Agustín de Zárate

Agustín de Zárate (Valladolid, - Seville, ) was a Spanish colonial, (state financial auditor), civil servant, chronicler and historian. His work (History of discovery and conquest of Peru) recounts the first years after the arrival of the Spaniards in the Inca Empire including the civil war between the viceroy and the encomenderos and up to the death of Gonzalo Pizarro in 1548. It is considered one of the most notable chronicles of the Spanish colonization of the Americas that have been preserved up to the present. First published in Antwerp in 1555, re-published in Venice in 1563 and then revised and published again in Seville in 1577, it was translated into English, French, Italian and German and can be considered a "best seller of the 16th Century".

Biography Family and early life Zárate was born around 1514 in Valladolid, when the city was the capital of the kingdom of Castile, to a family that had strong ties to the royal family. He was the only son of Lope Diaz de Zárate and Isabel de Polanco. His father was a court official who served as (secretary, chamber clerk) in the Council of the Supreme Inquisition and since 1512 he was also secretary of the Council of Castile, the highest administrative and judicial body of the Spanish monarchy at that time. Lope Diaz resigned in favor of his son Agustín who was named, at the age of about eight, as secretary of the Council, with the right to exercise the position after he had reached the age of eighteen. This allowed the young Zárate to become in 1532 secretary of the Council of Castile, with a quite meager salary of 9,000 maravedis per year. Most presumably immediately afterwards he married Catalina de Bayona, from Medina del Campo, the eldest of the daughters of the court butcher's supplier, owner of a considerable fortune, which provided Zárate a dowry of three thousand ducats.

In March 1538, Zárate's father died at the age of 62 in Valladolid. When the partition of his assets was carried out, Agustín received the sum of 564,525 maravedis, distributed in household furniture, silver objects and mainly, income titles in the jurisdiction of Valladolid and the nearby country.

The other half of his inheritance went to his sister, Jerónima de Zárate, mother of Polo de Ondegardo. Moreover in his will, Agustín's father had stipulated: "I send by special legacy to the secretary Agustin de Zárate, my son, all my books, of whatever faculty they may be, and all my weapons, of whatever quality they may be". The legacy of books allowed for the transmission of cultural baggage within the family of Castilian bureaucrats with an inclination towards letters according to the orientations of Humanism. Although the education of Zárate did not formally go beyond an elementary level, it is evident, through his writings, that he cultivated the reading of humanistic works in accordance with the prevailing intellectual current at the beginning of the 16th century. the judges of the new (Royal Tribunal) to be set up in Lima, the newly appointed governor of Nicaragua Rodrigo de Contreras and the public notaries Antón and Cristóbal Nieto; the former became Zárate's faithful secretary.

Zárate arrived at the port of Nombre de Dios, on the Atlantic coast of Panama, on 9 January 1544. There he immediately started his task of investigating the administration of the Royal Treasury officers in Tierra Firme.

He reached Lima on 26 June 1544 just a few days before the official opening of the (tribunal) and a couple of months after the start of the ' uprising.

In 1554 Prince Regent Philip gathered an army at A Coruña which would accompany him to marry the English Queen Mary I (known as Bloody Mary among her Protestant opponents). To this end, he tasked Zárarte with the collection of all the gold and silver from the last fleet of the Indies, together with another sum collected through an extraordinary quota to be paid by merchants and other private people. Zárate collected about 250 million maravedis in less than two months and brought them to the prince.

Zárate's was ready by that time. He gave the manuscript to the Prince, who read it during the week-long journey to Southampton and seemingly liked the story so much that he decided to ask Zárate to publish it. Zárate was then sent to Antwerp to collect taxes in the Flanders and start minting coins locally with silver coming from America.

On 30 March 1555 Zárate stamped his signature on the dedicatory letter of his book whose first edition was printed at the Martinus Nutius (Martín Nucio in Spanish) printing house in Antwerp. From then on the chronicle began its extensive dissemination, supported by numerous reprints and translations into various languages.

Zárate's work has been valued by the Spanish historians and critics.

Enrique De Vedia, one of the editors of Zárate work, affirmed in 1858 that it is “one of the most beautiful historical monuments (perhaps the first) of our [Spanish] language”.

According to the (Royal Library) the has always been praised as a work of recognized literary quality, reprinted in Venice in 1563 and in Seville in 1577 and also translated into English, French, Italian and even German, proof of its worth.

For Fernandez and Tamaro, Zárate "was a methodical writer and good stylist; although his book was not very original it enjoyed high prestige and was translated into Italian, English, French and German. He shows a remarkable mastery of the literary trade; he wrote with method and clarity, with great grace of language and style".

Sources of the Zárate based his work on several reports, although he mainly follows two of them: the first one is a manuscript that belonged to Viceory Pedro de La Gasca that recounts the uprising of Gonzalo Pizarro, while the second one is the report of Rodrigo Lozano, mayor of Trujillo, which Zárate mentions at the beginning of his book; Lozano's manuscript was used for the initial chapters about the discovery of Peru. This led to a new official doctrine in which the Christianization preferred to ignore rather than acquire any knowledge of the religious past of the Native Americans. This doctrine certainly implied a general application also in Spain and it is in this context that Zárate suppressed the three chapters of his concerning religion and myths from pre-Hispanic Peru.

Of these removed chapters, chapter 10 evokes, along with the cosmogony legends of the Andean Natives, their traditions referring to a flood that Zárate compares with the Genesis flood narrative of the Bible. Chapter 11 gives details on the offerings and sacrifices to the huacas (Andean shrines), called idols by the Spaniards. It constitutes a significant testimony of the human sacrifices in Peru. Moreover, this chapter reports that the Andean Natives used to compare the miter worn by Christian bishops to a similar headwear found on pre-Incan statues (perhaps dating back to the time of the Tiahuanaco culture). This led many of the Spaniards to believe that these statues represented the Christian apostles during a presumed first preaching of the gospel in America shortly after the death of Jesus. Finally chapter 12 attributes to the Andean Natives the belief in the resurrection of the flesh, a testimony to which Inca Garcilaso de la Vega was to attach the greatest importance.