Aristotle in the Mountains: Tyranny and the Andean Landscape in the Spanish Imagination

This paper examines the ways that neoscholastic political theory infused imperial ethnographic writing in Spanish America, and was in turn transformed by it.  A key conceptual tool for early colonial authors was the idea of tyranny, widely used for justifying Spanish conquest, as well as (more rarely) for critiquing it. Aristotle’s Politics, as filtered through medieval commentaries, offered a precise checklist for identifying a ruler as a tyrant; colonial writers used it to prove to their own satisfaction that the Inca kings of Peru had been tyrants and therefore illegitimate. At the same time, Spanish officials were struggling to understand how the Incas had created a rich and powerful state in such a harsh environment. They came to believe that the vertical landscape of the Andes necessitated tyrannical rule; to the older discourse of political theory, these writers added a new language of space.