Pedro Cieza de León

Pedro Cieza de León was a Spanish soldier and chronicler whose travels through the Andes produced one of the major early accounts of Peru. He observed landscapes, roads, settlements, political traditions, and Indigenous societies with unusual attention to geography and local testimony. His larger Crónica del Perú was organized into several parts, including narratives of the civil conflicts that followed the Spanish conquest. The War of Quito belongs to that historical sequence. In the Hakluyt Society edition, Clements R. Markham translated and edited Cieza’s account, presenting its chapters alongside related Inca documents. The narrative follows competing leaders, shifting alliances, marches, and claims to authority during a turbulent period in Quito and Peru. Cieza’s value rests partly in his effort to distinguish what he witnessed from what he learned through inquiry. The War of Quito gives English-language readers access to the political and military strand of a much broader chronicle that also preserved detailed observations of Andean life before its memory disappeared.