Noble Blood - The First New Chronicle

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

In 1600, Guaman Poma began writing what would become a nearly 1,200-page open letter to King Philip III of Spain. Part history, part social critique, it's an illustrated depiction of Inca life and culture that was lost to history for 300 years, until it was rediscovered by accident. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, Anatomy: A Love StorySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode. They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on Demand. This guy's bobo-u-bubim.

2-A-Mu-Water. And I'm like, wild, a wild batch you were with. It was like a first, like, closet moment from me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating her. in a different way than these boys are.

I'm not like, but listen to Los Coleristas on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. One quick note before we begin, Noble Blood is on Patreon.

If you want to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash Noble Blood Tales. It's where I upload scripts and bonus episodes. Like I watch period pieces with my friends once a month and talk about everything they get right and wrong. And also a brand new feature, which is if you subscribe at, you know, a medium level, you get to join our quarterly sticker club. Every season, we drop a new exclusive sticker just for Patreon subscribers available nowhere else. And you just get a brand new sticker every season that, like, an amazing artist,

They're very cool. I love stickers, which is why I did it. But yeah, support the Patreon for bonus episode scripts, stickers, and more. But of course, as always, the best possible support is just that you're listening to the show. So thank you so much. In 1908, a researcher was going through the archives in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. He was an anthropologist named Richard Peachman, but we don't actually know specifically what he was looking for in the library that day. But I think we can probably assume that he had spent a long time in the dusty aisles of the archives. Hours, days, even weeks. His eyes were probably going bleary from hours staring at narrow cursive script.

I imagine his hands slivered with paper cuts and his mind wrecked with exhaustion. And then, perhaps snucked. on the bottom of a shelf or hidden within a large folio, Richard saw something strange, something that looked unfamiliar and out of place. The German anthropologist pulled the artifact from where it had sat for decades, and he brushed the dust away.

It was 1,200 pages, a document written halfway around the world, meant for the King of Spain, and the document had made, made a long and circuitous journey. It had been stuck unseen within library collections, been bought and sold and inherited, passed through the hands of historians and collectors, without anyone truly understanding what they were looking at, until it came here. The Royal Library in Copenhagen, of all places, where a German anthropologist stumbled upon it,

nearly five centuries after it had been written. The document, at nearly 1,200 pages long, is really more of a tome than a document at all. And though it ended up in Denmark, it actually had nothing to do with Denmark at all. It's called El Primer Nueva Coronica and Buen Goeerno, or the first new chronicle of good government, and it's one of the most important historical tools we have

for understanding the culture of the Inca people in Peru and their lives both before and during the occupation of the Spanish conquistadors. Written by a man named Guamon Poma, the text is at once funny and deadly serious. He wrote it as a plea to the Spanish king so that he might understand the harm that the colonists had been doing and the abuses of power that the Catholic missionaries had been doing in the name of their God. Poma's missive likely never even reached his intended target. But now, years later, we can read his message through time and understand what he was saying in a way that King Philip never would have understood.

I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Francisco Pizarro was on the expedition that crossed the Isthmus of Pans. Panama in the 16th century, making him one of the first Europeans to ever see the Pacific Ocean. He tried twice to invade and conquer Peru, and he succeeded on his third attempt in the name of his native Spain. There were two especially important factors working in Pizarro's favor, a war of succession happening at the time within the Inca Empire, and smallpox that the Europeans brought with them. In 1535, Pizarro built the now Spanish capital of Peru at Lima, the center of his and Spain's imperial power in what was now a vice-royalty. Possibly that very same year,

Guamon Poma was born. On both sides of his family tree, Poma was noble, his mother was descended from Inca royalty, and his father was royal through a link to the dynasty that preceded the Inca's. We don't know exactly when Poma was born, but we know that he grew up in parallel with the Spanish invasion. His nation was literally being reformed from under him, politically and spiritually. His older half-brother became a priest and converted the family to Christianity. It's through that connection that Poma, who was a native speaker of the language, Getsua, learned Spanish and also learned how to read and write. Poma became something between a friend and an assistant to the friar Martin de Marua,

a Spaniard who would end up writing the first illustrated history of Peru. It's likely from his time spent with Martin de Muroa that Poma honed his own skills as an artist, although he was never formerly trained. But Poma's ability to speak multiple languages served him in adulthood when he began working as an administrator within the government of the vice royalty, at least until he got in political trouble. The details of the legal case are a little difficult to parse out, but in 1594, Poma represented his family in a land dispute about a claim on a parcel of land outside the town of Huamanga, which would have been entitled to

them given their noble lineage. The case became a legal quagmire, lasting for six years, coming back again and again with a verdict against Poma and his family. Eventually, Poma was accused of either misrepresenting or outright lying about his family's lineage in order to take the land illegally. As punishment, he was sentenced to 200 lashes and two years of evidence. And two years of exile from the town of Huamanga. The experience, both the ordeal of the trial and the humiliating punishment, affected Poma greatly. He felt that he had suffered a tremendous injustice, and he began working in his own way toward creating a more just world. He started by helping represent other indigenous people in lawsuits, and by traveling as a missionary with his friar friend, Martin.

