es of the
Spanish conquerors, especially of Pizarro's chaplain, Valverde, an
ignorant bigoted fanatic. Then we have somewhat later travellers and
missionaries, of whom Cieza de Leon (his book was published thirty years
after the conquest, in 1553) is one of the most trustworthy. The "Royal
Commentaries" of Garcilasso de la Vega, son of an Inca lady and a
Spanish conqueror, have often already been quoted. The critical spirit
and sound sense of Garcilasso are in remarkable contrast to the stupid
orthodoxy of the Spaniards, but some allowance must be made for his
fervent Peruvian patriotism. He had heard the Inca traditions repeated
in boyhood, and very early in life collected all the information
which his mother and maternal uncle had to give him, or which could be
extracted from the quipus (the records of knotted cord), and from
the commemorative pictures of his ancestors. Garcilasso had access,
moreover, to the "torn papers" of Blas Valera, an early Spanish
missionary of unusual sense and acuteness. Christoval de Moluna is also
an excellent authority, and much may be learned from the volume of Rites
and Laws of the Yncas.(1)

(1) A more complete list of authorities, including the garrulous Acosta,
is published by M. Reville in his Hibbert Lectures, pp. 136, 137.
Garcilasso, Cieza de Leon, Christoval de Moluna, Acosta and the Rites
and Laws have all been translated by Mr. Clements Markham, and are
published, with the editor's learned and ingenious notes, in the
collection of the Hakluyt Society. Care must be taken to discriminate
between what is reported about the Indians of the various provinces,
who were in very different grades of culture, and what is told about the
Incas themselves.

The political and religious condition of the Peruvian empire is very
clearly conceived and stated by Garcilasso. Without making due allowance
for that mysterious earlier civilisation, older than the Incas, whose
cyclopean buildings are the wonder of travellers, Garcilasso attributes
the introduction of civilisation to his own ancestors. Allowing for what
is confessedly mythical in his narrative, it must be admitted that
he has a firm grasp of what the actual history must have been. He
recognises a period of savagery before the Incas, a condition of the
rudest barbarism, which still existed on the fringes and mountain
recesses of the empire. The religion of that period was mere magic and
totemism. From all manner of natural objects,