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RIZAL’s Annotation of Antonio

Morga’s Sucesos De Las Islas


Filipinas (Events in the
Philippine Islands)
What is Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas?
• It is one of the important works on the early
history of the Spanish colonization of the
Philippines published in Mexico in 1609 by
Antonio de Morga
• Annotated by Jose Rizal with a prologue by Dr.
Ferdinand Blumentritt
Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, 1609 by
Antonio de Morga
Synopsis
An account of the history of the Spanish colony in
the Philippines during the 16th century. Antonio de Morga
was an official of the colonial bureaucracy in Manila and
consequently draw upon much material that would
otherwise have been inaccessible. His book, published in
1609 ranges more widely that its title suggests. In addition
to the central chapters dealing with the history of the
Spaniards in the colony, Morga devoted a long final
chapter to the study of Filipino customs, manners and
religions in the early years of the Spanish conquest.
From the first edition, Mexico,1609.
A new edition of First series 39
Antonio de Morga
• Antonio de Morga Sanchez Garay was a spanish
lawyer and a high ranking colonial official for 43
years in PH, New Spain and Peru, where he was
president of Audiencia for 20 years
• Spanish conquistador, government official and
historical anthropologist; author of Sucesos De Las
Islas Filipinas (Events in the Philippine Islands)
• He wrote the first lay formal history of the
Philippines conquest by Spain
• A doctorate in canon law and civil law
• His history is valuable in that Morga had access to
the survivor of the earliest days of the colony and he,
himself participated in many of the accounts that he
rendered
• The book Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas narrates
the history of wars, intrigues, diplomacy and
evangelization of the Philippines in a somewhat
disjointed way.
• Modern historians (including Rizal) have noted
that Morga has a definite bias and would often
distort facts or even rely on invention to fit his
defense of the Spanish conquest.
Morga’s Purpose for Writing Sucesos
• Morga wrote that the purpose for writing Sucesos
was so he could chronicle “ the deeds achieved by
our Spaniards in the discovery, conquest, and
conversion of the Filipinas Islans- as well as
various fortunes that they have from time to time
in the great kingdoms and among the pagan
people surrounding the islands.”

laking issue with the scopes of this claims, Rizal argued that
the conversion and conquest were not as widespread as
portrayed because the missionaries were only successful in
conquering a portion of the population of certain islands.
Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas
• CHAPTER 1 : MAGELLAN AND LEGAZPI’s
SEMINAL EXPEDITIONS

• CHAPTER 2-7: CHRONOLOGICAL REPORT ON


GOV’T ADMINISTRATION UNDER GOVERNOR-
GENERAL

• CHAPTER 8: PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, THE NATIVES


THERE, THEIR ANTIQUITY, CUSTOM AND GOV’T
What leads Jose Rizal to Sucesos De
Las Islas Filipinas?
• Rizal was an earnest seeker of truth and this marked
him as a historian.
• He had a burning desire to know exactly the
conditions of the Philippines when the Spaniards
came ashore to the islands
• His theory was that the country was economically
self-sufficient and prosperous
• Entertained the idea that it had a lively and vigorous
community
• He believed the conquest of the Spaniards
contributed in part to the decline of the Philippines
rich tradition and culture
What leads Jose Rizal to Sucesos De
Las Islas Filipinas?
• He then decided to undertake the annotation of
Antonio Morga’s Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas.
• His personal friendship with Ferdinand
Blumentritt provided the inspiration for doing a
new edition of Morga’s Sucesos
• Devoting four months research and writing and
almost a year to get his manuscript published in
Paris in January 1890
• Rizal spent his entire stay in the city of
London at the British Museum’s reading
room
• Having found Morga’s book, he laboriously
hand-copied the whole 351 pages of the
Sucesos
• Rizal proceeded to annotate every chapter of
Sucesos
Rizal’s Annotation of Antonio de
Morga’s “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas”
• Rizal comments that the Philippines of his time
was no better than the pre-Hispanic Philippines.
He says it could have developed on its own into
something great.
• According to Rizal, Filipinos has a system of
writing, an advanced knowledge of metallurgy
and a ship-building industry.
• Rizal knew that the Spaniards wouldn’t like his
work with it being banned in the Philippines
Rizal’s Annotation of Antonio de
Morga’s “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas”
• However, the works first critic is his friend
Blumentritt. In his introduction for the book, he
cited hindsight and anticlericalism as fatal
defects in a purely scholarly work.
• Rizal used history as propaganda weapon. It was
deemed too much propaganda for historians and
too historical for propagandists
• By recreating the proud pre-Hispanic
civilization, Rizal’s Morga had set the tone for
Philippine historiography and Filipino identity.
Rizal’s Annotation of Morga’s Sucesos
• His extensive annotations of Morga’s work number
“no less than 639 items or almost 2 annotations for
every page.”
• Rizal also annotated Morga’s typographical errors
• He commented on every statement that could be
nuanced in Filipino cultural practices
• For example, on page 248 Morga describes the
culinary art of the ancient Filipinos by recordings:
….they prefer to eat salt fish which begin to
decompose and smell
Rizal’s footnotes….
• This is another preoccupation of the Spaniards
who, like any other nation in that matter of food,
loathe that to which they are not accustomed or
is unknown to them… The fish that Morga
mentions does not taste better when it is
beginning to rot. The fish that
Rizal’s annotation of Morga’s footnotes
1. Rizal commits the error of many historians in
appraising the events of the past in the light of
present standards
2. Rizal’s attacks on the church were unfair and
unjustified because the abuses of the friars
should not be construed to mean Catholicism
is bad
• Ferdinand Blumentritt also wrote a preface
emphasizing same salient points:

