The Discovery and Conquest of Peru (review)

The Discovery and Conquest of Peru. By PEDRO DE CIEZA DE LEON. Edited and translated by ALEXANDRA PARMA COOK and NOBLE DAVID COOK. Chronicles of the New World Encounter, Latin America in Translation/ En traducción/Em tradução. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xviii, 501 pp. Cloth, $64.95. Paper, $21.95.

Pedro de Cieza de León, the "prince of Peruvian chroniclers," traveled widely in South America between 1535 and 1550, acting as a conquistador, a member of the royalist army that defeated Gonzalo Pizarro in Peru and a protoethnographer and chronicler of the realm. These travels, aided by his political connection to the president of the Audiencia, Pedro de la Gasca, then became fodder for a series of four manuscripts describing the conquest and settlement of Peru and the cultures of its native peoples. Part 3 of this project, here published as The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, relies less on his own acute observations than Cieza's subsequent interviews with native and European informants and access to his patron's private papers. It is a colorful and engaging narrative of the (mis)adventures of Francisco Pizarro and his cohort as they managed to subjugate and plunder the native populations while bickering violently among themselves.

Cieza is often considered the least "biased" of the early chroniclers; certainly he takes fewer sides than Fernández de Oviedo, the major chronicler of the South American campaigns of this period. Like Bernal Díaz in Mexico, he is aware of the politicking that goes on amongst those who would rule and is conscientious not to contribute to the hagiography. He is also unlike most of his compatriots in his relative modesty—for example, while he cannot fully explain why American natives restrained themselves when they could easily have demolished the tiny group of Spaniards in their midst, he cannot quite bring himself to say that it was out of God's favoritism. But of course his apparent lack of bias is often simply a taste for backroom drama and political gossip, informed by a healthy cynicism. He approvingly notes that the conquistador and cleric Hernando de Luque knew that "power does not tolerate equality and that everyone wanted it mostly for himself" (p. 130). And he wrote during the terrible civil wars and uprisings of the first decades of Spanish rule; his cynical attitude toward power and the personal motives of the conquistadors is born of sure knowledge of what was to come.

Like his contemporaries, Cieza subsumed his Andean experiences under a European model of the world. But his remarkable chronicles also partake of a personal knowledge of that Andean world, though not as personal or personally motivated as those familially intertwined with both republics, like Juan de Betanzos or Garcilaso de la Vega. While the content of this volume is more Eurocentric than his part 1, it represents the conflict between cultures with a dose of self-reflexivity, and a distance often absent from these early narratives. More unusually, Indian motives are considered with the same shrewd attention paid to Spaniards; he depicts Indians as alternately intrigued, disgusted, impressed and confused by their invaders, and the reader is left understanding how, if not why, such a small group of armed men could slip through the interstices of the crumbling Inca empire.

The Cooks here find a simple and engaging tone that well approximates Cieza's own, and supplement the text with a critical introduction and ample footnotes that make it ideal for classroom use. They have also furnished illustrations from the Seville 1553 edition of part 1 as well as a number of drawings from Guaman Poma de Ayala's now ubiquitous Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. This translation of Cieza's chronicle will be welcomed by students and scholars for its fresh and complicated retelling of the story of Cajamarca and its aftermath.