Francisco Balagtas

Francisco Balagtas y de la Cruz, who lived from 1788 to 1862 and is commonly known as Francisco Balagtas and also as Francisco Baltazar, was a Filipino poet and litterateur who wrote in Tagalog during the Spanish rule of the Philippines. He is widely considered one of the greatest Filipino literary laureates because of his impact on Filipino literature, and his epic Florante at Laura is regarded as his defining work. He took the legal surname Baltazar to comply with the edict issued in 1849 by Governor-General Narciso Claveria y Zaldua that required the native population to adopt standard surnames. The name Baltazar is often misspelled as Baltasar and is sometimes wrongly taken to be a pen name.