Early Modern Studies Journal

English Department | University of Texas | Arlington

Climate Change and the Great Dying in Sixteenth-Century Peru: : Reading the Relaciones geográficas de Indias as Documents of Historical Climatology Abstract

Victoria Ríos Castaño, Manchester Metropolitan University

Scholarly studies of the sixteenth-century Relaciones geográficas de Indias (Geographical Accounts of the Indies), an archive of reports informed by answers to a questionnaire created by Spanish royal cosmographers and dispatched from the Latin American colonies to Spain, have thrown light on illnesses and demographic decline in early colonial Mexico. The intention of this article is to focus on those accounts collected in colonial Peru. An examination of answers provided by Indigenous and Spanish respondents to the 1577/1584 questionnaire demonstrates that they were aware of the catastrophic decline of the Indigenous population due to poor living conditions, forced migrations, enslavement, and epidemics (e.g. smallpox, malaria, typhus). The study also brings the Relaciones geográficas de Indias to the attention of historical climatologists who seek to endorse scientific arguments or reinterpret historical events. The answers revealing the unprecedented population collapse of the Indigenous peoples in colonial Peru help in our understanding of the Great Dying of the Americas and add to claims by climatologists and geographers, like Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, that this contributed to human-driven historical cooling in the early seventeenth century.