THE INCA GARCILASO DE LA VEGA:
Garcilaso was born on April 12, 1539, in the very decade of the conquest of Peru, in the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco. The son of a Spanish conquistador, Captain Sebastian de la Vega Vargas, of noble Spanish lineage, and the Incan Princess, Ñusta Chimpu Ocllo, a second cousin to the last two Inca rulers – Huascar and Atahuallpa. He was therefore one of the first of the new race of "mestizos", the fruit of the coming together of the two races: the Spanish and the native south americans. He was baptised "Gomez Suarez de Figueroa" after several of his father's relatives (later in his adult life he adopted the name of Garcilaso from a Castilian poet whom he greatly admired).

He was raised during a time of much confusion, disorientation, anarchy and of great injustices imposed on the Incas and other native tribes. On the one hand the conquerors were trying to establish their authority and laws while building their own new cities and imposing their foreign ways upon the natives. On the other hand they were constantly fighting the Inca uprisings, their own civil wars driven by greed while in the process abolishing an entire culture by oppressing the native peoples.

As the son of a spanish nobleman, he recieved the best education available in Peru at the time, both from the european side as well as from the Inca side of his family. He spent much time learning about Inca culture and traditions from the Inca elders – his mother the Inca princess, his uncle Francisco Huallpa Tupac Yupanqui, the aged Cusi Huallpa and Juan Pechuta and Chauca Rimachi, who had been commanders under the emperor Huayna Capac, and other cousins and friends. In 1553 his mother sent him to greet the rebel Inca Sairi Tupac who was coming out of his refuge in the wilds. Garcilaso grew up in the middle of the brutal clash between two cultures and despite that he identified with both. He was very proud of his father and vice-versa. His father must have recognized his literary bent and left him a sum of money to continue his studies abroad. Placing the small COCA farm he had inherited in the hands of his mother, Garcilaso left his relatives and friends and travelled to Lima, then Panama and Cartagena on his way to his new adventure in the Old World.

Garcilaso lived in Peru until he was 21 years old, he left for Spain in 1560, never to return again to his native land. He lived the rest of his life in Spain and spent his last years in the seclusion of a small Andalusian town where he began to elaborate his great works, which he concluded only four years before his death in 1616.

While in spain he went to live with his uncle Alonso de Vargas, who had retired from service in the imperial army and had married and established himself in the quiet Andalusian town of Montilla, where he recieved an income from the estates of the marquis of Priego. Eventually, Garcilaso joined the imperial armed forces where he rose to the rank of captain in the War of the Alpujarras. In Spain he suffered many dissillusions when he was denied his father's wealth by the court in Madrid on the count that his father had committed treason by lending his horse to Gonzalo Pizarro during a civil war at the crucial battle of Huarina, on lake Titicaca. In Europe at the time, having an "Indian" for a mother did not exactly endear you to the spanish court either, and having your father labeled as a traitor on top of that must have been extremely humiliating for the young mestizo, who was seeking recognition and his place in Spanish society. So, dissillusioned, he resigned himself to a quiet rural existance, began assembling an excellent library and began to write his own books. It is here that he adopts the name of Garcilaso from the Castilian poet of the same name whom he much admired.

In 1589, with the death of the old marquis of Priego and the title passed to a cousin, he was no longer able to earn an income from the estates and was forced to move. In 1592 he resided in Cordova living modestly and having to move from house to house. A couple of years later he became steward of the hospital of the Limpia Concepcion, a post which included residence. About this time his friends and acquaintances included writers, historians, theologians and antiquaries in other parts of Andalusia. However, his books had not recieved the recognition he had hoped for and the Inquisition prohibited the circulation of some of his works. The "Dialogues of Love" finished in 1586 did not get published until 1590. The "Florida" completed in 1592 was finally published in Lisbon in 1605. Part One of his "Royal Comentaries of the Incas" begun in 1586 and completed by 1604 was finally printed early in 1609.

It was Garcilaso's hope that by writing Part Two of his "Royal Commentaries" he would be somehow vindicating the intellectual capacity of the early Americans and so restoring the credit and perhaps revising the fortunes of both the Incas and the new growing race of mestizos, to which he belonged. Instead, in 1569, Don Francisco de Toledo arrived in Lima as the new Viceroy and found the growing race of mestizos (many of them with little or no education, bastards, fruit of the whims of many conquistadors who had their way with Inca women) to be a threatening force to be reckoned with, contributing to the social instability, while the old Spanish conquerors were dying off. Francisco de Toledo thought that if the dispossessed mestizos should unite with the "Indians" they could pose a real threat to Spanish power. So he set out to break the last vestiges of Inca power and to destroy their imperial legend. In 1572 he sent a force to capture the "renegade" Inca Tupac Amaru, brought him down from his mountain hideout and had him executed and dismembered. Garcilaso gives a harrowing description of the scenes at his death in his Part Two of the Royal Commentaries.

It may come as no surprise by now that his writings were considered somewhat controversial by the Royal Council of Madrid. Garcilaso was to suffer the final humiliation of having his proud title of "Royal Commentaries" suppressed by the Royal Council from his Part Two, which finally appeared in print seven months after his death under the title: "General History of Peru."