{
  "id": "ovalle-historica-relacion-de-chile",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Alonso de Ovalle, Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile (Rome, 1648)",
  "summary": "The first substantial book about Chile printed in Europe, written by a Jesuit born in Santiago who found that in much of Europe people did not even know the country's name. It credits the Mapuche resistance with the valour that made the war long, reports women who refused Spanish dress after a lifetime among Spaniards, describes knotted cords kept as books of account, and carries the map and engravings that gave Europe its first look at the place.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "chile",
    "exploration",
    "ethnography",
    "books",
    "printing",
    "spanish-empire",
    "indigenous-knowledge",
    "maps",
    "missions"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "acosta-historia-natural-y-moral-1590"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "inca-garcilaso-de-la-vega"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "valladolid-debate"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "new-laws-of-1542"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alvar-nunez-cabeza-de-vaca"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "bertonio-vocabulario-aymara-1612"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juan-ignacio-molina-history-of-chili"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ercilla-la-araucana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cieza-cronica-del-peru-1553"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "buenaventura-suarez-astronomo-de-san-cosme"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "valdivia-arte-de-la-lengua-de-chile-1606"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "guerra-defensiva-de-chile"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sarmiento-viage-al-estrecho-1768"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "diccionario-de-autoridades-1726"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "nunez-de-pineda-cautiverio-feliz-1673"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "parlamentos-de-chile"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "libertad-de-los-indios-de-chile"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "terremotos-y-salidas-de-mar-de-las-indias"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is Alonso de Ovalle's Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile?",
    "When was the first book about Chile published in Europe?",
    "What did seventeenth-century Spaniards write about the Mapuche or Araucanians?",
    "Were quipus used outside Peru?",
    "Who was Alonso de Ovalle?",
    "What was the first printed map of Chile?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The title page reads \"HISTORICA RELACION Del Reyno de CHILE, Y delas missiones, y ministerios que exercita en el la Compañia de IESVS\", and names the author \"ALONSO DE OVALLE Dela Compañia de IESVS Natural de Santiago de Chile, y su Procurador a ROMA\", with the imprint \"EN ROMA, por Francisco Cauallo. M.DC.XLVIII. Con licencia delos Superiores\". The book is therefore written about Chile by a man born there, printed in Italy, for a European readership. The running head of the body, however, is not the title: it reads \"BREVE RELACION\" on the verso and \"DEL REYNO DE CHILE\" on the recto.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The motive is stated in the first sentence of the prologue and it is an absence rather than an ambition. Having come from the kingdom of Chile and found in these parts of Europe so little knowledge of it, \"que en muchas partes ni aun sabian su nombre\", the author felt obliged to satisfy the desire of those who pressed him to make it known. He concedes the book falls short of a proper history, calls it a \"borron\" - a rough draft - and pleads want of materials so far from where they could be had.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The plan announced in the prologue puts indigenous agency into the structure of the book. The first and second books give the nature and properties of the land, the third its inhabitants, the fourth and fifth the entry of the Spaniards and their conquest, and the sixth the various events of the war, which the author says was occasioned by \"la valerosa resistencia que han hecho los Araucanos alos Españoles\" - by the valorous resistance the Araucanians made to the Spaniards. The seventh treats the means of peace attempted by Father Luis de Valdivia to open the way for preaching, and the death of his companions.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "He states a rule of evidence and then a caution about his own partiality. Of the five things he advises the reader, the first is that in everything written here he has kept to the truth without departing from it in anything he reports having seen, and that the rest, what he has heard or read in the authors, he reports as he understood it \"sin añadir ni quitar nada asu verdad\". He then adds that although all whom he cites are worthy of credit, foreigners are \"mas libres de sospecha\" in everything touching praise - a writer anticipating the charge that a Chilean praising Chile is an interested witness.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The triumphalist frame is on the same pages and is recorded here rather than trimmed. The prologue closes by telling the reader that the book will above all show the pious affection of devotion in the favours by which the Queen of Heaven has favoured the kingdom of Chile, and that in little more than a century God has been made known and adored by so great a variety of nations as at last to oblige \"que le doble la rodilla el poderoso, e indomito Araucano, que tantos años hizo guerra resistiendo ala predicacion del santo Euangelio\". The resistance credited in claim c3 is here the thing finally overcome.