The First New Chronicle

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you so much. In nineteen oh eight, a researcher was going through the archives in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. He was an anthropologist named Richard Peachman. But we don't actually know specifically what he was looking for in the library that day, but I think we can probably assume that he had spent a long time in the dusty aisles of the archives, hours, days, even weeks. His eyes were probably going bleary from ours, staring at narrow cursive script.

I imagine his hands slivered with paper cuts and his mind wrecked with exhaustion, and then, perhaps snuck on the bottom of a shelf or hidden within a largefolio, Richard saw something strange, something that looked unfamiliar and out of place. The German anthropologist pulled the artifact from where it had sat for decades, and he brushed the dust away. It was twelve hundred pages, a document written halfway around the world, meant for the King of Spain. And the document had

made a long and circuitous journey. It had been stuck unseen within library collections, been bought and sold and inherited, passed through the hands of historians and collectors without anyone truly understanding what they were looking at until it came here, the Royal Library in Copenhagen, of all places, where a German anthropologist stumbled upon it nearly five centuries after it

had been written. The document, at nearly twelve hundred pages long, is really more of a ton than a document at all, and though it ended up in Denmark, it actually had nothing to do with Denmark at all. It's called El premier Nueva Coronica ibuen Gobierno, or the First New Chronicle of Good Government, and it's one of the most important historical tools we have for understanding the culture of the Inca people in Peru and their lives both before and

during the occupation of the Spanish conquistadores. Written by a man named Guaman Poma, the text is at once funny and deadly serious. He wrote it as a plead to the Spanish king so that he might understand the harm that the colonists had been doing and the abuses of power that the Catholic missionaries had been doing in the

name of their god. Poma's missive likely never even reached his intended target, but now years later we can read his message through time and understand what he was saying in a way that King Philip never would have understood. I'm danishwartz and this is noble blood. Francisco Pizarro was on the expedition that crossed the Isthmus of Panama in the sixteenth century, making him one of the first Europeans

to ever see the Pacific Ocean. He tried twice to invade and conquer Peru, and he succeeded on his third attempt in the name of his native Spain. There were two especially important factors working in Pizarro's favor, a war of succession happening at the time within the Inca Empire, and smallpox that the Europeans brought with them. In fifteen thirty five, Pizarro built the now Spanish capital of Peru at Lima, the center of his and Spain's imperial power

in what was now a viceroyalty. Possibly that very same year, Guaman Poma was born. On both sides of his family tree, Pomo was noble. His mother was descended from Inca royalty, and his father was royal through a link to the dynasty that preceded the Incas. We don't know exactly when Pomo was born, but we know that he grew up in parallel with the Spanish invasion. His nation was literally

being reformed from under him politically and spiritually. His older half brother became a priest and converted the family to Christianity. It's through that connection that Poma, who was a native speaker of the language Guetua, learned Spanish and also learned how to read and write. Poma became something between a friend and an assistant to the Friar Martin de Murua, a Spaniard who would end up writing the first illustrated

history of Peru. It's likely from his time spent with Martin de Murua that Poma honed his own skills as an artist, although he was never formerly trained. But Poma's ability to speak multiple languages served him in adulthood when he began working as an administrator within the government of the Vice Royalty, at least until he got in political trouble.

The details of the legal case are a little difficult to parse out, but in fifteen ninety four, Poma represented his family in a land dispute about a claim on a parcel of land outside the town of Huamanga, which would have been entitled to them given their noble lineage. The case became a legal quagmire, lasting for six years, coming back again and again with a verdict against Poma

and his family. Eventually, Poma was accused of either misrepresenting or outright lying about his family's lineage in order to take the land illegally. As punishment, he was sentenced to two hundred lashes and two years of exile from the town of Huamanga. The experience, both the ordeal of the trial and the humiliating punishment affected Poma greatly. He felt that he had suffered a tremendous injustice, and he began working in his own way toward creating a more just world.

