MORO LEADERS AND

PERSONALITIES
FIGURED PROMINENTLY DURING THE
SPANISH-MORO WARS
LUZON AND VISAYAN LEADERS
Diego Silang • venerated as heroes
Francisco Dagohoy because they faught back
to the colonizers
Magalat
Juan dela Cruz Palaris
MORO LEADERS AND INDIVIDUALS WHO
ALSO FAUGHT BACK TO THE SPANIARDS
• Datu Sirungan (The Rajah of Buayan)
• Datu Buisan (Rajah Mudah of Maguindanao)
• Rajah Bongsu (Sultan of Sulu)
• Datu Amai Pakpak (the defender of Marahui)
• Sultan Kudarat (Sultan of Maguindanao)
DATU SIRUNGAN the Rajah of Buayan
• Rajah of Buayan
• known for being kind
• kindly treated his prisoners (including the Jesuit
preist Melchor Hurtado, who lived among the
Maguindnaoans for about a year in 1603)
According to Hurtado
• “Maguindanaoans give to their vain rites and rubrics a
seriousness of attention which we ordinarilly fail to give to
those of our true religion.”
• “They say that Sirungan... one day while performing his vain
worship he was bitten by a poisonous centipede. It was a
painful bite, but it moved him as little as though he were a
piece of stone. Only after he had finished his prayer did he
put his hand inside his clothes; for he said, he considered it
lack of reverence to scratch oneself while speaking with
God.”
 Although being known as a kind hearted person,
Sirungan did not hesitate to fight back against the
Spaniards when necessary. After the Spaniards
committed several attrocities in the 1590s, the Datu
attacked the Spanish controlled territories of Panay,
Negros and Cebu with 50 vessels and 3000 soldiers. He
saved 800 Visayan captives, some of whom, embraced
Islam without being forced.
DATU BUISAN Rajah Mudah of Maguindanao

• He is the one who attacked the town of Dulag in

Leyte.
• Captured several hundred inhabitants, forced
the Waray datus to conclude a blood compact
with him and exhorted them to side with the
Maguindanaos and fight the Spaniards.
According to H. Dela Costa's written account:

• Buisan made a speech convincing the Datus of Leyte into a

blood compact and into joining him to sweep off Spaniards
out of the island.
• “Has the Spaniards been able to protect them? And the
people of Panay, Mindoro, and Balayan? But if they allied
themselves with the Maguindanaus, they would have him,
Buisan, for their friend.”
• Being convinced, they sat down, slit their wrists and let the
blood drip into the bowl of brandy and drank their mingled
blood and so, they became brothers.
 Moreover the blood compact of Buisan and
the Dtaus of Leyte was a very significnat
event because it exposes an attempt on the
part of the Christianized and Islamized
natives to evoke a feeling of belonginess by
performing a ritual that is rooted in our
common past.
Cesar Abdul Majud said:
“The siginificance of this blood compact was its
implications. Despite the pre-Islamic and pre-Christian
character of this ceremonial, the Muslims and the
Christianized natives participated apparently without
hesitation in this ritual. Christians could not have failed to
recognize that the ceremony recalled a pagan past; while the
Muslims, must have known too well that the drinking of blood
was a religious taboo. It may therefore be conjectured that the
chiefs who entered into the pact must have recognized,
however vaguely, a common racial beginning or cultural
history and that, at the bottom, the common enemy of the
datus of leyte and Maguindanao were the Spaniards.”