Martín de Murúa

Fray Martín de Murúa kicks and beats a local woman from Waman Puma de Ayala, Coronica, around 1600

Martín de Murúa (* around 1525 or 1540 , probably in Azpeitia / Guipúzcoa , Spanish Basque Country ; † around 1618 in Spain ) was a Spanish Mercedarian monk , missionary and chronicler of the history of the newly conquered South America ( Historia del Pirú ).

life and work

Not much more is known about Murúa's life than what he himself says of himself in the work or what his temporary interpreter and collaborator Waman Puma de Ayala reports about him. Accordingly, he traveled through the viceroyalty of Peru as a missionary and friar , especially in the vicinity of Lake Titicaca and the old Inca capital Cuzco , where he collected information about the Inca Empire, which perished half a century ago. He was also Comendador (Lord) of the village of Yanaca in Aymaraes Province , Peru. During his travels from around 1580 he began to write a chronicle of the country before and immediately after the conquest by the Spaniards; He wrote much of it in the Mercedarian Convention in Cuzco and concluded it during the earthquakes, eruptions and ash showers of the Huaynaputina volcano in Arequipa . In 1611 he stayed in Ilabaya (Peru), then in La Paz ( Bolivia ), in 1612 in La Plata (now Sucre) (Bolivia), in 1613 in Potosí (Bolivia), then in Córdoba del Tucuman , Argentina, and finally in 1614 in Buenos Aires , and 1615/16 the busy man is already in Spain ( Madrid ), where King Philip III. gave him permission to print.

The Historia general del Piru

The manuscripts

The work exists in two different manuscripts: the Galvin-Murúa (also known as Loyola-Murúa ) and the Getty-Murúa (also known as Wellington-Murúa ).

Chronicle of Martín de Murúa: Inca Pachacútec in the Coricancha temple

• Galvin-Murúa : it dates from the 1580s and was completed around 1600; this first version was created in Peru with the collaboration of local writers and artists, including Felipe Waman Puma de Ayala . The manuscript reached the Jesuit college of Alcalá de Henares in Spain in the 18th century , then to Poyanne in Aquitaine / France , where the Jesuits had fled in the Second Carlist War (1879–1900). The name Loyola-Murúa also comes from this connection between the manuscript and the Jesuits ; in the 1950s it came into the hands of the Galvin family, Meath , Ireland via an antiquarian in San Francisco , USA .

• Getty-Murúa : This is a second version of the chronicle, which was also compiled in Peru and in the area of ​​today's Bolivia , but most likely revised in Spain. This edition was later released for printing, but also remained unprinted. It came into the hands of the book collector, author, humanist and Castilian politician Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado (1583-1658), from where it ended up in the library of the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca in the university city of Salamanca after his death , after the Colegios were dissolved in 1799 the royal library and, as a result of the Napoleonic Wars, in the possession of the Duke of Wellington (hence also called Wellington-Murúa ). It was sold several times and finally published in a simplified form in 1962–64. The manuscript came into the possession of the Getty Research Institute in 1983 ; there it was carefully edited and facsimile from 2007-08.

The question of why two manuscripts that were so fundamentally and with so much effort could disappear in the archives of Spain without ever being printed and thus known to a wider public is related to the peculiarities of Spanish censorship : for fear of detrimental representations that would Could damage Spain’s reputation ( Leyenda Negra ), everything concerning the New World has been submitted to the Council of India before going to press since 1560 ; there the cosmographer , who gathered all the information about America, acted as the state censor. The long shipping route to and from Europe and the administrative drag, paired with bureaucratic caution, made this upstream censorship an “often indissoluble shackle”, so that many books about America did not appear until the 19th or even the 20th century; This fate also overtook numerous other works, for example the elaborately produced codex of the collaborator and critic of Murúa, Waman Puma de Ayala , which was only rediscovered in Copenhagen in 1906, and the historia general des Bernardino de Sahagún (1499– 1590), which was not published until 1829.

Structure and content

The detailed title of the chronicle reads in German translation:

• “General History of Peru. Origin and descent of the Incas, as well as the civil war among the Incas and the arrival of the Spaniards. Description of the cities and regions there and other newsworthy things, compiled by the venerated Brother Martín de Murúa, Superior General of the Order of Our Lady of Mercy [de las Mercedes], the liberator of the prisoners. "

It is divided into three volumes with a total of 92 chapters:

• Vol. 1 contains the origin of the Incas as well as a historical and country description under the Inca rule,
• Vol. 2 the mode of government, the ceremonies and customs of the pre-Hispanic rulers and
• Vol. 3 a description of the most important cities and regions.

Depending on the edition, the work comprises 37 ( Getty or Wellington Murúa ) or 113 ( Galvin or Loyola Murúa ) color illustrations on 145 folio sheets.

