Martín de Murúa
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Martín de Murúa,
Murúa's career in Peru
Murúa volunteered to serve in the missions of
In addition to his missionary work, Murúa gathered data to write a history of the Andean past. He was assisted in his translation of the date from the
In 1611, Murúa made the decision to return to Spain. He chose, however, not to take the usual route, by way of Panama. Instead, he traveled across the
The following year, while living in Madrid, Murúa received the necessary authorizations from both his Order and the king to publish his chronicle, entitled Historia general del Piru. The work covers Peru's
The Galvin and Getty manuscripts
There exist two versions of the Historia general del Piru: the Galvin Murúa (also known as the "Loyola Murúa") and the Getty Murúa (also known as the "Wellington Murúa"). The former is kept in a private collection in Ireland while the latter is at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. The original as well as a facsimile of the Galvin Murúa are available at the Getty Center for consultation by qualified scholars.
The Galvin Murúa dates from the 1580s and was completed around 1600. This first version of the chronicle was compiled in Peru by Murúa with the assistance of local scribes and Indigenous artists (one of whom was
The Getty Murúa dates from 1615–16 and was the second version of the chronicle. Most of the text was compiled in Peru and present-day Bolivia, although it was most likely re-edited in Spain. This version received the final approbation for printing, however for unknown reasons it remained unpublished during the seventeenth century. Once in Spain, the manuscript was somehow acquired by Castilian statesman and bibliophile Lorenzo Ramirez de Prado. After Ramirez's death in 1658, it was incorporated into the library of the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca in Salamanca and finally the private library of King Charles IV of Spain in 1802. As a result of the Peninsular War, it came into the possession of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. Thus the manuscript acquired the title the "Wellington Murúa." It was later sold at auction to a collector in Cologne, Germany, changing hands once more before its "rediscovery" by Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois in the early 1950s. Ballesteros Gaibrois published a two volume edition of Historia general del Piru in 1962 and 1964. In 1983, the manuscript was sold to the Getty Research Institute. Since then it has been known as the "Getty Murúa."
Research has proven that several images (including two by Guaman Poma) from the Galvin Murúa were removed and pasted into the Getty Murúa, although overall the Galvin Murúa contains more images than its counterpart. The images in both manuscripts were colored using paints, dyes, and silver from the Americas and Europe. An exhaustive study of both manuscripts was funded by the Getty Research Institute in 2007-2008.
Murúa's Historia general del Piru (1616)
Murúa's chronicle is divided into three books. The following is the complete title of the work:
The first book is divided into 92 chapters and contains the following:
The second book has 40 chapters and includes the following:
Finally, the third book contains the following in 31 chapters:
Murúa worked closely with indigenous peoples in compiling his text, incorporating their testimonies and oral accounts of Inca culture and political history into Historia general del Piru. The most striking feature of the chronicle is its numerous illustrations, which include portraits of Inca nobility and depictions of traditional ceremonies. These images blend European and indigenous artistic traditions.
Murúa and Guamán Poma
There is strong evidence that the chroniclers
Twentieth-century scholars had often speculated that there existed a some relationship between
Guamán Poma notably attacks Murúa in his Corónica, even depicting the friar striking and kicking an indigenous woman seated at a loom. This image is entitled "The Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa abuses his parishioners and takes justice into his own hands." According to Rolena Adorno, "... when he became an author after 1600, [Guamán Poma] was highly critical of a work by Murúa that he had recently illustrated. Guamán Poma was prompted to write his own account against what he understood to be Murúa's limited perspective, which he had encountered in the Galvin Murúa. Guamán Poma extended Andean history back in time of the era predating the Inca, and he also elaborated a long and highly critical survey of colonial society such as no other chronicle of his time produced. Guamán Poma's artistic repertoire, which was displayed in his own work in the creation of nearly four hundred drawings, drew upon the formative experience he had gained while working with Murúa, but it also developed in new directions to reveal a strong polemical and satirical bent that was directed against the abuses perpetrated under colonial rule ... Although the evidence suggests that they worked independently after 1600, the efforts of Murúa and Guamán Poma can never be separated, and their talents, individually and together, produced three distinctive testimonies to the interaction between missionary author and indigenous artist-cum-author in early colonial Peru."[2]
See also
- Guamán Poma
- Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
- Diego Fernández
References
- ^ a b Juan M. Ossio Acuña. "Martín de Murúa". Real Academia de la Historia.
- ^ Adorno and Boserup, pp. 7–75
Citations
- 1. Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup, "The Making of Murúa's Historia General del Piru" in The Getty Murúa: Essays on the Making of Martin de Murúa's 'Historia General del Piru,' J. Paul Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig XIII 16. [Edited by Thomas Cummins and Barbara Anderson] (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008)
Works
- Historia de los Incas. Reyes del Perú .... Crónica del siglo XVI. Anotaciones y Concordancias con las crónicas de Indias. ed. por Horacio H. Urteaga y C. A. Romero. Colección de libros y documentos referentes a la historia del Perú. ser. 2, t. 4. Lima 1922-1925. (Historia del origen y genealogía real de los Reyes Incas del Perú. Introducción, notas y arreglos por Constantino Bayle. Biblioteca "Missionalia hispanica", vol. 2. Madrid 1946. Los Orígenes de los Inkas. Crónica sobre el Antiguo Perú escrita en el año 1590 por el padre mercedario Fray ... Estudio bio-bibliográfico sobre el autor por Raúl Porras Barrenechea. Los pequeños grandes libros de historia americana. ser. 1, t. 11. Lima 1946).
- Fábulas y Ritos de los Incas (1573). Pequeños Grandes Libros de Historia Americana, Serie 1, t. 4. Lima 1943.
- Fray Martín de Murúa: Historia general del Perú. Origen y descendencia de los Incas (1611). Introducción y notas de Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois. Bibliotheca Americana vetus. Con prólogo del Duque de Wellington. 2 vols. Madrid 1962-64.