Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey listener discretion advised.
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Speaker 1: brand new sticker every season that like an amazing artist designs.
Speaker 1: They're very cool. I love stickers, which is why I
Speaker 1: did it. But yees support the Patreon for bonus episode scripts,
Speaker 1: stickers and more. But of horse, as always, the best
Speaker 1: possible support is just that you're listening to the show,
Speaker 1: So thank you so much. In a researcher was going
Speaker 1: through the archives in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. He
Speaker 1: was an anthropologist named Richard Peachman. But we don't actually
Speaker 1: know specifically what he was looking for in the library
Speaker 1: that day, but I think we can probably assume that
Speaker 1: he had spent a long time in the dusty aisles
Speaker 1: of the archives, hours, days, even weeks. His eyes were
Speaker 1: probably going bleary from hours staring at narrow cursive script.
Speaker 1: I imagine his hands slivered with paper cuts and his
Speaker 1: mind wrecked with exhaustion, and then, perhaps snuck on the
Speaker 1: bottom of a shelf or hidden with an a large ortfolio,
Speaker 1: Richards saw something strange, something that looked unfamiliar and out
Speaker 1: of place. The German anthropologist pulled the artifact from where
Speaker 1: it had sat for decades, and he brushed the dust away.
Speaker 1: It was twelve hundred pages, a document written halfway around
Speaker 1: the world, meant for the King of Spain, and the
Speaker 1: document had made a long and circuitous journey. It had
Speaker 1: been stuck unseen within library collections, been bought and sold
Speaker 1: and inherited, passed through the hands of historians and collectors
Speaker 1: without anyone truly understanding what they were looking at until
Speaker 1: it came here, the Royal Library in Copenhagen, of all places,
Speaker 1: where a German anthropologist stumbled upon it nearly five centuries
Speaker 1: after it had been written. The document, at nearly twelve
Speaker 1: hundred pages long, is really more of a tone than
Speaker 1: a document at all, and though it ended up in Denmark,
Speaker 1: it actually had nothing to do with Denmark at all.
Speaker 1: It's called El primier Nueva Coronica ibuen Gobierno, or the
Speaker 1: First New Chronicle of Good Government, and it's one of
Speaker 1: the most important historical tools we have for understanding the
Speaker 1: culture of the Inca people in Peru and their lives
Speaker 1: both before and during the occupation of the Spanish conquistadors.
Speaker 1: Written by a man named Guaman Poma, the text is
Speaker 1: at once funny and deadly serious. He wrote it as
Speaker 1: a plead to the Spanish king so that he might
Speaker 1: understand the harm that the colonists had been doing and
Speaker 1: the abuses of power that the Catholic missionaries had been
Speaker 1: doing in the name of their god. Poma's missive likely
Speaker 1: never even reached his intended target, but now you years later,
Speaker 1: we can read his message through time and understand what
Speaker 1: he was saying in a way that King Philip never
Speaker 1: would have understood. I'm Danish swartz and this is noble blood.
Speaker 1: Francisco Pizarro was on the expedition that crossed the Isthmus
Speaker 1: of Panama in the sixteenth century, making him one of
Speaker 1: the first Europeans to ever see the Pacific Ocean. He
Speaker 1: tried twice to invade and conquer Peru, and he succeeded
Speaker 1: on his third attempt in the name of his native Spain.
Speaker 1: There were two especially important factors working in Pizarro's favor,
Speaker 1: a war of succession happening at the time within the
Speaker 1: Inca Empire, and smallpox that the Europeans brought with them.
Speaker 1: In fifty five, Pizarro built the now Spanish capital of
Speaker 1: Peru at Lima, the center of his and Spain's imperial power,
Speaker 1: in what was now a vice royalty. Possibly that very
Speaker 1: same year, guamant Poma was born. On both sides of
Speaker 1: his family tree, Pomo was noble. His mother was descended
Speaker 1: from Inca royalty, and his father was royal through a
Speaker 1: link to the dynasty that preceded the Incas. We don't
Speaker 1: know exactly when Pomo was born, but we know that
Speaker 1: he grew up in parallel with the Spanish invasion. His
Speaker 1: nation was literally being reformed from under him politically and spiritually.