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The geography is set out as a problem in position rather than as wonder. The first chapter fixes Chile from the twenty-fifth degree to the strait of Magellan, gives its width as generally twenty leagues and in the widest part a hundred and fifty, distinguishes the jurisdiction of the governors of Chile from the length of the coast, and discusses whether the land continues to New Guinea - reporting that \"Abraham Ortelio quiso dezir, que por esta parte del Sur se auezindaua a Chile vna Tierra\", and setting against it the navigators who found the sea open at Cape Horn and undeceived them.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The book gives its indigenous adversaries a speech about liberty and does not answer it. In a harangue before battle the fighters are asked whether they expect less glory than their forebears won by their triumphs; today we have to die, and in this equality of fortune no advantage is recognised but that of \"vna muerte gloriosa por la estimada libertad dela patria, de nuestros hijos, y descendientes\"; remember that your heart is sustained and your veins filled by the inherited blood of those \"que jamas consintieron el infame yugo dela seruidumbre sobre sus cuellos\". The word for what the Spaniards offered, in a Spanish book, is the yoke of servitude.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Immediately after it comes the hostile characterisation, and both belong to the record. Their warlike spirit, he writes, has its beginning in their nature, \"porque son colericos, impacientes, mal sufridos, furiosos, arrogantes, soberbios, y feroces\", and in their vengeances they are notably cruel, inhumanly tearing the enemy apart when they have him in their hands. The same paragraph grants them constancy and obstinacy in what they begin, so the vice and the virtue are drawn from one temperament.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The physical and material description is close and admiring, and its detail is the kind a European reader could not have invented. They are generally of robust bodies, broad-shouldered, high-chested, agile, hard in labour and much enduring of hunger, cold, rain and heat, \"despreciadores delas proprias comodidades, y dela mesma vida\" when honour and liberty require the risk. They are great horsemen who ride without saddle on a bare skin. Their campaign ration is a bag of maize meal with a piece of salt and some ajíes - which, the author glosses for his readers, are called pimientos in Spain and chiles in parts of the Indies - loosened with water from any stream into a drink they call ulpo, or eaten thicker as rupu.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "Settlement pattern is read as a political choice rather than as backwardness. The number of people the country sustained can be gathered, he writes, from what the Spaniards found on entering, which the authors he cites put at a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand, more or less according to the size of the jurisdictions. Few of these were in the form of cities, \"porque todo lo que olia a algun genero de sujecion, o apretura, no les agradaua, sino el desahogo, y libertad\", and so they lived in the open country, each cacique with his own. The dispersal that made the country hard to conquer is explained by its inhabitants' objection to being constrained.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "One passage records a refusal of assimilation that a triumphal book had no reason to include. The more hispanicised women raised in the Spanish cities have taken up shoes, a shift and a petticoat under the manta, \"pero no otra ninguna cosa\"; and no greater affront could be offered an Indian woman than to put on her the headdress, mantle, bodice, collar, ruffs, gloves and other ornaments the Spanish women use, and much more if she were obliged to put white lead or rouge on her face. None of this, he writes, has taken hold even among those who are born and live their whole lives among Spaniards.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c12",
      "text": "The account of their economy turns into an argument about where a society places its honour. Their very plain dress and small display at home is a great saving of craftsmen and artificers, so that the people not being occupied in those trades there are more soldiers for the war, \"que es en lo que esta gente pone su honra, y presumpcion, como otras naciones la ponen, o en la grandeza, y sumtuosidad de edificios, o en athesorar riquezas, o hazerse eminentes en letras, y varias artes\". Of the European arts, he says, they never had notice and still less the practice, \"pero aprendenlas facilmente, y con eminencia quando se las enseñan\" - they learn them easily, and with distinction, when they are taught.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c13",
      "text": "Knotted cords are described in use in Chile, not only in Peru. They have no use of reading and writing, he writes, \"pero suplen esta falta con sus Quipos, que son vnos cordeles mas, y menos gruessos con que hazen variedad de ñudos, con que se entienden, para acordarse delas cosas, de que han de dar raçon\". These quipus are \"sus libros de memoria, y quentas\", and with them they render account of great quantities of livestock and distinguish those that have died of sickness. The technique usually filed under the Inca state is here a working instrument in a country the Inca state barely reached.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c14",
