A further contribution to the history of the Inca kingdom was made by Pedro Sarmiento, who not only held a high place among the Spanish navigators of the sixteenth century but also merits consideration among the writers of his time. He was born at Alcalá de Henares about 1532. His father was Bartolomé Sarmiento, a native of Pontevedra in Galicia, whose wife was of a Biscayan family named Gamboa. Pedro passed the period of his childhood and youth in his father’s house at Pontevedra, near the little port of Bayona; but at the age of eighteen he entered the military service of Spain, and was a soldier from 1550 to 1555, when he succumbed to the desire to seek adventures and fortune in America. His sojourn in Mexico and Guatemala left no important record in the history of the period. In 1557 he arrived in Peru, then under the rule of Viceroy Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza, Marqués de Cañete, who had made his solemn entry into Lima on June 29, 1556. [Sidenote: Social unrest and sedition] The rebellions of Gonzalo Pizarro and Girón had been put down, but the spirit of discontent and hostility to the government was manifest in many quarters. The judges of the audiencia were leaders of opposing factions; the corregidores were supporting practically independent military forces, and their unlawful acts imposed intolerable burdens on persons subject to their authority. Everywhere there were smouldering embers of sedition. The viceroy faced this condition of affairs with a grim determination to bring peace to the troubled society. He gathered and held subject to his order the arms and munitions that were scattered among the corregidores. The prominent disturbers of the peace he disarmed and sent into exile. He caused Tomás Vásquez, the lieutenant of Girón, to be executed, and ordered the corregidores to impose the same punishment upon turbulent and dangerous persons within their districts. And to furnish a vent to the restlessness of adventurers, he encouraged the organization of exploring expeditions, of which the most notorious was that of Pedro de Ursúa, that finally fell under the control of the brutal Lope de Aguirre. [Sidenote: The viceregal court] [Sidenote: Persecution of Sarmiento]