Polo de Ondegardo

Polo Ondegardo (c. 1520 in Valladolid – 1575 in Ciudad Rica de La Plata) was a Spanish colonial jurist, civil servant, businessman and thinker who proposed an intellectual and political vision of profound influence in the earliest troubled stage of the contact between the Hispanic and the American Indigenous world. He was born in Valladolid, when the city was the capital of the kingdom of Castile, to a prominent noble family that had strong ties to the royal family. He spent his entire adult life in South America in what is now Peru and Bolivia. He was involved in the political and economic management of the Spanish colony and based on his good knowledge of the laws as (licentiate) acquired a deep knowledge and practical experience of the Native Americans in the southern Andes, being an encomendero, (inspector general) and corregidor (district governor and judicial official) in the provinces of Charcas (today Bolivia) and Cusco. His administrative reports, well known and appreciated by his peers and contemporaries, have had wide repercussions in the field of Andean studies up to the present time.

Biography Family and early life Some sources include the name Juan (John) in his Christian name, but according to recent researches his name was solely Polo: he never used the name Juan and always signed his manuscript works as (the licentiate Polo).

There are no documentary elements that provide the date of the birth of Polo Ondegardo in the city of Valladolid, nor the years of his study at the University of Salamanca. From a testimonial statement made in March 1550, in which he stated that he was then over 30 years old, it can be inferred that he might be born around 1520 or perhaps some years earlier.

He was the eldest of the seven children of Diego López de León Ondegardo and Jerónima de Zárate. His father, (nobleman) of Valladolid with Milanese ancestors, was (receiver, administrator) of the Inquisition of Granada, that is the person who managed the incomes, taxes and other goods of any kind of the Inquisition. The López de León Ondegardo family was for sure an important one since the was appointed directly by the king and acted on behalf of the crown, who was responsible for disposing of the confiscated assets of condemned persons. His mother was the daughter of Lope Diaz de Zárate a court official who served as a chamber clerk (secretary) both in the and in the Council of Castile, the highest administrative and judicial body of the Spanish monarchy at that time. Polo's uncle (his mother's brother) was Agustin de Zárate, fiscal auditor and general accountant of the Viceroyalty of Peru and Province of Tierra Firme and later chronicler. In fact Polo's subsequent political position identified with the "intermediate" conception of the School of Salamanca, which distanced itself from the extreme positions either in favor of the Native Americans or the Spaniards. He defended the recognition of indigenous people as human beings, the preservation of their culture and traditional customs, and at the same time the promotion of evangelization by showing an attitude in favor of humanitarian principles but also in favor of the economic and political interests of the king. and their presence in the roundabouts of Cusco was a disturbance to the Christianization of the Natives. Polo could achieve the finding through his personal acquaintance with the kurakas (chiefs, indigenous governors) of the royal panakas (kinships of descendants of a Sapa Inca) whose collaboration they offered after the submission pact concluded with the Inca Sayri Túpac, presumed heir to the Inca Empire throne. It is Inca Garcilaso de la Vega that in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas) describes the surprise he feels when visiting Polo's house and meeting the mummies of his ancestors so well preserved in time. Garcilaso was in fact the natural son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, direct descendant of the Sapa Inca. The mummies disappeared from the hospital and were never discovered despite archeological investigations in the last 70 years.

Polo carried out also a significant urban work in Cusco: he contracted the construction of the cathedral, new headquarters for the city council, a hospital and shelter for orphan girls and stonework bridges. Finally he regulated the procession of the Feast of Corpus Christi which was (and still is) directly related to the Andean Quyllurit'i festival, that marks the start of the harvest, signaled by the reappearance of the Pleiades after being hidden for a 40 days period.