      "text": "Book seven describes a negotiated peace and an exchange of prisoners on equal terms. The caciques of Arauco having performed the ceremonies of peace, Utablame came forward and in sign of recognition of the king offered his branch of cinnamon, which the governor received, and each accepted the other's peace in the same form; the caciques stayed to the following day, were given presents to carry home, and in the meanwhile there was treating with them \"dela redempcion, y rescate delos cautiuos nuestros, y suios\" - the ransom of our captives and theirs. The two sides are described as holding prisoners of each other, and the book says so in one phrase.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c15",
      "text": "The mission that followed was bounded by a written instruction, and that detail matters more than the martyrdom it ends in. The fathers Horacio Vecchi and Martín de Aranda entered the land of war to preach; arriving at Elicura, five leagues from where they set out, and finding the Indians hospitable and inclined to peace, they began to teach and sent messengers further afield. Wishing to go on to help Spanish captives held deeper in, they wrote to Father Valdivia for licence, \"porque conforme al orden, que les hauia dado, no podian hazerlo, sin nueuo auiso\". The chapter that follows is headed with their deaths.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c16",
      "text": "The volume was designed to be looked at as well as read, and it says so. The descriptive title leaf promises that all of it is represented \"en varias imagenes, y en el Mapa de Chile, que van puestas en su lugar\", and a separate advertencia instructs the binder where each plate belongs - among them the twenty-five governors Chile has had from its foundation, beginning with Pedro de Valdivia and ending with Martín de Mujica, engraved three abreast on horseback so that they would fit on the great map. Chile reached the European eye as a picture and a map at the same moment it reached it as a text.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c17",
      "text": "What the book is limits what it proves. The author is a procurator sent to Rome to recruit men and money for the Chilean mission, and the work argues the merit of that mission and of his own order within it; its account of the war is written from the Spanish side; and its description of the inhabitants is offered as evidence that they are worth converting. It is first-rate evidence of what one criollo Jesuit knew and was prepared to print about his country in Europe in 1648, and it is not an independent account of Mapuche life.",
      "sources": [
        "ovalle-historica-relacion-1648"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language coverage of colonial Chile runs through Ercilla's poem La Araucana and through modern histories of the Arauco war; Ovalle, when he appears, is a line in a bibliography or a credit under the reproduced map. Read from the 1648 sheets, the book is a different and more useful thing: a description of a country by a man born in it, written because Europe did not know the name of the place. What it carries is specific and mostly absent from the summaries - the Araucanian resistance named in the author's own plan as the cause of the war's length; a pre-battle harangue on dying for the liberty of the patria against \"el infame yugo dela seruidumbre\", printed without rebuttal; the campaign ration of maize meal, salt and ají with the Mapuche names ulpo and rupu; a hundred to two hundred thousand people living dispersed because anything that smelled of subjection did not please them; women who after a lifetime among Spaniards still refused Spanish dress; quipus kept in Chile as books of memory and accounts; and a peace at which captives were ransomed on both sides. The costs travel with it, from the same pages: the inhabitants called choleric, arrogant and notably cruel two paragraphs after the harangue, the prologue's closing image of the indomitable Araucanian brought to bend the knee, and an author who is a fundraiser for the mission he is describing and who says himself that foreigners are freer of suspicion when it comes to praise.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ovalle-historica-relacion-de-chile",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/ovalle-historica-relacion-de-chile.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Alonso de Ovalle, Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile (Rome, 1648)",
    "description": "The first substantial book about Chile printed in Europe, written by a Jesuit born in Santiago who found that in much of Europe people did not even know the country's name. It credits the Mapuche resistance with the valour that made the war long, reports women who refused Spanish dress after a lifetime among Spaniards, describes knotted cords kept as books of account, and carries the map and engravings that gave Europe its first look at the place.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/ovalle-historica-relacion-de-chile",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-09",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile, y delas missiones, y ministerios que exercita en el la Compañia de Iesus",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=aJRbAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP7"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Alonso de Ovalle, Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile (Rome, 1648)"
  }
}