D'Amura and helping to convert the native people of the Andes. Around this time, Poma also began writing his letter to the King of Spain, telling him the story of his people and explaining what the Spanish invaders had gotten right and what they had gotten very, very wrong. During his travels with Martine de Marua, Poma was helping him with his chronicles by providing some illustrations. But we know from Poma's own writings that, even though he valued having access to the friars library, he had a miserable time doing that work. I imagine it's much the same for any creative person trying to work on an independent project when their boss is demanding that

they spend their creative energy on something that they, the boss, will get all the credit for. El Primer Nueva Coronica and Buen Gobierno took nearly a decade and a half for Guamonpoma. It was started in 1600 and likely wasn't fully completed until 1615. And boy oh boy, is it a real tome? The open letter contains 1,189 pages and 39 drawings that were done in black and white and white, in a simple style that would lend itself well to mass printing. The text, too, is formatted with the conventions of typesetting. Poma had imagined that, after King Philip III of Spain read it,

he would want the Nueva Chronica widely distributed. Now, let's take a brief detour to talk about King Philip the Third of Spain. The historian J.H. Eliot gives us a particularly colorful quote, describing the monarch as, quote, a pallid anonymous creature whose only virtue appeared to reside in a total absence of vice. I will say, King Philip's looks weren't his fault. He was a Habsburg and he fulfills all of the stereotypes of inbreeding that go along with it. His father had been the son of two first cousins and he married his own niece who also had cousin parents. And surprise, surprise, our Philip the Third would also marry a first cousin, though

once removed. At this point, the family tree was resembling more of a tumbleweed. Ultimately, Philip III's grandson would be the end of the Spanish Hapsburg line. That grandson would be deeply unwell in basically every regard and unable to procreate. His autopsy would memorably observed that upon death, quote, his heart was the size of a peppercorn, his lungs corroded, his intestines rotten and gangrenous. He had a single testicle, black as coal,

and his head was full of water. But that nightmare child was still years away during Philip the Third's reign, during which the biological potency of the Habsburgs and the power of Spain were both in decline. Though Philip did rule over the imperialistic boom of the Spanish Empire, and he did lead a few successful early campaigns in the 30-year-s war,

economic trouble would prove to be impossible to shake, and Spain's time as a global superpower would soon be drawing to a close. But for the time being, Spain was ruling over Peru, and Guamon Poma wanted to create a document that would serve both as a history of the Andean civilization that had been swallowed by the Spanish conquistadors, and also to explain the damage that Europeans were doing in the king's name, and in the name of the church. Guamon Poma was Christian,

which meant that he was all too aware of the rampant abuses of power among missionaries and those in positions of power. The first two-thirds of the thousand-plus paged home are an attempt to teach King Philip III that the Andean civilizations were complex, sophisticated, and elegant in their structures. The last third of the document, titled Buen Gobierno, would then explain how all of that was destroyed by the Spanish. The Nuevo Chronica is structurally an incredibly ambitious and complex document that blends a number of literary genres and styles of art. to say nothing of the way that it jumps between Spanish, Latin, and two languages of native Andean people, Quechua and Imara. The drawings are composed using European rules of representation and space,

but with the sort of lines that evoke the way Inca decoration is done, with abstract geometric shapes. The purpose of those juxtaposed styles wasn't to be slapdash, it was to make a clear evocative point about the merging and crashing of these two cultures, like tectonic plates meeting and creating fissures in the earth. Take, for instance, one of the illustrations of a map done in the style of the ones that were done in Europe in the 16th century. You can sort of picture it, right, with Europe at the center of the map, the seas vast, and with fantastical monsters like dragons and unicorns along the end. Poma's map has all of that too, but he has Peru at the center of the world, and the map is

