Pre-Spanish Philippine History
A. D. 43-1565
Pre-Spanish Philippine History during the first years of the
conversion-conquest was tabooed because of its pagan and infidel
associations. Whatever had to do with the past, the many records
there must have been in a land where literacy is reported to have been
general, was religiously destroyed by the missionaries. Likewise the
converts, and it was almost an unanimous conversion, were exhorted
to banish from their memories all traditions and recollections as
they valued their immortal souls. Thus was repeated, on a much larger
scale and more effectively, the Christianizing of England's Saxons.
The possibility of classical references to the archipelago had at
first to be generally ignored, even had the early European comers
been educated men, which for the most part they were not. Spain's
occupation was based on discovery from the New World and it would
have been considered like championing Portugal's rival claims to
circulate accounts of earlier Asiatic associations.
The contempt in which the Chinese were held acted to prevent much
mention of their former knowledge of the islands though scanty
references, apparently unwittingly, have occasionally crept into some
of the first chronicles.
Similarly a prejudice consequent upon the 1762-3 occupation of Manila
banned English histories of the Indian Archipelago. Then during the
last decades of Spain's final century of rule her apologists sought to
minimize the lamentable lack of progress since the first few decades
by ascribing savagery to the people Legaspi found.
A suggestion of the antagonism to historical research appears in the
frequent assertions of Spanish writers from 1888 to 1898 that the
only Philippine history was the chapter of Spanish history dealing
with Spain in the Philippines. More emphatic proof is the bitter
criticism of the early Spanish historian Morga whose 1609 "Events
in the Philippines" Doctor Rizal was blamed for republishing. That
Spaniards were not ignorant of the Philippines' past may be proved by
Raimundo Geler, who, in a book issued in Madrid during the liberal
régime of 1869, made a brief summary of what foreign writers had
gleaned from Arabian sources about the early Filipinos, but with the
return of the Bourbon dynasty to power he had to withdraw his work from
circulation till the claim is made that only a single copy remains.
Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Austrian professor, seems to have
pioneered in applying modern critical methods to extract the
true narrative from conflicting early authorities, in the later
1880s. Isabelo de los Reyes, a Filipino born in the Ilocos provinces,
tried to make deductions to fill out this narrative and supplemented
it with materials from folk-lore. Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera, another
Filipino, sought the aid of philology, dealing with the considerable
Sanscrit element in the local dialects. To Juan Luna, also a Filipino,
belongs the credit for the first essays in Philippine historical
paintings, for he availed himself of European museums to depict his
characters in the real costumes of their times. And Mariano Ponce,
in the Filipino students' Madrid review La Solidaridad, popularized
the chief events and prominent personalities of the conquest period.
Dr. José Rizal, greatest of all Filipinos, however, excelled all
the rest. His is the first history from the Filipino view point (to
be found in The Philippines a Century Hence, The Indolence of the
Filipinos, and his annotations to Morga's History). His was the first
systematic work by a Filipino in zoology, philology, and ethnology as
aids to history; and as well his was the earliest Filipino interest
in the Chinese records referring to these Islands. It was in 1887,
in Dresden, Germany, that Rizal conferred with Dr. A. B. Meyer and
Professor Blumentritt on the Chua Ju-Kua account of Manila in the
middle of the thirteenth century which had just been translated
by Dr. Friedrich Hirth, an extract from the work begun in 1885 and
continuing over ten years.