Bartolomé Arzans de Orsúa y Vela facts for kids
Bartolomé Arzans de Orsúa y Vela (1676–c.1736) was a Bolivian chronicler and historian.
He was the son of Mateo Arzáns Dapífer, a native of Seville, and María Jordana Castro. He was baptized as Bartolomé Arzáns Dapífer Castro, but for unknown reasons he opted to use the surnames Orsúa and Vela at various stages of his life.
In 1701, he married Juana de Reina y Navarrete, with whom he had a son named Diego. All of his professional activity took place in Potosí. It is unknown where he studied and his biographers note that he was self-taught in classical literature and history. He served as a school teacher. He was fond of arithmetic, attended bullfights, and liked to participate in all the religious and secular festivities held in the town of San Luis Potosí. Arzáns began to write the Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí in 1705 in the most absolute secrecy, using documentary materials that he began to collect at least three years before.
In 1707, he provided Friar Sebastián Izquierdo with a small extract of his writing so that he could pronounce it in a homily. In the detailed report about the whereabouts of this work that Bernabé Antonio de Quiroga sent to the Council of the Indies in 1756, it is said that the chronicle written by Bartolomé Arzáns spanned fifteen hundred pages in two volumes.
The first began the story in 1545, the date of the discovery of the hill, and ended at the end of 1720, while the second resumed the chronicle in 1721 and ended at the beginning of 1736. During his lifetime, the author received offers of between three hundred and five hundred pesos to publish his work, but he rejected all of them, citing his fear of criticism and slander.
To discourage his potential publishers, he propagated the story that he had entrusted his manuscript to the Spanish merchant Blas de la Fuente for publication in Europe. When he died in January 1736, his son Diego Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela took responsibility for the manuscript to which he added eight chapters set between 1736 and 1750. His intention to have a patron elevate it to the king failed. In 1755, Diego died and the work fell into the hands of a clergyman from Potosí who was finally forced to hand it over to the corregidor. The original manuscript was sent to Spain and kept in the library of the Secretariat of the Universal Office of the Indies of Grace and Justice. It is currently in the Royal Library of the Royal Palace. The text was known by the chronicler of the Indies Juan Bautista Muñoz who utilized it for his own History of the New World. Attempts to publish it in the 19th century were unsuccessful. A copy was acquired in Paris in 1905 by the American colonel George Earl Church, a specialist in Bolivian affairs. In his 1910 will, Church donated the manuscript to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
This work was finally published in 1965 by historians Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza.
See also
In Spanish: Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela para niños
