Juan Ponce de León
Spain

Juan Ponce de León was born in the village of Santervás de Campos in the northern part of what is now the Spanish province of Valladolid. Although early historians placed his birth in 1460, and this date has been used traditionally, more recent evidence shows he was likely born in 1474. The surname Ponce de León dates from the 13th century. The Ponce de León lineage began with Ponce Vélaz de Cabrera, descendant of count Bermudo Núñez, and Sancha Ponce de Cabrera, daughter of Ponce Giraldo de Cabrera.

Before October 1235, a son of Ponce Vela de Cabrera and his wife Teresa Rodríguez Girón named Pedro Ponce de Cabrera married Aldonza Alfonso, an illegitimate daughter of King Alfonso IX of León. The descendants of this marriage added the "de León" to their patronymic and were known thereafter by the name Ponce de León.

Although the identity of Juan Ponce de León's parents is still a matter of conjecture, according to Fuson and Arnade, citing Puerto Rican historian Aurelio Tió, Pedro Ponce de León and Leonor de Figueroa were most likely the parents of Juan Ponce de León. Thus Ponce appears to have been a member of a distinguished and influential noble family.

His relatives included Rodrigo Ponce de León, Duke of Cádiz, a celebrated figure in the Moorish wars (sometimes known as a "new Cid "), and Juan Ponce de León's first cousin. Aurelio Tió, in his Nuevas fuentes para la historia de Puerto Rico, made a vigorous case for Juan Ponce's aristocratic heritage, determining that Juan Ponce's father was Pedro Ponce de León, the Fourth Lord of Villagarcía, and his mother was Leonor de Figueroa, the daughter of Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa, Lord of Salvaleón, and María Manuel; consequently Juan Ponce's paternal grandmother, Teresa de Guzmán (Teresa Ponce de León y Guzmán), was La Señora de la Casa Toral, making Juan Ponce a Ponce de León on both sides of his family.

Through this grandmother, Ponce de León was related to another notable family, the Núñez de Guzmáns; a contemporary chronicler, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, says that as a young man he served as a page and then as a squire to Pedro Núñez de Guzmán, Knight Commander of the Order of Calatrava. Devereux says Ponce de León probably joined the Spanish campaigns against the Muslims in the Granada War in which the Catholic Monarchs finally conquered in 1492 the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim polity surviving in the Iberian peninsula. Puerto Rican historian Vicente Murga Sanz states that as the squire of Pedro Núñez de Guzmán, it is possible that Juan Ponce de León fought on the side of Rodrigo Ponce de León at the Battle of Granada. Fernandez de Oviedo writes that when Juan Ponce de León arrived in the Americas he was a military man who had gained his experience in the Granada War, but Arnade cautions, "Without proof the biographers of the conquistador state that he accompanied Pedro Núñez de Guzmán in the war against the Moors during the Granada campaign".
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