Speaker 1: His older half brother became a priest and converted the
Speaker 1: family to Christianity. It's through that connection that Poma, who
Speaker 1: was a native speaker of the language Getua, learned Spanish
Speaker 1: and also learned how to read and write. Poma became
Speaker 1: something between a friend and an assistant to the Friar
Speaker 1: Martin de Murua, a Spaniard who would end up writing
Speaker 1: the first illustrated history of Peru. It's likely from his
Speaker 1: time spent with Martin de Murua that Poma honed his
Speaker 1: own skills as an artist, although he was never formally trained,
Speaker 1: but Poma's ability to speak multiple languages served him in
Speaker 1: adulthood when he began working as an administrator within the
Speaker 1: government of the Vice Royalty, at least until he got
Speaker 1: in political trouble. The details of the legal case are
Speaker 1: a little difficult to parse out, but in fifteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: Poma represented his family in a land dispute about a
Speaker 1: claim on a parcel of land outside the town of Huamanga,
Speaker 1: which would have been entitled to them given their noble lineage.
Speaker 1: The case became a legal quagmire, lasting for six years,
Speaker 1: coming back again and again with a verdict against Poma
Speaker 1: and his family. Eventually, Poma was accused of either misrepresenting
Speaker 1: or outright lying about his family's lineage in order to
Speaker 1: take the land illegally. As punishment, he was sentenced to
Speaker 1: two hundred lashes and two years of exile from the
Speaker 1: town of Wamonga. The experience, both the ordeal of the
Speaker 1: trial and the humiliating punishment affected Poma greatly. He felt
Speaker 1: that he had suffered a tremendous injustice, and he began
Speaker 1: working in his own way towards creating a more just world.
Speaker 1: He started by helping represent other indigenous people in lawsuits,
Speaker 1: and by traveling as a missionary with his Friar friend
Speaker 1: Martine de Mura and helping to convert the native people
Speaker 1: of the Andes. Around this time, Palma also began writing
Speaker 1: his letter to the King of Spain, telling him the
Speaker 1: story of his people and explaining what the Spanish invaders
Speaker 1: had gotten right and what they had gotten very very wrong.
Speaker 1: During his travels with Martin de Marua, Poma was helping
Speaker 1: him with his chronicles by providing some illustrations. But we
Speaker 1: know from Poma's own writings that even though he valued
Speaker 1: having access to the Friars library, he had a miserable
Speaker 1: time doing that work. I imagine it's much the same
Speaker 1: for any creative person trying to work on an independent
Speaker 1: project when their boss is demanding that they spend their
Speaker 1: creative energy on something that they the boss will get
Speaker 1: all the credit for El premier Nueva Coronica ibwen Gobierno
Speaker 1: took nearly a decade and a half. For Guaman Poma,
Speaker 1: it was started in six hundred and likely wasn't fully
Speaker 1: completed until sixteen fifteen, and boy, oh boy, is it
Speaker 1: a real tone. The open letter contains one thousand, one
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty nine pages and three hundred and nine
Speaker 1: eight drawings that were done in black and white in
Speaker 1: a simple style that would lend itself well to mass printing.
Speaker 1: The text, too, is formatted with the conventions of type setting.
Speaker 1: Poma had imagined that after King Philip the Third of
Speaker 1: Spain read it, he would want the Nueba Coronica widely
Speaker 1: distribute it. Now, let's take a brief detour to talk
Speaker 1: about King Philip the Third of Spain. The historian J. H.
Speaker 1: Elliott gives us a particularly colorful quote, describing the monarch
Speaker 1: as quote a pallid, anonymous creature whose only virtue appeared
Speaker 1: to reside in a total absence of vice. I will
Speaker 1: say King phil looks weren't his fault. He was a
Speaker 1: Hapsburg and he fulfills all of the stereotypes of inbreeding
Speaker 1: that go along with it. His father had been the
Speaker 1: son of two first cousins, and he married his own niece,
Speaker 1: who also had cousin parents, and surprise, surprise, our Philip
Speaker 1: the third would also marry a first cousin, though once removed,
Speaker 1: at this point the family tree was resembling more of
Speaker 1: a tumbleweed. Ultimately, Philip the Third's grandson would be the
Speaker 1: end of the Spanish Hapsburg line. That grandson would be
Speaker 1: deeply unwell in basically every regard and unable to procreate.
