Annotation of Antonio de Morga’s,

Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas

Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas
Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas

 Chapter I: Magellan and Legazpi’s seminal expeditions.

 Chapter II-VII: Chronological report on gov’t
administration under Governor-General.
 Chapter VIII: Philippine Islands, the natives there, their
antiquity, custom and gov’t.
Rizal’s annotation of Morga’s Sucesos

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 the Catholicism is bad.
Ferdinand Blumentritt also wrote a preface
emphasizing some salient points:
 The Spaniards have to correct their erroneous conception of the
Filipinos as children of limited intelligence.
 That there existed three kinds of Spanish delusions about the
Philippines:
a. Filipinos were an inferior race
b. Filipinos were not ready for parliamentary representation and other
reforms
c. Denial of equal rights can be compensated by strict dispensation of
justice
 Ferdinand Blumentritt’s Prologue
 Writing in Spanish, instead of his native German Native language
 Praised Rizal’s work as “scholarly and well-thought out”
 He noted that Morga’s Sucesos was so rare that ”the very few
libraries that have it guard it with the same solicitude as if it were
the treasure if the Incas”
 He criticized Rizal’s annotation on two counts:
a. He first observed that Rizal had committed the mistake of many
modern historians who judged events in the past in the context of
contemporary ideas and mores.
b. 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
reform.
Rizal’s purpose Morgas’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 oblirated from
memory and in rectifying what has been falsified and
calumniated, I shall not have labored in vain, and on such
basis, little though it may be, we can all devote ourselves
to studying the futures”
Rizal’s Annotation

 In his historical essay, which includes and 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 metamorphosis, 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

momentoes 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 was 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 controlled 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
in you a 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.
“To Foretell the destiny of a nation, it is necessary to open
the books that tell of her past”

JOSE RIZAL