The work on the origin of the Indians of the New World, by Fray Gregorio Garcia,[1258] who travelled extensively in the Spanish colonies, is valuable, and to Garcia we owe the first notice of the priceless narrative of Betanzos. His separate work on the Incas is lost to us.[1259] Friar Martin de Múrua, a native of Guernica, in Biscay, was an ecclesiastic of some eminence in Peru. He wrote a general history of the Incas, which was copied by Dr. Muñoz for his collection, and Leon Pinelo says that the manuscript was illustrated with colored drawings of insignia and dresses, and portraits of the Incas.[1260] The principal writers on Inca civilization in the century immediately succeeding the conquest, of the three different professions,—soldiers, lawyers, and priests,—have now been passed in review. Attention must next be given to the native writers who followed in the wake of Blas Valera. First among these is the Inca Garcilasso de la Vega, an author whose name is probably better known to the general reader than that of any other who has written on the same subject. Among the Spanish conquerors who arrived in Peru in 1534 was Garcilasso de la Vega, a cavalier of very noble lineage,[1261] who settled at Cuzco, and was married to an Inca princess named Chimpa Ocllo, niece of the Inca Huayna Ccapac. Their son, the future historian, was born at Cuzco in 1539, and his earliest recollections were connected with the stirring events of the civil war between Gonzalo Pizarro and the president La Gasca, in 1548. His mother died soon afterwards, probably in 1550, and his father married again. The boy was much in the society of his mother’s kindred, and he often heard them talk over the times of the Incas, and repeat their historical traditions. Nor was his education neglected; for the good Canon Juan de Cuellar read Latin with the half-caste sons of the citizens of Cuzco for nearly two years, amidst all the turmoil of the civil wars. As he grew up, he was employed by his father to visit his estates, and he travelled over most parts of Peru. The elder Garcilasso de la Vega died in 1560, and the young orphan resolved to seek his fortune in the land of his fathers. On his arrival in Spain he received patronage and kindness from his paternal relatives, became a captain in the army of Philip II, and when he retired, late in life, he took up his abode in lodgings at Cordova, and devoted himself to literary pursuits. His first production was a translation from the Italian of “The Dialogues of Love,” and in 1591 he completed his narrative of the expedition of Hernando de Soto to Florida.[1262] [Illustration: HOUSE IN CUZCO IN WHICH GARCILASSO WAS BORN. [After a cut in Marcoy, i. 219. Cf. Squier’s _Peru_, p. 449.—ED.]]