Speaker 1: His autopsy would memorably observe that upon death quote, his
Speaker 1: heart was the size of a peppercorn, his lungs corroded,
Speaker 1: his intestines rotten and gangrenus. He had a single testicle
Speaker 1: black as coal, and his head was full of water.
Speaker 1: But that nightmare child was still years away. During Philip
Speaker 1: the third reign, during which the biological potency of the
Speaker 1: Habsburgs and the power of Spain were both in decline,
Speaker 1: Though Philip did rule over the imperialistic boom of the
Speaker 1: Spanish Empire, and he did lead a few successful early campaigns.
Speaker 1: In the Thirty Years War, economic trouble would prove to
Speaker 1: be impossible to shake, and Spain's time as a global
Speaker 1: superpower would soon be drawing to a close. But for
Speaker 1: the time being, Spain was ruling over Peru, and guaman
Speaker 1: Poma wanted to create a document that would serve both
Speaker 1: as a history of the Andean civilization that had been
Speaker 1: swallowed by the Spanish conquistadors, and also to explain the
Speaker 1: damage that Europeans were doing in the king's name and
Speaker 1: in the name of the Church. Guaman Poma was Christian,
Speaker 1: which meant that he was all to a ware of
Speaker 1: the rampant abuses of power among missionaries and those in
Speaker 1: positions of power. The first two thirds of the thousand
Speaker 1: plus paged home are an attempt to teach King Philip
Speaker 1: the Third that the Andean civilizations were complex, sophisticated, and
Speaker 1: elegant in their structures. The last start of the document,
Speaker 1: titled gwen Gobierno, would then explain how all of that
Speaker 1: was destroyed by the Spanish. The Nuebo Chronica is structurally
Speaker 1: and incredibly ambitious and complex document that blends a number
Speaker 1: of literary genres and styles of art, to say nothing
Speaker 1: of the way that it jumps between Spanish, Latin, and
Speaker 1: two languages of native Andean people, Quechua and Aymara. The
Speaker 1: drawings are composed using European rules of representation and space,
Speaker 1: but with the sort of lines that evoke the way
Speaker 1: Inca decoration is done with abs wracked geometric shapes. The
Speaker 1: purpose of those juxtaposed styles wasn't to be slapped ash.
Speaker 1: It was to make a clear evocative point about the
Speaker 1: emerging and crashing of these two cultures, like tectonic plates
Speaker 1: meeting and creating fissures in the earth. Take, for instance,
Speaker 1: one of the illustrations of a map done in the
Speaker 1: style of the ones that were done in Europe in
Speaker 1: the sixteenth century. You can sort of picture it right,
Speaker 1: with Europe at the center of the map, the seas vast,
Speaker 1: and with fantastical monsters like dragons and unicorns along the edges.
Speaker 1: Poma's map has all of that too, but he has
Speaker 1: Peru at the center of the world, and the map
Speaker 1: is centered not on Lima, the capital of colonial Peru,
Speaker 1: but on Kuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire. The
Speaker 1: top of the map has the coats of arms of
Speaker 1: the Pope and the Spanish Kingdom. But above that, even fire,
Speaker 1: are the deities of the Inca, the moon goddess and
Speaker 1: the sun god Inti. It's fascinating, but there is sort
Speaker 1: of a challenge when the message is meant to be
Speaker 1: filtered through both Inca and Spanish understanding of symbols. Almost
Speaker 1: no one in the sixteen hundreds would have been able
Speaker 1: to understand the full meaning of what Guaman Palma was
Speaker 1: trying to communicate, and almost no one would know all
Speaker 1: of the languages that would be required to read the
Speaker 1: whole book. But by speaking the Spaniards is language both
Speaker 1: literally and in terms of the layout of the drawings
Speaker 1: and structures of the essays. Guaman Poma was using a
Speaker 1: tool that's fairly common in debate, meeting someone at their
Speaker 1: level in order to persuade them of something. He was
Speaker 1: acknowledging the basic premises of the Spanish worldview in order
Speaker 1: to point out their hypocrisies. It's a persuasive strategy, and
Speaker 1: Poma also uses another strategy humor. His book. Once you
Speaker 1: understand the symbols is very funny. One of the drawings
Speaker 1: is basically a political cartoon in it, and Inca asks
Speaker 1: what the Spanish eat? The response gold. But the book
Speaker 1: is also a tremendously serious work of scholarship, and it's
Speaker 1: important to our academic understanding of what pre colonial Incan
Speaker 1: life was like. Even though Guaman Poma was writing a
Speaker 1: generation after Spanish arrival, and even though he had never
Speaker 1: really known life before they came to Peru, he is
Speaker 1: an invaluable source. The Inca had had an advanced recording system,
Speaker 1: it was written using knots on chords, but researchers still
Speaker 1: struggle to fully translate it. Guaman Poma's writing, even if
Speaker 1: it isn't exactly firsthand, is still an essential guide to
Speaker 1: pre colonial Inca culture. Some of that cultural information is
Speaker 1: incredibly basic. One of Poma's illustrations shows that both men
Speaker 1: and women were planting potatoes. We learned from that about
Speaker 1: their division of labor and that the planting season was
Speaker 1: in December, and he's also giving us important history. One
Speaker 1: illustration that depicts the beheading of the Inca leader Sapa
Speaker 1: Inca Atualpa, who defeated his brother in civil war to
Speaker 1: claim the throne to the Inca Empire after the death
Speaker 1: of their father, but who was later than captured by Pizarro.
