Introduction: Inventing Lima

Abstract

Viceregal Lima in the baroque seventeenth century was a theatrical and literary work of the early modern imagination. It was also an inhabitable space built of mud and brick, filled with a multitude of people performing all kinds of tasks and rites. Founded at the Pacific edge of the Andes on earthquake prone sand, The City of the Kings of Peru (La Ciudad de los Reyes del Peru) was a most modern city. Without a past and poised between the Andes and the South Sea (Mar del Sur), Lima was destined to become a new kind of city: both emporium and court. Notably, many of the once wondrous structures of Lima have led utterly modern and ephemeral lives, yielding to the sands of time; at the same time, the illustrious words that announced those wonders to the world have survived, if in fragmented form. These fragments reveal that what once held up—or, when fallen, rebuilt—her walls of adobe and paper was a great new wealth and heterogeneity, concentrated by Lima’s merchants and expressed in elaborate baroque rituals and a teaming plebe. By the means of ritual and congregation, Lima came to be the cabeça or head of that imaginary political body called the imperio peruano (Peruvian Empire) or reinos y provincias del Perú (kingdoms and provinces of Peru). As a new invention that became the head of a vast new political realm, Lima provides certain clues to abiding questions about early modernity and empire. This study is an attempt to read those clues in new ways.

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answers it provides to a question of yours.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities¹