“Above all, to thy own self be true”: Pedro de Valencia, the history of Chile and selfcensorship

During the reign of Philip III, crisis prevailed in the kingdom of Chile. The “pacification” of the southern part of that distant kingdom was going badly, and in royal court a debate raged over the type of military tactics needed to guarantee the region’s security. One party favored “defensive war,” while another opted for a “war of fire and blood.” In the middle of this debate, Pedro de Valencia, one of the king’s official chroniclers, decided, in a premeditated act of self-censorship, to abandon the history of Chile he had been especially commissioned to write. The connections between the crisis in Chile, the chronicler and self-censorship are many and complex, but they demonstrate, already at the start of the seventeenth century, the existence of a globalized world in which a military crisis in one hemisphere was able to trigger a crisis of conscious in another and which resulted in an act of self-censorship. In the following pages, I will attempt to unravel the various threads uniting what, at least on the surface, appears to be two separate and unrelated crises.