He started by helping represent other indigenous people in lawsuits, and by traveling as a missionary with his friar friend Martine de Moras and helping to convert the native people of the Andes. Around this time, Poma also began writing his letter to the King of Spain, telling him the story of his people and explaining what the Spanish invaders had gotten right and what they had gotten very, very wrong. During his travels with Martin de Merua, Poma was helping

him with his chronicles by providing some illustrations. But we know from Poma's own writings that even though he valued having access to the Friar's library, he had a miserable time doing that work. I imagine it's much the same for any creative person trying to work on an independent project when their boss is demanding that they spend their creative energy on something that they the boss will get all the credit for El premier Nueva Coronica ibuen Gobierno

took nearly a decade and a half. For Guaman Poma, it was started in sixteen hundred and likely wasn't fully completed until sixteen teen fifteen, and boy, oh boy, is it a real tone. The open letter contains one thousand, one hundred and eighty nine pages and three hundred and ninety eight drawings that were done in black and white in a simple style that would lend itself well to mass printing. The text, too, is formatted with the conventions

of type setting. Poma had imagined that after King Philip the Third of Spain reddit he would want the Nueba Karonica widely distributed. Now, let's take a brief detour to talk about King Philip the Third of Spain. The historian J. H. Elliott gives us a particularly colorful quote, describing the monarch as quote a pallid, anonymous creature whose only virtue appeared to reside in a total absence of vice. I will

say King Philip Up's looks weren't his fault. He was a Habsburg and he fulfills all of the stereotypes of inbreeding that go along with it. His father had been the son of two first cousins, and he married his own niece, who also had cousin parents. And surprise, surprise, our Philip the third would also marry a first cousin, though once removed, at this point the family tree was resembling more of a tumbleweed. Ultimately, Philip the Third's grandson

would be the end of the Spanish Habsburg line. That grandson would be deeply unwell in basically every regard and unable to procreate. His autopsy would memorably observe that, upon death quote, his heart was the size of a peppercorn, his lungs corroded, his intestines rotten and gangrenous, he had a single testicle black as coal, and his head was

full of water. But that nightmare child was still years away during Philip the Third's reign, during which the biological potency of the Habsburgs and the power of Spain were both in decline. Though Philip did rule over the imperialistic boom of the Spanish Empire, and he did lead a few successful early campaigns. In the Thirty Years War, economic trouble would prove to be impossible to shake, and Spain's time as a global superpower would soon be drawing to

a close. But for the time being, Spain was ruling over Peru and guaman Poma wanted to create a document that would serve both as a history of the Andean civilization that had been swallowed by the Spanish conquistadors, and also to explain the damage that Europeans were doing in the king's name and in the name of the Church. Guaman Poma was Christian, which meant that he was all too aware of the rampant abuses of power among missionaries

and those in positions of power. The first two thirds of the thousand plus page home are an attempt to teach King Philip the Third that the Andean civilizations were complex, sophisticated, and elegant in their structures. The last third of the document, titled Buen Gobierno, would then explain how all of that

was destroyed by the Spanish. The Nuebo Chronica is structurally an incredibly ambitious and complex document that blends a number of literary genres and styles of art, to say nothing of the way that it jumps between Spanish, Latin, and two languages of native Andean people, Quechua and Amara. The drawings are composed using European rules of representation and space, but with the sort of lines that evoke the way Inca decoration is done with abstract geometric shapes. The purpose

of those juxtaposed styles wasn't to be slapdash. It was to make a clear evocative point about the merging and crashing of these two cultures, like tectonic plates meeting and creating fissures in the earth. Take, for instance, one of the illustrations of a map done in the style of the ones that were done in Europe in the sixteenth century. You can sort of picture it right, with Europe at the center of the map, the seas vast, and with

fantastical monsters like dragons and unicorns along the edges. Poma's map has all of that too, but he has Peru at the center of the world, and the map is centered not on Lima, the capital of colonial Peru, but on Cuzco. The capital of the Inca Empire. The top of the map has the coats of arms of the Pope and the Spanish Kingdom. But above that, even high, are the deities of the Inca, the moon goddess and

the sun god Inti. It's fascinating, but there is sort of a challenge when the message is meant to be filtered through both Inca and Spanish understanding of symbols. Almost no one in the sixteen hundreds would have been able to understand the full meaning of what Guamanpoma was trying to communicate, and almost no one would know all of the languages that would be required to read the whole book.

