische Altertumswissenschaft an der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Eine Ringvorlesung zu ihrer Geschichte, Carl Joachim Classen, ed. (Göttingen: Göttinger Universitätsschriften, 1989), 128–148.

67. Wilhelm Meyer, “Die in der Goettinger Bibliothek erhaltene Geschichte des Inkareiches von Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa,” Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften und der Georg-Augusts-Universität zu Göttingen (January 1893): 1–18.

68. Juan Facundo Riaño, “‘Historia del reino de los incas,’ por Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, existente en la Biblioteca de Göttingen, España,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 22 (1893). Available online at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/historia-del-reino-de-los-incas-por-pedro-sarmiento-de-gamboa-existente-en-la-biblioteca-de-gttingen-0/html/00a65cd2-82b2-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_2.html, accessed May 22, 2021.

69. Rädle, Wilhelm Meyer, 147.

70. Ulrich Pretzel, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der mittellateinischen Philologie,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 5 (1968): 248.

71. Richard Pietschmann, Hermes Trismegistos nach ägyptischen, griechischen und orientalischen Überlieferungen (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1875); Richard Pietschmann, Geschichte Der Phönizier (Berlin: G. Grote'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1889).

72. SUB Göttingen, Nachlass Pietschmann 12.

73. SUB Göttingen, Nachlass Pietschmann 12.

74. SUB Göttingen, Nachlass Pietschmann 12, folder 5.

75. Richard Pietschmann al conde de las Navas remitiendo la obra “Geschichte des Inkareiches” de Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, para que la ingrese en la Real Biblioteca, Göttingen, 10-XII-1906, Real Biblioteca ARB/33, CARP/8, doc. 313.

76. Hans Steffen, “Anotaciones a la “Historia índica” del capitán Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa,” Anales de la Universidad de Chile 129 (1911): 1107–1214.

77. Rolena Adorno, “Un testigo de sí mismo. La integridad del manuscrito autógrafo de El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno de Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1615/1616),” http://www2.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/docs/adorno/2002/testigo.htm, accessed February 03, 2021.

78. Manuel Ballesteros, introduction to the Historia General del Perú of Martín de Murúa, Manuel Ballesteros, ed. (Madrid: Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, 1962), xxiv- xxvii.