The Sultanate of Magindanao

A storm-scattered fleet

formationDrafted from Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905)

No Moro record fixes an exact date for the arrival of Sharif Kabungsuwan, a descendant of the Prophet by way of Johor, at the mouth of the Pulangi river - the early Moros dated their own affairs only by a recurring eight-year cycle, unrelated from one cycle to the next. Working from the generations recorded between Kabungsuwan and his great-grandson Bwisan, who is independently known to have been alive in 1597, the arrival can be placed no more precisely than around the end of the fifteenth or the start of the sixteenth century - a range Captain Thomas Forest's own estimate of 1475, gathered from Magindanao informants in 1776, fits closely enough to accept.

People scattered across the archipelago

Kabungsuwan had not travelled alone. A storm scattered the fleet that left Johor with him, and its survivors made their way to ports across the region - Bangjar, Tampasuk, Brunei, Sandakan, Sulu, Malabang and Mindanao among them - seeding Islamic settlement well beyond the mouth of the Pulangi itself. At Magindanao, Kabungsuwan married Putri Tunina, the adopted daughter of the local chief Tabunaway, and it was through their descendants that the ruling line of the sultanate would trace itself for the next three and a half centuries.

Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905) · Shubert Ciencia · CC BY 2.0

Corralat

peakDrafted from Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905)

Magindanao's first documented clash with Spain came in 1597, when Datu Bwisan, allied with Silongan, the raja of neighbouring Buayan, checked an invasion led by the Spanish Marquis Rodriguez and defeated him at Tampakan. Bwisan was, by the source's own judgment, the most formidable enemy Spain had yet met in the southern islands

• but his son eclipsed him entirely.

The strongest sultan Magindanao ever had

Sultan Dipatuan Kudarat, known to the Spanish chroniclers as "Corralat," ruled with a strength his father had never matched. He fought Spain bitterly for decades, and his raiding fleets terrorized the coasts of Luzon and the Visayas and held much of the southern seas under his own control. In 1636 General Corcuera led a major Spanish expedition against him; Kudarat's fort, heavily fortified and armed with a substantial arsenal, held out before it was finally reduced, and the Spanish carried off eight bronze cannon, twenty-seven lantaka and a hundred muskets as spoils.

Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905) · Rijksmuseum · CC0

Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905) · Jahwulf935 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Peace, then war again

Ten years later, in 1646, Kudarat's position had only grown stronger, and he chose peace on his own terms rather than continued war: a treaty of mutual alliance with Spain that secured better trading conditions and allowed Jesuit missionaries to build a church in his own capital. The peace lasted thirteen years. When hostilities resumed in 1659 with a fresh Spanish campaign against Simuay, Kudarat blocked the Pulangi river at several points and turned the invasion back a second time - the last great victory of the sultan who had spent his whole reign proving that Magindanao would be courted, not conquered.

Of whom very little is known

contractionDrafted from Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905)

Kudarat was followed by his son, Dundang Tidulay, a sultan the tarsila genealogies preserve almost nothing about beyond his own name and his descendants - not a single campaign, treaty or building project of his reign survives in the record, a striking silence after a father whose wars had filled the same annals for decades. His own son, Sultan Mohammed sa-Barahaman, ruled more visibly and, by the account that survives, ruled peacefully, leaving behind several children of his own.

Two sons, and a question of age

Two of Barahaman's sons went on to become sultans in turn: Japar Sadik Manamir and Dipatuan Anwar. When Barahaman died, Manamir was declared his successor, but because he was still very young his own succession was widely considered illegal - an irregularity that gave his uncle, Kuda, grounds to contest it and set the stage for the civil war that would consume the sultanate for a generation after both of Barahaman's own sons were gone.

The last sultan of the old rites

endDrafted from Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905)

Manamir's disputed succession collapsed into a civil war that lasted, by some accounts, more than thirty years - the palace at Magindanao was plundered and burned, much of the town of Siangan destroyed alongside it, and one sultan, Manamir, was killed by his own nephew before the fighting finally burned itself out under the capable Pakir Mawlana, who restored the sultanate's prosperity and kept up its old pirate raids into the Celebes against Dutch and English shipping alike.

A treaty and a subordinate title

That recovery did not survive the return of Spanish strength. As Spain's naval power revived through the early nineteenth century, successive sultans found themselves negotiating from steadily weaker positions - a treaty in 1794, another cession of coastal territory in 1843 - until the reign of a young ruler remembered as Sultan Kudrat II, in honour of his formidable ancestor. He proved to be, as the source itself puts it, the last sultan who observed every custom and rite of the sultanate in full.

The downfall begins

In 1837 Sultan Kudrat II signed a treaty submitting to Spanish sovereignty, accepting the subordinate title of Feudatory King of Tamontaka in place of independent rule. Spain began appointing his successors directly and regulating the shipping that passed along a coast the first Kudarat had once held closed to Spanish ships by force alone. The submission marked, in the source's own words, the beginning of the sultanate's downfall - a slow eclipse rather than a single conquest, completed over the following decades as Spanish garrisons advanced steadily up the Pulangi valley that Kabungsuwan's storm-scattered fleet had first reached more than three centuries before.

Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (1905) · Rafael Monleón · Public domain