The Defeat of Atabalipa in Three 16^th Century French Maps

Carolina Martínez (CONICET-Universidad Nacional de San Martín/Universidad de Buenos Aires) 

The Spanish conquest of Peru, conducted by Francisco Pizzarro around 1532, led to the publication of numerous texts in which the Spanish “exploits” and the defeat of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, were narrated. The accounts, written by those who had witnessed the Spanish feat and published within the realms of the Spanish monarchy, were soon translated into different languages and printed across Europe, reaching widespread circulation in the next couple of decades. As a consequence of the descriptions present in these texts, the historical figure of Atahualpa became of interest to both readers and publishers. In the second half of the 16^th century, his clothes were illustrated in costume books (Boissard, 1581; Bruyn, 1581), his portrait and life were included in André Thevet’s Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584), and his murder at the hands of Pizarro became a topic of choice to illustrate the region of Peru among some mapmakers of the Norman “school” of cartography. By examining the representations of the “Kingdom of Peru” in the world map made by Pierre Desceliers towards 1550 and in Guillaume Le Testu’s 1556 Cosmographie Universelle, this presentation will focus on the process by which the death of Atahualpa was transposed from a literary genre into a cartographic image. Special attention will be paid to the map of Peru published in the anonymous Histoire de la Terre neuve du Péru en l'Inde occidentale in Paris in 1545.

The seminar will take place in FAB3.31. Refreshments will be served after the talk.