Advisor to the Viceroy in Lima In May 1561 Polo left the charge of in Cusco and went to Lima as an advisor to the viceroy López de Zúñiga. There he wrote for the lawyer Briviesca de Muñatones, one of the commissioners in charge of the problem, his (Report on the perpetuity of the encomiendas in Peru). The question of perpetuity of was one of the causes of the uprising of Pizarro in 1544 and was still being debated. In principle the should have been assigned to living persons as a reward for their offices, but many interpreted their right as hereditary. Polo was a very rich and in 1562 he obtained an additional distribution of 300 Natives for the cultivation of coca in his . Nevertheless, his office imposed him to have a better understanding of the matter, so he joined an expedition directed to the southern provinces to consult the local kurakas on the question. On the way, during his stay in Huamanga he dispatched the (Ordinances of the Huamanga mines).

Polo's second term in the government of the Cusco province, from August 1571 to October 1572, was intense. He completed the reduction of the natives in parishes, supported the incorporation of the yanakunas (servants of the Inca's court) into the Spanish crown, advised on the drafting of ordinances for the government of the city and for the cultivation of coca, and was an active supporter, through supply of food and ammunitions, in the war against the Inca rebel Túpac Amaru who was defeated by the Spanish army in Vilcabamba. After the Inca was executed, Polo quit his office as and left Cusco together with the Viceory continuing the general visit to the Andean highland provinces. While in La Plata, Polo assumed the office of of Charcas. In 1574 he wrote his (Report on the war of the Chiriguano Indians). Cristóbal de Molina "el cuzqueño", Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Francisco de Ávila and Pablo Joseph de Arriaga y Herrera.

Polo might have written several reports and letters but just a few of them have been recovered by scholars from the archives in Spain and Peru. His principal works are:

[1559 / 1561?] (Treatise and inquiry into the errors and superstitions of the Indians) which deals with the Andean religion and was written at the request of the Archbishop of Lima Jerónimo de Loayza, and used in the second and third Provincial Councils of Lima (1567 and 1582). Its manuscript has been lost. A summary of it was preserved as part of the (Confessional for priests of Indians with instructions against rites and exhortations as a help to well die) written by José de Acosta in 1584. [before 1561] (Report of the shrines of the Indians in the four ceques) which is fully included into Bernabé Cobo's (History of the New World). Polo produced a list of the huacas that extended along the ceques starting from the Coricancha temple in Cusco towards the four directions of the four provinces of the Tawantinsuyu. Basing on the Polo's treatise, the Cusco ceque system was investigated in detail by R. Tom Zuidema, who confirmed his discoveries and descriptions. (Report to the licentiate Briviesca de Muñatones on the perpetuity of the encomiendas in Peru) was drawn up according to the questionnaires established in the Royal Decree of 1553. It was requested by the viceroy López de Zúñiga, through the commissioner Briviesca de Muñatones, who was part of the group of commissioners sent by the king to deal with the issue of the perpetuity of the in South America. (Ordinances of the Huamanga mines). It was requested by the Viceroy and drafted for a mercury mine after a new method for extracting silver using mercury was proposed by a Spaniard. In this letter Polo proposes, on the one hand, a way to prevent the Natives from excessively addressing the courts with pleads, a custom that was born from dealing with the Spaniards, recommending that they keep their customs, and, on the other hand, he presents a series of provisions for the good government of the Natives, expressly indicating obligations to the . He supported the idea that the old pre-Hispanic law could be used to reduce the litigations, set up a local tax system based on the Incan one and to achieve a more successful colonization. To this end he suggested that the Spaniards' interests, in most cases, lay in preserving Andean institutions as they had found them. Viceroy Toledo did not accept his view and never adopted such a proposal.

Quipu Polo was among the first ones to recognize the value of quipus as registers. Polo postulated the idea that the quipus represented a registration system that allowed for an easy incorporation of information, not only numbers. Moreover, the data could be retrieved so easily by a (quipu manager, quipu responsible), that Polo stated that the effectiveness of quipu is not only incredible but indeed wonderful. In his writings Polo was astonished by the accuracy of the accounts kept in quipus. His conclusion was that they are instruments of all trust. He checked their accuracy by asking quipu managers to record some data and retrieved them some days later finding that they corresponded to Polo's own records in writing.