It is well known that the Renaissance profoundly influenced Spanish society and culture on the eve of its encounter with the New World, some aspects of which, such as the planning of towns, have received some scholarly attention. However, there has been no systematic study of the way in which Roman history and Roman and classical writings informed interpretations of the course of history in the Americas. Based on a series of lectures at the Istituto di Studi Umanistici in Florence in 2003, this book of essays explores Rome’s influence on Spain’s encounter with Peru as reflected in the writings of chroniclers of the Andean region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The book is divided into seven chapters and an epilogue. After a brief overview, each of the chapters takes up a separate theme: writing and origins; conquest; cities and the law; nature; language; and what defined Peru. The opening chapter notes the persistence of Rome in daily life in sixteenth-century Spain and in the ruins that littered the landscape. This classical heritage received renewed interest during the Renaissance, when Spanish scholars turned back to the original classical texts. Such familiarity with Roman history and personages inevitably influenced the interpretation scholars of conquest. Hence, commentators such as Pedro Cieza de León, Agustín de Zarate, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo all likened the conflict between conquistadors in Peru to the Roman civil wars, while Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa saw the Spanish empire in the Andes as a successor to that of Rome in bringing good governance to the region. MacCormack notes that no chroniclers compared the Inca empire unfavourably with that of Rome; indeed, Cieza de León and Bartolomé de Las Casas defended it as being equally civilized.

Chapter 2, which focuses on writing and the difficulties of recording Inca history, is perhaps the most interesting in the book. For the Spanish, writing was regarded as the only way to record things, but writing about Inca history proved difficult since it depended on oral traditions or on information contained on knotted strings used to record numerical information on people, goods, or resources, known as quipus. Cieza de León considered the lack of writing in the Andes to be an obstacle to gaining a true understanding of Inca history. Even when Andeans adopted writing, what they wrote was less intelligible to Spaniards because the sequence and inter-linkage of events and people did not follow the format they expected of histories that were written using alphabetic writing. Moreover, since Andeans often saw their origins in places – such as mountains, springs, or other natural features – in ways that were inconsistent with Christian beliefs, the chroniclers found themselves forced to reinterpret their history in Christian terms, looking back through Greco-Roman times to a biblical past and thus producing rather fanciful accounts of Inca history. Even the native chronicler, Guaman Poma de Ayala, who is unlikely to have read any classical texts, matched Inca historical phases with those of Europe.

In Chapter 3, MacCormack explains how, in attempting to explain events in Peru, chroniclers drew inspiration from Greek and Roman history. For example, the conflict between Francisco Pizarro and Diego Almagro was likened to the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. However, she argues that such analogies declined as conquest became consolidated and the emphasis shifted from soldiers to officials and lawyers. This is followed up in Chapter 4, which considers the role of towns in the consolidation of conquest and the creation of a república. The influence of Vetruvius and Alberti on the layout of towns, with the forum of ancient Rome reflected in a central plaza surrounded by colonnades with shops, is perhaps the best known of the classical influences on early Spanish colonization in the Americas. However, through examining how chroniclers compared individual cities to the classical ideal, MacCormack offers a new perspective.

While the Spanish empire was an urban-based one, how did the chroniclers’ views of nature and of humans’ interactions with it reflect classical texts? In Chapter 5, MacCormack analyses the influence of Pliny on the writings of Oviedo and Cieza de León, contrasting their relational approach with that of José de Acosta, who later drew on Aristotle to classify different human groups into a hierarchy. Chapter 6 turns to the issue of language, with MacCormack arguing that the chroniclers made favourable comparisons between Quechua and Latin. Because Quechua was regarded as a language of empire, had rules like Latin, and was widely used, it became acceptable as the language of Christian instruction. Chapter 7 then analyses how, being less extensive than the Inca empire, Peru came to be identified as a distinct geographical unit. Cieza de León based this on the existence of a physical infrastructure, especially of roads that might rival those of Rome, and defined its boundaries by the presence of hostile neighbouring groups, such as the Araucanians. Or simply put, Peru became the region where the Inca empire conformed most closely to that of Rome.

Finally, the theme of divine providence, which runs through much of the chroniclers’ writings, is taken up in the Epilogue, where MacCormack shows how they drew on classical writers (such as Acosta Seneca, who prophesied the opening up of the oceans), as well as on biblical narratives, to explain why the Spanish ended up in the New World in the first place and why they had been able to defeat the Incas so rapidly.

This is a unique and truly original work. It is also one of outstanding scholarship, drawing on an enormous range of sources, including classical texts. The book is enhanced by fifty well-chosen and annotated illustrations, including some watercolour paintings by the author herself. It is not surprising that it was awarded two prizes by the American Historical Association.

Although the book may appear to have a narrow focus on Peru, MacCormack clearly demonstrates how important Rome was in the consciousness of chroniclers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because of the nature of the Inca empire, comparisons between it and the Roman empire are easier to make than for any other region of Latin America. MacCormack’s text raises the question of how classical texts and history were used in the accounts of chroniclers for other regions. Since classical ideas were not unique to Spain at the time, but found throughout much of the Mediterranean, this book should be of interest to any scholar of early modern European expansion.