1. The Spaniards have to correct their erroneous


conception of the Filipinos as children of limited
intelligence

2. That there existed three kinds of Spanish


delusions about the Philippines:
Filipinos are inferior races
Filipinos were not ready for parliamentary
representation and other reforms
Denial of equal rights can be compensated by strict
dispensation of justice
Ferdinand Blumentritts Prologue
• Writing in Spanish instead of his native language
• Praised Rizal’s work as “scholarly and well-thought
out”
• He noted that Morga’s sucesos was so rare the “the
very few libraries that have it quard it with some
solititude as if it were the treasure of the Incas”
• He criticized Rizal’s annotations on two counts
He first observed that Rizal had committed the mistakes
of many modern historians who judged events in the
past in the context of contemporary ideas and mores
He perceived as the overreach of Rizal’s denunciations
of Catholicism that Rizal should confine his critique to
the religious orders in the Philippines who spared no
effort to suppress calls for reforms
Rizal’s Purpose of Morga’s Sucesos
• In Jose Rizal’s dedication, he explained among
other things, the purpose of the new edition of
Morga’s Sucesos:
“if the book succeeds in awakening in you
the consciousness of our past which has been
obliterated from memory and in rectifying what
has been falsified and calumniated, I shall not
have labor in vain and on such basis, little though
it may be, we can all devote ourselves to studying
the future”
3 Main Propositions in Rizal’s New
Edition of Morga’s Sucesos
1. The people of the Philippines had a
culture of their own, before the coming of
the Spaniards
2. Filipinos were decimated, demoralized,
exploited and ruined by the Spanish
colonization
3. The present state of the Philippines was
not necessarily superior to its past
RIZAL’s Annotation
• In his historical essay, which includes the
narration of Philippine colonial history,
punctuated as it was with incidences of agony,
tensions, tragedies and prolonged periods of
suffering that many people had been subjected
to. He correctly observed that as a colony of
Spain, “The Philippines was depopulated,
impoverished and retarded, astounded by
metaphor sis, with no confidence in her past,
still without faith in her present and without
faltering hope in the future.”
He went to say……
“….little by little, they (Filipinos) lost their old
traditions, the mementoes of their past; they gave up
their writing, their songs, their poems, their laws, in
order to learn other doctrines which they did not
understand, another morality, another aesthetics,
different from those inspired by their climate and
their manner of thinking. They declined, degrading
themselves in their own eyes. They become ashamed
of what was their own; they began to admire and
praise whatever is foreign and incomprehensible;
their spirit was damaged and it surrendered.”
RIZAL’s Annotation of Morga’s Sucesos
To the Filipinos: “In my NOLI ME TANGERE, I
commenced to sketch the present conditions
obtaining in our country. The effect produced by
my efforts gave me to understand- before
proceeding to develop, before your eyes other
successive scenes- that is necessary to first lay
bare the past, in order the better to judge the
present and to survey the road trodden during
three centuries.
Like almost all of you, I was born and brought up in
ignorance of our country’s past and so, without
knowledge or authority to speak of what I neither
saw nor have studied, I deem it necessary to quote
the testimony of an illustrious Spaniard who in the
beginning of the new era control the destinies of the
Philippines and had personal knowledge of our
ancient nationality in its last days.
It is then the shade of our ancestor’s civilization
which the author will call before you…If the work
serves to awaken you in consciousness of our past,
and to blot from your memory or to rectify what has
been falsified or is calumny, then I shall not have
labored in vain. With this preparation, slight though
it may be, we can all pass to the study of the future.
-JOSE RIZAL
• The “SUCESOS” as annotated by Rizal, appeared
for the first time in the Philippines sixty eight
years later when a publisher in Manila published
the new work in 1958, to contribute his bit to the
national effort to honor Rizal. The present work
is the sixth volume of the Series of Writings of
Jose Rizal which the Jose Rizal National
Centennial Commission has no published in
commemoration of his birth.

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