Peter Stuyvesant (c. 1610 – August 1672) was a Dutch colonial administrator who served as the director-general of New Netherland from 1647 to 1664, when the colony was provisionally ceded to the Kingdom of England. He was a major figure in the history of New York City and his name has been given to various landmarks and points of interest throughout the city (e.g. Stuyvesant High School, Stuyvesant Town, Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood, etc.).

Stuyvesant's accomplishments as director-general of New Netherland included a great expansion for the settlement of New Amsterdam beyond the southern tip of Manhattan. Among the projects built by Stuyvesant's administration were the protective wall on Wall Street, the canal that became Broad Street, and Broadway. Stuyvesant, himself a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, opposed religious pluralism and came into conflict with Lutherans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Quakers as they attempted to build places of worship in the city and practice their faiths.

Peter Stuyvesant was born around 1610 in Peperga or Scherpenzeel, Friesland, in the Netherlands, to Balthasar Stuyvesant, a Reformed Calvinist minister, and Margaretha Hardenstein. He grew up in Peperga, Scherpenzeel, and Berlikum. There is previously an erroneous report that Stuyvesant was born in Scherpenzeel in 1592 or 1602. However, his father (Balthazar Stuyvesant) only became a pastor in the Frisian Scherpenzeel between 1612 and 1619 and was previously in Peperga, so Peperga is the likely birthplace of Peter.

At the age of 20, Stuyvesant went to the University of Franeker, where he studied languages and philosophy, but several years later he was expelled from the school after he seduced the daughter of his landlord. He was then sent to Amsterdam by his father, where Stuyvesant – now using the Latinized version of his first name, "Petrus", to indicate that he had university schooling – joined the Dutch West India Company (GWC). In 1630, the company assigned him to be their commercial agent on a small island just off of Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, and then five years later transferred him to the nearby Brazilian state of Pernambuco. In 1638, he was moved again, this time to the colony of Curaçao, the main Dutch naval base in the West Indies, where, just four years later, aged 30, he became the acting governor of that colony, as well as Aruba and Bonaire, a position he held until 1644.

In April 1644, he coordinated and led an attack on the island of Saint Martin, which the Spanish had taken from the Dutch. Stuyvesant thought they had few men. When Stuyvesant raised the Dutch flag, the Spanish fired. Stuyvesant was injured in the leg, which required amputation, and the battle was lost.

Stuyvesant returned to the Netherlands for convalescence, where his right leg was replaced with a wooden peg. Stuyvesant was given the nicknames "Peg Leg Pete" and "Old Silver Nails" because he used a wooden stick studded with silver nails as a prosthesis. The West India Company saw the loss of Stuyvesant's leg as a "Roman" sacrifice, while Stuyvesant himself saw the fact that he did not die from his injury as a sign that God was saving him to do great things. A year later, in May 1645, he was selected by the company to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of the New Netherland colony, including New Amsterdam, the site of present-day New York City.

Stuyvesant had to wait for his appointment to be confirmed by the Dutch States-General. During that time he married Judith Bayard, who was the daughter of a Huguenot minister and hailed from Breda. Together, they left Amsterdam in December 1646 and, after stopping at Curaçao, arrived in New Amsterdam by May 1647.

Kieft's incompetence had left the colony in terrible condition. Only a small number of villages remained after the brutal wars launched by his administration, and many of their inhabitants had given up and returned to Europe, leaving only 250 to 300 men able to carry arms. Kieft himself had obtained a fortune of over 4,000 guilders without explanation and spent much of it to feed his growing alcoholism.