Pedro de Aguado

This does not exclude the possibility that Aguado made subsequent revisions, omitted or added some paragraphs, arranged the composition to his liking, and completed certain sections.

Equally significant is the end of the same sentence, where it says: "And what remained of it (the book) I endeavored to perfect after fulfilling the obligation I had to the duties and governance of my Province."

The only possible interpretation is that Medrano's literary legacy consisted of books that were so elaborate that they could be combined, albeit "with effort," into a single ready-to-publish body.

This interpretation aligns with what another Franciscan historian, Fray Pedro Simón, stated a few years later, in 1604, after arriving in Santafé, to the same province of La Purificación to which Medrano and Aguado belonged.

"[7] The investigation of the documentary records left by Aguado fully confirms the intellectual paternity of Medrano over, if not the entire, at least a substantial portion of the "Recopilación Historial."

From the text of the request to the Council of the Indies, to which Aguado attached the index of his historical work, the "tabla,"[8] it is clear that he did not do it to gain personal distinctions or rewards or to boast as a historian.

His sense of rectitude and commitment to the truth led him to include information about the historical labors of his predecessor, Fray Antonio de Medrano, in a proper manner.

Medrano died early, during the expedition led by Licenciado Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in search of "El Dorado," the discovery of the New Kingdom of Granada.

A planned Part III appears to have been abandoned, possibly in frustration at the difficulties with publication, with the witness statements that would have been the source material left in Spain on his return to Bogotá in 1583.

[12] After his death, the Recopilación historial was used directly and indirectly by other authors, notably by Fray Pedro Simón, who appears to have had access to a copy of Part II of the manuscript which de Aguado took with him on his return to Bogotá.

[1] The manuscript De Aguado left in Spain was obtained in the late eighteenth century by the historian Juan Bautista Muñoz; his collection became part of the University of Valencia on his death, and was transferred to the Real Academia de la Historia after the university was partly destroyed in 1812 during a French siege of Valencia.