The nueva corónica is not a history in the European sense but a petition with a history attached, and it is addressed to one reader. Guamán Poma set out to show Philip III that the Andes had had lawful government before the Spanish arrived, that Andean nobility was real nobility, that Christianity was welcome and Spanish colonial administration was not, and that the remedy was to restore Andean lords to authority under the Crown. To make that case he had to establish the Andean past as ordered and legible, so the first part of the manuscript runs through ages of the world, the Inca rulers and their queens, the officials of the state, the ritual calendar month by month, the punishments and the roads. The second part is an indictment.
Priests who keep concubines and run weaving shops, corregidores who extort, the mine draft at Huancavelica and Potosí, the taking of Andean women, the collapse of the population. He wrote in Spanish that a Spanish reader would have found rough, threaded with Quechua and Aymara, and he wrote it over decades. Then he sent it, and it did not arrive, or arrived and was set aside. It was found in the Royal Library at Copenhagen in 1908 by the German scholar Richard Pietschmann. How it got there is unknown.