manuscript of this great Aymara dictionary is divided into two parts: 474
pages of Spanish-Aymara, and 399 pages of Aymara-Spanish. The
Vocabulario is a rich mine of linguistic and ethnographic information, giving
us insights into the cultural and religious beliefs and practices of Aymara-
speaking peoples of the southern Andes at the beginning of the seventeenth
century. The work therefore has profound implications for the study of the
Incas, who were the ancestors of those Colonial populations.
Further Reading
Albó, Xavier, “Ludovico Bertonio (1557–1619): Fuente única al mundo aymara temprano.” Revista
Andina (Cuzco) 2, no. 1: 223–64. Republication of the introduction to the 1984 edition of the
Vocabulario.
———. “Bertonio, Ludovico (1557–1625).” In Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies,
1530–1900, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, vol. 2, 81–83. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.
Bertonio, Ludovico. Vocabulario de la lengua aymara. Documentos Históricos, no. 1. Serie Fuentes
Primarias, no. 2. Travaux de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines, no. 26. Cochabamba, Bolivia:
Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Económica y Social, Ediciones Ceres, 1984 [1612].
———. Transcripción del vocabulario de la lengua aymara. Instituto de Lenguas y Literaturas
Andinas-Amazónicas (ILLA-A). 2011. http://www.illa-
a.org/cd/diccionarios/LudovicoBertonioMuchosCambios.pdf.
■GARY URTON
BETANZOS, JUAN DEIt is not known when or where in Spain Juan de Betanzos (also known as Juan
Diez de Betanzos) was born, but by the 1540s he was in Peru fighting with
Pizarro loyalists in the civil war sparked by Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion of
1544–1548. After his capture by Royalist troops, he joined their side and
shortly after that received an encomienda (the grant of oversight of a group of
Native peoples to a Spaniard responsible for their welfare and religious
conversion in exchange for the right to collect tribute from them) in the
northern Titicaca basin. He later became a vecino, or citizen of Cuzco, where,
well regarded as a translator and interpreter of Quechua, he wrote a
catechism, since lost. In 1544, three years after the murder of Francisco
Pizarro in Lima, Betanzos married Pizarro’s mistress, a Cuzco noblewoman,
Cusirimay Ocllo, known by her baptismal name of Angelina Yupanqui. She
had been married to the Inca ruler Atahualpa before becoming Francisco
Pizarro’s mistress and bearing him two children.