{
  "id": "cobo-historia-del-nuevo-mundo",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Bernabe Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo: a book finished in 1653 and first printed in 1892",
  "summary": "A Jesuit who had spent most of his adult life between Peru and Mexico finished, in 1653, a survey of the Americas that runs from the cosmography down to how Andean farmers measured a short interval of time - the while it takes a pot of potatoes to cook. The manuscript went unprinted for nearly two and a half centuries. This entry reads the third tome of the first printing, Seville 1892.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "peru",
    "andes",
    "natural-history",
    "ethnography",
    "books",
    "seventeenth-century",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "historiography",
    "quipu"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "avendano-thesaurus-indicus-1668"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "inca-garcilaso-de-la-vega"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "acosta-historia-natural-y-moral-1590"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "columbian-exchange"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who was Bernabe Cobo?",
    "What is the Historia del Nuevo Mundo?",
    "When was Bernabe Cobo's history of the Americas first published?",
    "How did Andean peoples measure time before the Spanish?",
    "What did seventeenth-century Spaniards write about the quipu?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The volume read here states its own standing on the title page: \"SOCIEDAD DE BIBLIOFILOS ANDALUCES. HISTORIA DEL NUEVO MUNDO POR EL P. BERNABE COBO DE LA COMPANIA DE JESUS. PUBLICADA POR PRIMERA VEZ CON NOTAS Y OTRAS ILUSTRACIONES DE D. MARCOS JIMENEZ DE LA ESPADA. TOMO III. SEVILLA, Imp. de E. RASCO, Bustos Tavera, 1. 1892.\" Published for the first time, in other words, with the notes of a nineteenth-century editor, and in three or more tomes of which this is the third.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "What this tome contains is the part of the work that deals with people rather than with nature. It opens the eleventh book, whose first chapter is headed \"Que la America estaba poco poblada, y por que causas\", and the twelfth book runs as a dynastic history of the Incas chapter by chapter - chapter V, for instance, is \"Del segundo Inca, llamado Cinchi-Roca\".",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The opening thesis of the eleventh book is one modern demography has overturned, and it is stated here because an entry that quoted only the good pages would be worth less. Cobo begins the treatise on the nature and qualities of the Indian inhabitants of America from what he calls the small number of them found by the first Spaniards who came over, and argues that had this quarter of the globe been as populous as any region of Europe, no past age would have seen a more powerful monarch than the king of Spain who rules it. He concedes that some provinces were found very populous - Mexico in the north, and in the south Santa Fe de Bogota, Cuzco, Quito, Peru and Chile - but holds the thinly peopled and almost empty ones to have been far more numerous. He also records, in the same sentence, that there are fewer people now than there were then.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "Among the documents he copies into the eleventh book is the bull of Paul III on the capacity of the Indians, given in Spanish and taken, he says, as Fray Agustin Davila Padilla of the Order of Preachers reports it in his history of the province of Santiago de Mexico. Cobo introduces it as one of the rare cases men have seen in this matter, the pope having determined by apostolic authority, as a matter of faith, that all the Indians, as rational men of the same species as the rest, were capable of the divine sacraments.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The operative words are printed in full and dated. The Indians and all other peoples who may hereafter come to the notice of Christians, the text declares, even if outside the faith of Christ, \"no estan privados ni deben serlo de su libertad ni del dominio de sus bienes; y que no deben ser reducidos a servidumbre\"; they are to be drawn and invited to that faith by the preaching of the divine word and the example of a good life, and whatever is done to the contrary is to be of no value or firmness. The dating clause reads \"Dada en Roma ano de 1537 a los 9 de Junio, en el tercero de nuestro Pontificado.\"",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "His own comment on the bull is the sentence that fixes where he stands, and it cuts both ways. \"Cosa, por cierto, muy digna de consideracion, que sea tanta la ignorancia y rudeza de los mas destos indios, que haya dado ocasion a semejante disputa\" - it is worth considering, he writes, that the ignorance and rudeness of most of these Indians should have given occasion to such a dispute at all - and from that he draws not a criticism of the disputants but a compliment to the missionaries, \"lo mucho que han hecho y hacen en estas regiones los predicadores del Evangelio, plantandole en gentes que tan inhabiles parecian\". The man who preserves the bull holds the low opinion of its beneficiaries that made the bull necessary.