New data regarding the origins of the Franciscan missions in Peru, 1532-1569.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL 1651 that the first history of the Franciscans in Peru appeared. Its author complained even then of the lack of contemporary accounts of events and of the paucity of conventual archives; an unknown chronicler who is there referred to had died without leaving any record behind. Fray Fernando Rodriguez Tena, to whom the Archives of San Francisco of Lima are indebted for their present organization, has left copious examples of his activity as a historian in the second half of the eighteenth century; it is, however, hardly possible to discover anything new relating to the origins of the Franciscans in Peru in the long and repetitious writings of this indefatigable copyist and compiler, whose real merit is still difficult to assess.