Writing Cuzco from Córdoba

He left Peru at twenty one and never returned, and the Comentarios Reales was written in Andalusia some forty years later by a man in his sixties. That distance is the first thing to hold in mind about it. His sources were his own memory of a Cuzco childhood among his mother's relatives, the Quechua he had learned before Spanish, the conversation of Inca kinsmen who visited the house and talked about the old order, printed chroniclers he read in Spain, and letters he wrote asking former schoolfellows in Peru to check particular points for him. He worked in a scholarly culture that valued eloquence and moral pattern as much as documentary detail, and he had read his Renaissance humanists.

The book that resulted is beautifully constructed, warm about his mother's people, and organised around a thesis: that the Incas had brought order, law and a rational religion to a barbarous continent, and that the Spanish had a legitimate mission to complete rather than a licence to destroy. It is also, page for page, one of the most influential books ever written about South America. Later Andean political movements read it, and after the rebellion of Túpac Amaru II in 1781 the Crown moved to keep it out of Peruvian hands.