Martín de Murúa,índeMurú O. de M., ( in Gipuzkoa, Spain – in Spain) was a Basque Mercedarian friar and chronicler of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. He is primarily known for his work Historia general del Piru (written ), which is considered the earliest illustrated history of Peru.
Murúa's career in Peru
Murúa volunteered to serve in the missions of New Spain, where he was sent by his superiors and arrived in Peru in the early 1580s. He is known to have lived in the Curahuasi Valley around that period. He later traveled throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru as a missionary, serving in the proximities of Lake Titicaca and Cuzco, where he came to know some features of the inhabitants of the former Inca Empire well. From about 1595 to 1601 his residence was at the Mercedarian Monastery of St. John Lateran in Arequipa.
In addition to his missionary work, Murúa gathered data to write a history of the Andean past. He was assisted in his translation of the date from the Quechua language by a native Inca nobleman Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (also known as Guamán Poma), who provided over 100 illustrations of great historical significance for the work, but who was later highly critical of Murúa's depiction of Inca history in his own writings.
In 1611, Murúa made the decision to return to Spain. He chose, however, not to take the usual route, by way of Panama. Instead, he traveled across the Amazon Forest, crossing the Andes, arriving in La Plata (la actual Sucre). After a lengthy stay, from there he went on to Potosí and then to the Tucumán region. All along the way, he took the opportunity to have the local religious and government authorities review his work for comment and correction. He eventually passed through Córdoba and arrived in Buenos Aires, from which he set sail for Spain in 1615.
The following year, while living in Madrid, Murúa received the necessary authorizations from both his Order and the king to publish his chronicle, entitled Historia general del Piru. The work covers Peru's pre-Columbian and early Spanish colonial history. In his Historia, Murúa wrote of the presence of a number of mythological creatures in South America, such as Amazons and giants, which gave rise to the names of many geographical landmarks of the continent.
The Galvin and Getty manuscripts
There exist two versions of the Historia general del Piru: the Galvin Murúa (also known as the "Loyola Murúa") and the Getty Murúa (also known as the "Wellington Murúa"). The former is kept in a private collection in Ireland while the latter is at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. The original as well as a facsimile of the Galvin Murúa are available at the Getty Center for consultation by qualified scholars.
The Galvin Murúa dates from the 1580s and was completed around 1600. This first version of the chronicle was compiled in Peru by Murúa with the assistance of local scribes and Indigenous artists (one of whom was Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala). By the 18th century, the Galvin Murúa ended up in the possession of the Jesuit College in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. Between 1879-1900, the manuscript was housed in a Jesuit enclave in Poyanne, France. Its association with the Jesuits gave the manuscript its title the "Loyola Murúa" (after St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order). In the 1950s, the manuscript was bought by a rare bookseller in San Francisco, California and resold to the late John Galvin (d. 1996), a European aristocrat and private collector. The text remains in the hands of the Galvin family in County Meath, Ireland.