Pedro de Cieza de León

Pedro de Cieza de León (c. 1520–1554) was a Spanish soldier and chronicler of the conquest of Peru. Born in Extremadura, he sailed for the Indies as a boy of about thirteen and spent some seventeen years campaigning and founding towns in what is now Colombia and Peru, keeping notes all the while on the lands and peoples he saw. He returned to Spain in 1551 and published the first part of his Crónica del Perú in Seville in 1553, a geographical description of the Andes; the remaining parts, on the Incas, the conquest and the civil wars of the conquistadors, stayed in manuscript for centuries.