The Conquest of the Andes from Andean Perspectives

This article argues that it is time to write the history of “the” Spanish conquest of the Andes from Andean perspectives. What did the history of conquest mean for sixteenth-century colonial Andean people? Building on new insights into the fabric and authorship of Martín de Murúa’s 1590 Historia y genealogía and by comparing it with contemporary Andean evidence, this article shows how an Andean “wak’a history-idiom” was at the heart of colonial Andean telling and writing about “the” conquest. To some colonial Andean people, conquest appeared as something that Andean wak’a had truly foreseen. In retrospect, wak’a foreclosures were verified by history. This same history idiom also enabled colonial Andeans to understand the two other companions of Spanish conquest: Christianization and epidemic disease. In part, Spaniards adopted this Andean mode of telling history when they began to incorporate native approbation-letters into their own accounts of “the” Spanish conquest.