His paternal uncle became a protector, and he lived in Spain for the rest of his life, where he wrote his histories of the Inca culture and Spanish conquest, as well as an account of De Soto's expedition in Florida.

Born Gómez Suárez de Figueroa in Cuzco, Peru, in 1539, he was the natural son of a Spanish conqueror and encomendero and a royal Inca mother.

He traveled to Montilla, where he met his father's brother, Alonso de Vargas, who acted as the young man's protector and helped him make his way.

[6] The younger man soon traveled to Madrid to seek official acknowledgement as his father's son from the Crown, and he was allowed to take the name of Garcilaso de la Vega.

With another servant, Garcilaso had a second son, Diego de Vargas, born in 1590, who helped his father copy the Royal Commentaries and survived him until at least 1651.

[7] De la Vega entered Spanish military service in 1570 and fought in the Alpujarras against the Moors after the Morisco Revolt.

As an adult, he also gained the perspective to describe accurately the political system of tribute and labor enforced by the Incas from the subsidiary tribes in their empire.

Baptized and reared as Roman Catholic, he portrayed Incan religion and the expansion of its empire from a viewpoint influenced by his upbringing.

It is unknown whether that was an effort to portray his Inca ancestors in a more positive light to a Spanish audience or his ignorance of the practice having lived most of his life in Spain.

Jerald T. Milanich and Charles M. Hudson warn against relying on Garcilaso, noting serious problems with the sequence of events and location of towns in his narrative.

"[8] Lankford characterizes Garcilaso's La Florida as a collection of "legend narratives," derived from a much-retold oral tradition of the survivors of the expedition.

[9] While in Spain, Garcilaso wrote his best-known work, Comentarios Reales de los Incas, published in Lisbon in 1609.

[10] More than a century and a half after its initial publication, in the 1780s, as the uprising against colonial oppression led by Tupac Amaru II was gaining momentum, Charles III of Spain banned the Comentarios from being published in the Quechua language in Lima or distributed there on account of its "dangerous" content.