Garcilaso de la Vega refers to two, very important, Spanish literary gentlemen and soldiers, born in the sixteenth century.
Garcilaso de la Vega [1539-1616], sometimes called the Inca, was the Peruvian-born son of the Spanish conquistador Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas and the niece of the Inca leader Huayna Capac [AD 1493-1527], Isabel Suarez Chimpu Ocllo. This Garcilaso was an historian of the Inca peoples, and of the Spanish warriors who conquered them. Trained in Spain and Cuzco, he was fluent in Spanish, Quechua and Latin. His two-part history, Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) and the Historia General del Peru (1617) provide a rare, sympathetic image of the Inca civilization at the time of conquest.
Garcilaso de la Vega [1501-1536], on the other hand, was an important poet born in Spain. That de la Vega was the scion of a noble Castilian family (named Garcilaso de la Vega as well, and the fourth or fifth person in his family with that name) and a renowned poet, of the 16th century Petrarchism revival school, credited with bringing the Italian Renaissance into Spain. This de la Vega joined the court of Charles V of Spain in 1520. As a courtier and soldier, he went with the king to visit Henry VIII in England and fought in the Seige of Rhodes and other battles with the Ottoman Empire, and in fact was wounded and died after a battle.
The two were not related.
- Read more about Garcilaso de la Vega, the poet (from our About.com guide to Spanish literature, Crystal Honores, in Spanish)
- Read more about Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inca
Sources
This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Llosa MV. 2009. El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 42(2):160-166.
Rivers EL. 2011. On appreciating the other Garcilaso. MLN 126(2):390-395.
