Fray Martín de Murúa
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Fray Martín de Murúa, Spanish Dominican friar and chronicler, was a missionary in Peru during the 16th and 17th centuries, carrying out his mission in the proximities of Lake Titicaca and Cuzco, where he came to know some features of the primitive inhabitants of the Tahuantinsuyu (Inca Empire) very well. In addition to his evangelistic work, he was devoted to the task of gathering data to write a history of the Incan past which, in 1613, he entitled Historia general del Perú. It is considered Peru's earliest illustrated chronicle of its prehispanic and early post-Spanish conquest history.
Murúa's work journeyed first throughout the Viceroyalty in search of ultimately unfulfilled publication approvals, before making its way to Spain and England, accumulating the scars of politics, history and celebrated figures who cherished it, but consigned it to genteel oblivion for over a century. In 1945, it resurfaced, then resumed its odyssey, to New York, Germany, and back to the New World, where the book, its accretions and deletions are finally enjoying sustained study.
