Looking at the Filipino past

Vocabulary
•Audiencia - the royal Audiencia or the royal court of justice in Spain and its
colonies.

•Ecclesiastics – the religious missionaries.

•Secular – having ideas and attitudes not determinedby any religious bias.
Antonio Morga
 Was a Spanish administrator who served in the
philippines in the late sixteenth century.

Hhe was born in seville in 1559.

 He served as the Lieutenant – Governor of the

Philippines in 1593

 A judge of the Audiencia in 1598

 He died in 1636
 Published in 1609 in Mexico

 Consisted of eight chapters

 Written by Antonio Morga.

SUMMARY
 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 could consequently draw upon much material that would otherwise
have been inaccessible. His book, published in 1609, ranges more widely than
its title suggests since the Spanish were also active in China, Japan, Southeast
Asia, Taiwan, the Moluccas, Marianas and other Pacific islands. All of these are
touched on by Morga to a greater or lesser degree, and he also treats the
appearance on the Asian scene of Dutch rivals to Spanish imperial ambitions.
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 Philippino
customs, manners and religions in the early years of the Spanish conquest.
 Excerpts from Rizal’s annotations to inspire young
Filipinos of today.
“To the Filipinos: In Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer) I started to
sketch the present state of our native land. But the effect which my effort
produced made me realize that, before attempting to unroll before your eyes
the other pictures which were to follow, it was necessary first to post you on
the past. So only can you fairly judge the present and estimate how much
progress has been made during the three centuries (of Spanish rule). 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, wrote Rizal in
Europe in 1889.
 He annotated the work along the way with the intention of creating a critical work on the
history of the Philippines.
 Despite hopes of getting the work published through the help of Antonio Regidor, Rizal
ended up with no publisher when his annotations were done.
 September 1889, Rizal decided to publish the annotations himself in Garnier Hermanos,
a printing press based in Paris.
Historian Ambeth Ocampo provides five reasons
behind Rizal’s choice.

 First reason, according to Ocampo, was the fact

that Morga’s work in its original Spanish edition
was rare.

Second