Pedro Menéndez de Avilés
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was a Spanish naval leader and explorer born in the northern coastal town of Avilés, Spain, in the early 16th century. Coming from a family of minor nobility, he began his career in privateering before establishing himself as a prominent figure in Spanish maritime operations. During his career, he played a critical role in Spain's colonial ambitions, particularly in response to French incursions into Florida, a territory claimed by Spain. Menéndez was appointed by King Philip II to address the French threat by leading an expedition to Florida, where he successfully founded St. Augustine in 1565, the oldest permanent European settlement in what is now the United States.
His efforts included establishing military bases, agricultural settlements, and missionary activities aimed at converting Indigenous peoples to Catholicism. Despite his achievements, Menéndez faced numerous challenges, including supply shortages and resistance from Indigenous groups, leading to a tumultuous relationship marked by conflict and attempts at religious conversion. Although he experienced financial ruin due to the costs of his expedition, he remained loyal to Spain and was honored for his contributions. Menéndez died in 1574 while preparing for a new military campaign, leaving behind a complex legacy as both a colonial explorer and a military leader. He is buried in his hometown, Avilés.
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés
- Born: February 15, 1519
- Birthplace: Avilés, Spain
- Died: September 17, 1574
- Place of death: Santander, Spain
Spanish explorer
Menéndez de Avilés developed the Florida peninsula of North America as a colony of the Spanish crown.
Area of Achievement Exploration
Early Life
One of twenty-one brothers and sisters, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (PAY-droh may-NAYN-dayz day ah-bee-LAYS) was born in the seaport town of Avilés on Spain’s northern coast. A member of a family with claims to Hidalgo (minor nobility) status, he was related also by marriage to the important Valdés clan. Like many of his relatives, friends, and contemporaries who lived in this port city, Menéndez turned to the sea in pursuit of a career.
The young seaman served initially with a leading local privateersman, Alvaro Bazán, in battles with French corsairs operating off the coast of Western Europe. Soon he bought his own small ship with the prize money that he had earned and began the pursuit of French raiders under royal commissions granted by the Spanish Crown. His successes led him to expand his operations across the Atlantic to the Indies. He became a captain-general and commander of the Spanish treasure fleets plying the routes between their colonies and the homeland.
His rising reputation as a naval leader caused Spain’s King Charles I (Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) to assign Menéndez to accompany the emperor’s heir, young Prince Philip, to England for the latter’s wedding to Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of King Henry VIII and the future queen Mary I. While the close relationship that he had developed with the heir to the throne during this period helped Menéndez throughout his subsequent career, he incurred also the enmity of the powerful merchant circle in Seville, which had to bear the expense of maintaining the armed fleet needed to protect the sea lanes to Spain’s colonies. The merchants saw the young seaman as a potential rival for the profits emanating from transatlantic trade.
Life’s Work
By the middle of the sixteenth century, open hostilities had broken out between Spain and France, exacerbated by the militant Protestant movements that had swept Europe. Philip II, now king of Spain, turned south to stem the Protestant tide both on the European continent and in Spain’s colonial empire.
Rumors had reached the Spanish court of French incursions and the establishment of settlements on the coast of Florida, territory claimed by Spain by right of discovery. Loss of control of this strategic area would seriously jeopardize Spanish sovereignty over the whole Caribbean zone. Philip II decided that he had to take strong countermeasures as quickly as possible. Previous attempts by Spain to establish a permanent colony under its explorers Hernando de Soto and Juan Ponce de León had ended in failure.
Philip now turned to his successful, experienced captain-general Menéndez to evaluate and to make recommendations on how to deal with the Florida problem. The veteran sailor replied quickly that the French threat was a real one and that the so-called Protestant heretics, if they were successful in enlisting Florida’s Native Indians in their cause, could threaten the Spanish political and economic status quo throughout the area. Menéndez recommended the dispatch of an expedition immediately to rout the French if they had indeed established bases there, to institute agricultural settlements with Spanish immigrants, and to employ missionaries to convert the indigenous peoples to Catholicism. He estimated the cost of such an expedition, together with a necessary year’s supplies after landing, to be in the neighborhood of eighty thousand ducats to the royal treasury.
