ABSTRACT
In Comentarios reales (1609), Inca Garcilaso inserted a story about two Indians who were fooled by their Spanish master because they were unable to read a letter he had given them. The Indians’ inability to read the letter and their reference to the divine nature of the Spaniards reveal the period’s discourse about civilization and barbarism. Garcilaso also acknowledges that a similar anecdote had been reported by Francisco López de Gómara in his Historia general de las Indias (1553). In fact, there existed at least three more renderings of the same story in Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s Decadas de Orbe Novo (1516), Melchor de Santa Cruz’s Floresta española (1574), and Lope de Vega’s El Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Colón (1599). Comparing the five texts will contextualize Garcilaso’s short story in ways that uncover the literary and oral traditions he engaged with in his historiographical project as well as the contact between humanistic and colonial topics within early-modern culture.
