Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-9051977

1527-1900

Patrícia Morgado,

Latin American history and culture

Cuzco's carefully planned layout, featuring palaces and temples of superb stone masonry, astonished the city's first Spanish visitors and settlers. Despite their admiration, from its Spanish foundation in 1534 to the late 1580s Cuzco was reshaped into a colonial city. Several Inca walls and parts of the structures did survive. However, the lack of Indigenous and sixteenth-century Spanish visual representations hinders the reconstruction of the physiognomy of both the Inca and the early colonial city. Although more research is still needed, Inca Cuzco has been addressed in book chapters, articles, and more importantly, two monographs: Santiago Agurto Calvo's Cusco: La traza urbana de la ciudad inca (1980) and Ian Farrington's Cusco: Urbanism and Archaeology in the Inka World (2013). Colonial Cuzco has been studied more extensively, particularly in Harold Wethey's Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru (1949) and Graciela Maria Viñuales's El espacio urbano en el Cusco colonial: Uso y organización de las estructuras simbólicas (2004). Nonetheless, as Michael J. Schreffler points out in his introduction, these texts focus on the architecture produced after the devastating 1650 earthquake, leaving the city's transition from Inca to Spanish unexplored. In Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City, Schreffler takes on this challenging research. Rather than relying on archaeological records of material remains, he traces the making of the Inca city and the transformations that took place from 1534 to 1560 in the writings of firsthand witnesses of these events such as Juan de Betanzos, Pedro Cieza de León, and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as official documents of the time. Additional primary sources as well as archaeological and scholarly research are used to confirm and complement each of the texts by the aforementioned authors.An engaging and well-documented account of the Incas and their heirs present at the time of the conquest threads the seven chapters together and introduces the reader to Inca history. Similarly, each of the sixteenth-century texts are accompanied by information on the author, the context in which they were written, and an interesting analysis of contemporary visual representations of the city. Chapter 1 focuses on Inca Cuzco, from its establishment circa 1000 to its transformation into the major city that the Spaniards encountered, a design and effort attributed to the ninth Inca, Pachacuti (r. 1438–ca. 1472). The chapter introduces the main public spaces and structures, among them the House of the Sun (commonly known as Coricancha), through which, in subsequent chapters, Schreffler demonstrates the city's transformation. The idealized images of a grand and wealthy Cuzco described by two of Francisco Pizarro's companions who never set foot in the city are explored in chapter 2 within the context of Inca Atahualpa's imprisonment and the conquest of Peru. Through two detailed official documents—Cuzco's foundation document and the city council records—chapters 3 and 4 analyze Cuzco's Spanish foundation in 1534 as well as the city's reordering during the year that followed. The yearlong siege of Cuzco (1536–37) led by Manco Inca (Inca Atahualpa's successor) and the subsequent damage to the city are examined in chapter 5. The civil wars that followed this Indigenous uprising and their effects on the city are the topic of chapter 6. The decades of the 1540s and 1550s, when the city saw more significant interventions—including the transformation of the House of the Sun into a Dominican convent, an emblematic example of the imposition of Spanish rule—are discussed in chapter 7.Considering that the author claims that his analysis is positioned “at the nexus of art history—understood here to include the history of architecture—and literary history,” what is missed in this otherwise interesting study are more detailed plans of the city and the House of the Sun (p. 16). Schreffler could have included in his plans of Inca and Spanish colonial Cuzco (on pp. 12 and 93, respectively) the existing Inca walls in order to help the reader understand the magnitude of the Inca capital's transformation into a Spanish city. Additionally, including topographical information would have allowed for a better understanding of the city's dramatic setting. Schreffler's plan for the House of the Sun (on p. 36) would have benefited from including a north arrow to show the structure's solar orientation, a critical aspect for the Incas; details of the niches and openings; and its immediate surroundings, specifically the terraced gardens and the plaza Intipampa, both discussed in the text. More importantly, this plan could have strengthened the book's treatment of its central topic by making a distinction between existing walls and hypothetical ones in place of those dismantled. The book would have further benefited from a second plan showing the transformation of this sacred Inca structure into the convent of Santo Domingo.Despite these shortcomings, however, Schreffler's book is exquisitely well written and rigorously researched. Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City is without doubt a significant contribution to the body of knowledge on this unique city.