Cieza de León, Pedro

Pedro Cieza de León (1520 - 1554) was a Spanish conquistador and chronicler of Peru and Popayán. He is known primarily for his Crónicas del Perú, which would be the most detailed European report of that region well into the seventeenth century. Little is known of his youth and education. He was born to a family of Jewish conversos in Llerena, a Spanish town near the border with Portugal. At the young age of 16, having learned of the discovery of the Incas, he travelled to Seville to take ship for the Americas. Despite the prohibition of Jews and Conversos from the Spanish colonies, his family was sufficiently well establsihed for him to receive permission to go. His initial postings were in Colombia; the Popayám province, where he would participate in the foundation of several colonial cities. In 1547 he took part in Pedro de la Gasca's royalist campaign against Pizarro's rebellion, a march that took him through modern-day Ecuador and Peru, to see the war's culmination outside Cuzco and Pizarro's execution. Settling for a time in Lima, he began what was to be a four-volume history of Peru and the New World. His research would lead to further travel in the region. He returned to Seville in 1551, and there published the first volume of his work in 1553. His death the following year curtailed the publication of the rest of the work, which lay fallow until the translation of the second part 1871 by Clements Markham. The third and fourth volumes would be unearthed and published in the 20th century.