Rizal's Annotation of

Sucesos De Las Islas

Filipinas
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.
Antonio de Morga
 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 conquested by Spain.

A doctorate in canon law and civil law.

Antonio de Morga
 His history is valuable in that Morga had access to the
survivors of the earliest days of the colony and he, himself,
participated in many of the accounts that he rendered.
 The book (Sucesos..) 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.
Sucesos De Las Islas Filipinas
Morga's purpose for Writing Sucesos
 Morga wrote that the purpose for writing Sucesos was to
explain "the deeds achieved by our Spaniards: the discovery,
conquest, and conversion of the Filipinas Islands - as well as
various fortunes that they have from time to time in the great
kingdoms and among the pagan peoples surrounding the
islands. "
Taking issue with the scopes of these 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
expedition.

 CHAPTER 2 - 7 : Chronological report on gov't

administration under Governor-General.

 CHAPTER 8 : Philippine Islands, the natives there,

their antiquity, custom and government.
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 Philippine's rich tradition and culture.
What leads Jose Rizal to Sucesos De Las
Islas Filipinas?
 He then decided to undertake the annotation of
Antonio de 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 the

Sucesos.
Rizal's annotation of Morga's Sucesos
 His extensive annotations of Morga's work number "no
less than 639 items or almost two annotations for
every page."

 Rizal also annotated Morga's typographical errors.

 He commented on every statement that could be

nuanced in Filipino cultural practices.
Rizal's annotation of Morga's Sucesos
 For example, on page 248 Morga describes the culinary
art of the ancient Filipinos by recording: "... 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; all on the
contrary" it is bagoong ,and all those who have eaten it
and tasted it know it is not or ought not to be rotten"
Rizal's annotation of Morga's Sucesos
 Rizal commits the error of many historians in appraising the
events of the past in the light of present standards.

 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: Filipinos were an inferior race, Filipinos were not ready
for parliamentary representation and other reforms, denial of equal
rights can be compensated by strict dispensation of justice.
Ferdinand Blumentritt's Prologue
 Writing in Spanish, instead of his native German
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 of the Incas”.
Ferdinand Blumentritt's Prologue
 He criticized Rizal's annotations on two counts:

 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 more.
 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 of the 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 labored 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
 The people of the Philippines had a culture on their own,
before the coming of the Spaniards.

 Filipinos were decimated, demoralized, exploited and ruined

by the Spanish colonization.

 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 of people
had been subjected to. He correctly observed that
as a colony of Spain, "The Philippines was
depopulated, impoverished and retarded, astounded
by metaphors, 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 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.
 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