Encyclopedia of the Incas

region. Guaman Poma also knew and for some time worked closely with the
Mercedarian friar and chronicler, Martín de Murúa. It is clear, for instance,
that Guaman Poma produced a few of the drawings in the manuscript known
as the Galvin manuscript.
The manuscript of Guaman Poma’s chronicle, El primer nueva corónica y
buen gobierno, now in the Royal Library of Denmark, contains 1,190 pages
of which 398 are full-page drawings produced by the author. The manuscript
is written in Spanish but with a heavy admixture of Quechua and Aru terms
and grammatical structures. Broadly, the substance of the work begins with a
detailed historical account of the land of the Incas before the time of the
Spanish conquest, followed by a middle section recounting the major events
of the conquest itself, and ending with Guaman Poma’s plaintive detailing of
the destruction and ongoing deterioration of his Andean homeland under
Spanish colonialism.
Guaman Poma’s primary intended audience for the work was the king of
Spain, Philip III, and his objective in producing the work was to argue to the
king why it was essential that the conquest and colonization be brought to an
end and that governance of the land be returned to its natural rulers, the
descendants of the Incas and those of high ranking lineages. In order to make
his argument (in his own eyes) to the king of Spain, Guaman Poma
understood himself, first, to be writing “the first new chronicle,” in the sense
that he was contesting those chronicles written by Europeans up to his time,
which he saw as unsympathetic to Andean peoples; and second, that he was,
in his chronicle, detailing the “good governance” that had existed in the land,
under the native lords, before the arrival of the Spaniards.
Guaman Poma’s account contains a tremendous amount of detailed
ethnographic information on Andean life before and up to the time of the
writing of the chronicle. This information includes accounts of many on-the-
ground realities of life in Andean communities, such as agricultural practices,
agricultural and ritual calendars, the tending of crops and herds of camelids,
the production of textiles, and other such matters. At a higher, public level,
Guaman Poma discusses public administration and the relationship between
Inca administration and local administrative officials, the system of decimal
administration and census taking, the hierarchies of state administrative and
religious officials, and a wide range of religious beliefs and practices, both
indigenous and Christian. Both his text and his drawings are particularly
insightful concerning ongoing transformations in civil and ecclesiastical