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "Where he is at his best is on things he could watch. On Andean time-reckoning he reports that they had no sort of clock for knowing how much time they spent on what they did, but had two ways of dividing the day, neither exact. The first was to point with a finger to the part of the sky the sun stood in when the work began: ask a traveller what hour he left the inn and he would answer by raising his finger to the place where the sun then was, from which the time he had walked could be inferred more or less.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The second way is a unit of duration taken from the kitchen, and it is the detail the book is worth reading for. Almost everywhere in the kingdom of Peru the Indians gather certain roots called papas, which serve them for bread and which boil in about an hour; that cooking time is what they take to measure the duration of things quickly done, answering that such a thing took as long as it takes a pot of potatoes to cook - \"tanto tiempo cuanto basta a cocerse una olla de Papas\".",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "On the quipu his description is functional rather than dismissive. In place of writing, he reports, they used thin woollen cords or strands like those on which rosaries are strung, called quippo, and by these memorials and registers they preserved the memory of their deeds, and the Inca's stewards and accountants rendered account of receipt and expenditure. A bundle of them served as book or notebook, the threads of different colours and the knots and loops made in each being figures and ciphers signifying various things. He adds that many very old bundles survive in his own day, and that Indians who understand them, on declaring them, relate many matters of antiquity contained in them; officers deputed to that work were called quipocamayos.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The dynastic chapters show a book interested in policy rather than only in kings. Of Cinchi-Roca, the second Inca, Cobo relates that at the beginning of his reign he visited the places and settlements of the valley of Cuzco and in that visitation ordered that all should cultivate the land they needed for sowing potatoes, so that cultivation spread as far as the hill of Cinga facing Cuzco, land nobody had been willing to move on to before; and that he gave licence for all who wished to settle on those lands, native Indians and outsiders alike. He also records the advice of the queen mother Mama Huaco against expansion while the neighbours around Cuzco remained friends.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "What was actually read, and at what remove. This entry rests on the 1892 Seville sheets of the third tome, not on Cobo's manuscript and not on a printing he saw: the work was first published in this edition, more than two centuries after it was written, by a nineteenth-century editor who also supplied notes and illustrations. No page opened here gives the date the work was completed, and the tome carries no preface by the author that this run reached, so nothing is claimed here about his years in the Indies, his sources, or the composition of the earlier tomes. The entry is tiered at secondary for that reason.",
      "sources": [
        "cobo-historia-nuevo-mundo-sevilla-1892-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Cobo reaches English readers, when he reaches them at all, through two twentieth-century translations of selected books and a standing description as \"a source for Inca religion\" - a label that tells the reader nothing he can check. This entry opens the 1892 Seville sheets and prints what is on them: the title page declaring the work published for the first time with a nineteenth-century editor's notes, the eleventh book opening on a claim about American population that later demography has reversed, the bull of Paul III copied out in Spanish with its Roman dating clause, and then the pages that make the book valuable - the two Andean ways of telling time, one by pointing at the sun and one by the hour a pot of potatoes takes to boil, and the quipu described as a working accounting and memorial system with its officers named. Beside them it prints the sentence in which the same author calls most of the people he is describing ignorant and rude, and turns the bull that defended them into praise of the missionaries.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-10",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/cobo-historia-del-nuevo-mundo",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Bernabe Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo: a book finished in 1653 and first printed in 1892",
    "description": "A Jesuit who had spent most of his adult life between Peru and Mexico finished, in 1653, a survey of the Americas that runs from the cosmography down to how Andean farmers measured a short interval of time - the while it takes a pot of potatoes to cook. The manuscript went unprinted for nearly two and a half centuries. This entry reads the third tome of the first printing, Seville 1892.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/cobo-historia-del-nuevo-mundo",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-10",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia del Nuevo Mundo, por el P. Bernabe Cobo de la Compania de Jesus, publicada por primera vez con notas y otras ilustraciones de D. Marcos Jimenez de la Espada, tomo III",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=by8rjIFaUkYC&pg=PA295"
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Bernabe Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo: a book finished in 1653 and first printed in 1892"
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}