Antonio de León Pinelo

Who was Antonio de León Pinelo?

Antonio de León Pinelo was a Spanish-colonial historian.

Pinelo was born in Cordova de Tucuman, and educated in the College of the Jesuits of Lima. He travelled to Spain in 1612 and became attorney of the council of the Indies. Then, he became judge of the tribunal of La Contratacion in Seville, succeeding Gil Gonzalez Davila in 1658 in the post of historian of the Indies. He died in Seville.

Antonio de Leon Pinelo maintained at great length that Biblical Paradise was situated in America.

The "cedularios" permitted initiating the compiling works, because they provided order to legal texts. Using those as a base, several Spanish jurists started writing the so-called "summaries", which were extracts of a new law or a mixture of several laws about the same theme. In this work, one of the first was Diego de Zorrilla, whose work was then revised by Rodrigo de Aguiar and lastly by Antonio de Leon Pinelo, who prepared a new project and in 1628 published the summaries of the 4 first books so they could be revised.