Encyclopedia of the Incas

Born in Llerena, Extremadura, Spain, around 1518, Cieza came to the New
World as a young soldier in 1535 where he lived in New Granada (a Spanish
Colonial jurisdiction in northern South America) engaged, as he put it, “in
conquests and discoveries.” Even before he arrived in Peru he felt compelled
to write about “the strange and wonderful things that exist in this New World
of the Indies.” He reached Peru in 1547 to fight on the side of the Spanish
Crown during the rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro, one of Francisco Pizarro’s
brothers. In 1549, after the rebellion, he cast his weapons aside and “put his
quill to the great things that are to be recounted of Peru,” traveling down the
spine of the Andes and the coast of Peru, to Cuzco, the Lake Titicaca region,
and into highland Bolivia.
His masterpiece, the Crónica del Peru (Chronicle of Peru), is divided into
four parts: the first, referred to as “Part I of the Chronicle of Peru” and the
only one published before his death in Seville, in 1554, deals with the
geography of the Andes, from New Granada to Argentina. It also describes
the cities founded by the Spaniards and the ancient rites and customs of the
indigenous peoples he encountered as he made his way south; many of his
sources were Native informants. He was one of the first chroniclers to
describe Inca roads, comparing these “splendid highways” to the ones built
by Alexander the Great and other “mighty kings who ruled the world.”
Although he never reached Chile and Argentina, the southernmost extent of
Tahuantinsuyu, the Inca Empire, he based his account of regions he had not
visited on information gathered from other sources.
The second part of the Crónica del Perú, entitled the Señorío de los Incas
(Kingdom of the Incas), is a history of the Incas and of “their great deeds and
government.” Cieza’s narrative of the Incas is considered by many to be one
of the most readable and reliable chronicles; indeed, many of his astute
observations have been borne out by archaeology. In Jauja, in the central
highlands, and in Cuzco he interviewed the keepers of the knotted-string
records, the quipucamayocs (see Quipu), admitting that at first he was
dubious that information could be recorded on quipus, but once the system
had been explained to him he was “amazed” at its accuracy. The influence of
his contemporary, the chronicler Juan de Betanzos, whom he met in Cuzco,
is discernable, especially in accounts of Inca myths and rituals, although the
sway of other writers is also apparent. Unlike the chronicles written after the
1570s that sought to discredit the Incas as the legitimate sovereigns of
Tahuantinsuyu, Cieza demonstrated that they were in fact the rightful rulers