On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (review)

MacCormack provides a stunning and imaginative reconstruction of the way in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and Peruvian historians perceived the history of the Inca world. She also shows how these historians assimilated Inca history to that of Europe, and how their work eventually shaped the Peruvian sense of national identity.

The key to MacCormack's study is Rowe's observation that the Renaissance revival of classical Roman learning paradoxically made the Roman world "infinitely more distant and harder to understand than it had been previously"(12).¹ As the past could no longer be assumed to be like the present, the new learning led to the development of a new way of approaching it—the past as Other. Spanish writers were then able to apply the same analytical techniques to the history of the Inca people, the contemporary Other, relating it to the Roman imperial world and, ultimately, to the Christian providential conception of history. The Spanish saw the Inca Empire playing a historical role similar to that of the Roman and Spanish empires. As the Romans had civilized the peoples of their world and paved the way for Christianity, so did the Inca exert a civilizing influence in the Americas, preparing the way for the Gospel brought by the Spanish Empire.

The core of the book is an analysis of the historical works that the conquest of Peru generated—for example, by the Spaniards Oviedo, Cieza, and Zárate and by the Incan scholar Garcilaso de la Vega. All of these writers shared a common intellectual perspective shaped by the study of the now-distant Roman world and by the Christian notion of providential history. One important consequence of employing a Roman historical framework is that it provided a basis for criticizing the activities of the Spaniards in the Americas to the extent that they resembled the evils committed by the Romans in their imperial expansion. At the same time, the Spaniards could also admire the positive qualities of the Incas as they admired the positive qualities of the pagan Romans.

Finally, MacCormack demonstrates that any attempt to create a history of Inca Peru free of Spanish intellectual influences is doomed to fail. The only available materials about that world came through the Roman-Christian lens, because there is "no such thing as an uncontaminated Andean text" (xvi).