The king and his advisers countered the proposal by offering to license Menéndez as adelantado, or governor, promising him lands, revenues, and titles if he would undertake the expedition largely at his own expense, but with some financial and material support by the Crown. Such an arrangement had become a common practice employed by Spanish royalty at the time, since it reduced the burden on the Crown’s own finances. Menéndez accepted this risky venture involving exploration, the probabilities of serious conflict, the transfer of a substantial group of immigrants, and the religious conversion of the indigenous population.
Although the new adelantado initially received moral support, military men, supplies, and missionaries to aid him, he encountered resistance from another quarter, the merchants of Seville and the Casa de Contratación powerful groups that played a major role in the transatlantic trade between Spain and its colonies. They delayed the aid pledged by the Crown in furnishing the ships and supplies Menéndez required to start his enterprise.
Undaunted, Menéndez not only employed all his own personal resources in the project but also secured the support of family and friends in and about Avilés. These loyal comrades became the key personnel on which he depended in building and administering the new colony. The group pledged not only their wealth but also their lives in support of their kinsman and close friend.
Meanwhile, powerful French Huguenot interests had begun assembling a fleet of their own. They did indeed have a colony started at Fort Caroline on the Florida coast, and they planned to reinforce this fledgling operation before Menéndez arrived.
By the time the Spanish expedition had reached Florida in mid-1565, the enterprising French had already reinforced their settlement at the Caroline location. On September 8, Menéndez landed north of the French fort at a beach that he named St. Augustine and dedicated to the Spanish Crown. It became the headquarters for the new adelantamiento, or seat of government.
Two weeks later, the Spanish leader marched south, carried out a surprise attack on Fort Caroline, captured it, and killed most of the inhabitants. Later, when some of the survivors of the initial battle who had escaped attempted to surrender, Menéndez executed the majority of them as well. Such massacres of the vanquished were all too common in the bloody encounters among European rivals. In this case, the Spaniards had quickly and forcefully ended the French threat to their control of Florida.
The adelantado then proceeded to launch his threefold plan of action for the colony: the establishment of military bases, the preparation for the influx of permanent settlers, and the religious conversion of the indigenous peoples. The progress proved to be slow. Food remained in short supply during the settlement’s initial stages, causing low morale within the garrisons, and the North American Indians proved to be difficult to convert to a new religion.
The relationships between the conquistadores and their North American Indian charges were tumultuous. The missionaries who accompanied the soldiers insisted that the Indians give up their traditional gods and adopt Catholicism exclusively. The friars demanded that the converts discontinue their practices of polygamy, sodomy, and child sacrifice, customs that were accepted traditionally within their culture. The Spanish soldiers also took by force what they wanted from the Indians and abused the women. Moreover, when the Spaniards adopted a particular tribe as allies, they immediately incurred the enmity of that group’s traditional adversaries.
Vital supplies continued to be a problem for Menéndez’s Floridian colonies. Officials both in Cádiz and in Havana either ignored the adelantado’s requests or demanded prepayment for goods to be delivered. The scarcity of provisions critical to the settlements’ welfare kept the outposts at a bare survival level.
Despite the hazards facing the Spaniards throughout Florida, Menéndez managed to establish a string of forts along the shores of the peninsula. Unfortunately, sporadic raids by Indians, food shortages, and mutinies created problems for the Spanish leader whenever his duties called him away from the peninsula. On many occasions, he was forced to punish drastically, and in some cases to execute, malefactors.
The cost involved in establishing and supplying these outposts proved to be much higher than anticipated. The colony’s backers lost many ships and much cargo in the process of navigating through uncharted waters. Menéndez and his associates also suffered severe financial reverses, because Florida’s natural resources offered little in the way of immediate return on investment. Disorder broke out constantly among the unruly soldiery when they came to realize that there was little loot to be acquired from the Indian population. Menéndez decided to return to Spain and present his problems to the Crown.
