Royal Commentaries Of The Incas And General History Of Peru 2 Volume Set

Reading The Royal Commentaries Without Losing Your Mind

I spent a week last year trying to pin down Inca genealogies using Garcilaso de la Vega's text, and I learned pretty quickly that page numbers mean different things depending on which reprint you hold. The standard 1966 University of Oklahoma Press edition (edited by Francis Cantillo) has one pagination, the older 1843 Royal Society translation has another, and Amazon PDFs of public-domain scans shift around completely. If you're cross-referencing footnotes between editions, just pick one and stick with it. I wasted two days tracking a citation before I realized I was comparing the Cantillo footnotes against a 19th-century marginal note system that didn't actually correspond. The set itself is two volumes: Volume 1 covers the Royal Commentaries, Garcilaso's personal account of Inca civilization blended with his own biography, and Volume 2 is Pedro Cieza de León's General History of Peru, which runs chronologically through the Spanish conquest. They're often bound together now as a single 2 Volume Set because neither text makes much sense without the other. Garcilaso writes from the inside as a mestizo noble with actual memory of the culture; Cieza de León writes as a conquistador administrator who watched it all collapse. Put them side by side and you get something closer to how the period actually reads than either alone.

The Royal Commentaries Of The Incas And General History Of Peru 2 Volume Set

The practical thing to know first is what you're actually getting. These aren't modern scholarly editions with critical apparatus. The Cantillo edition has some useful footnotes but no source criticism. You're reading a 17th-century author who was writing partly to legitimize his own social position and partly because he felt the Inca story was being erased. That means you need to read him with one eye on his agenda, not as a transparent primary source. Cieza de León is more straightforward in a brutal way — he's reporting what he saw, and he saw a lot of violence. His chronicle is less filtered but also less interested in the interior life of the cultures he describes. I ran into a specific problem when trying to verify the succession list of Sapa Inca rulers. Garcilaso gives a clean lineage, but he also lived in a world where lineage determined tax obligations and social standing, so he had incentive to smooth over gaps or ambiguities. The Cieza material contradicts him on several successions, and modern historians like John Rowe have pointed out that Garcilaso's dates don't align with the archaeological record in a few key places. My workaround was to use Rowe's Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest as a parallel reference — it's older and more skeptical, but it flags exactly where Garcilaso gets things wrong. If you only read the Commentaries without something like Rowe checking your elbows, you'll absorb Garcilaso's version as fact.

What Makes This Pair Worth Your Time

Most people approach these texts looking for adventure stories about the Incas. You'll find those, but the real value is in the institutional detail. Garcilaso describes how the tribute system worked, how mit'a labor was allocated, how the quipu recording system functioned at a granular level. Cieza documents the early colonial administration's attempt to co-opt those same structures. Reading them together shows you that the Spanish didn't invent a new system — they grafted onto an existing one and modified it. That's a counter-intuitive point a lot of introductory courses miss. The colonial state wasn't a rupture; it was a parasite that happened to survive by eating the host. The downside is that neither text is easy reading. The prose is dense, the names are numerous, and the geography shifts as Spanish place-names overlay Inca ones. I've seen people give up on Volume 2 around Chapter 30 because Cieza gets repetitive describing the same battles from different angles. The workaround is to skip ahead to the sections on administration and economy first — those are where Cieza is most useful — and come back to the military narrative later if you have the patience. It took me three passes through the whole set before it started clicking. The first pass was mostly just getting used to the rhythm of the language. Another thing nobody tells you: the 2 Volume Set you buy on Amazon isn't always the same edition. Some listings are reprints of the Cantillo translation, some are cheaper bindings with smaller type and wider margins that eat into your reading space, and some are outright different translations with no note. I bought one copy last year and the pagination was completely off from the citation in a paper I was reading. The ISBN for the standard Oklahoma edition is 978-0806130022 for Volume 1 and 978-0806130039 for Volume 2. Check the ISBN, not the title. Titles get recycled across different publishers.

How to Actually Use These Texts

If you're doing serious work with them — genealogy, institutional history, economic analysis — you need a good index. The Cantillo edition has one, but it's shallow. I ended up building my own keyword index in a spreadsheet: every mention of a name, a ruler name, a tribute good, a labor term. It took about six hours spread over a weekend but it paid off immediately. Once you have that index, you can locate references in minutes instead of hunting through pages of running prose. I still use that spreadsheet years later. The quipu references are where things get genuinely tricky. Garcilaso describes the knotted cord recording system in detail, but his description has been debated by ethnographers for decades. Some argue he understood it better than he admits; others think he was filling gaps with plausible-sounding details. There's no resolution to this debate, and neither text gives you a definitive answer. If quipu is your focus, you'll need to go to modern scholarship like URTEAGA's work or the more recent studies coming out of the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. The Commentaries alone won't get you there. For casual reading, I'd recommend starting with Cieza's General History Volume 2 because it's more linear. You follow the Spanish advance chronologically, and the Inca context comes in as needed. Then move to the Commentaries for the cultural depth. Reading them in publication order — Cieza first, then Garcilaso — actually mirrors how the historical understanding of this period developed. That's not an accident worth ignoring.

The set runs about 500-600 pages per volume depending on your edition, and at a normal reading pace you're looking at two to three weeks for the complete pair. Don't try to power through. These texts reward slowing down and rereading passages that don't make sense on first pass. I've had sentences click into meaning only after I'd read three more chapters and encountered the same concept from a different angle. That's how the material works. It's not designed to be consumed linearly like a novel.

Where This Approach Breaks Down

I should be straight about the limitations. These texts are European-dominated. Garcilaso writes from a privileged position as a noble mestizo; Cieza from the position of a Spanish administrator. The voices of ordinary people — farmers, weavers, laborers — are almost entirely absent. What you get is elite perspective filtered through colonial intermediaries. If you're looking for social history from below, you'll be frustrated. The material exists in archaeological records and in later ethnographic work, but not in these texts. Also, the political agenda of both authors skews the record. Garcilaso wanted to prove that Inca civilization was sophisticated enough that his mixed heritage deserved respect in Spanish society. That means he sometimes overcorrects, presenting Inca institutions in a more rationalized form than they may have actually been. Cieza wanted to justify the conquest to his patrons back in Spain. That means he sometimes underreports Inca sophistication to make the Spanish achievement look more impressive. Reading them critically means holding both agendas in mind simultaneously, which is harder than it sounds. There's no single perfect alternative to this pair. The closest modern scholarly companion is probably the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. 2 Part 1, but that's expensive and academic in a way that makes it less readable. For most purposes, the Royal Commentaries and Cieza together remain the foundation text, even with all their flaws. Just don't treat them as complete. They're starting points, not endpoints.

If you want a free digital copy, the Cantillo translation is in the public domain in the United States. The HathiTrust Digital Library has scan copies of the original 1966 edition available online. Amazon listings for the physical 2 Volume Set run anywhere from forty to eighty dollars depending on condition and edition. Cheaper options exist but tend to be lower-quality reprints with smaller type. Worth paying a bit more for readability if you're planning to actually use the text, not just own it.