Encyclopedia of the Incas

In 1551 the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza commissioned Betanzos to write
Suma y Narración de los Incas, or “Narrative of the Incas,” a treatise on the
Incas. In 1557, the year Betanzos’s account ends rather abruptly, he was
appointed by Mendoza’s successor, the Viceroy Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza,
Marquis of Cañete, to act as an interpreter in negotiations with the neo-Inca
ruler Sayri Túpac to settle in the Urubamba valley and leave Vilcabamba,
where his father, Manco Inca, had created a rump state (see Vilcabamba).
Betanzos spent the rest of his life in Cuzco, where he died in 1576.
Betanzos’s narrative remained unpublished until the nineteenth century, but
it was used by Antonio de la Calancha and cited by William Prescott in his
history of the conquest of Peru, published in 1847. An incomplete manuscript
dated 1574 is found in the library of the Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo in
El Escorial, Spain, while a more complete version, possibly a sixteenth-
century copy, was acquired by the Fundación Bartolomé March in Palma de
Mallorca from the library of the Duke of Medinaceli. This so-called Palma
manuscript is the basis for a Spanish edition published in 1987 and an English
version published in 1996.
The first 18 chapters are devoted to Inca origins and biographies of Inca
rulers spanning 12 generations, with an emphasis on Pachacuti. It ends with
the reign of Huayna Capac, the last independent Inca ruler. The second part
covers the civil war between the brothers Atahualpa and Huascar; the
encounter between Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro in Cajamarca; covers
the relations between Manco Inca (Huayna Capac’s son who was crowned
puppet ruler by the Spaniards) and Pizarro in Cuzco, as well as Manco Inca’s
uprising; and briefly touches on Vilcabamba and negotiations with Sayri
Túpac, in which Betanzos took part.
Several scholars have commented on the colloquial style of Betanzos’s
chronicle, suggesting that many passages are literal translations from the
accounts of his Quechua-speaking informants, especially his wife Cusirimay
Ocllo and her kin, members of Capac Ayllu, the panaca, or royal lineage, of
Topa Inca, Pachacuti’s son. Betanzos is especially laudatory about Pachacuti,
attributing many innovations in Inca statecraft, as well as the rebuilding of
Cuzco, to this legendary ruler.
The style of Betanzos’s chronicle evokes Inca oral tradition and even
emulates, in some passages, the rhythms of Quechua oral narrative. Unlike
other works penned by Spaniards, Narrative of the Incas often portrays an
Inca point of view and has an eyewitness tenor to it, with firsthand reports of