University of Oklahoma Press, 1959

More than 400 years ago, Pedro de Cieza de Leon set out to condict the readers of his time and those of subsequent generations over the Royal Road of the Incas. His chronicles of Peru - one of which was published in Seville in 1553, the other not until 1880 - have been ranked with Bernal Diaz del Castillo's account of the conquest of Mexico. English translations up unti lthe present time have been clumsy and much abridged and for many years have not been available. Cieza arrived in Cartagena in 1535, a boy of 13, and for the next 17 years travelled through South America, observing and describing the country and its peoples, preserving for posterity the achievements of the Inca civilization even as it was being destroyed. The `Chronicler of the Indies was no fine scholar setting out to make a record of the conquest, but he saw strange and wonderful things that exist in the New World of the Indies, and there came over me a great desire to write certain of them.'...