Introduction

At seventy, in Spain, the Inca Garcilaso wrote this history of his mother's people. In his preface he says that the histories of Peru written by Spaniards are full of misunderstandings, because they did not know Quechua, the language of the Incas, whereas he had heard these stories from his mother's kin since childhood. The first part tells of the origin and flowering of the Inca Empire: Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, children of the Sun, set out from Lake Titicaca with a golden staff to find a place for their capital and founded Cuzco where the staff sank into the earth; then how successive Inca kings conquered the lands around, built roads and governed the state, and the Incas' religion, astronomy, calendar, laws, farming, knotted-cord records and festivals. The second part tells of the Spanish conquest of Peru and the civil wars that followed. Among the most important sources for Inca civilisation, it is beautifully written and full of longing and sorrow for a vanished empire. This volume translates its most important parts.