centered not on Lima, the capital of colonial Peru, but on Kuzko, the capital of the Inca Empire. The top of the map has the coats of arms of the Pope and the Spanish kingdom, but above that, even higher, are the deities of the Inca, the moon goddess and the sun god, Inti. fascinating, but there is sort of a challenge when the message is meant to be filtered through both Inca and Spanish understanding of symbols. Almost no one in the 1600s would have been able to understand the full meaning of what Guamonpoma was trying to communicate, and almost no one would know all of the languages that would be required to read the whole book. But by speaking

the Spaniards' language, both literally and in the language, both literally and in terms of the layout of the drawings and structures of the essays, Cuomo was using a tool that's fairly common in debate, meeting someone at their level in order to persuade them of something. He was acknowledging the basic premises of the Spanish worldview in order to point out their hypocrisies. It's a persuasive strategy. And Poma also uses another strategy, humor.

His book, once you understand the symbols, is very funny. One of the drawings is basically a political cartoon. In it, an Inca asks what the Spanish eat. The response? Gold. But the book is also a tremendously serious work of scholarship, and it's important to our academic understanding of what pre-colonial ink in life was like. Even though Guamon Poma was writing a generation after, Spanish arrival and even though he had never really known life before they came to Peru,

he is an invaluable source. The Inca had had an advanced recording system. It was written using knots on chords, but researchers still struggle to fully translate it. Guamunpoma's writing, even if it isn't exactly firsthand, is still an essential guide to pre-colonial Inca culture. Some of that cultural information is incredibly basic. One of Poma's illustrations shows that both men and women were planting potatoes. We learned from that about their division of labor and that the planting season was in December. And he's also giving us important history. One illustration that depicts the beheading of the Inca leader Sapa Inca Atualpa, who defeated his brother in civil war to claim the throne to the Inca Empire after the death of their father,

but who was later than captured by Pizarro. Though Atahualpa converted to Christianity and a ransom was raised for his release, the Spaniards still executed him. Poma's drawing shows Atahualpa tied to a flat table, held down by multiple European men. A Spanish soldier holds a knife at the leader's name. neck with a mallet in his other hand, ready to strike a fatal blow. Atta Hualpa clutches a cross in his hands. Below are the words, Andean nobles lament the killing of their innocent lord.

It was a clear indictment of the cruelty of the Spanish conquistadors, but unfortunately, Poma's message likely never reached King Philip of Spain. The book would have circulated among the court in Lima before traveling to Spain, but it ended up forgotten somewhere in a collection of rare documents that was eventually traded or gifted to the library in Copenhagen. But still, Guamon Poma's message reached us. We now know the stories and structures of the Inca before the Spanish arrived. We can see the depictions of what the Spanish did. Guamon Poma. did tell his story to the Western world. We just received it a few hundred years late.

That's the story of Guamonpoma and the Nuevo Coronica, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the symbolism in one of his drawings. Will Farrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend Janet. And we have been joined at the Hipsons High School. Absolutely.

Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Well, they had a bogo.

Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just take it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on.

Could you believe? I would buy it. Cut through the defense like a hot. knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You are.

I'm lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend Janet.

Hey. And we have been joined. at the hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider.

This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They had a bogo.

Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just hit it. Oh, what are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on.

Can you move? I would buy it. cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.

Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a notion in Inca culture that towns are divided, both physically, and socially into two halves. There's the lower half and the upper half, known as Hurin and Hanan. Those halves are symbolically associated with left and right. In one of Guamonpoma's drawings, the Pope is standing on the left-hand side of the page, with the King of Spain kneeling on the right. That was fairly confusing to me. The left side is considered the lower side, and Guamonpoma would have always believed that the church is higher than the king. The king would have believed that too, and in the drawing the king is kneeling. So why would the pope be on the left? Well, he is on the left.

The reader's left. But if you were in the picture looking out, the pope is standing on the right, with the king kneeling to his left. It's another little element that needs to be decoded, and it's also a little inadvertent reminder that sometimes we need to change our perspectives around. There's another little Easter egg in the drawing. Guamonpoma put himself in the drawing, small as a figure smaller than the king and kneeling down below him. But if you're looking at it from the drawing's perspective, Guamonpoma drew himself in the king's superior position to the king's right. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by Rima Il Kiali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHart. iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists. We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys. We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.

They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. Video on Demand. This guy's bobo- 2 a.m. But whatever time it is, Lizzie McGuire. And I'm like, a wild bat. A wild batch you were with. It was like a first closet moment from me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot, like the rest of that. No, no, no. I was like, she's beautiful. But I'm appreciating. her in a different way than these boys are. I'm not like, but listen to Los Angeles

on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.