Indigenous Knighthood: The Inca Military Order of Saint Rose of Lima in 17th-Century Peru

In this paper I analyze the memorial sent by an Indigenous leader to push
the Spanish administration to recognize the Inca nobility as Castilian
aristocracy through the founding of their own military order. In 1676 an
Indigenous cacique (chief) of a Peruvian repartimiento appeared at the royal court in Madrid as a representative of the Inca nobility of Cuzco with a petition to the Council of the Indies. He demanded better conditions for Indigenous vassals of the Spanish monarch and, more specifically, he defended the social, economic, and political privileges of the Inca nobility of Cuzco against the mistreatment of colonial administrators. The cacique thought his fellow Inca descendants could escape the administration’s wrath if the king founded a military order like the prestigious Iberian Order of Santiago, exclusively for the Inca nobility of Peru. This order would be under the patronage of Santa Rosa de Lima. My examination of this seventeenth-century memorial demonstrates how the Inca nobles drew symbolic capital from the Spanish military orders and shows how their perception of the orders reflected a means to negotiate status and, especially, to seek justice and reparations. The proposal of Santa Rosa de Lima as Patron Saint of the Order mimicked the emblems of Santiago and thus allows us to explore the reconciliation of different cultural and religious traditions in the creation of an institution where Iberian messianism and localized Catholicism converged. This case underscores the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and power via imperial religious institutions that were appropriated by the Incas to achieve pre-Hispanic status under colonial administration.