Unfortunately for the Spanish colony’s leader, Philip II had turned his attention to more pressing difficulties closer to home. Both France and England threatened Spain’s control over its spheres of interest on the European continent itself. Accordingly, faraway Florida ranked low on the king’s list of priorities.
Nevertheless, a visit to court by Menéndez did produce some favorable results. King Philip added to Menéndez’s Florida command the post of governor of Cuba as well. Menéndez acquired command of a newly formed armada to operate as Spain’s main line of defense throughout the Caribbean. Recalcitrant Seville and Cádiz merchants received orders from the Crown to furnish Menéndez with overdue money and supplies.
The adelantado was not left to govern his Florida enterprises for much longer. Philip recalled him to Europe for a new, somewhat more mysterious, assignment in mid-1573. He gave Menéndez command of a great two-hundred-ship armada, the purpose of which was to launch an attack against English home ports and to cut off supplies to English raiders harassing Spanish shipping in the Americas.
On September 17, 1574, while in the midst of organizing this undertaking, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés suddenly died, perhaps poisoned by English spies. Certainly Spain’s outstanding seaman represented a serious threat to the English Crown. When Philip attempted an invasion of England some fourteen years later under a less experienced and less successful admiral, the undertaking proved to be a disaster.
Although Philip II had heaped honors of all kinds on his captain-general, the huge expenses of the Florida expedition left Menéndez penniless at the time of his death.
Significance
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés has been criticized by some historians for his brutal repression of the French colonists who attempted to secure Florida for their own king. He is credited with being the first European to colonize the peninsula on a permanent basis as well as founding the oldest city in the continental United States, St. Augustine. Although he sustained prohibitive financial losses personally in his attempt to develop the colony, Menéndez never wavered in his loyalty to the Spanish ruler or in his commitment to introduce Catholicism to the indigenous peoples of Florida. He must be recognized as one of Spain’s outstanding colonial explorers and military leaders. He lies buried in his hometown of Avilés.
Bibliography
Barrientos, Bartolomé. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés: Founder of Florida. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1965. Barrientos, a historian, was a contemporary of Menéndez.
Folmer, Henry. The Franco-Spanish Rivalry in North America, 1524-1723. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1954. The author attributes the Fort Caroline massacre of the French by the Spaniards to direct orders by Philip II to Menéndez to kill all of those he might find in Florida. Folmer also describes the severe reprisals that the French took against the Spaniards during their raid on the Spanish settlement that had replaced Fort Caroline in 1568.
Gallay, Alan, ed. Voices of the Old South: Eyewitness Accounts, 1528-1861. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Menéndez’s account of his travels in Florida is one of many first-person narratives reproduced in this anthology of antebellum primary sources. Includes bibliographic references.
Glete, Jan. War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500-1660. New York: Routledge, 2002. An account of the development of Spain into an empire founded on military power and economic exploitation of foreign territories. Provides the larger context for Menéndez’s life and career. Includes bibliographic references and index.
Kenny, Michael. The Romance of the Floridas. 1934. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1970. This work is divided into two parts: “The Finding: From Ponce de León to Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, 1512-1565” and “The Founding: The Menéndez-Jesuit Period, 1565-1575.” The emphasis is on the Jesuit missionary activity that took place during the Menéndez expeditions.
Larsen, Clark Spencer, ed. Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Anthology of essays detailing the effects of the colony first founded by Menéndez on all aspects of indigenous life in Florida, from diet to disease to everyday behavior. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.
Lyon, Eugene. The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Spanish Conquest of 1565-1568. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1976. An account of the initial era of exploration and settlement of Florida by the Menéndez expeditions.
Lyon, Eugene., ed. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. New York: Garland, 1995. Volume 24 in the Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks series, this work includes bibliographical references, illustrations, and maps.
Solís de Merás, Gonzalo. Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. Translated by Jeannette Thurber Connor. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1964. Solís de Merás was Menéndez’s brother-in-law. The writer furnished an intimate knowledge of the explorer and his times.
Related article in Great Events from History: The Renaissance & Early Modern Era
1493-1521: Ponce de León’s Voyages; September, 1565: St. Augustine Is Founded.