Garcilaso de la Vega, also called El Inca (born April 12, 1539, Cuzco, Peru—died April 24, 1616, Córdoba, Spain), one of the great Spanish chroniclers of the 16th century, noted as the author of distinguished works on the history of the Indians in South America and the expeditions of the Spanish conquistadors.
Garcilaso was the illegitimate son of a Spanish conquistador, Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega, and an Inca Indian princess. Raised in his father’s household in Peru, he absorbed both the traditions of the Incas and the stories told by his father’s Spanish associates. He learned Spanish and Latin and was an eyewitness to the civil wars then raging in Peru, which he later recorded in his chronicles.
A highly intelligent youth, he was used by his father as a scribe and agent to govern his vast estates in Peru. In the fall of 1560 he arrived in Spain and came under the protection of his father’s brother. In the 1560s he served in the Spanish armies, in which he reached the rank of captain. Later he entered the priesthood, becoming a minor ecclesiastic in 1597.
Garcilaso’s literary career started with his translation into Spanish of the Italian Neoplatonic dialogue, Dialoghi di amore (“Dialogues of Love”), by the Jewish humanist Léon Hebreo, which was published in 1588. Garcilaso is best known for La Florida del Ynca (an account of Hernando de Soto’s expeditions north of Mexico) and his history of Peru, describing the civil wars that broke out among the Spanish conquerors of Peru (Part I, 1608/09; Part II, 1617). Garcilaso’s writing places him within the currents of Spanish Renaissance literature, but he should not be confused with the great early 16th-century poet of the same name, to whom he was related.