Record: the document says itPattern: documents line upLens: our readingOpen: not yet provenDisputed: argued, often by a hostile witness
Year: 1540 · Places: Europe
SUMMARYTatarrax, the king of Quivira the Spanish chased (Nov 8, 2026; Tito: "Don't forget Tartarrax")
RECORD (Rev. Michael A. Shine, "The Lost Province of Quivira," Catholic Historical Review, vol. 1, no. 2, April 1916)Coronado's guide "the Turk" led the 1540–41 expedition toward Quivira; Coronado wrote that "the guides confessed to me, that they had not told the truth," and found "not more than twenty-five villages of straw houses there."
RECORD (Semi-Centennial History of Nebraska, 1904, p. 33)Omaha "had Quivira parades... wherein King Tatarrax rode in all the savage glory of an early Nebraska sovereign" ("savage" is the source's word). RECORD, to pull word for word: the Spanish chronicle description of the lord "Tatarrax" (spelling in the sources: Tatarrax; "Tartarrax" is the modern online spelling), said to be hoary-headed, to wear or worship a golden cross and to pray to the image of a woman, the Queen of Heaven; this is attributed to López de Gómara's Historia general de las Indias (1552), the same chronicler as P845; open the Spanish text and the chapter on Quivira before quoting
PATTERNthe Spanish wrote down a rich, crowned, Christian-looking king on the plains, then reported only straw-house villages; either the king was invented to lure them, or what they found was written down small
DISPUTEDthe status-quo reading says the Turk invented Tatarrax to lead the expedition astray, and that Quivira was the Wichita villages of central Kansas
LENS (WW9)the name sits close to "Tartar," the old maps' name for the Great Khan's lands (Asia Major, Cathay), which matches the WW9 reading of the Americas as Asia Major; online "Tartarian Empire" claims build on this but are Open, not Record
OPENGómara's exact words in Spanish; Castañeda's and Jaramillo's relaciones; 16th-century maps placing "Quivira" (Ortelius and others) with dates. Connects: P845, the Asia Major cards, Fighters of the Land No. 07.