Blas Valera
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Blas Valera was born in Chachapoyas in 1545. Although the author of the Comentarios Reales de los Incas believed that Valera was born in Cajamarca, it is proved that he was born in the city of Chachapoyas.
Valera is considered to be the son of Luis Valera, one of the illustrated men who accompanied Pizarro in the conquest. He established himself in this city since its foundation. The mother of this out-standing Chachapoyano writer was Francisca Pérez, a native who had taken this name after been baptized.
The circumstance that he was born in 1545, less than 20 years of the fall of the Inca Empire, allowed him to meet many of its prominent men and also old amautas, that transmitted and entrusted him the events that he later narrated in his works.
He did his first studies in Trujillo and then continued them in Lima. Considering his knowledge of Quechua, he took part in the missions that Jesuits had established in Huarochirí, an important pre-Hispanic center of worship that at the beginning of the XVII century was the location of the most intense eradication campaign of idolatry, carried out by Francisco de Ávila.
He took an active part in the III Concilio Limense of 1583. Father Valera died in Alcala de Henares, Spain in 1597.
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[edit] The Priest
His priestly vocation made him travelled to Lima when he was still a teenager. When he was 17, he joined the Compañía de Jesús (Society of Jesus), where he gave excessive samples of his top intelligence since he began his priestly studies.
But at the same time he was preparing for the religious ministy, his love for the Peruvian history was also growing and, in his insistence of knowing about Peruvian past better, he devoted himself to the study of native languages. He became the biggest authority of his time in this subject.
This skill made that people entrusted him missions in which his linguistic knowledge was necessary, which simultaneously allowed him to keep on increasing his data gathering, collecting information from the authentic sources of all the places he was visiting.
Valera was a special case in those times: a bilingual mestizo and well-educated. He was entrusted with the compilation of news from the pre-Hispanic civilization, but the suspicions that his sympathies towards the Inca culture raised made that the Compañía closed the access of mestizos in the order and they supposed a negative opinion of him.
Because of his knowledge of native languages, he was a valuable collaborator of father José de Acosta, who prepared the first catechisms in Quechua and Aymara. These catechisms deserved the approval of Toribio de Mogrovejo.
On the other hand, there are evidences that Valera was accused of heresy because he include some favourable comments to the Inca Empire. He was shut in by the Jesuits for a brief period.
[edit] The writer
Luckily this man, who had the opportunity to know people who were able to provide very valuable information to him, was provided with a remarkable talent that distinguished him from his very early studies. Since he was a very young man, he could realize how important was, for the Peruvian history, to compile data information about the great Inca culture, which was already becoming extinct as fast as the western culture was imposing in this country.
All his works were written in Latin and, according to his critics, they were written in an elegant, neat and clean style. He narrated events of Peruvian past with a rigorous critical sense, accepting only the events that were supported by irrefutable evidence. This fact has given the authority to his writings that Garcilaso recognized in them. Many other historians have coincided with Garcilaso's judgment later. Some of them also believed that in other chroniclers' works, there are plagiarisms of the work of this venerable Jesuit and even the clandestine use of unpublished documents that he could not release.
In 1595, being in Spain, Valera lost valuable writings in the plundering of Cadiz made by the Englishmen. Some of them were acquired later by Garcilaso, who relates that they were provided him by the Jesuit Pedro Maldonado. Maldonado saved the documents, and even they were burnt and mistreated, Garcilaso thought that they were a valuable source of information with more authenticity and credibility than any other chronicler of the epoch.
[edit] His works
Between his works, it can be quoted:
- Vocabulario quechua (Quechua vocabulary)
- Historia de los Incas (History of the Incas)
[edit] Controversy about his life and works
Lately a few supposed new information on Blas Valera's biography have started to circulate. The most controversial one talks about "Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno" (A new Chronic and a Good Government), of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. According to specialist Laura Laurencich Minelli, there are three sheets of paper with drawings in the "Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum" that have the signature of an "Italian Jesuit", Blas Valera. According to Minelli, these drawings were made before 1618, that is to say, some years after the official death of Valera.
Apparently, the objective of Valera in Europe was to tell the Pope the truth about the conquest of Peru made by Pizarro, who would have poisoned Atahualpa's soldiers with a mixture of arsenic and wine. This fact was told to Valera by another conqueror, his own father, Luis Valera. The general of the Compañía, Claudio Aquaviva, didn't agree with Valera's intentions, for this reason he was declared a dead person and was exiled. He went to Spain, where he supposedly shared part of his works with the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
Later, it is said that Valera returned back to Peru secretly with the intention of publishing his version of the Peruvian conquest. he got in touch with other two Jesuits: Joan Antonio Cumis and Joan Anello Oliva. To carry out their intention, the three of them had to hide the identity of the real author, so they used the name of Huaman Poma de Ayala. When he carried out his assignment, Blas Valera would have returned to Spain in 1618, where he supposedly died a little time later.
The enigma of knowing who was the real writer of "Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno" and also about the biographical mess of Blas Valera have not still been solved.
