Pedro Cieza de Leon

Pedro Cieza de León , 1518?-1560, Spanish soldier and explorer in South America. His Chronicle of Peru is one of the most richly detailed accounts of the Spanish conquest.

Bibliography: See El Inca, abr. Eng. tr. (1959) by H. de Onís.

St. Augustine the oldest city in the United States, in northeastern Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spanish explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles. It is located near the place where Ponce de Leon, who discovered Florida, landed in 1513. Between 1672 and 1696 Spain authorized the building of the Castillo de San Marcos, which still stands as the oldest masonry fort in the country, in order to fend off attacks from the north. In 1702–03 St. Augustine turned away the South Carolinians, and in 1740 the city repelled an attack by James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia. In 1742 Fort Matanzas was built. In 1763, at the close of the French and Indian War (1754–63), the English gained possession of the city. During the Revolutionary War it attracted large numbers of Tories from the North, but they left when it was passed to the Spanish in 1783. In 1821 Spain ceded Florida to the United States, and St. Augustine began to thrive as never before. This era of growth came to a halt with the Seminole War of the 1830s. In March 1862 Union troops occupied the city and maintained their hold on it until the end of the Civil War.