Staff, Waman Puma de Ayala

During the compilation of his work - after all, the work on the two manuscripts took more than 35 years - the author worked closely with local informants, eyewitnesses and scribes; the many colored illustrations in the book are (mostly fictional) depictions of the Inca rulers and representations of traditional ceremonies.

The collaboration with his interpreter and illustrator Waman Puma de Ayala was not very pleasant: Waman Puma stopped working after a few illustrations and wrote his own account of the events, which - with 399 illustrations, is much more richly illustrated, but only in black and white A local's view of the Incas, the former masters, and the Spanish conquerors; Murúa is portrayed several times as a model of an irascible, flogging and unjust missionary and is even portrayed graphically.

If Martín de Murúa is also described by his Indian colleague as a choleric philanderer, then comes his Basque , solid coarseness, his industriousness, his humor, his mischievousness, already indicated in Waman, and his pronounced sense for the female gender, combined with attention to detail, curiosity and an ethnologically seeming acumen also benefits the work itself, especially as regards the description of the cult of the sun maidens ; M. describes sexual behavior in this very foreign culture precisely and impartially like hardly any other chronicler before or after him.

Waman Puma de Ayala, Punishment of Sun Maidens

Individual evidence

1. ↑ "Murúa itself remains a riddle"; The Getty Murúa, p. 1
2. ↑ To Poyanne: http://www.kath-info.de/solminihac.html sv Sel. Francisco Gárate
3. ↑ Joaquín de Entrambasaguas: La biblioteca de Ramírez de Prado. Madrid: Soler 1943. - “One of the richest libraries in Spain in the 17th century”; http://avisos.realbiblioteca.es/?p=article&aviso=63&art=1029
4. ↑ Website of the Getty Foundation with the option to order the facsimile including comments: http://www.getty.edu/Search/SearchServlet?col=getty&nh=10&qt=murua&x=0&y=0 .
5. ↑ There was also the church censorship of the Inquisition, which, however, only extended to works that had already been printed.
6. ↑ Bernard Lavalle: Cultural Life. In: Handbook of the History of Latin America. Vol. 1, pp. 510 ff - On the relationship between state censorship and the church inquisition: Interview with Rolena Adorno in http://www.librosperuanos.com/archivo/rolena-adorno.html
7. ↑ http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/661/es/text/ . Filipino national hero and writer José Rizal (1861-1896) portrayed the model image of the rumbling mendicant monk abusing the locals with a stick in his novel Noli me tangere in the figure of Father Dámaso (also known as "Stick Father " or "Padre Garotte") " arranged everything with fists and blows of the cane, which he passed out with a laugh and without the slightest malice. " (Chapters 11 and 13).
8. ↑ In the picaresque novel " Lazarillo de Tormes " (anonymous, around 1552), such a Mercedarian monk is satirically portrayed: "... obsessed with going outside, worldly business and social affairs, so much that I, I believe, more shoes more than the whole monastery. He gave me the first shoes that I walked through in my life, they didn't last longer than eight days, and I couldn't keep up with his gait any longer "; Chapter 4.

expenditure

• 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 CA 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, Series 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.
• Códice Murúa. Historia y genealogía de los reyes Incas del Perú del padre mercenario Fray Martín de Murúa . Códice Galvin. Estudio de Juan Manuel Ossio Acuña. Madrid: Testimonio 2004. - Facsimile with commentary by Galvin-Murúa with his 117 colored pictures.

literature

• Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois: Relación entre Fray Martín de Murúa y Felipe Huaman Poma de Ayala . In: American Studies. FS f. Hermann Trimborn on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Edited by Roswith Hartmann and Udo Oberem. (Collectanea Instituti Anthropos 20). San Augustine 1978. Vol. 1
• Rolena Adorno. Ivan Boserup: The Making of Murúa's Historia General del Piru . In: The Getty Murúa. Essays on the Making of Martín de Murúa's "Historia General del Piru," J. Paul Getty Museum Ms. Ludwig XIII 16 . Ed. V. Thomas BF Cummins and Barbara Anderson. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute 2008, ISBN 9780892368945 .
• Rolena Adorno: The polemics of possession in Spanish Americas narrative . New Haven et al. a. : Yale UP 2007, v. a. Chapter 2, ISBN 9780300214765 .
• Maret Keller, Expansion and Activities of the Mercedarian Order in the Andean Region in the 16th Century , Heidelberg 2015, URL: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/18729 , in Chapter 6.4. Fray Martín de Murúa in Peru before 1616 , pp. 498-547.
• Maret Keller, history and current status of the indigenous Andean population in the chronicles Martín de Murúas (1616) and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayalas (1615) , in: Judith Becker / Bettina Braun (eds.): The encounter with strangers and the historical consciousness . Göttingen [u. a.] 2012, pp. 59–78. ISBN 9783525101124 .

Web links

• http://www.librosperuanos.com/autores/martin-de-murua.html