Juan Bautista Muñoz

[1] After the death of his father in 1751, his mother placed him under the tutelage of his uncle, the Dominican friar Gabriel Ferrandis at the convent of Pilar de Valencia, where he began to receive his first formal education.

From 1753 to 1757, Muñoz was enrolled at the Jesuit seminary in Valencia, where he came under the influence of the polymath Antonio Eximeno Pujades, and began to take an interest in mathematics and modern philosophy.

On October 28, 1770, at the age of twenty-five, Juan Bautista Muñoz was appointed Cosmografo mayor de Indias (cosmographer-major of the Indies) by King Charles III of Spain.

In the course of the composition of the geographical and navigational reports and memoirs he submitted to the Consejo de Indias, Muñoz frequently had to resort to examining the historical documentary record of Spanish America.

The outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War (1779) had suspended the further appearance of Robertson's work in Spain, and encouraged the Spanish establishment to initiate its own up-dated history.

On July 17, 1779, Charles III formally placed Muñoz with the responsibility of writing a comprehensive history of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas, in an effort to set the record straight, snuff out various apocryphal stories and leyenda negra rumors circulating throughout Europe and defend Spanish territorial rights in America from the encroaching claims of other European powers.

Seeing the value of having all the Indies-related documents collected in one place, Muñoz recommended to José de Gálvez, the Minister of State, that a repository bringing together all the documentary materials for the Indies.

The project for the new archive was under the direction of José de Gálvez, who worked closely with Muñoz in collecting, sifting and cataloging the incoming documents.