Guaman Poma Writes a Chronicle for the King of Spain

Around 1615, an indigenous Andean nobleman named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala completed an expansive handwritten manuscript entitled El primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno. Addressed directly to King Philip III of Spain, the text was composed as an appeal across the Atlantic Ocean. Guaman Poma aimed to provide the Spanish monarch with an extensive record of Andean civilization from its earliest inhabitants through the Inca Empire and the European conquest, while confronting the monarch with the realities of colonial administration in Peru.

The manuscript combined written narrative with hundreds of intricate full-page pen drawings. Guaman Poma organized the earlier portions of his chronicle around the structures of Andean life before European arrival, explaining social hierarchies, religious customs, seasonal festivities, legal codes, and agricultural economies. While modern historians note inaccuracies in his accounts of pre-Inca and Inca chronology, his descriptions capture how indigenous communities remembered and understood their own history during the early decades of viceregal rule.