Speaker 1: Though Atahualpa converted to Christianity and a ransom was raised
Speaker 1: for his release, the Spaniards still executed him. Poma's drawing
Speaker 1: shows Atahualpa tied it to a flat table held down
Speaker 1: by multiple European men. A Spanish soldier holds a knife
Speaker 1: at the leader's neck, with a mallet in his other hand,
Speaker 1: ready to strike a fatal blow. Atahualpa clutches across in
Speaker 1: his hands. Below are the words and Ian nobles lament
Speaker 1: the killing of their innocent lord. It was a clear
Speaker 1: indictment of the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadors, but unfortunately
Speaker 1: Poma's message likely never reached King Philip of Spain. The
Speaker 1: book would have circulated among the court in Lima before
Speaker 1: traveling to Spain, but it ended up forgotten somewhere in
Speaker 1: a collection of rare documents that was eventually traded or
Speaker 1: gifted to the library in Copenhagen. But still Guaman Poma's
Speaker 1: message reached us. We now know the stories and structures
Speaker 1: of the Inca before the Spanish arrived. We can see
Speaker 1: the depictions of what the Spanish did. Guaman Poma did
Speaker 1: tell his story to the Western world. We just received
Speaker 1: it a few hundred years late. That's the story of
Speaker 1: Guaman Poma and the Nuebo Coronica. But keep listening after
Speaker 1: a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more
Speaker 1: about the symbolism. In one of his drawings, there's a
Speaker 1: notion in Inca culture that towns are divided both physically
Speaker 1: and socially into two halves. There's the lower half and
Speaker 1: the upper half, known as Huren and Hannan. Those halves
Speaker 1: are symbolically associated with left and right. In one of
Speaker 1: guaman Poma's drawings, the Pope is standing on the left
Speaker 1: hand side of the page, with the King of Spain
Speaker 1: kneeling on the right. That was fairly confusing to me.
Speaker 1: The left side is considered the lower side, and Guaman
Speaker 1: Poma would have always believed that the church is higher
Speaker 1: than the king. The king would have believed that too,
Speaker 1: and in the drawing the king is kneeling, So why
Speaker 1: would the pope be on the left, Well, he is
Speaker 1: on the left the reader's left, But if you were
Speaker 1: in the picture looking out, the Pope is standing on
Speaker 1: the right with the king kneeling to his left. It's
Speaker 1: another little element that needs to be decoded, and it's
Speaker 1: also a little inadvertent reminder that sometimes we need to
Speaker 1: change our perspectives around. There's another little easter egg in
Speaker 1: the drawing. Guaman Poma put himself in the drawing small
Speaker 1: as a figure smaller than the king and kneeling down
Speaker 1: below him. But if you're looking at it from the
Speaker 1: drawings perspective, Guaman Poma drew himself in the king's superior
Speaker 1: position shan to the King's right. Noble Blood is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from
Speaker 1: Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Danishwartz. Additional
Speaker 1: writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, hannah's Wick, Mirra Hayward,
Speaker 1: Courtney Sunder, and Laurie Goodman. The show is produced by
Speaker 1: rema Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive
Speaker 1: producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more
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Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.