But by speaking the Spaniards's language, both literally and in terms of the layout of the drawings and structures of the essays, Guamanpomo was using a tool that's fairly common in debate, meeting someone at their level in order to persuade them of something. He was acknowledging the basic premises of the Spanish worldview in order to point out their hypocrisies. It's a persuasive strategy, and Poma also uses another strategy humor. His book Wants You Understand the symbols is very funny.

One of the drawings is basically a political cartoon in it, and Inca asks what the Spanish eat? The response gold. But the book is also a tremendously serious work of scholarship, and it's important to our academic understanding of what pre colonial inc In life was like. Even though Guaman Poma was writing a generation after Spanish arrival, and even though he had never really known life before they came to Peru, he is an invaluable source. The Inca had had an

advanced recording system. It was written using notts on cords, but researchers still struggle to fully translate it. Guaman Poma's writing, even if it isn't exactly firsthand, is still an essential guide to pre colonial Inca culture. Some of that cultural information is incredibly basic. One of Poma's illustrations shows that

both men and women were planting potatoes. We learned from that about their division of labor and that the planting season was in December, and he's also giving us important history. One illustration depicts the beheading of the Inca leader Sapa Inca Atualpa, who defeated his brother in civil war to claim the throne to the Inca Empire after the death of their father, but who was later than captured by Pizarro. Though Attahualpa converted to Christianity and a ransom was raised

for his release, the Spaniards still executed him. Poma's drawing shows Attahualpa tied to a flat table, held down by multiple European men. A Spanish soldier holds a knife at the leader's neck, with a mallet in his other hand, ready to strike a fatal blow. Attahualpa clutches across in his hands. Below are the words Andian nobles lament the killing of their innocent lord. It was a clear indictment of the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadors, but unfortunately Poma's

message likely never reached King Philip of Spain. The book would have circulated among the court in Lima before traveling to Spain, but it ended up forgotten somewhere in a collection of rare documents that was eventually traded or gifted to the library in Copenhagen. But still Guaman Poma's message reached us. We now know the stories and structures of the Inca before the Spanish arrived we can see the depictions of what the Spanish did. Guaman Poma did tell

his story to the Western world. We just received it a few hundred years late. That's the story of Guaman Poma and the Nuebo Kronica. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the symbolism. In one of his drawings. There's a notion in Inca culture that towns are divided both physically and socially into two halves. There's the lower half and the upper half, known as Hurin and Hanan. Those halves are

symbolically associated with left and right. In one of Guamenpoma's drawings, the Pope is standing on the left hand side of the page, with the King of Spain kneeling on the right. That was fairly confusing to me. The left side is considered the lower side, and Guaman Poma would have always believed that the church is higher than the king. The king would have believed that too, and in the drawing the king is kneeling, So why would the pope be on the left, Well, he is on the left the

reader's left. But if you were in the picture looking out the Pope is standing on the right with the King kneeling to his left. It's another little element that needs to be decoded, and it's also a little inadvertent reminder that sometimes we need to change our perspectives around. There's another little easter egg in the drawing. Guaman Poma put himself in the drawing small as a figure smaller

than the king and kneeling down below him. But if you're looking at it from the drawings perspective, Guaman Poma drew himself in the king's superior position to the king's right. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston,

hannah's Wick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by rima Il Kayali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.