Polo de Ondegardo

Polo Ondegardo (c. 1520 in Valladolid – 1575 in Ciudad Rica de La Plata) was a Spanish colonial jurist, civil servant, businessman and thinker who proposed an intellectual and political vision of profound influence in the earliest troubled stage of the contact between the Hispanic and the American Indigenous world.

The López de León Ondegardo family was for sure an important one since the receptor was appointed directly by the king and acted on behalf of the crown, who was responsible for disposing of the confiscated assets of condemned persons.

Polo's uncle (his mother's brother) was Agustin de Zárate, fiscal auditor and general accountant of the Viceroyalty of Peru and Province of Tierra Firme and later chronicler.

On that ship traveled also Diego Martín, cleric and Hernando Pizarro's butler, who was charged of the interests of his lord in Peru and who carried out propaganda action spreading a negative image of the viceroy.

A couple of months later the uprising of the Peruvian encomenderos started against the royal authority, which led to the acceptance of Gonzalo Pizarro as governor in Lima and the deposition of the viceroy Núñez Vela by the Real Audiencia.

[4] Polo moved to the city of Cuzco, where he publicly supported the Pizarro side and in 1547 was forced by the field master Francisco de Carvajal, the Demon of the Andes, to return to Lima and take charge in favor of the pizzaristas.

In the meantime the king had named Pedro de la Gasca president of the Audiencia and acting viceroy in an attempt to try a peaceful settlement of the dispute.

In order to collect the precious data he included in his manuscripts, Polo was probably the first person to carry out inquiries with interviews to people, in what has now become a well-known anthropological technique.

[5] At the beginning of 1550 he left his office of judge in Charcas and moved to Lima becoming an advisor on government business to the newly established archbishop Jerónimo de Loayza.

Thanks to his good offices Polo received from Loayza a land extension to his encomienda in Charcas and in 1552 he eventually settled in Ciudad Rica de La Plata (today Sucre), capital of the region.

In 1558 Polo received from the viceroy Marquis of Cañete the appointment of corregidor (district governor and judicial official) of the province of Cuzco and took possession of this office at the end of the year.

He investigated in detail the religion and society of the Andean communities and found out the location of the huacas (shrines) along the ceque system in the four suyus (regions) of the former Inca Empire.

This achievement was notable for the church because the Incas mummified their dead rulers and continued to worship them after their death[8] and their presence in the roundabouts of Cusco was a disturbance to the Christianization of the Natives.

[12] Polo carried out also a significant urban work in Cusco: he contracted the construction of the cathedral, new headquarters for the city council, a hospital and shelter for orphan girls and stonework bridges.

Finally he regulated the procession of the Feast of Corpus Christi which was (and still is) directly related to the Andean Quyllurit'i festival, that marks the start of the harvest, signaled by the reappearance of the Pleiades after being hidden for a 40 days period.

She was a Creole and daughter of Rodrigo Contreras, former governor of Nicaragua who had traveled from Spain to Panama on the same ship with Polo and after accusations of bad government had retired to Lima.

For this reason he had appointed Francisco de Toledo as viceroy in 1569 and charged him (among other tasks) with producing the proof that the Incas were tyrants, conquered their territories by subjugation of the local people and were not legitimate rulers.

Sarmiento had his book read in front of the kurakas form the royal panakas and a distinguished group of Spaniards in Cuzco in order to have a formal verification of his history which described the Incas as tyrants.

Polo was witness of the most important issues of his time: the knowledge of indigenous customs, the debate on the perpetuity of encomiendas and those on the economy and colonial government, and he carefully reported about them in his writings.

In his reports he presented to the Spanish authorities the main rites and beliefs of the Andean communities, the pre-Hispanic tax system, the distribution and use of natural resources and the administrative, economic and political complexity of the Tahuantinsuyu.

[21] He supported the idea that the old pre-Hispanic law could be used to reduce the litigations, set up a local tax system based on the Incan one and to achieve a more successful colonization.