Juan de Betanzos, Suma y narracion de los Incas (written 1551, printed Madrid 1880)
A history of the Incas written at Cuzco in 1551 by a Spaniard who had spent six years of his youth making a Quechua doctrina and two vocabularies, who married a sister of Atahuallpa, and who says in his dedication that Spanish accounts of Peru run far from what the Indians used, because the conquistadors were less employed in knowing the country than in subjecting it. It stayed unprinted for three hundred and twenty-nine years, and what reached print in 1880 is a fragment.
Why this wins its question: Betanzos is normally reached through modern editions of the fuller Palma manuscript, and English summaries reduce him to a label - the conquistador who married Atahuallpa's sister. What is quoted here is the 1551 dedication itself, in which a working interpreter tells the viceroy that Spanish accounts of Peru run far from Andean usage because the conquerors were busy subjecting the land rather than learning it, and records the six years he spent making a Quechua doctrina and two vocabularies that no longer survive. Around it the object sets what the 1880 printing states about its own limits: a fragment of eighteen chapters from an Escorial codex, found in the summer of 1875, silently normalised in its spelling of Andean names by an editor who also argues, in the same preface, that this author preserves an Andean voice his better-known rivals do not. Achievement, transmission damage and editorial interest are all on the same pages.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The printed title reads "Suma y narracion de los Incas, que los indios llamaron capaccuna, que fueron senores de la ciudad del Cuzco y de todo lo a ella subjeto, escrita por Juan de Betanzos", published by Marcos Jimenez de la Espada in the Biblioteca Hispano-Ultramarina, Madrid, Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernandez, 1880. A work finished in 1551 first reached the press three hundred and twenty-nine years later.
The dedication is to Antonio de Mendoza, viceroy and captain general in the kingdoms and provinces of Peru, and it opens with a piece of linguistic biography. Betanzos had just finished translating and compiling a book called Doctrina chripstiana containing the Christian doctrine and two vocabularies - one of words, the other of notices with whole prayers, colloquies and a confessionary - and states that he spent six years of his youth on it, and was left so fatigued in judgement and so tired in body that he had determined to compose or translate no further book of that kind in the Indian language.
His stated reason for the reluctance is a judgement on his own side, made in 1551 and addressed to the viceroy. Besides the great labour, he names the variety he found in informing himself of these things, and how differently the conquistadors speak of them, "muy lejos de lo que los indios usaron"; and he believes the cause to be that at that time they were not so much employed in knowing it as in subjecting the land - "no tanto se empleaban en sabello, cuanto en sujetar la tierra". The unreliability of conquest testimony about the Andes is here asserted by a conqueror's interpreter, in a dedication to the crown's own viceroy.
The narrative itself is reported speech throughout, which is the feature the work is valued for. The first chapter treats of Con Tici Viracocha, whom they hold to have been the Maker, and of how he made heaven and earth and the Indian peoples of these provinces of Peru; it opens with the statement that in ancient times they say the land of Peru was dark, that in it there was neither light nor day, and that of the name of the people then in it and of the lord who commanded them they do not remember. The frame is consistently what the informants say, not what the author concludes.
The volume closes with a technical table rather than a peroration: the months of the Inca year set against the Christian calendar, with the names given in parallel columns - Inti-Raymi and Aucay Cuxqui for June, Coya-Raymi and Puzcuayquiz for September, Capac-Raymi and Laimequiz for November - the editor noting a disagreement over the reading of the October name against Rivero and Tschudi.
What was printed in 1880 is not the book Betanzos wrote, and the edition says so on its own front matter. The copy the editor used is in the Escorial, in the codex L j 5 that also holds anonymously the second part of Cieza de Leon's chronicle of Peru; as he found it in the summer of 1875, in a thick volume bound long before and with all its folios, it consisted only of the beginnings and the first eighteen chapters, the last of them incomplete. He states that this fragment, considerable as it is, was all that was then known of the Suma y narracion de los Incas.
The trail of the complete text runs cold early. About 1607 the Dominican Gregorio Garcia gave notice, in the proem and chapter VII of the last book of his Origen de los indios, of a history by Juan de Betanzos of the beginning, descent and succession of the Incas and of their wars and events down to the entry of the Spaniards, adding that he had it in his possession and that it had helped him much. The editor could find no account of that manuscript after Garcia's death in his convent at Baeza, and says the book is not heard of again until modern times, cited two or three times and without distinction by Prescott in his Conquest of Peru.
The editor's case for the fragment is about voice rather than fact. He holds the remains of the treatise of real importance for the study of Peruvian antiquities, not only for the unique notices they record and because their data were gathered from the first years of the conquest to 1551, but especially for a style that makes them without equal: in this history, he writes, things happen "a lo indio", not as they are read in Cieza and Garcilaso and others "a la espanola", or perhaps in the Roman and the Greek manner. It is a literary judgement by an interested editor and is recorded here as such.
The printed text departs from its exemplar in ways the reader must be told about, and to its credit the edition tells them. A footnote to the first page records that although the manuscript serving as original writes the name Contitiviracocha throughout, the edition follows the majority of authorities in the matter and prints the forms tizi, tici, ticci, tizci and ticsi. The normalisation is defensible and it is still a departure: quotations of Andean names from this printing are the editor's orthography, not Betanzos's.
Betanzos is close to his material because he is inside the politics of it, and that cuts both ways. He settled at Cuzco and, after the death of the marquis Francisco Pizarro, married one of Pizarro's women, called Anas and at baptism dona Angelina, a nusta or royal princess, sister of Atahuallpa and mother of Pizarro's third son. That marriage and his reputation as a great interpreter got him named in 1558 by the marquis of Canete, with fray Bautista Garcia, as interpreter and negotiator in the reduction of the Inca Sayri Tupac from the Andes, and he took part later, under governor Lope Garcia de Castro, in the first negotiations with the rebel Inca Titu Cusi Yupanqui. His informants were his wife's kin, and the book was ordered by the viceroy who governed them.